How Restaurant & Hospitality Can Serve Up More Customers With Social Media

Various trades and industries are using social media for marketing, creating brand awareness, reputation monitoring  and consumer engagement. The restaurant industry is no different.

There are many good reasons why restaurants, taverns and bars should be using social media marketing. It is a great way to interact with new customers and keep up with existing ones. It drives traffic to your website. It is much less expensive than traditional advertising mediums like television, radio and print.

Chances are that if you are a restaurant, especially a well known, recognized one, people are talking about you online. Make no mistake that there is chatter happening. The question is what type of chatter is it? Good, bad or in between, and how do you plan on dealing with it? Talk is happening everywhere, forums, blogs, comments, review sites, Twitter and so forth. Starting with the basics, Google Alerts should be setup to track any keyword/brand mentions. The next step is monitoring Twitter. Twitter is the real time watering hole for all types of chatter. It is often the first place that a rant or rave will be mentioned, and from there it can quickly go viral in no time. Once something starts to spread on Twitter, it’s often hard to do the right damage control. It’s imperative that Twitter is monitored heavily and should be priority number one for brand monitoring.

People who are talking about you on Twitter or any social media network are mainly two things, existing customers or potential customers. Follow back everyone who talks about your brand in a positive manner. After all, these are brand evangelists, it’s word of mouth marketing, and it’s not costing you a dime. Reciprocation shows that you as a brand have taken interest in your customer. Be responsive to this and when applicable engage them in a conversation, or at the very least send them a quick thank you note. You should also identify and develop relationships with  your loyal brand endorsers because these people are essentially an extension of your online marketing dept.  In addition to engaging these people, reward them with a gift card to your restaurant. Tokens of appreciation go far and are always remembered. If you think they are talking now, just wait until that gift card arrives in the mail. The positive stuff is pretty much a no brainer, but always remember  social media is all about the conversations, unfiltered at that. Responding to negative chatter is equally important as well, use these social media tools wisely to handle crisis situations, and avoid a PR nightmare. In the online environment, word spreads at an alarming high frequency, and once it does,  there will be very little that you can do no matter how much you try to correct the situation.

Twitter for the most part is a customer service tool as I outlined in the previous paragraph, but it can also be used for marketing. Announce the new menu or drink specials of the day. Promote a happy-hour event or special restaurant event. Ask your brand endorsers on Twitter to leave a review, as well as customers in your restaurant. Remember nowadays everyone is a food critic. These online review sites are a big source of customer information and they are global reaching.

Building a good community is like preparing a good meal. You start with the right ingredients. Open a Facebook account – the world’s largest site for social media marketing. Facebook has become a digital calling card for many restaurants. It allows you to network and stay in touch with your current customers and make new ones.

Restaurant & Hospitality have an advantage over a lot of other industries that use social media. Why you may ask? Social media is about story telling and visuals. Food is very visual, both physically and emotionally. Food evokes conversations, experiences, memories, and stories that people share. This is what social media is all about.

Multichannel to Cross Channel Marketing

The challenge with adopting anything new is that old habits die hard. Cross channel marketing, whereby marketers target customers based on channel preference and permission, is emerging as the most effective way of competing for mindshare at a time when 3,000 marketing messages bombard consumers every day (according to researcher SymphonyIRI).

Yet cross channel marketing simply isn’t that simple to implement. Just as many companies adopted email marketing as a distinct competency years ago, the same has more recently happened with mobile and social media. Moving quickly to utilize innovative ways of reaching customers leaves little time to consider how digital channels overlap or work better when stitched together. Marketing within channels, or multichannel marketing, is the result.

This would not be an issue, were it for the fact that customers who browse and buy via multiple channels are among the most coveted. RSR research shows this to be the case for retailers, but when you think about it, no matter your industry, anyone who visits your website, opts into your email program, provides permission to be communicated with via SMS text messaging and follows your brand on Twitter and Facebook, is someone you should know. You could infer that anyone who meets these criteria defines your highest value customer segment.

Getting Past the Marketing Silos

So what’s a digital marketer to do? Whether you’re a “one person show” with purview over anything digital, or oversee distinct teams aligned to email, mobile and social media, the challenge is the same:  you probably have separate databases of customers for email and mobile channels. Many companies possess internal email lists but their agencies often have mobile phone numbers obtained from one-off campaigns without any identifying data. With social media, playing by the rules in that space makes it difficult to connect with customers on a one-to-one basis.

The solution is a new category of software that ties these channels together, unifying the customer record, and providing the tools and workflows to enable digital marketers to target their cross channel customer segment with engaging marketing campaigns. The software itself doesn’t require businesses to completely re-think their marketing efforts or organizational structure; rather it complements marketing in each channel, helping create a “whole” more valuable than the “sum of its parts.”

And, it’s delivered as a service, as in Software-as-a-Service, a business model that ensures innovation is rolled out to all customers rapidly, and not isolated to one-off, custom implementations. Technically, it’s called multi-tenancy. At a time when social media innovation is outpacing all other categories, the value of a cross channel marketing application delivered as a service cannot be underestimated.

Social Media ROI – a different approach…

Following the 2010 World Cup on Twitter

The 2010 World Cup is going to be a very interesting one as far as social media goes — it’s the first to be played out in the Twitter era and the first to fully embrace the social media universe.

This bodes well for avid soccer fans keen to stay up to date with all the most recent news from their favorite players and teams. The real-time nature of Twitter may well entice these newcomers to hop on the micro-blogging site. To get new users ready for the action, we’ve got a few tips for how to follow the World Cup on Twitter complete with a list of who you should be following to stay informed on the games, news, and goings on in South Africa.

Hashtags and Searches

While Twitter’s hashtag system is a great way of monitoring a certain topic, and for getting real-time updates on what the Twitterverse is saying about a live event, the organic nature of exactly how the tags are decided can cause confusion.

Currently, there seems to be a fair amount of footie-related tags in circulation, although we’d imagine by the first few days of the tournament these will be narrowed down as the most popular ones become trending topics and are adopted by tweeters.

At the moment, #worldcup seems to be the largest tag by volume of tweets, but #wc2010 is also doing the rounds, as is #2010worldcup. Don’t forget, however, that the World Cup is a global event, so different languages also come into play. In Spanish, World Cup is “Copa Mundial,” in French it’s “Coupe du Monde,” and so on.

Other tags have, of course, sprung up around teams. #England is what most people are using to refer to the England team, while mentions of the United States team can be found under the tag #USMNT.

To quickly access a stream of tweets containing a certain hashtag you can save a search on Twitter, so that the results are just a click away from your home page — and the search can be easily removed after it’s no longer relevant.

Lists

The World Cup only lasts for a month, so it’s unlikely you’ll want to permanently follow all the World Cup-related sources you’ll be getting your footie news from over the next four weeks, especially as many sources have been created solely for the event.

Alternatively, if you’re just interested in the big headlines, rather than blow-by-blow coverage, TweetMeme’s World Cup 2010 aggregated feed of popular tweets might be of interest.

It’s more work, but if you’re a little more selective then you can create your own list and simply delete it after the tournament on July 11. To get you started we’ve made some suggestions of World Cup Twitter news resources that can be found below.

Twitter Resources

Whether it’s the official FIFA feed, tabloid newspaper coverage, big broadcaster’s headlines or just the final scores, you’ll find the news you need in this list.

2010 FIFA World Cup – “The Twitter page of the 2010 Organizing Committee.” News and updates.

SA2010 World Cup – “Official 2010 FIFA World Cup South African Government website with all the information you need!” News, personal updates and commentary.

FIFAWorldCupTM – “The FIFA soccer world cup tweets. All the latest FIFA news and information on the 2010 soccer world cup.” Updates, human interest, emphasis on players and coaches.

TheFA.com – “The official website for the England Football Team and The FA Cup.” Updates on England players and live Tweets from England matches.

US Soccer – “U.S. Soccer: the governing body of soccer in all its forms in the United States.” Inside look at the US team, players and matches.

CNN World Cup – “All the latest news on the 2010 World Cup in South Africa from CNN International.” News and match scores culled from CNN reporters.

Telegraph World Cup – “World Cup 2010 news, analysis, pictures and video from Telegraph.co.uk” Links back to stories posted by The Telegraph.

NY Times Goal – “The New York Times Soccer Blog reports on the international game and the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.” Live updates and links back to New York Times stories.

AP World Cup – “Join the conversation as @AP covers the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.” News, match scores and brief commentary.

BBC World Cup – “A feed dedicated to World Cup headlines from the BBC website.” Links back to BBC.

Sports Illustrated Soccer – “Soccer, World Cup coverage from Sports Illustrated and SI.com writers and photographers.” Player news and general features.

The Sun World Cup – “Follow all the latest news on the 2010 World Cup in South Africa with The Sun.” Mostly England updates and news, general match coverage.

Four Four Two – “Humorous but wholehearted, polished but readable, substantial but accessible, it’s football’s most insightful brand – with added F.U.N.” Quirky and off-beat updates, general news.

Fox Soccer News – “FOXSoccer.com headlines.” Links back to Fox Soccer.

World Cup Scores – “Live 2010 world cup soccer scores.” Match scores and live updates.