As the chart shows below in the past few years it has become the the most popular review sites in Australia and for some customers it has become a blood sport to leave negative comments for even the smallest problems.

In the case of a popular venue its profile will be seen by several thousands visitors a month and can refer several thousand visits to its website every month.

In terms of the traffic it drives to websites, you could say Urbanspoon seems to have more power than Facebook and Twitter combined (not to mention the other review sites in Australia).

The chart above is based upon our experience of dealing with several clients.

Typically when any new venue opens there is a certain amount of hype across social media, websites and traditional media driving people to visit a restaurant.

The venue probably won’t have a proper website up with a menu and food prices and any pictures of their food available.

That means lots of people will visit a venue in it’s early days – beta phase as they’d in IT – with no idea of what to expect at a time when it hasn’t quite got the service, food, drink selection or pricing right.

In the early days of opening customers and fans are forgiving. But as the hype builds a less forgiving audience starts visiting at a time when the restaurant is still in beta.

In terms of numbers it means that maybe 30-40 people a week – or even double that – could be voting on a venue with a fair share making a negative vote.

The negative comments and down votes seem to often peak as voting volumes start to slip. At the same time you find yourself falling from the heady days of a rating of over 80+% to falling towards 70% and eventually 60%. Or towards 50%.

Often by the time a venue starts to take action by sorting out its food, service and price points the damage has been done.

They now are facing the Cost of Inaction (COI)which means it is sometime before they can even think of a ROI – Return on Investment from engaging in social media.

At this point the venue is received maybe 10 votes a week as opposed to 10 or 20 – or more – a day. And when, say 300 have votes you a rating of 65% it means you have had 195 upvotes and 105 down.

At 10 votes a week it can take up to 6 months or more to recover a poor Urbanspoon score.

Inevitably a low rating on Urbanspoon does affect you business as some customers will be put off.

The temptation is to use Facebook, Twitter and friends to vote. But Urbanspoon has an algorithm that recognises patterns and deletes these votes, probably with a few other upvotes as well. You end up worse off than at the beginning.

It’s a tricky game to play even if you are simply replying to diners gripes.

Some venues take the bad reviews personally and hunt the reviewers down. That takes a lot of emotional energy and I think is a negative thing to do.

Others hire a third party to deal with these reviewers is a rational, unemotional manner.

Each instance has its own solution.

This work is the start of a white paper we are producing on social media and we are pleased to hear venu operators thoughts on the problems of dealing with online reviews.

The post What can you do about Urbanspoon reviews? appeared first on Tomato Media.

The crowd is wild and unpredictable. It always has been. People have always been unpredictable. Some will love you and become customers. Some will despise you.

But you can’t control them.

And now thanks to social media they have a voice, a voice you can’t control like an ad, direct mail or PR.

And as is argued here in the Harvard Business Review your brand isn’t yours anymore. It’s the customers and you may not like what they do with it.

“Every large organization I’m aware of is highly sensitive about its brand, and few are happy about losing or even sharing control over it. They react to the reality of Web 2.0 era in many ways, but most of them amount to some form of trying to exert or reestablish control. Some move their mass media campaigns online to counteract the outside conversation,” says Andrew McCaffe.

I maintain that large companies, especially here in Australia, aren’t ready yet to let go of control as they should. But for smaller and medium companies, where there are a small number of key players who have a voice, there is an unprecedented opportunity to engage with the crowd.

Already I’m seeing this with chefs, winemaker, brewers and small producers.

There is a few years of opportunity to dive in a surf it, engage in conversations and win new customers and fans.

All you need to know are a few simple rules, the same rules that you may apply if you were socializing at a cocktail party.

1. Don’t hard sell

2. Don’t create social spam

3. Be polite

4. Bite your lip rather than become angry about criticisms

5. Reply to people who engage you in conversation

6. Don’t be static. For instance, on Twitter follow as well as be followed.

7. Link to people

8. Comment on their blogs

9. Don’t do anything anonymous

These rules evolve the whole time and there is no one answer. But these nine points are a start.

The post Crowd control doesn’t work appeared first on Tomato Media.

In a week when NineMSN launched its new food portal, the recipe battle online just got fiercer. The competition is for which website has the most rcipes best optimised to be found in Google searches whether it be Taste, Gourmet Traveller, SBS Food or whichever.

There’s a reason for this. Recipes mean traffic. People want recipes. The big traffic blogs mostly rely on recipes.

Therefore if you are a restaurant it makes sense to publish search engine optimised recipes on your website, preferably in a blog format, to help drive traffic.

If you are using WordPress you probably want to use the Recipe SEO plugin to help get you up in search results.

The good thing about recipes is that they are interesting to people andcan stimulate people to do something further reinforcing your brand. I suggest thinking of a blog-like website where you create a “news” category and take that category’s RSS feed and make it a newsletter with an email service like Mailchimp.

Importantly, recipes generate links from blogs and other social media sites which are the drivers of the best quality and most engaged traffic to websites. More links means more google juice (credibility in Google search).

Everything points to making recipes an important part of your web content plan.

The post Why recipes matter in social media appeared first on Tomato Media.

Luckily some of the best tools are free, although if you do feel inclined to pay for any probably Hootsuite is the best.

Some of these tools have the ability to pre assign activity, but I’m not sure if this is a good thing. Things such as Facebook and Twitter are conversational. Think about chatting to somebody at a bar, or a party.

You can’t be conversational if you have a robot sending out tweets pre programmed several hours or days earlier. You best and most influential activity will be rapid fire conversations you dip in and out of. If you just want to broadcast your own news then you are doing it wrong.

You have to mix that news in with other more interesting conversations – football or racing perhaps -and not too often.

However, I am an advocate of planned social media activity – one blog post a week, targeting 5 new Twitter followers a day, 1 Facebook conversation a day, 5 new food photos uploaded a week etc.

It means you keep the activity constant, which is one of the secrets of success.

So here are the basic monitoring tools:

1. Google Alerts
Updates that mention terms you specify.

2. Advanced Twitter Search

3. Tweetdeck
Tweet from multiple accounts and send updates to multiple social media platforms. Monitor mentions by setting up searches.

4. Seesmic
A bit like Tweetdeck but with added features.

5. Hootsuite
The only drawback is you have to pay, although only from USD5.99 a month, for the full features although there is a free version.

6. Klout
The key to monitoring is measuring and one thing you may want to measure is your influence as a brand. Klout is a pretty useful tool to get a basic idea.

The post What about monitoring social media? appeared first on Tomato Media.

1. Front page blog like functionality with RSS feed

2. Allow multiple categories in blog with individual RSS feeds.

3. Mailchimp email sign-up form front page in sidebar. Mailchimp takes RSS feed to make email. Email send to Facebook/Twitter.

4. Twitter stream in right hand sidebar

5. Facebook open graph tags on front page so Facebook like button works as one for Facebook page and webpage.

6. Menu pages in text (with pdfs also featuring)

7. Each blog update sends update to Twitter

8. Badges for Facebook like, Follow on Twitter, Linkedin etc and Foursquare across all pages.

9. Ability to create photo gallery from RSS feed of Flickr gallery. Or Instagram.

10. Location page: A Google map.

11. An open source content management system. Ideally WordPress but Joomla or Drupal are fine.

12. Ensure that you have a version optimised for smartphone viewing.

The post Specifications for a restaurant website appeared first on Tomato Media.

This is a slideshow outlining a verbal presentation I gave to members of Restaurant and Catering in Melbourne last week.

The post A rough guide to social media for restaurants appeared first on Tomato Media.

I’ll be talking about what modern day consumers expect from a restaurant and their website. In contrast to being a threat social media now provides free market research to businesses helping them give customers what they want.

The implication for businesses is that you have to give customers information that they want in the places they want. that means designing your website correctly but also ensuring that menus, opening times and maps are also spread around the rest of the web.

You can download the booking form below.

DBB – The Buzz on Social Media VIC

The post Doing Better Business 10 October 2011 appeared first on Tomato Media.

“Microsoft organised itself around the structure of the industry; Apple organised itself around the customer. You have to organise around the customer.”

I caught up with Chris Lucas who I helped out on the digital and social media side for the launch of Chin Chin. He is excited about what social media offers to focus what he does on the customer. Each day he feeds reviews from Urban Spoon to the kitchen.

It’s brilliant because if you ask somebody what they thought of a meal they’ll never tell you. But they will on the internet. It’s free market research.

The author also quotes Marshall McLuhan:

“we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers.
we are human beings – our reach exceeds your grasp.
Deal with it.”

The post Centre yourselves on your customers appeared first on Tomato Media.

There is no one prescriptive answer but it is more than just having a single website or newsletter that can only be viewed on a computer.

It’s all about giving choices. The information on your website need to be available all over the place. That means it should be available to the near 11 million Facebook users in Australia, the 1.8 million or so people on Twitter locally and the 2 million or so on Linkedin.

And not lets forget how people want to receive information. My newsletter going to followers of my food blog is read by one third of people on a mobile phone of some sort or an iPad style device.

What you need to do it make information available in as many places as possible and formatted correctly for a phone or tablet computer.

If you are in the restaurant business that means menus, opening times and maps in addition to pictures and videos of food and drink.

The post Be everywhere with everything appeared first on Tomato Media.

“And Davos confirmed that the Facebook social networking and mobile technology revolutions were now a priority agenda item for Australian business leaders extending from retailing (Mr Goyder) and banking (Mrs Kelly) to construction (Mr King) and business services (Ms Walker).”

Westpac CEO Gail Kelly said that social media meant that “business was more exposed to issues being magnified and accelerated at digital speed”.

“There are big implications for the way you manage media and marketing, the way you manage your brands and your reputation. The immediacy of feedback means you need to be listening and engaging a lot more.”

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