Social Media and the Restaurant Industry Powerpoint

SocialMediaRestaurants

Final Project: Social Media and the Restaurant Industry!

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When we look at the various industries throughout the United States, it is incredible to look at the rapid increase of social media and how this affects the way they operate their businesses. An assortment of social media platforms are now utilized for marketing, creating brand awareness, reputation monitoring, and consumer engagement. When looking at the restaurant industry, this is no different. Nowadays, it takes much more for a restaurant to succeed, then just knowing how to prepare the perfect dish. It takes a great amount of creativity not only in the kitchen, but also in truly realizing how to market your brand and connect with your customer base. Essentially, restaurants are now able to develop social media platforms for marketing, brand monitoring, and beyond.

There are six key steps that restaurants need to dive into in order to gain more customers and to operate their business in the most successful way possible.

1.) Who is talking about you and what is being said? It is critical to go on different types of social media such as forums, blogs, review sites, Twitter, and so forth to see all of the commotion that is surrounding your restaurant. More specifically, Google Alerts should be set up to track any keyword and/or brand mentions. This will help look at the positive and negative talk that is being said online about your business. It is imperative to acknowledge not only the positive comments, but the negative publicity as well.

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2.) Use your tools and let them do the work. Using Twitter is an invaluable resource for restaurants and since these free tools are out there for anybody to use, why not use them to your advantage? This gives businesses the ability to search Twitter for brand’s relevant keywords and also the choice to set up RSS feeds to track them. More specifically, Tweet Beep is a free service that restaurants should utilize since it automatically emails hourly updates of when a specific keyword or URL is mentioned on Twitter.

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3.) Respond to your customers. It is obvious that various industries cannot ignore their customers, since this creates a negative image for their brand and will eventually cause a domino effect of problems. By engaging with their customers, reciprocation shows that you as a brand have taken interest in your customer. Furthermore, when applicable, engage them in a conversation or at the very least send them a brief thank you note. Responding to negative chatter is equally important as well in which these social media tools can assist in handling crisis situations. Identifying and developing relationships with your loyal brand endorsers is extraordinarily critical for restaurants because these people are essentially an extension of your online marketing department.

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4.) Use Twitter for marketing. As stated earlier, Twitter is an effective way to engage with customers and to increase customer base. Using this social media platform, it gives restaurants the ability to announce the new appetizer or drink special of the day, promote a unique restaurant event, request ideas for new menu items or specials of the day, offer prizes for people who follow you on Twitter by a certain time and date to be entered into a raffle, and even use it as a tool to listen and converse with your customers.

5.) Start a company blog. By effectively creating and using a company blog, this gives your restaurant the rare opportunity to showcase customer testimonials, pictures from specific events, menu items, share food/drink recipes, employee profiles, and anything else that relates to your restaurant. Ultimately, blogging is a great way to bring the customer into the kitchen since it provides another gateway to show customers the behind the scenes work and make them feel a part of the restaurant.

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6.) Reviews. Urbanspoon.com and Yelp.com are two major websites that allows customers to post feedback. Yelp.com is a free “online urban city guide that helps people find cool places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play, based on the informed opinions of a vibrant and active community of locals in the know. Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great — and not so great — in your world.” Yelp.com has more than 39 million monthly unique visitors as of late 2010. For restaurants, it is important to be sure to encourage your customers to post a fair review. Furthermore, if there is a negative review, try to reach out to that customer and mend the situation if possible.

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In order to better understand how a specific restaurant has utilized the various social media platforms, it helps to look at Manhattan-based Cuban restaurant Havana Central. To drive customer interaction, Havana Central uses social media for a series of interactive contests. Havana Central’s Social Media Manager, Tanya Castaneda explains:

“We have found that running contests has substantially increased our following on Facebook, Twitter, and our emailing campaigns. Inside the restaurant, we would promote ‘Win a Free One Hour Open Bar for You and 9 of Your Friends.’ There were 3 ways contestants could enter the drawing: by “liking” our Facebook page and writing ‘Open Bar’ on our wall; by following us on Twitter and tweeting ‘@havanacentral Open Bar’; or by signing up for our email list.”

After just 3 contests, Havana Central had increased their email list by roughly 1,000 subscribers, their Facebook fans by over 200, and their Twitter followers by over 50!

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In addition to how restaurants are effectively using social media, it was fascinating to learn about Starbucks and their new mobile payment system. This has been a tremendously successful step for Starbucks. Less than three months ago on January 19, 2011, Starbucks rolled out a Starbucks Card Mobile app that allows customers to “touch and pay” for their purchases which can be used at nearly 7,000 Starbucks across the United States. This was available for both the Apple iPhone and BlackBerry applications. Like the long-standing Starbucks Card, users are now given the option to add cash to their account, but rather than keeping a plastic card in their wallets, users hold their phones up to a scanner, which recognizes a unique barcode the app presents on the phone’s screen. The purchase amount is then deducted from the customer’s account.

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The Starbucks Card Mobile app has been used by over 3 million people in only 3 months! As a bonus incentive for Starbucks customers, purchases made through the app qualify for Starbucks’ rewards program, thus allowing customers to earn free drinks. The app also helps users find the nearest Starbucks store. CEO Howard Schultz states that both mobile payments and social networking will remain vital aspects of the company’s “blueprint for growth” in the future.

It is unmistakable that social media is radically helping the restaurant industry in terms of marketing, creating brand awareness, engaging consumers, and much more.  In essence, the effectiveness of social media isn’t the tool; it is listening, answering questions, and ultimately connecting with others.

*My Personal Learning Network: I have included blogs and websites that are relevant to my project on my Twitter and Delicious accounts. My Twitter username is @kerrimoy and my Delicious username is kerri.moy.*

Social Media Monitoring Blog Post #2: Lady Gaga

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After looking at Lady Gaga’s continued success through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, it is evident that a large part of Lady Gaga’s success is due to her embracing the digital revolution for a net-savvy generation, thus leading to more exposure and a larger fanbase. She has done an incredible job with social media and it is evident by looking at the drastic growth of her Twitter followers. In March 2010, she had approximately 3 million followers on Twitter and in August of the same year, this number jumped up to over 5.7 million (which surpassed Britney Spears’ amount of followers)! As of March 28, 2011, she has roughly 9,079,368 million followers and this number continues to climb every day.

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It is imperative to understand that Lady Gaga’s Twitter followers do not seem to be slowing down anytime soon, since her growth is consistent compared to other celebrities. As illustrated through Famecount, she typically has 15,000 to 19,000 new followers a day, whereas Britney Spears’ growth is much more unpredictable. More specifically, when looking at Britney Spears, one day her account would gain a few thousand new followers and then another day, she would stay mostly flat or even lose followers.

Credit: http://www.famecount.com/facebook/lady-gaga

When looking at Lady Gaga’s iTunes success, her “towering digital sales, almost all of them iTunes downloads, only tell part of the story. In fact, much of Gaga’s audience got her music for free, and legally. They have listened to free streams – by the hundreds of millions – on YouTube and the other online services that Gaga currently leads, according to research firm BigChampagne.” She even released her latest hit “Born This Way” on YouTube, and then a few weeks later, released the music video for the song through the same website. By looking at Trendistic, it is clear that when she released the highly anticipated single “Born This Way,” she created a sea of commotion throughout Twitter:

Credit: http://trendistic.com/lady-gaga/_30-days

This social media activity can be seen through IceRocket as well:

Credit: http://trend.icerocket.com/trend?query1=Lady+Gaga&days=30

As stated earlier in Part I of my social media monitoring assignment, Lady Gaga has an enormous fanbase that she constantly stays connected to through a variety of social networking platforms. This is an imperative marketing tactic because it allows her to keep her audience informed and engaged with not only what she is currently doing at the moment, but where she will be making her next appearance. Lady Gaga clearly understands how to create a balance between promotion and authenticity. “She took great pride in engaging directly with her fans across every medium available to her,” Battle said. “I would definitely say that that plays a very large role. It’s also not just touchy feely stuff. If you look at it, she does very obviously draw attention to everything that she needs to promote, so you won’t find too much fluff. It’s still orchestrated even though it’s personal.”

Target Audience:

Lady Gaga’s target audiences are teenagers to young adults between 16-28 years old. This means that utilizing the social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to connect to her fans are extremely crucial for her continued success. Lady Gaga constantly keeps in touch with her target audience on a daily basis by giving them an inside look into her life to form a stronger connection, instead of just allowing them to listen to her music.

Lady Gaga’s fans continue to support and remain loyal because of her personalized social media efforts. She continues to thank her fans for all of their support, whether this is made through her Twitter or Facebook account. Steve Berman, Universal Music’s president of sales and marketing states, “Gaga has worked tirelessly in keeping up daily, if not hourly, communication with her fans and growing fanbase through all the technology that exists now.” This continues to show through SocialMention, due to the increase in strength, sentiment, passion, and reach by looking at four time intervals:

Evidently, Lady Gaga continues to discover creative ways to interact with her fans. On March 16, 2011, Lady Gaga set her sights on a new social marketing channel – Google’s video platform. Essentially, this gives Lady Gaga the great opportunity to work with Google on a new YouTube campaign (called the moderator) that puts her in touch with fans via video. Now, fans have the chance to ask Lady Gaga whatever questions they want; this ranges from her music to her fashion choices. All they have to do is go to Lady Gaga’s YouTube channel to submit video/written questions or vote for the questions that they want to hear her respond to. Fans can even tweet their questions using the hashtag #GoogleGoesGaga. Fans had until the end of the day on March 18, 2011 to submit their entries. Over 14,000 fans had submitted nearly 30,000 questions. This is yet another successful marketing tactic that will connect Lady Gaga’s fans to her through an extremely personable way.

Goals and Marketing Strategy:

When looking specifically at Lady Gaga’s Facebook page, it is managed by quite a number of people, including herself. However, her Twitter page is much more authentic where “… she did handle it herself, because actually at that time she made it clear that she wanted to be the one to tweet… She didn’t want anything promotional on her Twitter account.”

Lady Gaga also understands that the internet is global and in order to achieve the highest success possible, she needs to not only be able to cater to her English-speaking audience, but to the international community as well. She has purposely written her songs so that they are simple enough to sing along to in any language. This illustrates her creative ability to use social media to attract even more attention outside of the United States.

Recommendations:

When we look at Lady Gaga’s usages of social media, she has clearly done an unbelievable job, especially utilizing Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Throughout the past few years on her seismic ride to fame, she continues to keep her audience engaged with her music and keep them informed of upcoming singles, performances, and essentially anything else worth watching for.

In terms of what Lady Gaga could do better, there is really not much she could work on, since she seems to be doing all of the right things at the right time. However, if I had to give one suggestion, Lady Gaga could try to reach out to more fans on an individual level (for example, tweeting to specific fans) since she has such an enormous fanbase with millions and millions of followers! At the same time though, it seems that she is already one step ahead since she has started doing this through her latest marketing efforts, namely, the Google video launch!

Social Media Monitoring Blog Post #1: Lady Gaga

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For my social media monitoring project, I decided to follow Stefani Germanotta, also known by her stage name as Lady Gaga. I am sure that you have heard of this name, since she has exploded in popularity throughout the past few years as an American pop singer-songwriter. I wanted to follow her trends in online conversation and other social media because of her incredibly rapid success into fame within the competitive music industry. To monitor Lady Gaga, I utilized a variety of social media monitoring resources such as IceRocket, Social Mention, FameCount, Trendistic, Twitaholic, Google Blog Search and Insights for Search, Facebook Lexicon, YouTube, and Twitter.

Born and raised in New York City, 24 year old Lady Gaga’s success skyrocketed after the release of her debut studio album The Fame in 2008. Her two singles “Just Dance” and “Pokerface” garnered international attention and the album reached number one on the record charts of six countries. She then released the follow up extended play The Fame Monster in 2009, which included two more global chart topping singles, “Bad Romance” and “Telephone.” She just recently released her second studio album in February 2011 Born This Way.

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Lady Gaga is not only the queen of pop, but she can be seen as the queen of social media through her effective usages of the various platforms Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. When looking at FameCount which generates statistics across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to help track the trends and rank the stars, Lady Gaga is the overall leader in all categories.

Credit: http://www.famecount.com/facebook/lady-gaga

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I wanted to look at how much Lady Gaga’s social media popularity increased immediately after her appearance at the 53^rd Grammy Awards show on February 13, 2011. Her grand entrance down the red carpet captured an enormous amount of attention since she arrived inside of a giant egg carried by four men, like an avian Cleopatra! I have to admit that this topped her past outfits such as her Kermit the frog ensemble and meat dress. By using Trendistic, it is obvious that Lady Gaga created the most buzz on Twitter during the Grammy Awards Show; a successful social media marketing tactic.

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Credit: http://trendistic.com/lady-gaga/_30-days

Of course, Twitter was not the only site that generated so much discussion regarding Lady Gaga’s grand entrance onto the red carpet. When looking at the bigger picture, the blogging world as a whole drastically escalated as well, illustrated here by IceRocket:

Credit: http://trend.icerocket.com/trend?query1=Lady+Gaga&days=30

While looking more closely at Lady Gaga’s various uses of social media, it is critical to understand how she uses Twitter to expand her success, since this is where the majority of her attention has been centralized. Twitter is a brilliant way for Lady Gaga to build and maintain relationships with her fans. Moreover, it allows her to promote her latest work and give fans a peek into her everyday life. Lady Gaga joined Twitter on March 26, 2008 and made history on February 4, 2011 as the first person to ever reach 8 million followers! As of February 25, 2011, she had 8,415,409 followers!

Lady Gaga utilizes Twitter to keep her fans aware of what she is currently doing and to keep her name buzzing within the news. She even regularly Tweets to her audience from backstage! Clearly, she has been doing an effective job using Twitter since she is currently ranked first by followers on Twitaholic, as well as ranked first in location (New York, NY). On February 23, 2011, she tweeted:

It is equally imperative to look at Lady Gaga’s valuable usage of Facebook. According to Facebook, the human with the most “Likes” in 2010 was Lady Gaga with 24.7 million. Currently, she has 29,889,907 Facebook “Likes.” In addition, Lady Gaga also made history on July 3, 2010 when she became the first living person to score 10 million fans on Facebook which surpassed President Barack Obama and pop singer Britney Spears (Michael Jackson is the only other artist who has achieved this honor).

Just like her Twitter account, Lady Gaga effectively utilizes her Facebook page by constantly updating her wall with upcoming news, events, and thanking her fans for all of their support. On February 11, 2011, she posted: 

To further illustrate a progression of how Lady Gaga’s online presence has increased since the Grammy Awards Show, it is helpful to look at Social Mention. This site analyzes a person’s strength, sentiment, passion, and reach.

• Strength = The likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media
• Sentiment = The ratio of mentions that are generally more positive to those that are generally negative
• Passion = A measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly
• Reach = A measure of the range of influence

By looking at the progression from last month/last week/last day/ last 12 hours, we can see that Lady Gaga is mentioned pretty often (strength), the general tone is positive with every one comment being negative (sentiment), users are not really talking about her repeatedly due to a steady decline (passion), and she is reaching a decent amount of users (reach).

Credit: http://socialmention.com/search?q=lady+gaga&t=all&btnG=Search

 

Additionally, it is essential to acknowledge YouTube in correlation with Lady Gaga’s successful online presence. On February 28, 2011, Lady Gaga released her world premiere hit “Born This Way” on YouTube before anywhere else. “A YouTube video is really about letting go of control and trusting that your creativity will engage the groundswell” (Groundswell, 198). Lady Gaga joined YouTube on May 15, 2008 and became the first musical artist to reach one billion online video views. As of February 25, 2011, she has 48,394,063 channel views, 134,914,998 total upload views, and 411,567 subscribers to her channel.

Lady Gaga undoubtedly knows how to use social media successfully to connect with her fans and build relationships. This in turn, keeps them devoted to her music. By analyzing various metric resources and trends, it proves that she connects to her audience and constantly keeps them coming back for more. I will continue to track Lady Gaga's social media presence and will report back in Part 2!

Reading Reflections #3: The Groundswell Powers Through Your Company

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Tapping the groundswell inside of your company is extremely critical for the success of a business, as illustrated through chapters 11 and 12 of Groundswell. The Best Buy case study does a great job showing how the internal groundswell successfully touches upon all five objectives which includes: listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing. The employees are imperative to a company’s success, as shown through Blue Shirt Nation, by making employees feel more empowered, connected, and more committed on a daily basis. By tapping the groundswells of ideas among employees (who best understand how your business operates) though connections on social networks, collaborations on wikis, and contributions to idea exchanges, this drastically helps organizations run more smoothly and efficiently.

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Essentially, Blue Shirt Nation was created to listen to what Best Buy employees had to say. In terms of listening, this enabled management to openly listen to their employees and rapidly fix any rising problems before they escalated. By talking, corporate had the ability to post any policy changes so that any person who was part of Blue Shirt Nation had the ability to read this. Additionally, for energizing, positive employees had the capability to spread their optimistic thinking to the entire employee base which drastically affected a number of stores. By supporting, this meant that employees helped out one another and some stores even promoted employees within. “The online forum on Blue Shirt Nation is a natural extension of that mentoring culture, where employees can find the support they need from around the company, not just from within their store or district” (Groundswell, 220). Lastly, by embracing, this gave employees and upper level management the ability to generate and carry out ideas.

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The groundswell thinking through Best Buy reminded me of our earlier class reading about Mini Coopers and how they created a community. Happy owners of these cars spread their enthusiasm through online forums, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. More specifically, on Facebook, 204,023 people “Like” the Mini Cooper page and these fans have the ability to openly ask questions, post photos/videos, have access to promotions, and much more. This in turn, gives employees (or anyone behind the scenes from the company) the opportunity to respond to one another, bounce ideas, and essentially utilize the groundswell that is taking place. This helped to energize the groundswell and resulted in a successful campaign through the employees.

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It is equally important to talk about Avenue A/Razorfish and their internal intranet site; a wiki with blogs and collaboration spaces. This gave their employees a communication channel and the chance to interact directly with the CEO. “When the wiki started in January 2006, pages in it were viewed fifty-seven hundred times. Nearly two years later, pages on the wiki had been viewed 1.8 million times. Over 90 percent of the employees have logged in, uploading three thousand files and contributing to seven thousand pages” (Groundswell, 222). This opportunity for nurturing the internal groundswell gave employees from the top down the chance to talk and listen to one another, thus empowering the organization as a whole.

In conclusion, the groundswell is extraordinarily effective since it is cheap, easy to create, simple to improve upon, and gives people the chance to connect to one another. Throughout Groundswell, the readers have learned that this connection comes from person-to-person activity, listening, patience, opportunity, flexibility, collaboration with others, and being humble. “These are the principles of groundswell thinking…you’ll be able to build on your successes, both with customers and within your company” (Groundswell, 241). 

Original Post #3: I've Got Bieber Fever!

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I will admit, I saw Justin Bieber: Never Say Never in IMAX 3D last weekend after being pressured by one of my friends. I surprised myself because I really enjoyed it! I shouldn’t have been that shocked though, considering it topped the box office with an estimated grossing of $12.4 million on its opening day from 3,105 theaters! I do listen to Justin’s music, such as “Baby” when it comes on the radio, but I never thought I would pay to see a movie about him. In a nutshell, the movie is a 3D part-biopic, part-concert film and gives viewers an inside look at the rise of Justin’s rapid transformation from a street performer in his small hometown of Stratford, Ontario to an internet phenomenon, and finally, to a global superstar. Did I mention that he is only 16 years old? That is what makes his story so inspiring.

I did not know Justin’s life story and that he got noticed utilizing social media, more specifically, through the user-generated content site YouTube and microblog (Twitter). His current manager, Scooter Braun, discovered videos of Justin on YouTube by accident. YouTube is a way to self-promote an artist to attract producers and record labels. Scooter was so impressed after watching Justin’s videos that he tracked down Justin’s mother (Pattie) who eventually gave in to allow her son to fly out to Atlanta, Georgia to meet Scooter and record demo tapes. He ultimately met R&B singer/songwriter Usher there, which started his path to fame.

 

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It is fascinating to see how YouTube has helped launched the careers of many young singers these days, but most noticeably, Justin’s launch into the competitive music industry. Essentially, YouTube is a video-sharing website where users can upload, share, and view videos. Countless people utilize this website because unregistered users can simply watch videos without signing up for anything, while registered users have the ability to upload an unlimited number of videos. “A YouTube video is really about letting go of control and trusting that your creativity will engage the groundswell” (Groundswell, 198). It is interesting to see how other celebrities, such as Lady Gaga, achieved fame and success without the use of YouTube, by going through the grueling process of performing gigs in small clubs for a number of years until she was finally recognized and signed to Island Def Jam Records. On the other hand, Justin was signed to a major record label simply because his video on YouTube went viral.

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In addition to how Justin promoted himself on YouTube, it is equally important to discuss how he effectively utilizes Twitter. Twitter is a free, microblogging service in which users send and receive messages (or tweets) that can be no longer than 140 characters. Twitter is a brilliant way for artists to build and maintain relationships with their fans. Moreover, it allows celebrities to promote their latest work to give fans a peek into their everyday lives. On Perez Hilton’s website, Justin has consistently been in the top 140 most popular Twitter users and he averages 11,000 new followers daily.

  

Clearly, many celebrities like Justin have done an exceptional job using popular methods of social media, such as YouTube and Twitter, to keep their fans in the loop of their latest singles, appearances, etc. If you think you have a great voice, it doesn’t hurt to make an account on YouTube and upload a video of yourself singing. Who knows? Maybe a producer will stumble across your video and you could become famous!

Reading Reflections #2: Brand Success Through Energizing and Embracing the Groundswell

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After reading chapters 7 through 10 of Groundswell, I completely agree and value the third level of groundswell thinking which is: energizing. It is imperative for companies to energize the base because it has the ability to boost businesses, as illustrated through the case study of Jim Noble and eBags. Moreover, it is incredible how committed and enthusiastic customers (like Noble) can manifest into viral marketers, by simply telling others how much he values his eBag.

Clearly, Li and Bernoff emphasize that word of mouth is vital to increase the brand marketing for companies. This is because it is an honest form of marketing and ultimately, "people believe other people more than media" (Groundswell, 131). This method is successful because it is "believable (testimonials from customers are far more credible than any media source), self-reinforcing (hear it from one person, and it’s intriguing… hear it from five or ten, even if you didn’t know them before, and it has to be true), and self-spreading (…if a product is worth using, its word of mouth generates more word of mouth in a cascade that’s literally exponential)" (Groundswell, 130). Evidently, by embracing the most enthusiastic customers, this allows companies to turn these people into "an integral part of the company’s products and processes" (Groundswell, 151). 

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Throughout my own experiences, I can relate to energizing the groundswell when I bought my Sennheiser HD 555 Professional Headphones with Sound Channeling online through Amazon. Before making this purchase, I had never owned headphones that covered your ears entirely, since I used the small iPod  headphones which you plug into your ears. Once I received the Sennheiser headphones in the mail and listened to music with them, I was ecstatic with my purchase. Because I was so happy about my new headphones, this prompted me to tell all of my friends about them. Like Noble and eBags, this is an example of energizing the groundswell since I utilized the power of word of mouth to tell others how unbelievable a specific product/brand was!

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Additionally, if you look at the reviews on Amazon.com, you can see that people are answering one another’s questions about any issues they are experiencing with the headphones. This saves the company a great deal of money and shows how the groundswell is supporting itself. This type of marketing is brilliant for Sennheiser because it doesn't cost them a single penny. Furthermore, Sennheiser "keeps the customers at the center of [their] organization" since they engage with their customers (Groundswell, 198). In an interview with John Falcone, President and CEO of Sennheiser, he said, "Our approach is to listen to our customers and respond with the right solution." This is critical for helping the groundswell support your company.

Essentially, even though companies themselves can utilize the groundswell to increase their businesses, customers can turn into such an incredibly powerful asset as well. Ratings and reviews from customers play a critical part of their success. As a valued customer, if you buy a product and you absolutely love it, why not rave about it online so that others will hear about it! On the other hand, if you end up buying a product and hate it, you should be even more inclined to write about it to warn other potential customers!