Restaurant Owners Beware: Yelp to Add Inspection Notices

Yelp, the ever-growing user generated review website, has expanded its review services to include restaurant health inspection notices.
 
As the AP recently reported, Yelp will begin allowing city-supplied health information to appear on restaurant pages. The program will begin in San Francisco before expanding to other markets.
 
Restaurants will be given a grade, and users will be able to click through to read recent health inspection information.
 
As if restaurants didn’t have enough to worry about – managing their online reputations, mitigating false claims posted on social sites … Now health inspection notices will have a longer shelf-life and will be housed on the most popular online restaurant review site in the world.
 
As the digital world continues to evolve, does your digital strategy continue to evolve, too? Don’t know where to start managing your online brand reputation?
 
Then check out our Brand Reputation white paper or give us a call!
 
Authored by Heather Schowalter, Senior Account Executive. Get more marketing insight: @SummitSocial.

Social Media & the 7 Deadly Sins

Talk about an attention-grabbing research study!  An advertising agency conducted a survey about social media habits and how and if those habits translated to the 7 deadly sins as stated in the Bible: gluttony, lust, greed, pride, wrath, envy and sloth.  Of the 562 adults surveyed, 70% committed at least 1 of the 7 deadly sins.

 

Here are the rankings:

Gluttony (content overload) 41%

Pride (believing online friends are better than most) 37%

Greed (craving attention) 30%

Lust 30%

Sloth (texting instead of calling; being online instead of exercising) 30%

Wrath (cyber bullying) 19%

Envy 16%

 

Other findings:

15-24 year olds were guilty of more offenses than most age groups

25-29 year olds averaged 3+ sins each

Wrath skewed male with 24% vs. 14% female

Slothful skewed female with 33% vs. 26%

 

So which of the deadly sins do you think you fall prey to?

 

The Social Media Revolution 2012

Being social is more than saying “Hi” to your neighbor as you walk to the mailbox.

Being social is more than being on Facebook.

Being social is more than Yelping an opinion on a restaurant.

Being social is a movement, a collective, a change in the way we as people are relating to eachother.  Think not?  If I ask you who’s in your circle of friends. How would you answer?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eUeL3n7fDs&feature=share

very Pinterest ing

Below is a blog post I read today. I thought it was interesting and hope you do too. Additionally I need to have Lisa show me how to share blog posts Snapshot: Very Pinteresting [breaking down the Pinterest user base] February 27th, 2012 by Luis Oliveros | No Comments

LinkedIn: Effective Lead Gen & Now a Company Follow Button

Survey findings of 5,000 businesses shows that LinkedIn is 277% more effective than FB and Twitter with lead generation. 

 

Additionally, as of this morning, LinkedIn now has an added feature for companies to add a Follow button.  Directions regarding how to implement the Follow button can be found here:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31601/linkedin-launches-company-follow-button-how-to-add-it-now?source=Blog_Email_[LinkedIn%20Launches%20Co]

 

 

 

neat Twitter factoid

i heard this story on NPR today about how people on Twitter tend to follow people in other similar cities…so if you live in London, you probably aren’t going to follow someone in Po-dunk, Iowa. They mapped the trends and discovered that the model for Twitter followers is similar to maps of airline routes.

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/21/147180159/why-twitter-ties-resemble-airline-hub-maps

I am still trying to carve time out of my life to actually tweet. Right now I just follow news organizations and Mario Batali. HAHAHAHAHA.

 

Social Media Best Practices

Thank you to all of you who attended the lunch-n-learn yesterday! I appreciated all the questions and hope you found the hour valuable. I wanted to share with you the presentation for future reference or in case you weren’t able to join us.

As I mentioned at the end of the presentation, we have made great progress in establishing various social channels for Summit Marketing. You can visit and participate with us here:

Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
LinkedIn
Slideshare

We are working with the magic men (Doug and Lance) to auto-populate the email signature I talked about yesterday…hopefully we will have this done by the weekend. If everything works out, there will be no action on your end. Keep your fingers crossed that Doug and Lance come through again to make magic happen!

Be on the look out for future lunch-n-learns…we have only started the conversation! The knowledge available within this company is quite amazing and I personally look forward to learning from all of you and your experience.

Sounds interesting, but will it actually work?

This morning I read an MSNBC blog post about building a social media command center at the Super Bowl. The Indianapolis host committee is investing what has to be millions of dollars into this endeavor — to monitor what is being said, as well as provide visitors information about events throughout the city. They also plan to use Twitter to get out emergency messages if needed.

It all sounds really cool but will it actually work? I don’t know about the rest of you but my experience trying to post to Facebook while at a sporting event with thousands of other fans has been nothing but frustrating. Rarely is there enough cellular bandwidth for it to work in a timely manner. When you only have one bar on your phone — because everyone else in the stadium is also trying to post something — often it takes several minutes for something to post, if it will even post at all.

So what do you think? Will the cellular network infrastructure handle the load to make this marketing effort a success?

If you weren’t able to see my recent photos from the Cotton Bowl, because I could get them to post to Facebook, here they are. Texas Stadium was awesome, too bad we lost.

Article:

Super Bowl gets a social media “command center”
The Super Bowl is going social, with a marketing team opening a 2,800-square-foot social media command center in a bid to increase online engagement with fans who are in Indianapolis for the game. The center, operated by digital marketing firm Raidious, will be staffed by a team of 50 people. “It’s the first time any facility like this has been built to manage social media for such a large event,” says Raidious CEO Taulbee Jackson. MSNBC/Digital Life on Today blog (1/23

Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery or is it something else?

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Imitation is the sincerest flattery.”

This got me to thinking. Pinterest, the rapidly growing social media website targeted to women my age (older), is based on this very notion. Find ideas you like — pin them (attached to your electronic bulletin boards) — recreate them yourself — then re-share the ideas with the world.

For those of you avid Pinterest followers the “time suck” can be mind boggling, but the creativity is utterly inspiring. I have to admit to spending many an evening sifting through thousands of tiny photos searching for home decorating ideas. I even recreated a few myself this past holiday season.

However, I bet the developers of Pinterest didn’t find it all that flattering when a competing social network, (Pinspire), flat out copied their business model. It’s kind of ironic that a site based on sharing/copying other people’s ideas was itself copied.

But, this makes me wonder how or if copyright laws will change to keep pace with this rapidly changing technology. Can anyone truly protect their original ideas anymore?

I found this recent Forbes article interesting:

Column: Pinterest’s success inspires “radical copycatting”
The success of Pinterest has given rise to “radical copycatting,” with a site called Pinspire emulating the social image-sharing site’s model, writes Tero Kuittinen. Successful social sites always inspire copycats, but most make a show of seeking to improve on and expand the original site’s functions, Kuittinen writes. “Pinspire attempts nothing but recreating the Pinterest experience with complete fidelity. The audacity is impressive,” he writes. Forbes (1/22)

Foursquare: Someone Doesn’t Get It. Is It Me, Or Is It Businesses?

Someone is missing the point of Foursquare and I don’t think it’s me. (I don’t mean to brag, but I am the Mayor of three places, including Summit Marketing, St. Louis.) Please correct me if I’ve got it all wrong. If I haven’t been using the app properly then, by all means, let me know so that others can learn from my silly mistakes.

Before you read any more, I must disclose something that you may find hard to believe. I am not a socialite. I don’t hit all the trendy spots in town and ‘Check In’ to announce my presence to all my online friends. I don’t use Foursquare as a tool to find out where all my friends are hanging. I have one friend on Foursquare and she’s my wife. (Gotta keep tabs on her somehow :>)
So maybe that’s why I’m not seeing any benefit to Foursquare. Does the number of friends you have influence how many or what kind of offers you get? Nope. At least I didn’t find any mention of that when I read about using specials within Foursquare’s merchant section. http://support.foursquare.com/entries/481480-what-are-foursquare-specials

So unless I’m missing something, the businesses around here are definitely missing something. They’re missing out on my loyalty.

For the past two months I’ve been using Foursquare to check in at the different businesses I visit. I have yet to receive or unlock a special that has benefited me. Not even a Newbie special or a special when I became Mayor.

I visit some places, like grocery stores, 1-3 times a week. (Don’t I live an exciting life?) I think grocery stores provide a great example for our discussion here. A couple miles from my home, two competing grocery stores (Dierberg’s and Schnuck’s) are located across the street from each other. I drive past them every day so they’re both equally convenient. Here’s the thing…I’m not loyal to either store. Some days I go to Schnuck’s, some days I go to Dierberg’s. I don’t have any rhyme or reason for that. Over the past two months I’ve checked in at Schnuck’s 9 times and Dierberg’s 7 times. And I have absolutely nothing to show for it. OK, every once in a while I get a nifty little badge icon and a congratulatory message on my phone from the nice folks at Foursquare, but not one thing from the actual store where I’m checking in.

All it would take is for one of the stores to give me a valuable special and they would get the lion’s share of my business. Now I don’t expect them to turn my visit into that awesome old game show, Supermarket Sweep, but $5 off a purchase of $50 would be cool.

Giving me a simple offer like that would engage me and allow me to interact with their brand on my phone. More important, it would make me want to continue to check in at their store to see what other specials I could unlock. The more specials I would unlock, the more connected to the brand I would become.

In a way, a check in is like a consumer asking a business for some love. When check in after check in gets ignored, it’s like the business’ way of rejecting their customers. One can only take so much rejection before moving on.

I can see the potential value Foursquare offers to businesses and consumers. But until businesses “get it”, I don’t see how Foursquare will survive. The potential will go unfulfilled. If there’s nothing in it for me, then why should I care?

So do I have this all wrong or do you agree with me? What are your experiences with Foursquare? Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.
-Kevin