This article originally appeared in The Social Media Monthly.
While checking out Foodservice Social Media Universe last September in San Francisco, I often wondered how Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi would fare in the era of Facebook. How many disgruntled customers would whine on Yelp or Twitter that they didn’t get their soup? Would viral videos of his rants turn him into the honey badger of the foodservice social media universe?
To a former foodservice operator like me, the Soup Nazi was both hero and secret fantasy. He just didn’t give a damn about what people said. Any restaurant owner will tell you that word of mouth can be the best and worst thing that happens to your business. But the Soup Nazi didn’t seem to care whether people loved his soup in spite or because of the abuse he dished out.
Cheap, sexy, and easy social media have amplified WOM in ways that can be both terrifying and the answer to every restaurateur’s prayers, especially in this economy. Back in the days when I co-owned a cafe, Yelp was just scary concept that a lot of us could afford to ignore. Now that Yelp has grown into a platform with 20 million reviews, the ratings of anonymous, amateur food critics outweigh Zagat’s. One negative opinion can trump the ten glowing reviews on the rockstar website that few bother visiting.
Social media is WOM taken to the next level. Steven Groves, Co-Author of ROI of Social Media, Online & Social Marketing Strategist at ProfitStreams, calls it “WOM at the speed of electrons”. Consumers and employees are taking ownership of the brand image and social media is their platform. C-suite no longer controls the conversation. Businesses that want to remain relevant must take to the same channels and not only engage in the conversation, but add value to it.
How? FSMU brought to operators much needed insights and best practices from industry leaders and social media practitioners. Three years in the making, the event featured 48 speakers and 15 panels that covered a lot of ground, from social media 101 to roundtable visions of a Web 3.0 where mobile, social, and local will integrate seamlessly.
In between sessions, social web analysts and location-based service providers demonstrated how to slice, dice, chop and serve the huge amounts of data that customers freely provide to connected businesses. It was exactly the sort of information that FSMU’s 190 attendees were hungry for. Scanning the three thousand enthusiastic tweets sent, which generated over 15 million impressions, it was clear that FSMU producers FohBoh, the digital and social media hub for foodservice pros, and Networld Alliance had scored a major success.
“The latest statistics revealed at FohBoh’s social media conference were eye opening for a number of restaurant operators,” Eric Jaffe of ChowNow said. “Social media has transitioned from a niche communication tool to exchange pleasantries with tech-minded customers to a central marketing platform capable of creating top line growth from even moderate implementations.”
In his keynote address Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst at Altimeter, spelled out a five-step strategy to success: learn, dialogue, advocate, support, and innovate. Companies can opt out at their own peril. “Social media permeates every vertical, especially the service intense food service industry. Customers are having direct conversations with each other, and they trust each other more than they trust organizations. Unlike other industries, this one must pay close attention because customers may make split decisions based on social networks, as well as give immediate feedback in public. As a result, restaurants must have a pre, during, and post strategy to connect with customers.”
Attendees learned how social media management systems crawl the web searching for conversations to translate into actionable data they can use to engage, track their own and competitor’s online efforts, protect brand, for example against rogue franchisees, and innovate. Everything about your last meal can be mined for detail and immediately visualized on dashboards or scorecards, broken down in underlying themes, trends, keywords, even sentiment such as irony or sarcasm in all its international nuances. Data interpreters, like FohBoh’s own Fohbuzz.com, offer online reports that allow operators to filter, segment, and organize the data that concerns them without sitting at a computer 24/7.
Findings from ongoing brand monitoring can help define the dialogue on social media channels. Information includes customer complaints, searched off domain on unofficial communities like the ones powered by Get Satisfaction. Complaints are opportunities – not threats – to fix the root issues, but operators need to know where to draw the line. Is the customer loyal? Influential? Or just a clown? Although all comments should be welcome, serious issues should be moved to a private channel for resolution, since responding t socially may reinforce the behavior of complaining in public.
If you are not prepared to engage, leave it be. Once you start the dialogue, customers and employees expect you to maintain the conversation. Speaking about the growing influence of the social customer, Michael Brito of Edelman Digital cited a Cone 2010 Study that found 78% of social media users interact with brands, with 37% engaging at least once per week. New media expect companies or brands should not only have a social media presence (95%), but also interact with their consumers (89%).
Owyang encouraged operators to recruit an “unpaid army” of highly engaged advocates to promote their brand online. These brand advocates should be placed front and center, for example by rewarding their loyalty with points redeemable for products – and inviting them into the company. Starbucks partners with Foursquare to offer barista badges and drink discounts. Tasti D-Lite customers earn TastiRewards for every purchase made with a card that triggers updates to Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare accounts.
“The goal of every brand should be to transform social customer into an advocate” Brito said. “Advocates talk about brand even when brand is not listening. They are not influencers, whose participation is based on incentives. Brand advocates don’t care about you, but about the brand. They will continue to write about the brand regardless of incentives.” Trusted among their peers and within their micro-communities, advocates are aiding and influencing others down the purchase funnel.
Operators shouldn’t think of advocacy in terms of short-term campaigns, but cultivate relationships with enthusiastic customers, leveraging their social graph through advocacy apps or interactive promotions, sweepstakes, contests, coupons, and giveaways. Wildfire, Buddy Media, Zuberance, and Involvr can help brands identify advocates and activate them to drive social recommendations. Bizzy’s “My Try List” features Social Recommendations by distance or category; once you Check-Out of a place, it’s automatically saved with your rating. The Foodspotting app allows to upload (“spot”) photos of your favorite dishes. For every “nomination” contributed to the community, Foodspotters earn virtual tips and merit badges. Loyalty management platforms like the upcoming mobile app Dealishes registers customer behavioral data to help operators identify, reach and incentivize loyal customers to become evangelists – and ultimately build a “Salesforce.com” for restaurants.
Using the input of the most valued guests, restaurants can innovate in real time, testing ideas, streamlining processes, and improving products and services. Tens of thousands of customers have submitted, commented, and voted on ideas at My Starbucks Idea. Over fifty suggestions have been implemented. Houlihan Restaurants tapped HQ, an invite-only Ning community of 10,500 brand evangelists recruited from its database of more than 600,000 customers, to revamp its value menu, which now accounts for 26% of item sales in ten markets. Owyang advised transparency about why some popular ideas aren’t implemented, so customers still feel like their voices matter.
Only the brands that are engaged in community, soliciting feedback, and innovating products can expect to see ROI. “Social media marketing is a unique blend of science and art – the art is in crafting a message that connects you to the audience and the science is in ROI.” Steve Groves said. “The challenge is to engage in a way that’s measureable and leads to a revenue-based result. Time and money are the variables that can and should be tracked when it comes to showing the ROI in marketing; online, social or traditional. Begin by tracking minutes and hours spent in social marketing, the cost of subscriptions and licenses to the tools you need, and then the time to assemble and make the comparisons that lead to insight. The inability to think strategically leads to a fixation on tactics and tools, neither of which provides an answer to ‘why are we doing this?’ by themselves.”
For Melissa Simpson of Firehouse Subs, the diminished economy of 2011 was the perfect time to take the brand’s reputation for community online. In 2010, Firehouse spent mostly on traditional outreach. Now she gets people engaged on Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare by asking them about their personal lives. If you listen to your guests, they’ll tell you what they want, Simpson says. This year, Firehouse’s Big Eight Showdown pitted their eight most popular sandwiches against each other. All receipts included a code that customers could use to vote for their favorite on Facebook. A custom-built tab with real time preference standings and giveaways of gift certificates and tickets to sports events kept the audience engaged for the ten-week campaign. Results? About 80,000 votes submitted and a 6.4% sales lift. Store locator visits up to 22% from 17%. And an additional 11,000 subscribers to its database.
“Facebook is the great equalizer; it puts you in the same league as the big brands” Annica Kreider of McAlister’s Corporation said. With its small town flavor and small town ad fund, McAlister decided to capitalize on their image and design social media right into a folksy interactive site, teatownusa.com. Visitors are invited to post pictures with their favorite employee and personal content that can earn them merit badges. The small town image fits them just right. “Be true to the brand, engage in the way guests expect you to engage. It isn’t all about you, so ask your audience questions unrelated to the product.”
Michael Atkinson calls this being gracious – communicating about topics unrelated to your existence that will pull people in. A seafood restaurant can blog about fish, sustainability, the methodology and philosophy on purchasing a certain fish locally, which by the way, will be on Friday’s menu. People are drawn to thought leaders. If you have a blog that sets you apart, where you share freely your experiences and knowledge, people will gravitate towards it naturally.
Once they are on the networks, businesses need to develop internal intake processes for feedback and external policies to set customer expectations. Clearly, social must become an essential attribute of organizational culture. Some employers like Pacific Catch let employees own their own voice. Others have set up internal social media so that both front and back of house know what’s affecting guest satisfaction. Michelle Bixler of Pizza Divina teaches her staff that they are top influencers and encourages their participation through contests, quizzes and rewards. She wants them to witness firsthand how crucial engagement and brand advocacy are to business growth. With over 7,000 employees in 1,000 locations using Expion to monitor and respond in social media conversations, Applebee’s has built on their brand promise as your “Neighborhood Bar and Grill.” The strategy has allowed them to retain control over messaging and content, while dramatically improving ROI by connecting with customers at the local level.
In her panel on social media policy, Kyle-Beth Hilfer, of Counsel Collen IP said that while empowering employees to be brand ambassadors is a natural fit for the restaurant industry, employees need to know how to separate their personal and professional lives. “Because of the casual nature of interactions in the restaurant environment, it’s more likely that an employee might need guidance on company expectations for online behavior. The social media policy must reflect corporate culture in tone, language, and content. It should protect confidential information, intellectual property, and the reputation of the brand. It should cover media relations, customer relations, discussions of competitors, and use of respectful language. It should also include clear instructions on how to comply with the FTC’s Endorsement and Testimonial Guidelines.” What’s the jurisdiction of an employer over the employee’s personal life? Hilfer pointed to recent guidance from the National Labor Relations Board, to ensure that policies don’t infringe on employees’ protected labor rights.
Social media policies will be increasingly important as cloud computing, mobile computing and social networking continue to redefining the industry and our world. “Everything that can be mobile will be mobile”, said keynote speaker Nate DaPore, President and CEO at PeopleMatter. “Mobile check in, mobile ordering, mobile curbside are taking hold of the industry. There are two million Google searches per minute, 122 million per hour, three billion per day; 43% of all local mobile searches are for restaurants and bars. In January 2011, mobile restaurant search queries surpassed desktop”.
A self-order and self-pay app created by OLO for Five Guys, a restaurant with usually long lines, got 250,000 downloads. Self-service ordering now represents as much as 26% of order volume at some Five Guys locations. App orders are 25% larger. By finding customers and driving them to online ordering systems, eThor increased monthly sales for a pizza chain with 28 locations from $149K to $263K in nine months, doubling a customer database that took four years to build. ChowNow delivers orders directly from Facebook and smartphones to tablet devices provided to their subscribers that automatically track sales and promote last-minute deals.
In addition to sales, mobile-social can positively impact employee connections – via scheduling and check-in, training videos on YouTube, job applications through LinkedIn, and one-to-many platforms that help employers broadcast culture to prospective hires, discuss experience in career path, and promote opportunities for growth.
We are shifting from reactive to proactive. To stay relevant, the only thing to do is to take a quantum leap and get connected, says Kathleen Wood, chief catalyst at Kathleen Wood Partners and author of The Best Shift in Your Life. Foodservice sales have gone from $43.8 billion in 1970 to $558.3 billion today. That’s $1.8 billion a day. Social media represent a new era for a mature sector; 76 million millenials with poor interpersonal skills but great online connections will have the same impact on the industry as baby boomers did at the peak of its growth. At the speed we are moving, adapting to this new generation is critical. Social media is the platform to do so. Wood envisions the quantum leap as an equation:
Mature market + generational customers + velocity
social media
The formula allows for leadership position, market share expansion, speed to market advantage, value creation for investors, and an opportunity to redefine service and segment.
The future will see even more integration of Facebook with smartphones and iPad or tablet apps, for real-time, onsite recommendations and conversations based off customers’ social graph. And, more than ever, tomorrow will be all about the data… or WOM, because some things never change. The question is still, who loves you, baby, and how? As FSMU made clear, at least online, it is increasingly easy to know.