How Safe is Your Restaurant’s Reputation on Yelp?
By Carina Ost
What is Yelp? If you look up the definition of the word, it means “a sharp short cry.” If you were to ask your fellow restaurant owners they may think, Yelp is as Yelp does.
The website Yelp is a user generated site for reviews on anything and everything. If you are a restaurant owner Yelp reviews may be your top fear. You may let out a sharp short cry yourself with the idea of one Yelper writing a bad review and ruining your restaurant’s reputation forever.
That is a legitimate fear but Yelp does not control your restaurant, you do! You can monitor, respond, post offers, events, and photos for free but you can’t edit what people say.
Also, and this is a big no-no, you can’t post positive reviews from fake Yelp accounts nor can you ask your employees or your public relations agency to do so. Not only are fake posts unethical and against FTC Guidelines on Adequate Disclosure but it is also desperate, pathetic, and the readers will know right away.
According to Yelp, 83% of users rate a business 3 stars or higher. That is not bad odds. As a Yelper, experienced food blogger, and professional restaurant reviewer, those statistics mimic my review history.
It pays off for Yelpers to write a lot of reviews, it helps their chances of achieving Yelp Elite status which includes private invitations to parties with free food and booze. Also, it can be gratifying for some Yelpers to write a negative review to an untouchable and perfect restaurant; call it human nature.
You must understand that negative reviews come with the territory and if it is genuine feedback take it and learn from it. If it is something completely absurd like, “I hate this restaurant because the waitress looks exactly like my ex girlfriend….zero stars” Just laugh. There is nothing you can do. A smart Yelper will read a positive review, a negative review, and the most recent and read them all with a grain of Kosher salt.
A San Francisco restaurant, Pizzeria Delfina, has been very smart about utilizing its negative reviews and turning them into positives. As quoted from the New York Times article Restaurants to Yelp Reviewers: Bring It On:
Pizzeria Delfina, a Mission District institution, is flaunting Yelp reviewers’ mean-spirited, one-star reviews with pride. The restaurant made T-shirts quoting bad reviews and gave them to employees to wear on the job.
Obviously, this may not be the right public relations strategy for every restaurant but the point is that a negative Yelp review is one person’s opinion and it is not the end all be all.
Yelp is only part of your marketing communications mix that helps to build your restaurant’s reputation. If you tweet and treat your customers well, engage with them on Facebook, have a great website, restaurant, and food, then a few bad Yelp reviews really won’t matter.
Good Bedfellows: Why SEO and Public Relations Should Marry
In many organizations the search engine optimization and the public relations teams don’t work together. And this is a huge missed opportunity since 75 percent of search results are due to the activity that happens off your website. Public relations tactics such as press releases, blogger engagement, guest blogging, forum commenting and other external communications efforts can, if strategically executed, dramatically impact your organic search rank.
The first introduction consumers and media have to your company are your Google search results. Generally, searchers are not typing in the name of your company, they are searching for terms such as “steakhouse”, “restaurant”, “Great Napa wine tasting room” and other category keywords. If your competitor comes up ahead of you, most likely the click will go to them and not your company.
According to recent research from the Chitika, an advertising data analytics firm, the first page, first position result is worth double the traffic of the number two spot.
But don’t despair, even small search rank improvements can make a big difference: moving from the 
first position on the second page to the last position on the first page will see a 143 percent jump in traffic. For a highly competitive industry like fine dining restaurants, this could make the difference between staying in business and having to close your doors.
In addition to helping with your search rank results, search optimization can drive referrals, word of mouth recommendations and establish your company’s expert status in a category, as well as, provide many other benefits.
PHOTO CREDITS: Google photo – ManFrys; Despair Finger - Juliana Coutinho
Ink Foundry Wins New Travel Industry Business – DoubleTake Marketing
Ink Foundry is very excited to announce that it has secured DoubleTake Marketing’s word of mouth, traditional and social media marketing business. Ink Foundry’s strategic marketing plan will hyper-target DoubleTake’s core consumers, media buyers, through a multi-layered influencer engagement program.
Since 2006, DoubleTake Marketing has transformed baggage carousels at 23 North American airports with its patent pending AdSpressive Graphics and a variety of creative, out-of-the-box campaigns for clients including Toyota, Harrah’s, and Overstock.com.
In addition to reaching nearly one million travelers who check bags daily, the DoubleTake Marketing platform offers a breakthrough advertising placement that provides a potentially interactive experience for the viewer. A creative Harrah’s campaign transformed a baggage carousel at Kansas City International Airport into a larger-than-life roulette wheel, prompting travelers to bet with each other on which number and color their bag would land.
DoubleTake Marketing was created when one of the company’s founders, Michael Gleeson, was waiting for his luggage and realized that everyone was staring at the carousel. DoubleTake Marketing was created to capitalize on this dull waiting time by introducing vibrant, moving ads directly into consumers’ lines of vision, offering travelers unexpected boredom relief and advertisers prime access to an ideal, affluent demographic.
For more information on DoubleTake
LinkedIn
• Zack Clark, co-founder and CEO
• Michael Gleeson, co-founder
• DoubleTake Marketing
Flickr
• All Photo Stream
YouTube
• Durability
• Fox News
• Baggage Carousel Advertising Install Process
Facebook
• Facebook.com/DoubleTake Marketing
Platform Magazine Explores Word of Mouth Marketing
Are you participating in the conversation? Ink Foundry was recently interviewed by Josh Morris at Platform Magazine in its examination of word or mouth marketing and the role that public relations plays in corporate communications. Check out the full story: Word of Mouth: Join the Conversation
PHOTO CREDIT: GeishaBoy500
11 Top Tips To Build Your Twitter Following
1. When You Create Your Twitter Handle Consider The Following:
- If you are a household brand name, like Virgin America, by all means use it. Followers will be looking for you.
- If you are a well known in your category and people are already seeking you out, use your name in your handle. Again, people will want to find and follow you because you’ve already built a personal reputation offline.
- If you fall into the category of virtually unknown, like most of us, consider using a descriptive name in your title, for example @winedinetv. Building my following would have been much easier had I used “public relations” or “social media” in my twitter handle.
- If you use your company name and/or your personal name and you don’t have a significant offline following, describe what you do in your profile.
2. Fill Out Your Profile Completely
- Think of this as your introduction to your followers. If you were at a networking event you would introduce yourself and at some point get around to telling people what you do for a living, your philosophy on life, the books you’ve written; whatever you want people to know about you.
3. Post A Photo Of Yourself
- This proves you are indeed, human. Leaving the Twitter icon up looks like you might be a spammer (this is the equivalent of talking to a wall at a party and no one wants to relive THAT experience). We found when we had our logo posted we did not get as many followers. When we posted my personal picture, the numbers of followers increased greatly. Again, going back to @winedinetv, they use their brand name, but put pictures of themselves up on their page.
4. Do Not Lock Your Updates
- Locking your updates tells potential followers that you’re not interested in having a two-way conversation with them. We have a client who was complaining that no one was following them, but they had locked their updates. We unlocked their updates (and changed a few other things) and followers poured in.
5. Follow Your Followers
- The whole idea behind participating in social media is to have a two way conversation with the folks in your group. If you don’t follow people who follow you, it’s like you are staring mutely back at someone who ask you a question.
- There are a few exceptions and I may be a prude, but there are some people who I don’t follow back because of the content that they are tweeting. Some of that stuff I just don’t want to see pop up on my screen!
- If you don’t follow your followers, you may find that they stop following you.
6. Follow Your Follower’s Followers
- If your followers like your content, their followers are likely to be interested in the same topics.
7. Be Consistent With Your Tweet Content
- This allows people to find and follow you based on content. With few exceptions, I consistently tweet about social media marketing, public relations, wine and restaurants. If someone is considering whether to follow me, they will have a good idea of what I’m all about and decide if that’s information they are interested in receiving.
- If your business is geographically specific, i.e. you run a furniture store in West Hollywood and you know your customers come from a 15 mile radius, you need to mention “West Hollywood” in your tweets as many times as appropriate.
8. Give Back To The Community
- It’s fine to send people to your website for specials, deals, information etc. But if you only do that, you will earn a bad reputation as a taker, you will lose followers and break the trust of your followers.
- Find articles that talk about your area of interest or retweet other posts.
9. Avoid Following People With Locked Updates
- Do you really want to try to have a conversation with someone who is already telling you they don’t want to talk to you?
- I have found that these people are less likely to follow back
10. Tweet (seriously)
- I realize this seems obvious, but clients will tell me that they can’t understand why no one is following them, but they posted three totally lame (and you know who you are) updates months ago.
- You need to post on a regular basis with relevant, helpful information. Except for your parents, few people care that you can’t find matching socks in the morning.
- We recommend that client’s tweet at least every 48 hours.
11. Don’t Over Do It
- If you are tweeting too frequently, unless you are reporting breaking news, you are probably sending out too much information too frequently that can overwhelm people and turn them away.
Check out our 26 Tips On Social Media Participation.
PHOTO CREDIT: AcousticSkyy
Has Traditional Media Become Russian Roulette For Your Brand?
This is an extraordinary time in our history. We are in an environment where social media is ubiquitous: it is in nearly every global household spanning young, old, rich and poor. This bloodless revolution has changed the way we read the news, get our mail, talk to our friends, network, decide our dining preferences, and purchase everything from toilet paper to rare automobiles. We do it all online. And it happens in milliseconds.
As of a week ago, there were 60 million worldwide bloggers talking about everything including wigs, wine, wedding bling and grandma’s recipes. According to Technorati, nearly one hundred thousand new blogs are created each day. Consumer generated media is so powerful it helped elect the most unlikely of candidates, President Barack Obama, against absolutely impossible odds.
On the flip side, traditional media as you know it is taking its last gasping breaths. As you may be aware, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has ceased publication and two-thirds of respondents to a recent Nielson survey didn’t care. It was the city’s oldest and most influential news source and it had become obsolete to advertisers and consumers.
The reporters we’ve relied on for decades are going the way of the dinosaurs by virtue of reduced space for editorial, daily layoffs, and the rise of the proletariat blogger. Soon, reporters will no longer roam the hallowed halls of some of America’s greatest news sources but be relegated to fighting for their digital voice among the masses.
The ascendency of the blogger and the ubiquity of social media have transformed the practice of media relations and the very definition of influencer.
About four years ago when we were opening a glitzy Hollywood celebrity-filled restaurant, the Los Angeles Times gave the Italian restaurant a much deserved glowing review. The client’s hopes were very high that the article would fill the restaurant with happy patrons. To everyone’s surprise, the phones were nearly silent. “Odd,” we thought. “It must have been a fluke.” The week after the feature print story ran, we launched the restaurant’s on- and offline word of mouth campaign including outreach to some of our friends who were running restaurant review blogs and an email campaign to Ink Foundry’s exclusive foodie database. By noon on the day that both the email announcement was distributed and a positive review ran in a blog, the not-insignificantly-sized restaurant filled its reservation quota for the entire week.
Oprah talks about the “a-ha moment” and this was it for us. We realized without a doubt that traditional media had lost it standing as the preeminent influencer and that social media was changing the way we do business. We learned from that and subsequent experience with everything from luxury automobiles, organic clothing, travel, and live entertainment that the return on investment for social media marketing far surpassed its traditional media cousins.
Is traditional media totally dead? Don’t count them out just yet. Who doesn’t want to see their brand in the New York Times? I know I still do and our clients feel the same way. But if you are relying on traditional media to move the needle for your brand, or recommending a traditional media-only strategy for your clients, you are clinging to an unreliable and risky proposition.
Study: Articles Featuring a Brand More Likely Than Ads to Get Consumers to Act
From Media Bistro
When it comes to getting someone to read or take action after viewing content, it turns out PR related functions – namely, placing your client in a story – are more effective than online advertising tactics.
According to an ARAnet poll by Opinion Research Corporation, cited today by eMarketer:
Compared with banner ads, pop-up ads, e-mail offers and sponsored links, articles that include brand information were most likely to lead US Internet users to read – and act.
Book: Seducing The Boys Club
Nina DiSesa, chairman of McCann Erickson New York and author of Seducing The Boys Club, is my new hero. The book recounts her success managing a herd of wild and crazy ad men(and I use that term loosely) through out her career. My favorite story is about how she and a group of senior executives were stuck in Brazil. You’ll have to read it to find out how they get out, but just know that it involves manicures. We can all take a note from her book.
$156,000 Vinegar
Author Benjamin Wallace dives deep into the world of rare wines and the people who drink and covet them in his book, “The Billionaire’s Vinegar.” It is a fascinating inside look at the auction of what was claimed to be a 1787 bottle of Chateau Lafite Bordeaux owned by Thomas Jefferson. Wallace is a fantastic writer who brings the characters and their rarified world to life. If you are interested in the high end world of wine, this is the book for you. Hardcover about $25.
Inside Steve’s Brain
Leander Kahney’s book “Inside Steve’s Brain” is a great easy read on the creativity and detail of Steve Jobs. It is a testament to the detailed pursuit of perfection that has built Apple into one of this century’s most legendary success stories. The author has covered Jobs’ tantrums and bad behavior for many years, but focuses this book on what makes his so successful. A great easy read for anyone interested in analyzing success.
