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One particular pet-peeve of mine is the forced gratuity added to meals at tourist destinations and tawny restaurants - for small parties and large ones - and the shrug of “what can I do?” the waiters/waitresses offer while pointing to the “mandated by management” disclaimer. This is taking restaurants directly into a headwind of the Groundswell of well-connected clients. “This experience was remarkable - because the management says it was.”

“Your brand is what your customers say it is” - Groundswell, by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

Lest you think I’m a cheapskate, I tip generously for great service - but it’s meant to be a reward for what I saw as remarkable effort and a pleasant experience. If I’m forced to wait at my favorite Indian Restaurant, mouth on fire, for 10 minutes while the waiter refreshes my beer (bar usually 15 feet a way) - there will be a price to pay.

I recognize that the gratuity being entirely connected to “table service” may unfairly discriminate against the kitchen staff… so I would love the ability to tip the food and service separately or at least see how it was divided.

I do not run a restaurant but know people who do, and realize that it’s a hugely difficult financial challenge. Just watching restaurants come and go here in Lexington is evidence enough of the perils they endure. Family-oriented restaurants without high-profit alcohol sales to lean on have it even tougher.

But forcing consumers to pay a mandatory gratuity for a burger and fries is stretching things a bit far - and someday may face a legal challenge. One silver lining that may keep the practice intact is that automatic gratuity has a paper trail, and thus using it as a tax shelter is far more difficult.

Johny Rockets’ Mandatory Tip

I love 50’s diner-retro experiences and Johny Rockets has always been a favorite - each time we’re passing through Newport KY or the Montgomery Road area of Cincinnati we stop in. I walked 2 miles to eat at one in Long Beach CA once. My kids love it, and despite the $50+ cost of a meal, I was a fan and I’ve even blogged about it . The restaurant is owned by Daniel Snyder and led by president Lee Sanders and they plan an extensive expansion to 1000 locations - so I might get my wish for one in Lexington metro.

No doubt, I had always thought I’d be a dedicated customer, but now I’m not as sure. Forcing a mandatory tip (no matter what the service level) has given me reason to raise eyebrows. I would have left a tip of roughly the same amount as the forced one, by the way, and left far happier knowing I had sent a message of my satisfaction.

So I was much more likely to go online to voice my opinion.

Consumer Ratings Online Are Moving to Mobile Devices

“Tipping is a deeply personal practice” says Henry Harteveldt - Travel Analyst with Forrester Research, and if restaurants remove the ability for us to take a stand against crappy service or food, what are we to do? Well, I have one idea of what’s going to happen in this Groundswell. The funnel is going to get flipped and the mobile device becomes the megaphone via ratings of these businesses.

Enter mobile restaurant rating and local search. Our voices are about to get quite a bit louder.

Restaurant ratings guides (such as Urbanspoon, pictured right) are now getting tied to GPS locators, local directories, and social networks.  Combining that with the amazon iPhone interface makes it a pleasure to use. A bad experience will be read about by hundreds of other people - at the moment they are out looking for a place to eat.

GPS-enabled phones will allow patrons to find “well-rated” restaurants near their location and rate them on the spot. They allow us to send restaurant information to our phone with a click on our desktop computer, too - in case we found one we wanted to try from a social networking friend.

Smart Restaurants Will Leverage The Trend

For good restaurants with happy customers, this is a huge advantage.

If I had a successful restaurant in a foot-traffic area, I’d put a 24″ monitor in the window rotating my review listings for all to see.

I’d hand out small “rate-us” cards to customers after setting up a simple URL (e.g. restaurant.com/rate-us) that made the ratings on sites such as Yelp a one-click proposition.

I’d position a netbook-type computer dedicated to ratings where people could voice their opinions online instead of a tip and kicking in a bonus to the staff myself when great service is reported, and having heart-to-heart talks with staff when it didn’t.

“Some business owners will post their reviews on their door, or on the counter, to show them off, and that’s a subtle way of asking customers to write about them”
- Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman

The ultimate remarkable service idea might be to combine the above and a “pay what you think it was worth” model - to get people talking to friends.

Restaurants that stand out win.

I realize how hard it is to run a restaurant - and in no way do I wish to belittle that effort or the entrepreneurial risk it requires. But with these challenges you must remember that customers are everything - and they can be your ambassador on the connected web every day if you engage them. The “quiet middle” of the satisfaction bell curve gets you nowhere - you must look to amplify the fans and listen to the critics to stand out.

PS: See “Flipping the Funnel” - a nice little 18 page e-book by Seth Godin. [pdf]

I’ve posted the audio, slides and handouts from the recent Lexington Ad Club Event.

It is a great primer for those at the starting level in Social Media - businesses that just want to hear that it’s real. There are case studies, exceptional Q&A, and a really strong fundamental explanation of Social Networks, Online Authority, and more. The panel discussion includes Nick Huhn, Jason Falls, and Scott Clark and is moderated by Bill Dotson and was sponsored by the Lexington Advertising Club.

Audio Playback (or, download the MP3 file here to import into iTunes or your MP3 player)

Full Length Video (audio is a bit quiet.  The audio on the MP3 file above is far clearer.)

Want to import it into iTunes? Download MP3 file here (right click and save)

Printer Friendly Version of Handouts also here (PDF file)

First let me say that I’m 100% against any form of spamming or overt promotion of products or services on Yahoo! answers or any other network. This article is about adding real value to those networks before anything else.

Goal: Connecting Your Expertise With Those Who Need It - Fast and Without Noise.

When an expert provides solid, authentic responses as answers in Q&A networks such as Yahoo! Answers, LinkedIN answers, Experts Exchange, Google Groups (which scours pretty much every forum on the web,) and similar sites, they can enhance their reputation, drive visitors a site or blog, produce content, build a brand and ultimately drive real sales.

A Little Bit About Q/A Social Sites

Being one of the first two answers to any relevant question can substantially improve the chances of being voted a “best answer” and being read by more interested people. So fast is good.

• If your answer is good (duh!) fewer will bother to answer the question, and you’ll have a better chance of being the “best” answer everyone reads.
• Few people read more than a couple of answers + the best answer. Being at the top means you’ll get the attention.
• People are more likely to vote you up because you’re above the fold, and plainly, the best answer :-)

For my example, I’ll use Yahoo! Answers - but any group search/forum search tool would work.

TIP: On Yahoo! Answers you can answer quickly, and then “edit” your answer to fill in the details. As of this writing that will secure your position in the answers.

Flipping The Funnel

Answering consumer questions is a solid investment of time, but there are ways to make technology work for you and reduce the amount of work it requires to monitor your particular niche. This post is about using such technology to isolate just those consumers who need you and eliminate the other noise.

Keep in mind that answering questions does not just speak to the single person who asked the question, but also for the dozens or hundreds of people who will encounter the response sooner or later. You are using your answers as precision authentic content and offering it to people online.

Cutting Through The Noise

Yahoo! Answers is a horrribly “noisy” environment at times. You’ll see questions like these all the time: “Where can I get a free _______” and “I need a cheap or free ______” and they are often out-of-category. Manually monitoring Yahoo! answers is tedious and often makes one lose faith in the human race :-) - so we’ll filter that stuff out and lift you above your competition.

So we will use several services to slice, dice, and deliver only the Yahoo! answers you care about to the destination of your choice, 24×7, without your intervention. You can then skim this distilled list and answer the questions.

The Tools

In this example, I will utilize three services (and one optional add-on.)

• Yahoo! Answers to find the questions (this could be any Q/A site with RSS)
• ZapTXT and their awesome new version to send you notifications via SMS (text message) or email.
  (You can use other similar services if you choose, such as Google alerts, etc.)
• Vertical Response Email Marketing
• Twitter for ping marketing.
• Google Talk Instant Messaging (Any IM works)
• My mobile phone (to get SMS messages)

Let’s get Started!

1. Set up a Yahoo! Account (if you don’t already have one) - you’ll need it for Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Pipes. Make sure to save your username and password - Yahoo! is hard to recover. I recommend you consider setting your business name as your yahoo account (and for other social profiles too) in this case.

(more…)

Lee Odden posted a fascinating list of results from the TopRank Reader Poll which reached out to a large group of business marketers. Lee received 400 responses to the question “What 3 Internet marketing tactics will you emphasize most in the next 6 months?”

… the results were fascinating.

* Search engine optimization (36%, 149 Votes)
* Blogging (33%, 134 Votes)
* Pay per click (26%, 107 Votes)
* Email marketing (22%, 89 Votes)
* Social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) (21%, 86 Votes)
* Blogger relations/blog PR (14%, 56 Votes)
* Microblogging (Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku) (11%, 47 Votes)
* Affiliate marketing (11%, 47 Votes)
* Advertorial (NewsForce, AdFusion) (10%, 40 Votes)
* Video marketing (7%, 29 Votes)
* Corporate Website (7%) (This pattern was echoed here)

Why do so many who call me want to just spend their entire budget on their website but ignore Social Media and blogging? (I’m wondering if my business name needs to change soon) I think a lot of company decision makers are confused about the benefit from trackbacks or RSS subscribers on blogs or the methods needed for effective social media relations, even though marketers seem to be whispering it in their ear more loudly now.  Some know it’s important but are unwilling to take the leap to doing it right.

But that doesn’t hold a candle to the level of confusion out there about SEO. Executing a well-thought out SEO strategy requires an immense amount of education for most clients.

One question I have…Where is testing on this list? Isn’t offer optimization part of marketing? What about post-click analytics and focusing on finding the right offer to roll back into the SEO, Blogging and PPC engine? I think it would have been interesting to learn who, if anyone is doing this with any regularity.

I guess in the minds of the participants testing and optimization are simply part of the activity itself.

Just in case you thought that citizen-created journalism was going to remain on the edges, Google now has connected its powerful blog search to a sort of meme-counter to help gauge the importance of a given story.  It’ll be interesting to see how this changes the traffic picture for bloggers.

I predict that there will also be a reverse… that is, a link from Google News back to the meme count too.

One of the most frustrating things that happens during my meetings with potential clients is the “shifting in the seat” that occurs whenever I talk about Social Media. “You mean, for us?” Despite my best efforts and handing out of copies of Groundswell or talking about the big “billion” users prediction, and explaining the massive graying of social networks, Social Media is still often perceived as a time-wasting, edgy, esoteric practice for teenagers often shunted to the I.T. department along with the company website. I admit, I’m still looking for the right approach to the conversation about the huge potential and risk reduction this kind of activity brings.

So it always excites me to see well-executed studies like this study presented by Cone Research of 1092 adults aged 18 or older who were asked about what they thought of companies participating in Social Media.

• 60 percent of Americans interact with companies on a social media website.
• 25% interact with companies on a social media website more than once per week.
• 93% of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media.
• 85% (!!!) believe a company should be active with customers in social media.
• 56% of Americans feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them on a social media environment.
• Men are twice as likely to interact frequently on social media frequently
• 30% of the difficult 18-34 group believe that companies should use social media to market to them.
• 30% of those with household incomes over $75,000 believe companies should market to them via social media, and two thirds of these people say they feel a stronger connection to companies they interact with in this way.

These are impressive numbers. When asked in detail about the interactions that they ‘expect’

• Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)
• Companies should solicit feedback on their products and services (41%)
• Companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand (37%)
• Companies should market to consumers (25%)

Here’s the thing this study amplifies.

Social Media Engagement is not something you learn on a corporate off-site. It’s not something you leave to your I.T. guys/gals. It’s not something you can ignore.

It takes time and commitment. It takes practice and thoughtfulness before you actually need to depend on it to save your rear. To be less familiar with social media than your consumer, or to expect they won’t notice your social media incompetence is a very dangerous position to be in when the whole world is watching.

chart from Brian Solis used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License