Sorry folks. But there just isn’t any discernible ROI for restaurants in social media. Does that mean that restaurants shouldn’t be using social media, or investing in their digital presence and strategy? Absolutely not, but let’s cut the crap and cease muddying the waters with terms like “return on investment”. Is that why you opened a restaurant? To get a healthy return on your friggin’ capital?

I think not, so let’s stop playing that game with one another and talk about what’s important.

What’s important is that your brand, your business be visible and in front of the most passionate and committed segment of your given cities dining community. You need to be where these people are, where they hang out: to chat, to gossip, to have fun, to gripe, to praise. These are the people who appreciate when restaurants engage with them and do so on the platforms they prefer.

What else do I mean?

• I mean conversing with customers and potential ones. I don’t mean tweeting out nothing but your daily specials once a day and peace-ing out back to the kitchen.
• I mean reading the blogs and tumblrs, testing out new apps and platforms. I don’t mean sticking your fingers in your hears and hoping it all goes away.
• I mean listening to your followers and friends and creating content that is relevant, humorous and helpful to them. I don’t mean soliciting or sucking up to people in hopes of getting a few more “likes”.
• I mean joining the community of other restaurants in your city and neighborhood and building them up as much as you should. That means get out of the kitchen, go meet the other chefs and restauranteurs, collaborate with them, work together to solve mutual problems or to create fun new opportunities. We are watching and we will reward those establishments that are proactive online and off.
• I mean involving yourself in the events, charities, opportunities, street fairs and markets where your customers hang, not just the ones that give you the promise of great press.
• I mean taking terms like strategy and analytics seriously.

Ultimately, I mean generating and executing a strategy that is line with those passionate principles you had when you started the business.

Just do me a favor, stop obfuscating, stop obstructing. There is a very healthy return to be had on Social Media. Stop looking for it in the wrong places and with the wrong terms.

Not Sure What The Dinosaur Is About

One of the most frequent criticisms of “social media” and digital lifestyles is that it’s just all so ephemeral, here one minute, forgotten and meaningless the next. But as our culture starts to recognize that social media is here to stay, that its not a fad but more a permanent change to our society, I expect we’ll see more tools like Timehop.

What is timehop?

A simple service that tells you what you were doing a year ago with various social medias: What photos were you taking on Instagram? What locations were you checking into on Foursquare? What tweets were you sending? As Timehop describes it:

Timehop turns your web services into a time capsule. Everything you post today becomes a note for the future!

We put time capsules in the ground to see what was important to us “back then,” often because most of what’s in that capsule won’t be so memorable. But some of it will, and the fact that Timehop has sprouted up and generated some traction with its simple service (they only send you an email every morning, for now), shows us that this whole social media thing is more important to more people than previously thought.

Knowing what we were tweeting, checking into, what photos we snapped and shared, or more simply: what we were DOING a year ago today, on a granular level is likely to spur memories, good or bad, that we otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. I wonder if this will bring us into contact with our own ephemeral pasts in a way we aren’t quite ready to be.

Fab.com is just another daily deal site. Their particular niche is design-related products: books on auteur directors, pop-art inspired iPhone cases, vintage subway posters, etc. But where Fab really starts to break away from the rest of the pack is in the technology and pace of innovation that they’ve built into the business.

A few weeks ago, Fab.com launched a new feature called  ”Live Feed,” which displays, in real-time, what Fab.com users are buying, commenting on, socially sharing, and interested in. For a community such as the one Fab.com is building, this is a great tool, as it looks quite nice and is functional. One is very likely to appreciate, research and purchase what other users are. We all like what’s in demand.

Fab.com's Live Feed Feautre

But there is another more significant functionality to the Live Feed: the community aspect. Even if we aren’t technically connected to the other Fab.com users, we are shopping on the same site for the same kind of design-related home gifts, which makes us faintly part of the same community. This becomes stronger when we see our fellow shoppers likes and comments, their purchases. It takes that faint sense of community and makes it stronger.

The likely outcome is that we will move to actually connect with these people (on Twitter, Facebook, etc) who buy the same thing that we did, or who like the same kinds of objects or gifts. And, again, it all revolves around the Fab.com brand. Which is a huge brand builder in the 21st century. It is now an accepted truism that brands that solve problems for people, that connect people, will win out over those businesses that simply try and get as much OUT of their customers as they can. Improve the lives of your community, however small or big, and you will build loyalty.

New kid on the block app Jotly takes the rating and reviewing app technology and philosophy to new, hysterical levels. If I had a nickel for every tech startup or entrepreneur who didn’t realize it but just wanted to build the same old app again and again, I’d be a very rich man. But in these cliches, I am never quite sure who is supposed to be paying out the nickels, so I never get any.

Sucks. Anyway: JOTLY!

Why is that the food and technology go together so well?

Is it all the picture taking? The uploading and commenting? The bloviating? The useful tips our friends leave for us around town, alerting us to can’t miss dishes and off-the-menu gems? Or is it because in cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco there are just so many great options that figuring out where we want to go each evening is becoming an impossible task? Or is it simply that going out to dinner, sitting around a table, communing with our loved ones, having our senses seduced and enlivened by professionals simply lends itself to sharing?

Whichever the answers, Forkly, a new and promising looking app, seems like one of the more ambitious apps in the food space: with something for everyone.

As you can plainly see, Forkly is aiming pretty big here. For the casual user they promise to be THE app used for food discovery, organizing what dishes we want to try and where, the ability to share our food and drink patterns and “earn influence points.” You can see that Forkly is trying to fold in, like an omelette, all the best things that other apps such as Zagat, Foursquare, UrbanSpoon and many more. Their ambition to encourage users to become “influencers,” presumably which would win them free meals and discounts, tastings and other offers down the line is something that we’ll need to observe over the coming months.

Recently, Klout has been rapidly improving its service, upgrading its user interface and doubling down on rewards for its digital mavens. Can this work soley in a niche like food?

Forkly: Brands, Bloggers and Businesses

For brands and businesses such as bars, restaurants, catering halls, food trucks and the like, Forkly has a lot to offer. First and foremost the vaunted “analytics dashboard” (ooooo) that allows businesses to “understand who draws the most influence at your establishmennt….and help you build lasting loyal relationships with patrons.” Presumably so business owners can take said influencers out to a strip club in order to thank them. I kid cause I love.

Forkly is also offering the ability to control and personalize your restaurant’s menus based “on patron’s taste.” Not sure how they are going to do that, and this seems like another step in the direction of tailoring and customizing our experiences specifically to our tastes, which is either technology making our lives earlier, or another sign of just how fat, lazy and stupid we’ve become that we can’t even decide what to eat.

Which brings us perfectly to the bloggers: Forkly promises to be a major tool in the arsenal of countless bloggers. Enabling bloggers to “embed tastes into your blog,” Forkly is paying the blogging community a great amount of respect. And by clearly acknowledging that many bloggers are influencers among their friends and communtiy, they’ve highlighted those aspects of the app and platform.

Things can get ugly quickly. This story from Houston seems like a harbinger of things to come:

​Allison Matsu was having drinks at Down House on Sunday night when she posted a Tweet, since deleted, wherein she called a bartender a “twerp” for quoting Bobby Heugel — the owner of Anvil Bar & Refuge — and appended her statement with the hashtag #jackass#jackoff.

Matsu has achieved mild, local notoriety for her late-night Tweets, even recently winning aHouston Press Web Award for that very activity. Down House, for its part, has achieved a reputation in the short time that it’s been open for having capricious service. The two collided in a Twitter-fueled spectacle that resulted in general manager Forrest DeSpain calling the bar, speaking shortly with Matsu, and asking her to be ejected from his establishment.

“She called him a twerp,” DeSpain said by phone yesterday afternoon. DeSpain runs the Twitter account for Down House and was agitated that someone would bully his bartender, as he saw it, and took action despite not being at the restaurant that night. “I immediately called up here and talked to her for a few minutes and asked her if she had any kinder words.” She didn’t, DeSpain said, so he asked her to leave.

Left @DownHouseHTX in tears after GM called up & asked the bartender to hand me the phone. He proceeded to curse a me & ask me to leave. Wow

August 15, 2011 12:14 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@AllisonHiromi

Alli

I prefer to stay on the positive side of things when I think about where social media and real-life meet. But as more of our lives are shared in real-time, and are geo-located, incidents like the one mentioned above are much more likely to crop up. Restaurants and other businesses that are subject to social media interactions taking place in real-time need to develop policies and protocols for situations just like this.

The truth, however unfair, is this: when these incidents happen, most outsiders are immediately and inherently going to sympathize with the client. A woman leaving a restaurant in tears after being berated on the phone by a manager? Not good. Who knows if the woman was drunk? Or overly aggressive? Shit, maybe she works for a rival restaurant and is just causing trouble.

We have all been trained that the customer is always right, especially in a place like a restaurant or a bar. Anyone who goes out regularly knows these situations crop up form time to time, though of course most of the time, the situation never gets close to the intensity and seriousness of this incident.

But because consumers and the general public will almost always, at least initially, side with the offended customer, businesses needed to be extra careful how they handle these instances. Customers can be bullies no doubt. And a business owner should always protect their team members and employees from an aggressive and offending customer. This really is new territory.

I have a recurring fear about tweeting something unsatisfactory about a chef or a particular dish and having that chef or general manager see my tweet and confront me. I wonder if I would be able to collect myself and back up my critique, or cave and apologize. I really don’t know.

Earlier this summer I was asked to write up a proposal for a small, but increasingly national, fashion boutique. The project was intended for an event for Fashion’s Night Out, to take place in early September as part of New York Fashion Week. I ended up doing a ton of research on where the fashion world was with regards to social networking, apps, digital campaigns and new business models. Unfortunately I didn’t land the client, but since then, I’ve maintained my monitoring of the Fashion world and have become quite intrigued at the amount of excitement and energy.

To that end, one of the clearest examples of Fashion’s new found taste for all things digital is a new app, called Snapette.

As TechCrunch last week noted:

You can snap photos of your favorite bag, top, shoes accessory, pair of jeans or other fashion item, choose your location, comment on where you found the product (i.e. what store), and post this to Snapette. And other users can browse products near their current location or by their favorite store, or brand.

Women can also see what items are trending globally, or by their specific location. And other users can comment on photos and share tips and recommendations. Each user has a “virtual closet” profile page that collects and showcases photos of items they’ve Snapped, Like and Want, and you can also post your ‘Snapettes’ on Facebook and Tumblr.

Not only is Snapette truly well designed with great branding, simple and intuitive user experience of the app, they’ve also got a fun Tumblr where the company is curating some of the best photos their community is offering up.

The big take here is the location-aware sensibility. Being able to easily find and sort what my followers and friends are finding out there in the wilds is starting to make the shopping experience much more relevant and interactive. We no longer need to go shopping with friends who have proven out to have great fashion sense. We may still want to, but at least there is an option now, especially in the spontaneous moment when most decisions about shopping occur, to call up an app, see what people I’ve chosen to follow and friend are looking at, trying on and what they’re commenting on.

It is apps like Snapette that are pushing us one step closer to the truly social shopping experience we are constantly promised by the fashion industry.

With Fall fast approaching and with it, my 2-year anniversary of being in business as a digital strategist looming ominously overhead, I’ve been wanting to do a taking stock post. Many of my clients over these few years have been restaurants and restaurateurs, and as a food lover and true denizen of New York City, the playground of social media is one that I’ve been focused on even when I wasn’t working on client projects in food. I suppose as I start to get a little nostalgic over the past couple of years, I’ve been wrestling with a summation of sorts, based on but not limited to the following questions:

• what has exactly gone on?
• Where were my predictions right?
• Where were they wrong?
• What did I completely miss?
• Where have I been surprised?
• What’s working and what isn’t?

What Has Happened to Restaurants and Social Media?

At least now, they all know what social media is, what it can do, what it can’t and whether it is for them or not. Going back a few years ago, my job was one first of education then of selling. I had to inform clients and the broader market about just what social media was. And of course, educating businesses and businesses people, and BUSY ones at that, was not and remains a difficult proposition. Half of that is because “social media;” its tools, outlets, protocols, apps and services are in a constant state of flux.

But I can say quite safely that the broader restaurant community in and around New York City has come quite far. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of restaurants actively using social media for a multitude of reasons and in unique and interesting ways. Also, there are tons using social media in predictable, boring, pedantic, even obnoxious ways. Takes all kinds…

So for every Dell’Anima and Joe Campanale, for every Luke’s Lobster and Supper, there are plenty of restaurants doing nothing more than tweeting out photos of food, refusing to learn the various platforms and tailoring their activities in any specific way.

What Does Success Look Like for Restaurants Embracing Social Media?

A fraught question, because a straight marketer and business person would have to say “an appreciable increase in business correlated to the amount of time and energy we’ve put into it.” And that straight marketer wouldn’t be wrong.

Of course, we all know I am not a “straight” marketer, at least not totally. I am comfortable with questions about ROI.

But social media will always contain an element of “feel,” an aspect that isn’t describable or definable and certainly isn’t trackable. Whether measuring in Klout scores, retweets, mentions on Eater, mainstream press attention, etc.. success in social media is really a feel thing. Eventually we will have great tools that cross-reference actual POS sales against social activity, but until that day and even beyond that, whether or not a restaurant can be said to be successful with social media is going to be subjective.

It’s going to be in the ether, a matter for jokes and references among the fooderati (yes i said that). Success in social media will be defined by consistency, experimentation, tone and fun.

So Where Are We?

Right now I think that the restaurant scene in New York City, with regards to social media, is closing in upon a really great sweet spot. We have lots of voices already involved with the community, with more coming on every day. And as these new restaurants come on, they’ve had the time to understand what social media is and what it isn’t. Social media for restaurants is NOT about saving your business, or generating a quick sales boost. Enough restaurants have tried that route and ended up washed up in the rocky shoals.

Another reason we are close approaching that sweet spot is that restaurants are experimenting with newer tools like Foursquare, Instagram and Tumblr. Experimentation is a hallmark of the digital world, an understanding that trying and failing are good things in the long run.

This morning I checked into Murray’s Bagels on Foursquare, earned a badge and this is the tweet I got back in return:

@Zacharycohen Thanks for the visit, and congrats on the badge! Hope everything's delicious.

August 18, 2011 9:26 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MurraysBagelsC

Murrays Bagels

That was ten minutes after I checked in and a nice surprise as I devoured a poppy seed bagel with Lox, onion and egg. (It’s called the LEO). This is the kind of thing that clearly communicates that restaurants, or the people they are hiring are really starting to figure out what a good social media profile looks like for a restaurant.

I’ll be doing a few more of these wrap ups in the coming days and weeks so keep an eye out. And please feel free to leave a comment if you want to add to the conversation, or if you feel I’ve missed something

A few months ago I wrote a tame little piece called “Why Groupon Sucks” about the utter insanity of the group buying segment. I love being right, and I am so often wrong, that today I had to grapple with that unfamiliar feeling of vindication. Today, The Week informs us that Groupon has revised their IPO filing, revealing hundreds of millions of dollars of losses MORE than the market had expected. Think about that one for a second.

Investors already expected Groupon to have lost lots and lots of money “acquiring its customer base,” but now its just a matter of just how much money they are losing. And this company is going public? WHY LORD!

To wit:

the company reported a $420 million loss for 2010 and a $117.1 million loss for the first quarter of 2011. In the second quarter of 2011, Groupon had a record $878 million in sales but still lost $102.7 million. Does this “startling turnabout” spell doom for Groupon’s IPO, which had been expected to raise $750 million and value the company at $30 billion?

Flash Sites and Group Buying Are Nothing New

Kevin Ryan, Gilt’s chief executive, said the company was simply repositioning as “a broader lifestyle brand, all high-end,” adding, “Whether it’s full-price or discount is a detail.” But others say the effort reveals that the much-heralded flash-sale business is hitting its limits.

The Times continues:

Mr. Ryan said that Gilt’s flash-sale sites continue to be successful. Gilt, three-and-a-half years old, brought in $500 million in gross revenue last year. “It’s impossible to say that this has not grown very quickly in a very short period of time,” he said. Inventory fluctuates, he said, but there is enough available for Gilt to host 30 sales a day.

$500 million in gross revenue! Awesome. Wait, how much are you spending? Cause if its more than that, you are NOT profitable. And then this:

Still, most of the flash-sale sites remain, like Gilt, unprofitable, analysts say, and many have also tried to grow by expanding into new areas, though not into full-price commerce. Rue La La and ideeli, for instance, have branched into children’s apparel, travel and local deals, but have rarely sold full-price items.

Emphasis mine.

I think I’ve figured out why there has been so much ink spilled in the service of sites like Groupon, Living Social, Gilt, Lot18, Fab and all the hundreds of others. These sites promised to exorcise the ghosts of the internet bubble.  Back when the internet was first learning to walk and crawl, the first thing that “it” (the internet) tried to do, was make money. Funny, that seems like the only thing American companies EVER try to do, whether they are ready to or not. But the internet couldn’t even crawl, let alone walk over to the bank and take out some money.

Now, however, the internet can walk, it can talk, it can sue your ass, it can go mobile, it can socialize, it is 100% verified and ready to party. This internet is all growns up and it wants to remake how you do almost everything. And ya know, I am down for the good majority of that. There is so much in our society that simply needs a good resurfacing, more even, remaking. So if the internet wants to invite itself in and remake vast swaths of our society, improving much of what it touches, I am fine with that.

But the idea that the internet is going to generate tremendous profits for the same old crap because of a slight tweak of existing retail models is preposterous and the failure of Groupon and the “pivots” of Flash sites like Gilt illustrate this as elegantly as anything.

I don’t know yet…investigating now after a fascinating breakfast conversation yesterday morning. But in the meantime, this is pretty awesome: