The Yellow Pages are dead. Cut the deadweight from your Marketing
If there is one thing you should rush to do to stop any useless dollars being spent in your marketing budgets now and for the future is to end all money spent with Yellow Pages (yes including those that claim to be “online” these days). It is time to put these paper behemoths permanently in the recycling bins!
According to pewinternet.org, 14% Of the American Population even knows what the Yellow Pages are! 1% Of Americans will ever search for a business in the Yellow Pages. The Yellow pages of today are online business directories such as Google Places, Linkedin, Yelp, and Facebook. All of these sites have options for businesses to set up business accounts with a basic listing always being free of charge. There are of course customization and enhancements to your listings such as running optimized targeted advertising, posting product photos, and video.
The traditional Yellow Pages companies have made the migration online, and Qwestdex (Dexonline) seems to be the most aggressive and capable, yet there is a major problem. They are extremely far behind these other platforms in the areas of SEO. It is rare to find unpaid Dexonline listings ever appearing in the top ten listings on Google for a business. I would love to revisit them in the future, as I am always rooting for businesses to reinvent themselves to survive in the new economy. For now, when it comes to Yellow Pages advertising in any way shape or form, my advice is that from the one-hit-wonder band of the 80’s; Slade and their song “Run Runaway!”
Proof that we are still a visual-based culture Pinterest has become the social media network to watch after growing more than 4,000 percent in the last six months (according to compete.com). At an average of 88.3 minutes per visitor, Pinterest currently ranks third on engagement behind Facebook and Tumblr and it ranks well ahead of LinkedIn (16 minutes) and Google Plus (5.1 minutes). Further proving that image based social networks and applications (like Foodspotting and Instagram) are rapidly gaining market share due to their high engagement levels with their audience.
From the Pinterest website:
Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard.
Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.
Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.
Pinterest is a social network that also has a promotional value as well: Users share photos that they find online by “pinning” them, the equivalent of “liking” a status on Facebook or giving a +1 on Google +. That act in turn has the ability to create beneficial SEO and linking opportunities for individuals and brands alike.
Users have to download a toolbar that can be used to pin items from any website. The photo and information then appears on your Pinterest board, and users who follow you can see your collection of photos and even “re-pin” them (like retweeting on Twitter or other forms of sharing).
This platform, while not specifically designed for marketing strategies may be a very effective social media platform for your restaurant or business when you take the following steps to market your restaurant.
1. Share your Menu, Photos, and Amenities
The most obvious way to use Pinterest for your restaurant is to pin photos of your own brand, logos, menus, staff, specials, venue, and amenities. Since you can create several boards, it is best to group your pins into different categories such as: Specials, Events, Food & Drink, Our Staff, Our location, and so on. By doing this, you are creating a rich story in images highlighting your food, brand, and service.
2. Add pins to the “gifts” section of Pinterest
When you create an entry for your pins, you can add a price tag. By selecting this option, you can then add a link, pointing back to your website. Items added in this way are automatically included in the “gifts” section on Pinterest, which is a virtual catalog of gift ideas. Be sure to select your best photos for pinning, and include a description. This gives you an opportunity to get your prices out there, and call attention to events like Wine Dinners or Gift Packages for certain holidays.
3. Show off your Event Spaces
By pinning photos of great events that are held in your event spaces, it allows people to get ideas and envision their own party in those spaces. This works great to promote seasonal spaces like patios, decks, and rooftop spaces as well. Make sure you include any great photos of beautiful views from your venue as well.
4. Maximize the SEO benefits
When you pin your products, you have an opportunity to maximize your SEO strategy and drive traffic back to your website. You create high quality backlinks when you or other users link to your photos and pins. Using keywords when you write compelling descriptions will attract visitors and potentially compel them to visit your website. You can integrate your Pinterest account with your Twitter Account and Facebook Page and share your pins on these social networks. All of these efforts will help to drive more traffic to your site and to increase your organic search engine rankings.
5. Create and Pin content that people would want to view
Most of us can easily spot a corporate profile that is designed only to blast out marketing pitch after marketing pitch are likely not only to steer clear of your account, but to avoid and in extreme cases to bash your attempts. You can avoid many of those cases by creating interesting relevant content that provides an added value or is exclusive content to that audience (like posting recipes for some dishes for a fan to try at home or pinning specials only available to your Pinterest Audience).
Finally, just like any other social media platform, it has to be a two-way conversation. Engage with your audience and listen and watch what they find most or least interesting in your brand. Pinterest is perfect for your brand if your brand can be displayed in images, and with the ease of digital photography these days, photos can be quickly taken, edited, posted and shared, creating great content for you to use to promote your Restaurant.
We met with and chatted with Gene Rebeck, the Senior Editor at Twin Cities Business Magazine, and he wrote a blog post based on our discussions. Here is the opening excerpt and a link to Gene’s blog:
Sterling Cross’s Social Studies
Chris and Mary Lower, the spouses and owners of Maple Grove-based social media and public relations agency Sterling Cross are highly regarded in the burgeoning Twin Cities social media scene. But don’t call them “social media gurus.”
It’s a term that makes them laugh and shake their heads. Such “experts” often are mid- to late-career marketing or PR types looking to latch on to the Next Big Thing. (Test the guru: Ask for case studies.)
Besides, as Chris notes, it’s not a field that you can be an expert in: It’s changing too fast and too continuously. “These experts say things like, ‘Make big money on Twitter!’” Chris says, chuckling.
At Sterling Cross Communications, we’re very proud to have been a recent case study focus by Meetings: Minnesota’s Hospitality Journal Magazine’s Winter 2010 Issue. The Case Study covers the work we have been doing for our client moto-i, the first sake microbrewery outside of Kyoto, Japan, located in Uptown Minneapolis. It goes into detail about the behind-the-scenes efforts that were put into place to promote this restaurant via social media channels as well as integrating media and blogger relations. Here is the article:
Sake & Social Media
Placing his trust in Sterling Cross Communications, restaurateur Blake Richardson turned to socialmedia to market his latest venture, Moto-i sake microbrewery and restaurant.
By Ellie M. Bayrd
Nearly seven years ago, Blake Richardson, owner of the Herkimer Pub & Brewery in Minneapolis and the mind behind Triple Caff draft energy drink, fell in love with sake. Inspired by what he calls an “amazing beverage,” the beer brewer embraced the possibility of creating a sake microbrewery restaurant in Minneapolis. The labor of love took him to Japan several times, where he studied the art of sake. At the same time that Richardson was becoming enamored with the drink, he was also in a love affair with Asian cuisine like many other Americans. “The synergy between the two just came together at the right time,” he says.
The idea percolated and his studies progressed, and about two years before his restaurant idea would become a reality Richardson had a chance meeting with Chris Lower, director of marketing, public relations and social media at Sterling Cross Communications. A company touting its traditional storytelling in a modern world,Maple Grove-based Sterling Cross has embraced online marketing tools. While Richardson wasn’t really thinking about how he would market his new restaurant concept at the time, his conversation with Lower spurred him to action. “I don’t want to allude to that I wouldn’t have had a plan,” Richardson says. “But I came in contact with Sterling Cross long before that segment of my responsibilities to the marketing would have come along.”
I’m linking to a valuable article for you today. I am quoted in it, but that’s not the reason I did. This article focuses specifically for social media strategies and learnings for the Multi-Housing Industry. It appears in the August 2009 issue of the Multi Housing Advocate Magazine. The Magazine is produced by the Minnesota Multi-Housing Association (MMHA), where I spoke in June on the topic of Managing your Online Reputation and Brand. The article is written by the MMHA’s PR Director, Tina Gassman and is full of insight about how to apply social media to the multi-housing management space. Here are the first two paragraphs and you can click the link following that to read the full article:
Last month, I sat in on MHA’s two-part Hot Topic seminar. Robert Turnbull of Rentwiki.com presented “The Social Media Phenomenon” and Christopher Lower of Sterling Cross Communications presented “The ROI of Managing Your Online Reputation.” While I had been reading about and researching this topic fairly extensively, I found the information to be very helpful in that it was tailored to our industry. As I discuss how this social media phenomenon must change the way we approach marketing, I will include the valuable points I learned from these two presenters and will provide you with a quick and dirty guide to your public relations efforts in this “always on” age.
Today’s marketing landscape looks much different than it did 30 years ago…
It’s become a fact in this economy that companies are going out of business. Even those companies that were forward thinking in their marketing have not been able to escape the factors in the economy, and they have had to close down. A client of ours became such a casualty two months ago. They had just launched several online platform accounts at the beginning of the year. All was going very well for them as they built their followers slowly and steadily to amass an engaged audience. Then we received “the email” alerting us that the client was ceasing all business activities and requested we shut down all of their accounts online.
This would be a first for us. We’ve worked with over a dozen companies, all with varying degrees of success, but, it has always been success. It was even successful for this client as well; we had executed the initial strategy well, and were growing our audience to allow us to move into the second phase of the strategy. Now we had proof though, that even the almighty social media with all of its bells and whistles could not solve all problems a company faced.
So we went and started deactivating accounts and learning to what degree the information could truly be removed or purged from the internet. The results were interesting to say the least:
The Corporate Website – This was able to be turned off. Searches to the domain name now lead to a placeholder page put up by the hosting company. Two months later though, the site still shows up in searches. The links are broken, so I will assume Google, Bing, and other engines will eventually drop the results, it wasn’t gone in two months. The search engines have archives and cached pages of the website, which are starting to deteriorate as well. Queries made to the search engine companies have come back with inconclusive answers as to how long something can live online. Some items that are heavily linked to from other sites will last longer than those that had only a few links.
Facebook – the Company’s professional page was shut down, but the owner of the Company kept his personal page up to continue building his personal brand for a new career/job. Facebook is fairly complete when it comes to deleting material permanently. Due to the fact that most of the content is kept inside of the Facebook community tags, and unless it was open to search by the outside internet community, it seldom shows up in outside searches.
Twitter – After the corporate Twitter account was shut down, it was determined that the content would not easily go away, in spite of Twitter having the content open for immediate outside search. The several different search applications associated to Twitter archived Tweets almost immediately and most kept running archives up to eight pages long. The owner of the company decided to re-brand the Twitter account and continue its use for his personal brand.
A WordPress Blog – The blog was deactivated, but is still found in several searches. The codes that many blogs are created in are very search friendly. Search sites have copies and cached copies of the blog posts, and many of the posts were reposted on other sites. Unless those posts are removed by the individuals that reposted them, they will stay online.
Linkedin – The Company profile was removed, but the fact that it is listed by former employees, and as past positions of the owners, the company listings will stay online in Linkedin.
Some of this material can be litigated to be removed, but you’ll want to make sure you are going down the right path with the right legal team for that. Most bloggers are protected by 1st Amendment rights and you will need to engage an attorney with experience in Constitutional law. Other sites may require formal legal requests to remove photos, videos and other charts and images.
The bottom line is that yes you can deactivate your accounts and remove some material online, that it will not result in the immediate removal of all of the material from being found online. It may fade over time, like the memory of the company, but for now it is a record of existence that won’t easily go away. With that in mind, what kind of online legacy is company leaving online?
This is an article I wrote for Resorts & Campgrounds Magazine and appears in their summer 2009 Issue. Due to popular demand, it was reprinted here for those who do not have access to the Magazine. Enjoy!
I grew up lucky enough to have had an annual family trip to some resort or campground every year. If you are the same, you probably have some great old photos. Some might be in albums, some might be framed, but most are probably in a box or bin somewhere, but wherever they are, they capture and represent great memories. There are great tools online these days that allow you to post and share these photos and memories online. 80% of all internet users are posting photos to share online, and 54% of them are posting vacation photos, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project data. 30% of those vacationers are posting to sites and communities connected to the place they went on vacation, if there is a space to post. Disney is great at this for their Camp Wilderness property.
You too can create a space where your visitors can share photos. You can brand your own photo sharing page on many social media photo sharing sites like Flickr, ShutterFly, and Photobucket. These sites can be linked back in to your own website, where potential new visitors can share in the memories and see great pictures of people enjoying your services and amenities. Of the 140 million Americans online, 63% of them are booking their travel destinations online. 53% of them state that their decision to book is based on photos or videos of visitors enjoying the property and amenities. Social media tools allow your guests to share their great times and memories and empower them to build community by connecting to other resort and campground visitors. Other tools like blogs, YouTube, and pages on sites like Facebook allow people to connect and share as well. The common backdrop across all of these sites is your location.
Like any vacation destination in today’s times and economy you must adapt to keep up. In 2008 it was reported that up to 60% of campgrounds and 84% of RV Parks have added WIFI internet access to their list of amenities, whether in the common areas, or available throughout the property. If you offer internet access on location, you can encourage guests to post up photos while still there and even offer prizes for photo contests, to build your online content. All photos posted should be tagged (identified) to include your property name and location to aid in the online search benefits you will receive from posted photos.
More often than not, these social media tools are low to no cost to implement, and can be managed by staff onsite. For best results, you’ll want to invest a bit to ensure that your brand is represented across each of these social media sites which can be handled typically by your web developers or marketing team. Here is a list of tools that any resort or campground owner or manager can use to connect with their customer to convert them to brand evangelists and lifelong customers:
Social Media Tools for Resorts & Campgrounds:
Make sure your property can be searched and reviewed through local business guides such as Yelp.com, Hotels.com and TripAdvisor.com. Suggest that positive feedback from patrons is shared on these social business guide sites.
Twitter – sign up for a Twitter account. Use it also as a tool to listen and converse with your customers.
E-Newsletter – Email a monthly newsletter with the latest happenings, new renovations, additions, or upgrades etc.
Blog – Customers want to be part of something more than just a onetime trip; they want to feel like they belong. You can set up a blog to allow guests to post their memories and stories.
Facebook – Set up a Facebook fan page to connect with your customers on Facebook.
MySpace – If your clientele is the MySpace generation, create a profile page and consistently update it with fresh content.
YouTube – Incorporate video into your social media strategy.
The Business Card – Provide a business card or note-card to each customer that visits your property with their receipt that maps out where they can continue their vacation experience online by connecting to you via social media to share memories.
Christopher Lower is the Co-owner of Sterling Cross Communications, a Social Media, Public Relations, & Web Design Firm, that focuses on the Restaurant, Hospitality, Hotel, and Lodging industries. In addition to over 20 years of PR & Marketing experience, Chris worked over eight years in the Hospitality Industry. He can be reached at www.sterlingcrossgroup.com or can be found on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mrchristopherl.
It was a Restaurateur’s worst nightmare. In the span of a few minutes of video posted to YouTube, a 50 year old brand was brought low.Two (fired and facing felony charges) employees of a franchise location of Domino’s Pizza recorded a video of themselves doing horrendous and disgusting things to food that was potentially about to be served to an unsuspecting customer. The video went viral. The YouTube video reached one million views in less than 3 days. References to it were in five of the 12 top search results on the first page of Google search for “Dominos,” and discussions about Domino’s had spread throughout Twitter. Several major news outlets have covered the incident, including the New York Times, USA Today and Fox News.
Reportedly Domino’s knew about the video for nearly 48-hours before it launched a PR blitz to respond to the overwhelming amounts of negative comments, and comments faulting the company for not responding in a timely manner. They were first notified of the video from bloggers that had seen it online.The company itself was not monitoring what was being said about its brand and reputation online. That was a fatal mistake that has brought great damage in customer confidence and loyalty and has crushed an iconic brand.
As Domino’s is starting to realize, social media has the reach and speed to turn tiny incidents into marketing crises. In November, Motrin posted an ad suggesting that carrying babies in slings was a painful new fad. Unhappy mothers posted Twitter complaints about it, and bloggers followed; within days, Motrin had removed the ad and apologized, but as with Domino’s, it was a case of too little, too late.
There was no one watching out for their brand online.
If this can happen to a mighty chain with a fifty year history, how much can it affect independent restaurants, smaller chains, and family owned businesses?If you are in the restaurant industry, or for that matter, in any industry that can be reviewed online, you cannot afford to ignore what is being said about you online.Many restaurateurs are not even aware of the many sites and places where people can and are talking about them online.Sites like Yelp, Urbanspoon, Chowhound, Metromix, Getsatisfaction.com, and Trip Advisor offer consumers a platform to get their complaints or raves heard.
Crises Communications is not a new practice, but it is new when trying to be performed in Social Media. There are several tools though for low to no cost for a restaurateur to watch what is being said about them (good or bad) online. You can do simple things, such as setting up Google Alerts, or searching Twitter and blogs to monitor what is being said, or you can pay for more robust search tools to and firms to do it for you (We offer such services for clients). No matter what you do though, you need to start watching what is being said starting now, and on a regular basis.Domino’s and Motrin failed to respond quickly 48 hours is an eternity online, and the damage is done.
What is the cost of not paying attention, or “hoping it will go away”? A majority of your business could be in jeopardy. 89% of US online buyers read customer reviews before they purchase: 43% most of the time, 22% all of the time. A bad reputation hits your bottom line.
So what should you do? Here are a few things to get you started:
·Create a Crisis Communication plans for online issues.
·Execute effective online Customer Service.
·Get the tools to monitor what’s being said online about your brand, your company, and you.
·Learn the strategies and steps to take to respond to information already posted.
·Learn the strategies and steps to take to have negative information removed, mitigated, or retracted.
If you are in the Minneapolis – St. Paul area, we are holding a seminar on April 28th, 2009 on The ROI of Managing your Online Reputation & Brand. Click here for more details: http://onlinereputation.eventbrite.com/.
This is an article I wrote for Restaurateur Magazine and appears in their April 2009 Issue. Due to popular demand, it was reprinted here for those who do not have access to the Magazine. Enjoy!
You work hard to get everything right, the food, the atmosphere, the service, the kitchen and back of the house staff, and once a guest comes through the door, you have the power to make sure they have the best possible experience. Then they go home. A place you can’t control the experience – and you don’t know what they’ll tell their family, friends, co-workers, and anyone who will listen, about their experience. What if you could control it? What if you could extend the dining experience beyond the walls of your restaurant? With social media tools, you can.
You’ve heard the buzzwords: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, and YouTube. These tools allow you to enhance and carry the dining experience beyond your front door. They allow your customers to take the physical connections and loyalty virtual to experience it online as well. With customers increasing their online activity, the online experience that guests have with you can make or break you.
You put thought, consideration and passion into every physical aspect of your guests’ interaction with you, but how is their experience with your website? Does it convey your brand, atmosphere, and message? Is it easy to navigate? Are your menus and specials quickly found? Is your contact information, location, hours of operation and amenities crystal clear? These are just the bare minimum standards now needed to entice someone to interact with your online brand.
When they interact, they feel connected. When they feel connected, they’ll often be your evangelists and make a point to refer your establishment or brag about their incredible experience. They are inclined to take someone with them the next time they visit, and will want to connect your restaurant to others.
In the best of times, it’s hard to promote a restaurant. With labor and food costs constantly battling to take the lead as your primary concern, you need systems and tools that can give you the greatest return on your investment of dollars and time. Social Media are emerging tools that fit that bill.
Social Media tools are increasingly moving from consumer to consumer tools to business to consumer vehicles.6,000 people a day are signing up for Facebook and only a percentage of them are the college students that the platform initially attracted.Many businesses are motivated by the opportunity to opt in at a fairly cost effective manner, and also the ability to bring them to an intimate space next to their customer. What you are seeing is a vast array of Social Media approaches that converse and connect. Once you realize who your customer is, what makes them tick, what they like and dislike, using social media can be that missing link that transforms a casual customer into a brand evangelist.
Using tools for the “cool” factor of saying you use them will not bring you a tangible return.You’ll need to start with a strategy. Once you’ve determined who your customers are, you need to know which social media tools they use, and engage with them on their turf. The effectiveness of social media isn’t simply using the tool; it’s listening, answering questions and connecting with others. These tools are just opportunities to connect your customers to your brand and by connecting with them, they’ll help you build relationship and gain invaluable insight to their propensity to buy from you.
Here is a list of tools that any restaurant owner can use to connect with their customer to convert them to brand evangelists:
Social Media Tools for Restaurants
Make sure your restaurant can be searched and reviewed through local business guides such as Yelp.com, Urbanspoon.com, Getsatisfaction.com and TripAdvisor.com. Encourage your guests, that if they had a great experience to please post it to one of these sites.
Twitter – sign up for a Twitter account. Use it also as a tool to listen and converse with your customers.
E-Newsletter – Email a monthly newsletter with the latest happenings, new menu items, entertainment news, recipe of the month etc.
Blog – Customers want to be part of something more than just a meal; they want to feel like they belong. A blog can be that tool.
Facebook – Set up a Facebook fan page to connect with your customers on Facebook.
MySpace – If your clientele is the MySpace generation, create a profile page and consistently update it with fresh content.
YouTube – Incorporate video into your social media strategy.
The Business Card – Provide a business card or note-card to each customer that visits your establishment with their receipt that maps out where they can continue their dining experience online by connecting to you via social media.
Christopher Lower is the Co-owner of Sterling Cross Communications, a Social Media, Public Relations, & Web Design Firm, that focuses on the Restaurant, Hospitality, Hotel, and Lodging industries. In addition to over 20 years of PR & Marketing experience, Chris worked over 8 years in the Hospitality Industry. He can be reached at www.sterlingcrossgroup.com or can be found on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mrchristopherl.
Sterling Cross is a proud to have been selected as a preferred vendor for Hospitality Minnesota. Hospitality Minnesota is the management entity for
The Minnesota Restaurant Association, Minnesota Lodging Association and Minnesota Resort and the Campground Association. These Associations provide legislative and regulatory advocacy, marketing, education and information and money-saving programs to members. In addition, Hospitality Minnesota operates a non-profit education foundation, the Hospitality Minnesota Education Foundation, which provides a high school curriculum in foodservice and lodging management and provides scholarships to students pursuing higher education in the hospitality field. For more info: www.hospitalitymn.com.
We’d like to present our Social Media Bootcamps here in the Twin Cities:
What:Sterling Cross Communications Presents Social Media Boot Camp Basic Training & Advanced Maneuvers
When:Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 – 9:00 – 10:30 am for Boot Camp Basics 11:00 – 12:30 pm for Advanced Maneuvers
*Breakfast/registration will begin at 8:30 a.m. and the beginner session will begin at 9:00 and run until 10:30. There will be a half hour break and then from 11 – 12:30 the advanced session will take place ending with lunch.
Where: Hilton Hotel in Bloomington (3900 American Blvd West, Bloomington, Minnesota, United States 55437 Tel: 1-952-893-9500)
Cost:$100 per session or $175 for both – Early bird purchases by March 16th – $85 per session or $150 for both
Social Media platforms are the fastest growing segments of the Internet user population. New users of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, Flickr, and so on, number in the millions daily. Besides the basic benefits of networking, there are a myriad of ways you can utilize and incorporate Social Media tools into your business to support and enhance such functions as communication, customer service, PR, marketing, sales, new business development, research, education, human resources, recruiting, training, and more.
Boot Camp Basics will cover:
·Introduction of Terms
·Getting Started
·Early Adaptors vs. Practical Marketing
·Basic Training – Initiation of Followers
·Measurement & Tracking
·Strategy Overviews
Guest Speakers -
·Robyn Flach, Partner from Excellanz, will speak to why a business owner must engage in social media.
·Julio Ojeda-Zapata, author of Twitter Means Business: How Microblogging Can Help or Hurt Your Company will speak about his book and why businesses are flocking to Twitter, as well as what they are doing once they get there.
Boot Camp Advanced Maneuvers will cover:
·Creation of Live Twitter Case Study
·Integration of a Social Media Campaign
·How do I speak to my audience in Social Media?
·Base Initiative Ideas
·Time Management for Social Media Applications
·ROI (Return on Investment) /ROP (Return on Participation)
·Strategy and Tips for Selling Social Media Initiatives to Marketing and Financial Decision Makers (as well as clients)
Guest Speakers -
·Phil Wilson, Partner from Localtone Radio, Comic Twits, & Remain Comm.com, will speak to the transformation of Traditional media to social media.
·Julio Ojeda-Zapata, author of Twitter Means Business: How Microblogging Can Help or Hurt Your Company will speak about his book and why businesses are flocking to Twitter, as well as what they are doing once they get there.
