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Archive for May, 2008
Restaurant Owner Threatens Girls Life For Bad Review
May 31, 2008Connecting with the Customer
May 31, 2008Starting with a relatively small list of customer e-mail addresses collected in various ways, Buckhead Life Restaurant Group sent an e-mail offering a $25 Ultimate Card as incentive for joining the company’s new e-mail program. Signing up for the program and receiving the incentive required guests to input information about themselves into an online database. It also encouraged viral growth by allowing recipients to forward the invitation to friends and families. Within a week, more than 20,000 people had signed up for the e-mail program – an astounding response by any measure. “The key to the long-term success of the program was to use the customer information respectfully, with relevance,” says Hanna. The program launched in 2001 and still remains a powerful marketing resource for the restaurant group.
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The Coffee Was Lousy. The Wait Was Long.’
May 25, 2008“If you want good coffee and a comfy place to work, I’d recommend this place,” wrote Stephanie S., who gave Rooz four stars. “And the No Yelpers sticker made me laugh.”
Rooz’s owner, Steve Ranjbin, said he put the sticker up as a joke, but added that he had a complaint about Yelp.
“Yelp does not respect us as business owners,” Mr. Ranjbin said. “They don’t listen to business owners unless you’re an advertiser paying Yelp.”
Mr. Ranjbin, who said that amateur reviews can hurt his business, said some had misquoted him or called his employees names, but that Yelp had refused to take these comments down. Yelp rarely removes reviews, even when advertisers complain, preferring to let the crowd have its say.
Online reviews can help grow a business
May 23, 2008LOS ANGELES — Mike Dorausch is always on the lookout for new chiropractic clients in Los Angeles. To help spread the word about his services, he gently asks patients to say nice things about him at one of the many customer-review sites popping up on the Web.
“Online reviews is how people find us,” Dorausch says. About 80% of his new business stems from customers finding online reviews about him and booking appointments, he says.
Picking up on a trend started by the travel industry, business-listing sites by Google, Yahoo and others including Yelp and Citysearch let customers rave about their favorites, or complain about poor service. That helps consumers get real-life opinions about local businesses and services. For businesses attempting to reach consumers, the feedback spreads the word in a way ads can’t. But perhaps more important, the reviews can dramatically raise a website’s visibility in search engines.
Reviews and star ratings are often cited in search results. A Google search for “Los Angeles chiropractor,” for instance, includes not only links to websites and descriptions, but also a 10-item list of local chiropractors with their addresses, reviews, star ratings and a local map at the top of the page.
See ful story http://www.rimag.com/index.asp?layout=articleXML&xmlId=794959733&nid=3458
The Power of Word of Mouth
May 21, 20082008-05-18 — You don’t need to spend a lot of marketing dollars to create a sensation among consumers.
Heinz ketchup, Blendtec blenders and Makers Mark whiskey are all examples of brands that have used successful word-of-mouth marketing with minimal investment.
With email, blogs, YouTube and a plethora of other consumer-driven content exploding on the Internet, savvy restaurateurs can no longer afford to ignore the power of their customers’ opinions, says Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking.
“The days are gone where you can write a gazillion ads to convince people to buy your stuff, even if it isn’t very good,” says Sernovitz, who delivered a speech on the topic of viral marketing Saturday morning to a packed room of several hundred attendees at the NRA Show in Chicago.
“What’s the first thing people do before they buy?” he asks. “They Google.” Some 60,000 regular folks penned Internet reviews on products or services this year alone, notes Sernovitz, all the more reason that restaurant owners should replace their traditional matchbook give-aways with in-store invitations for customers to post their own restaurant reviews on Yelp or some other popular restaurant review site.
http://www.qsrmagazine.com/articles/news/story.phtml?id=6575
Bloggers, self-appointed critics put pressure on restaurateurs
May 13, 2008Getting dinged by diners
Bloggers, self-appointed critics put pressure on restaurateurs
Portland Business Journal – by Erik Siemers Business Journal staff writer
The microwave in Kevin Hutchinson’s pizza restaurant is for boiling water.
For tea, not pizza.
It’s not a detail pertinent to the operations of his restaurant, Carboni’s Wood Fire Pizza and Pasta in North Portland. But it was something Hutchinson found himself explaining thanks to an unflattering review posted anonymously online.
“That guy who wrote that bad review talked about my microwave and how I take shortcuts. If anyone knows my practice, I don’t take shortcuts. My dough takes three days to make,” Hutchinson said. “I have to back up and explain every little thing on my practice.”
The days when restaurateurs fretted over the words of just a few local newspaper reviewers are gone. Now anyone who enters a restaurant can be a published critic by virtue of the Internet, whether through blogs, message boards, or sites like Portland.citysearch.com, where Hutchinson’s anonymous reviewer left a critique.
For some restaurant owners, the growing multitudes of food critics can be as valuable as free advertising, building word-of-mouth business with each review.
Yet some, like Hutchinson, believe the proliferation of online critiques can be just as much of a threat as a bad review in a traditional newspaper, if not more.
“It can be very damaging,” he said. “They go on a witch hunt and they put you down and that really hurts.”
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http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2008/05/12/focus1.html?b=1210564800%5e1632955
Mobile marketing drives guest traffic for special promotions
May 12, 2008(April 21, 2008) As restaurant chains increase their efforts to target 18- to 34-year-olds, they’re quickly finding the best place to reach them is where they spend much of their time: on the phone.
The latest chains to launch mobile or interactive campaigns are Buffalo Wild Wings, which launched “Wild Messages” to promote its long-running Wing Tuesdays, and McDonald’s restaurants in Utah and parts of Nevada and Wyoming, which offer mobile coupons for free iced coffee.
In the past, such chains as Hardee’s, Denny’s, McDonald’s, Starbucks Coffee, Krystal, Wienerschnitzel and Bennigan’s Grill & Tavern used mobile coupons and text messages to make special offers available through cell phones.
Two studies released in March support efforts by marketers to reach consumers through interactive initiatives. A Nielsen Co. study reported that 51 percent of mobile-phone subscribers who saw a mobile ad during the last 30 days responded to it. A report by the PeopleMetrics market-research firm said that brands with strong customer engagement have loyal, repeat customers who promote the brand to others.
That’s the goal of the 500-unit Buffalo Wild Wings, which is using “Wild Messages” to encourage customers to invite friends to the restaurant through customized phone messages.
The chain’s website contains a section where customers submit the names of their friends and their phone numbers and e-mail addresses. They choose a time for dinner and pick one of three characters—space alien, “worldly” Frenchman and blonde twins—who send a customized invitation either by voice mail or e-mail.
Full Story http://www.nrn.com/landingPage.aspx?menu_id=1416&coll_id=554&id=353090
Innovation Puts Chains Ahead of the Curve
May 9, 2008Curbside pickup. Online ordering. Cell-phone coupons. Interactive Web sites. All these have been successful innovations at chain restaurants—and you can tell even without looking at the sales figures behind them.
How? The copycat factor. All four innovations, rolled in the last two years or so, are on the brink of being commonplace in the industry.
As will, we predict, the innovations we’ve gathered for this story. Whether they’re new menu items, service enhancements or online offerings, all innovations serve the same purpose: to bond customers closer to the brand. That bonding is essential not only in this slack economy, but to keep a brand a growing concern.
“Every brand has to keep ahead of the competition by continually recreating those points of difference,” says Frank Steed, president and chief executive officer of The Steed Consultancy, a chain-restaurant consulting firm based in Kerens, Texas. “With the wealth of talent and the speed of the Internet, everybody’s ability to copy is split second.”
