Your Digital Identity 2015v2

Your Digital Identity Social Media & Technology Trends for Restaurants 2015.v2

Why You’re Losing Facebook Likes • Yelp Buys Eat24 • How New Customers Find You Pay Your Friends with Facebook Messenger • The Fate of Google+ • Reputation & Valuation How iPads Affect Tipping • Responding to Negative Comments Online • The Table8 App

www.socialdraft.com

March 9, 2015

If you have been paying attention to your Facebook page likes, you may have noticed that there has been a significant decrease in your page likes. We understand this is painful, especially if you spent money previously on gaining Facebook fans.

The drop seemed to start at the end of February with a rapid decrease in the beginning of March. If you’re wondering why this is happening, it’s because Facebook is removing memorialized and deactivated accounts from Page’s like counts. This means that anyone who passed away or deactivated their account will no longer count as a like for your page. It will be interesting to see how much further Facebook goes. Last year’s Instagram purge of fake followers was big news. We predict this will come to Facebook soon as well.

Why Facebook Removed Inactive Facebook Accounts In their press release, Facebook notes their reasoning behind this purge of likes. They listed two main reasons: 1. Business Results: Facebook removed inactive likes so that you can get accurate information and insights on the people who like your brand or business. The idea is that you will have better data to work with in order to gain better followers through Facebook tools including LookAlike audiences.

2. Consistency: Facebook was already filtering out likes and comments that were generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts from your pages.

The Drop Begins in Late February 2015

What This Means to You 1. Facebook states that over the next few weeks, you will see a small dip in your numbers. We’ve spoken to community managers, some have already seen small dips, others have seen large dips.

2. Any accounts that are deactivated or memorialized going forward will be automatically removed from your page like count.

3. If a deactivated account is re-activated, it will automatically be re-added to your page likes.

In the short run, this is painful. In the long run this is good as you will be better able to measure your results AND have fans and likes that are active and relevant. Besides, it was disconcerting when Facebook showed users a defunct friend who liked your business page, so removing memorialized accounts will make for a better user experience on Facebook.

How restaurant searches are evolving www.restaurant-hospitality.com

January 12, 2015

3. Local search optimization is key Local search is a proven marketing tactic because it puts your restaurant in front of diners at the moment they are actively searching for somewhere to eat.

We’ve already discovered that restaurants are the most searched for industry on mobile apps and mobile browsers. A Nielsen survey further validates this, showing that 90 percent of mobile search consumers convert the very same day, and 64 percent convert within one hour of their local search query.

To succeed at local search optimization, focus on a few of these tips: Trying a restaurant for the first time can be a gamble for customers.

It is up to you to convince potential diners that your restaurant and your food are top notch, and that begins with first impressions, including how consumers find your restaurant online. A number of factors influence that process and how would-be guests get information about your establishment and menu.

• If you have more than one location, create a unique website page for each location.

1. Word of mouth leads to online search

Take action: Include local information on your website and sign up for Google+ (while you still can! See article on page 9)

In a digital survey of food aficionados, nearly 50 percent of respondents said they seek information about where to eat from their trusted friends, family and coworkers. More than 80 percent went on to say they do additional online research after that first restaurant recommendation.

This particular study explained that customers take a complex journey before choosing a restaurant. Their journey consists of: • a thorough review of the restaurant’s website • visits to restaurant review sites • tips from friends • food blogs • Google searches Since dining outside the home is an activity shared by many people and talking about food is a natural part of everyday conversation, you can see how your customers’ search naturally flows onto the web.

Take action: Freshen up your restaurant’s website.

• List your business with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, CitySearch and YellowBook.

• Concentrate on link building. Solicit reviews from local bloggers, put coupons on coupon sites and sponsor charity events.

4. A professional website is critical First and foremost, customers are heading to your restaurant’s website. Yet, even as recently as two years ago, studies showed that fewer than half of independent restaurants had a website, and fewer than half of those with a website showcased their menu on it.

It’s important that you not only have a professional website, but a mobile-friendly site that is easily readable on all devices.

Consider these stats from a National Restaurant Association survey that tallied results from consumers ages 18–65+. They said they would likely use a smartphone or tablet for the following restaurant-related activities: • 67 percent said they are likely to look up locations or directions.

• 52 percent said they are likely to order takeout or delivery online.

• 50 percent said they would use rewards or special deals.

• 46 percent would make a reservation.

• 42 percent would look up nutrition information.

2. Mobile phone search on the rise According to research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, restaurants are the most-searched-for industry by consumers through mobile applications and browsers.

The firm polled nearly 1,500 people and found that more than 80 percent of them had searched for a restaurant on a mobile app and 92 percent had searched through a web browser during a six-month period. These searches outperformed other highly searched for industries such as retail, entertainment and hotels. What’s more, 75 percent of them say they choose a restaurant based on search results.

Other findings include: • 80 % of diners want to see a menu before they eat at a restaurant.

• iPhone users are doing the most restaurant searches.

• 84 % of diners look at more than one restaurant before choosing.

• 70 % want to see the menu on their phone.

Take action: Invest in a mobile-friendly, responsive website.

Your restaurant’s website should look as good on a phone or tablet as on a desktop computer.

Take action: The previous percentages increase dramatically in the 18-44 year old categories and those with children under the age of 18 at home. This study clearly illustrates the importance of a responsive, professional-looking website.

5. Menus are a must Your menu is one of the most searched-for items on your website.

The Chadwick Martin Bailey study found that 70 percent of diners want to see a restaurant’s menu online, and 62 percent said they would be less likely to choose a restaurant if they can’t read the menu online. That amounts to a lot of lost business.

Take action: Create an SEO-optimized menu that offers a good user experience.

3

Yelp Acquires Online Food Ordering Service Eat24 www.fsrmagazine.com

February 11, 2015

Yelp announced it has acquired Eat24, a web and app-based online food ordering service. With this acquisition, Yelp will drive daily engagement in the key restaurant vertical and plans to expand Eat24's oering to the one million U.S. restaurants listed on its platform.

"As more food ordering transactions move online, further integrating Eat24 will enhance our user experience with an easy-to-use product and service that allows our large consumer audience to transact directly with businesses," says Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp co-founder and CEO.

Based in San Bruno, California, Eat24 was founded in 2008 to expand online food ordering while providing an improved customer experience. Eat24 provides approximately 20,000 restaurants in over 1,500 cities nationwide with the ability to oer online delivery and takeout services.

"With this acquisition, we gain more tools and expertise to help engage our users from discovery through transaction in a key vertical for Yelp."

"We're excited to join the Yelp team to deliver an even better consumer experience inside this top destination for finding local businesses," says Nadav Sharon, Eat24's co-founder and CEO. "This is an incredible opportunity to further connect with Yelp's highly engaged users and to expand our reach to even more local businesses on its platform."

4

How to respond to negative comments on Yelp! www.restaurant-hospitality.com

February 9, 2015 Article by Holly Machanic

If you've gotten zinged by an unhappy guest's post on Yelp, TripAdvisor and other online review sites, you’re not alone.

Plenty of your restaurant colleagues and competitors are also receiving negative reviews. Unfortunately, low ratings are likely to hinder your business, and they’re not going to go away on their own.

Whether the negative reviews are justified or not, criticism is difficult to take. It can feel like Yelp and the general public are working against you, when in reality, Yelp points out that only a small percentage of people will actually take the time to post a review online. The influential impact happens when millions of monthly viewers rely on Yelp to make informed dining decisions.

Further substantiating Yelp’s influence, new research indicates that negative posts can predict an impending restaurant’s closure with 70 percent accuracy. This begs the question: Are restaurants doomed for failure just because Yelp says so?

When you first discover your critical reviews, it’s likely that you will become frustrated with the system (i.e. Yelp’s algorithm) and wonder where all of your positive reviews are being sequestered. You will be tempted to ask friends and family to post reviews on your behalf, and you might even write an angry reply defending your business.

Ultimately, you may decide it’s better for your sanity to ignore online reviews altogether. Your best bet is to avoid all of these options, and instead focus on a more proactive approach.

HOW TO DEAL WITH ONLINE CRITICS • Claim your restaurant’s Yelp listing so that you can manage your profile and make posts on behalf of your business.

• Call a full staff meeting. Come prepared with a few negative (and positive) Yelp posts that are credible and can offer teachable moments to your staff.

• Constructively review the feedback as a group and talk about strategies for improvement.

• Solicit comments from both the front and back of the house to get the whole story.

• Reinforce the mantra that either “we all succeed together, or we all fail together.” Invested employees are more likely to be committed to the success of the business.

• Make sure everyone on staff understands the protocol for handling a customer service issue and has the autonomy to correct a problem in the moment.

• Be sure to address positive reviews in the meeting, too.

It’s important to keep morale up by talking about what’s being done well and giving praise when merited.

• Implement a policy of responding to both negative and positive reviews online. Keep replies sincere and gracious: “Your feedback is important to us. We hope you’ll consider giving us another try.”

• Depending on the nature and legitimacy of the review, you could invite the guest to continue the conversation offline, and discuss options for correcting the situation.

While none of these steps can undo a negative customer experience, they can reduce the likelihood of a repeat occurrence. More importantly, your comments will demonstrate to potential guests who are reading reviews that you care about the experience you’re providing to your customers.

5

Mobile pay makes headway in restaurants www.nrn.com March 6, 2015 article by Ron Ruggless Mobile payment technology is growing fast as a must-have component in the restaurant business, alongside customer demand for speed, convenience and a willingness to use the technology.

While many operators rely on third-party services, some have chosen to develop proprietary smartphone apps in-house. “[Technology] has become a part of everyone’s daily life, and this is just the beginning,” said Kevin McCarney, owner of the 10-unit Poquito Mas restaurant group in Los Angeles, which last year introduced mobile payments and online ordering through a third-party provider.

“We are in the hospitality business, and today our guests use technology to connect to friends, to the world and to us as restaurants,” McCarney said.

That adoption has been swift. Roughly one-quarter of consumers say technology options are important features that factor into their decision to choose a restaurant, according to the National Restaurant Association in its 2015 Restaurant Industry Forecast, published in January.

That was an increase from less than 20 percent the prior year, which underscored that “technology rapidly is becoming an expectation rather than a novelty when dining out.”

NRA research found 9 percent of consumers at least once a week used smartphones or tablets for meal payment, and 26 percent used it at least a few times a year.

Many restaurant brands look for mobile payment solutions that incorporate other services, such as ordering and loyalty programs, including rewards.

The 21,800-unit Seattle-based Starbucks Corp. has more than 9 million My Starbucks Rewards program members, and many have adopted its smartphone app. While Starbucks has become a gold standard in this regard, smaller brands are finding ways to tap into the all-in-one mobile offerings.

In mid-February, Chicago-based Wow Bao, the five-unit fast-casual division of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises Inc., introduced a branded mobile payment app that includes messaging, online ordering and gift purchases.

“Wow Bao customers can now select a favorite location, buy gift cards, reload gift cards easily and much more with this new version.”

Geoff Alexander, managing partner at Wow Bao, said in a statement.

The brand worked with Denver-based Mocapay, its mobile marketing provider, on the mobile app, which includes the points-based loyalty program. Users get one point for joining the program and one point for every dollar spent.

“We expected adoption of RPU to be modest as the customer is still learning about it and how to use it,” Shaich said. “What we've seen has surprised us. Rapid Pick-Up is now representing 3 percent of company transactions. That's today. Again, that's with very little marketing push behind RPU, beyond in-store communications in MyPanera,” which is the company’s loyalty program.

Shaich said he was astounded that about 8 percent of the brand’s sales at the end of the fourth quarter occurred digitally.

“Once the customer reaches 50 points, they will receive a $5 credit that is automatically provisioned to their Wow Bao app via the mobile wallet,” Mocapay said in a release. The technology also enables in-app messaging, options to request a payment token for secure payment, purchase of gift cards, and online ordering for pickup and delivery. The app is available for both Apple and Android devices.

McCarney of Poquito Mas, which worked with ChowNow for its Apple Pay-based mobile payment and ordering solution, said he wanted a product that was intuitive, state of the art and affordable.

“That rate of digital adoption is more than double where we were at the end of the second quarter,” he noted, adding that big box retailers are generating digital sales of 2 percent to 5 percent, and the big pizza brands are seeing digital sales in the range of 35 percent to 50 percent.

The pizza brands appeal to a younger audience, who are adopting mobile payment technology faster than other demographic groups, according to the NRA 2015 forecast.

“As with most technology-related matters, this sentiment is much stronger among younger consumers,” the NRA noted. “But older generations are starting to increase their usage as well. In addition, people with children under 18 in their households are more likely to say that technology options factor into their restaurant choices.”

“We looked at all the options out there,” McCarney said. “We wanted a solution that gave us our own app and did not put us on a list of dozens of others restaurants.”

Poquito Mas began the mobile payment implementation about a year ago, starting with one location, and it added the other units once it saw a performance improvement in to-go sales.

“Guests were quick to embrace the app,” he said. “We saw an immediate increase of over 50 percent in online takeout orders. As we hoped, phone orders began to gravitate to the app, which makes taking orders much more efficient.”

Efficiencies in to-go orders convinced St. Louis-based Panera Bread Co. to fast track its own Rapid Pick-Up, or RPU, offering in its Panera 2.0 initiative to the entire system before other aspects, such as kiosks and table ordering.

Ron Shaich, founder and CEO of Panera, said in a February earnings call with analysts that the RPU expansion was based on the improvements it generated for the chain.

“RPU was originally conceived as an element of Panera 2.0,” Shaich said. “It offers our to-go customers the convenience of ordering and paying for their meals via our website or mobile app and then picking up their order at a designated time. As the name implies, RPU allows customers to grab their orders directly from our pickup shelves without ever having to stand in line.

“After seeing the power of Rapid Pick-Up in Panera 2.0 units, we decided to roll it out fully to the system in 2014 instead of waiting for full Panera 2.0 conversion,” he said. The rollout was completed in the fourth quarter.

Rapid Pick-Up is only available online or through the iPhone app with a credit card.

7

Research firm Technomic has found in its consumer research that younger people are increasingly expecting mobile pay.

Jackie Rodriguez, a senior manager at Technomic, said that “it’s a very fluid environment. Things are happening rapidly.”

In a survey at the end of 2014, the Chicago-based researcher revealed that the number of people who had used a smartphone to pay at a restaurant had doubled, to 19 percent, from the beginning of the year.

Like the NRA, Technomic found it was younger consumers, a big audience for quick-service restaurants, who were adopting mobile payment at a faster rate than the market as a whole. A Technomic survey in the second quarter of 2014 asked consumers if they were “interested” in mobile payments: overall, 39 percent answered yes, but among consumers ages 25 to 34 years, that number skyrocketed to 56 percent.

“Thirty-three percent expect to use their smartphone at restaurants,” Rodriguez said. “Not only are they interested, but they fully expect to use their smartphone to pay at restaurants more often.”

Technomic is closely watching how mobile payment applications are being integrated with other smartphone solutions, such as ordering and loyalty programs.

“The thing to look at is how seamless it is,” she said, referring to Google Wallet, which was introduced in 2011, and Apple Pay technology, which was introduced last October for use with the iPhone 6 and adopted quickly by brands including McDonald’s, Subway and Panera Bread.

“The third leg of that, to complete the cycle, is the tie-in with loyalty programs,” Rodriguez said. “What consumers seem to be receptive to is linking loyalty with ordering and payment.”

She said companies like Starbucks provide a glimpse at that integration. “They are frank about the role technology can play in improving customer service,” she said.

“It’s really exciting,” Rodriguez said. “It’s very competitive, and it can be intimidating for a restaurant. We tell our clients: focus on the function and not the tool. It’s about what you need it to do.”

Social media for the next generation February 2015 • Vine, the video service owned by Twitter, released Vine Kids, a family-friendly version of the app that filters out inappropriate posts. Children can swipe left or right for new pre-screened and approved videos and tap the screen for fun sound effects, navigating with the help of animated characters and cute animals.

• On a similar note, YouTube released the YouTube Kids app that makes it safe and easy for kids to find videos on topics they want to explore.

Google, proving it still hasn’t figured out social, will strip Google + for parts www.qz.com article by Mike Murphy March 2, 2015

Google had no shortage of aspirations for Google+, which launched in 2011. It wanted to be Yelp, with its acquisition of Zagat; it wanted to be Flickr with its photos; it wanted to be WhatsApp with Hangouts, and Facebook with stream of user status updates.

Despite all of its features, Google+ was unable to uproot any of the existing social networks. For a while, Google was counting activity on any Google service as Google+ use—as all the services were interconnected—essentially overstating its popularity. And now the product appears likely to land on the list of other social endeavors that Google has pulled the plug on, such as Google Wave, Google Buzz and Orkut.

Sundar Pichai, Google's Android head, says Google+ is splitting up.

Google+ is a social graveyard. It’s reported to have more than 2 billion profiles, but fewer than 7 million public posts were made in the first two weeks of January. While Google isn’t yet admitting defeat, it will be carving out the most popular parts of Google+ into separate services— as sure a sign as any that the comprehensive approach to social media isn’t working out.

Bradley Horowitz, a seven-year veteran of Google products, including Google+, announced on the social network this morning that he will be heading up two new products, “Photos” and “Streams.”

He didn’t mention Google+ by name, but at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier today, Android head Sundar Pichai put Horowitz’s announcement in context: For us, Google+ was always two things, a stream and a social layer.

The stream has a passionate community of users, but the second goal was larger for us. We’re at a point where things like photos and communications are very important, we’re reorganizing around that.

Hangouts will still exist.

Facebook, meanwhile, has managed to figure out the patchwork of social networks that Google+ attempted to become. It now touts more than 1.3 billion monthly active users, as well as 3 billion daily video plays. (Granted, Facebook’s video figure is bolstered by the fact that Facebook autoplays videos on users’ news feeds, but that just reinforces the continuing popularity of its social stream.

For reference, YouTube says “billions of views” take place on its site daily; a more specific estimate was reported to be about 4 billion daily in 2012.)

Facebook also has 300 million monthly active users sharing photos on Instagram, and 700 million users messaging on WhatsApp. (Its Facebook Messenger service is no slouch, either. And all these services are connected to the backbone of Facebook itself.

When Google Wave was shut down in 2010, the company scrapped it for code. A Google spokesperson tells Quartz that the company has “no specific product details” to share at this point regarding Google+, but with Horowitz and Pichai’s statements today, it’s likely its fate will be similar.

Tweets will come up on Google search results www.socialdraft.com

February 9, 2015

This is HUGE. We’ve always said that Twitter was itself a mini search engine. Now, search giant Google will have access to Twitter content. This means tweets will come up on Google search results.

This has ginormous meaning to anyone marketing on social media, be it a local business, a publication, or a brand.

HOW HAVE THINGS CHANGED? In the past, Google had to crawl Twitter for information. With the new deal, Google will get instant access to Tweets so they will come up in search results immediately (just as they did in 2009 before the deal between the companies lapsed).

WHY THIS IS GOOD FOR YOU Imagine you are a mom and pop restaurant. You’re active on Twitter and someone searches “where to get tarte tatin in New York”.

If you’ve recently tweeted about this, Google may serve your content to the person searching. All other restaurants that have not been active will miss out on the chance. Same if you are a blog.

If you constantly tweet your original content, you have a higher chance of getting people to click over to your site. Basically: 1. Twitter is becoming more searchable 2. Logged out, non-Twitter users will be a step closer to seeing Tweets (they will land on a “logged out” page and prompted to sign up or sign in).

9

How a weak online reputation can hurt your valuation www.restaurant-hospitality.com February 27, 2015 article by Bob Krummert

Customers aren’t the only ones turned off by shaky social media reviews.

They make potential buyers think your restaurant is worth less, too.

In the social media era, online reviews have a lot to do with a restaurant’s ultimate success. But that’s not the only ramification they have. A new survey finds that negative reviews, or even not having enough positive reviews, can significantly reduce a restaurant’s perceived value when the current owner puts it up for sale.

This finding comes from a study conducted by online business-for-sale marketplace BizBuySell.com. The company quizzed 1,400 small business owners and potential buyers about how businesses are valued today. Not all the respondents were restaurant operators. But the ones that were had plenty of say about the impact online reviews were having on the value of their business. Eighty-eight percent of restaurant owners told BizBuySell survey takers they believe online reviews affect the market valuation of their restaurant.

The survey found that social media rankings can raise or lower the final sale price of a business transaction, including those of restaurants. How much? Forty-one percent of survey respondents said the effect falls in the five to ten percent range. An additional 35 percent said that number was even higher, somewhere between 10 to 20 percent.

Given the magnitude of these figures, you’d think business owners, including restaurant operators, would be doing everything they can to manage and boost their online reputations. But the survey findings say they don’t.

A meager 27 percent of business owners said they encourage customers to post reviews. Twenty-five percent take action to ameliorate bad reviews when their business gets one.

And 24 percent share their business’s positive reviews by posting them on their website and/or giving them prominence on social media.

While potential customers will briefly check a restaurant’s online reviews before deciding whether or not to eat there, someone interested in buying that restaurant will analyze them closely. BizBuySell’s survey found that prospective buyers believe online reviews directly affect the value of any business. While 75 percent of business owners said there was such an effect, 89 percent of buyers hold that view.

10

Buyers also give more credence to online reviews than business owners do. Seventy-two percent of buyers agree that online reviews are a good indication of the quality of a business’s products and services. Just 58 percent of owners say they present an accurate picture.

Why the differences? In many transactions, the business owner is older and less social media-savvy than the potential buyer.

"Small business buyers often come from a younger generation than sellers and may be more perceptive to how technology will affect the future of the business," says BizBuySell general manager Bob House.

"Owners should be aware of how new innovations, business models and online reviews are affecting their value and be ready to address the issue during negotiations."

On the plus side, this survey found that restaurant owners might be blessedly exempt from the disruptive technologies and direct-to-consumer business models that are hurting many other types of businesses, particularly brick-and-mortar retail and hotels. Seventy-eight percent of restaurant owners told BizBuyComm they don’t see delivery apps such as Seamless, Eat24Hours and Grubhub as a threat.

“It's hard to replace the experience of going to a restaurant," one restaurant operator said.

5 Ways to Destroy Your Business Credibility in Less Than One Minute www.socialnomics.net

February 5, 2015

article by Melissa McGibbon

Are you guilty of neglecting your website and online presence?

According to a web credibility study done by Stanford University, 75% of users admit to making judgments about a company’s credibility based on a website’s design. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that brands with little to no social media marketing are more likely to suffer from poor online conversion.

Is your website slow? Not mobile-friendly? Unsecure? Beware of these digital follies—they will lead to poor user experience and destroy your company’s credibility faster than you can click refresh.

3) Slow Site Speed If a webpage loads like molasses, it will become irrelevant.

Google offers site speed tools and suggestions on how to increase speed because fast and optimized pages lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. UX Magazine published a study done in-house by Walmart.com, which found that for every one second of load time improvement, the site experienced up to a 2% increase in conversions.

4) Non-responsive Design 1) Lacking Social Media Presence If you think not having a strong social media presence doesn’t negatively impact your bottom line, you’re wrong. Though measuring ROI for social media marketing and brand promotion can be ambiguous, there is a strong correlation between social signals and conversions.

Customers are becoming increasingly reliant on social proof, i.e. testimonials from their trusted circles, as well as general public opinion from aggregate review ratings on sites like Google Reviews and Yelp. If consumers look to social media channels to learn more about a brand prior to making a purchase decision and find insufficient social information, the chance of conversion drops dramatically. According to HubSpot, social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.

2) Poorly Designed Website Even if a company’s website was well-designed five years ago, it’s likely outdated now. Sometimes users are willing to slog through a website if it has the necessary information, but if the overall user experience is frustrating, the bounce rate will increase and Google will penalize the site by decreasing its index status.

A visitor’s likelihood to convert to a paying customer is heavily influenced by their experience on the company’s website.

In particular, users appreciate easily navigable sites, clean design, clear calls-to-action, and obvious ways to contact the company— including an email, phone number, and physical address.

Appropriate use of key terms, good site maps, and proper grammar are also factors.

Is your website designed to work with mobile devices?

Smart Insights reports that in 2014, conversions from tablets outgrew conversions by desktop and this trend is expected to continue.

In an algorithm update last November, Google started factoring a site’s mobile-friendliness in search rank. Meaning if users are having a bad experience on a website because it hasn’t been updated to work with a smartphone, smartwatch, tablet, etc., a company could expect to see a directly related drop in traffic.

5) Unsecured Site Users have long been wary of websites that are not secured— those lacking data encryption—but now Google has taken action by flagging sites that do not employ secure data transmission, regardless of a site’s industry. Whether it’s Wikipedia or a business portfolio site, it needs to be secured. Users can tell if a site is secure by checking to see if an s follows the http in a site’s URL (https) or looking for the padlock icon in the search bar. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise given all of the recent massive hacking attacks. This week Google built a feature into its Chrome browser to warn users about websites that do not scramble their data during transmission in order to protect their users from identity thieves and even Uncle Sam. Making these items a priority will improve a website’s technical integrity with Google and will increase user experience, which will also augment a site’s index. Tackling these aspects will not be an incredibly complicated undertaking, but will take time.

Reputation investment is critically important to a company’s success, so addressing these five influencers will certainly increase a brand’s wealth and preserve its credibility.

11

How iPad Ordering Changes the Way Diners Tip www.fsrmagazine.com

February 16, 2015

According to a new study, consumers prefer iPad tipping the most in casual restaurants, compared to fine-dining and even quick-service establishments, and this presents casual-dining operators offering iPad POS systems a chance to improve the guest experience—and thus the tip amount a guest leaves.

These are the findings from a study released in January by Software Advice, a restaurant tech research group. The study found iPad POS systems are more beneficial to restaurateurs than traditional POS systems due to increased upsell functionalities, direct placement of orders to the kitchen, and the ability to offer a streamlined, more positive customer experience.

The use of an iPad can increase the likelihood a customer leaves a tip; restaurants can ensure the smart tipping option is on, which automatically offers pre-set tip amounts on each check, and keep the signature screen separate from the tipping screen, so that customers can't move on to sign their receipt until they've indicated how much tip they want to leave.

The tactics appear to work: Nearly a third of consumers surveyed said they were more likely to tip when presented with an opt-out "no tip" button they had to press.

"The standard process has three interactions: the dropping of the bill, the picking up and processing of the bill, and finally the returning of the receipt," says Justin Guinn, a market researcher at Software Advice. "Given today's technology, this process is unnecessarily elongated and inefficient. With iPad POS systems, the payment process is one quick, seamless interaction. It's for that reason that these systems will be much more impactful to full-service restaurants as opposed to fast-casual or quick-service restaurants."

The proximity of the server is another important element that impacts tipping. Forty-one percent of consumers will increase their base tip if their server or cashier is in close proximity, though another 41 percent said the server's proximity would make no impact, since they would leave a tip regardless.

R.I.P. Urbanspoon Urbanspoon is about to be taken off the menu.

The restaurant review and recommendations service, which had previously been acquired by IAC in 2009, has been sold off again, this time to Zomato, an online restaurant discovery service based in India. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a source familiar with the matter pegged the acquisition price at more than $50 million.

Deepinder Goyal, the founder and CEO of Zomato, told Mashable in a recent interview that the goal is to use the Urbanspoon acquisition to help the Indian startup break into the U.S., Canada and Australia — three markets where Urbanspoon had a strong presence.

However, Zomato does not plan to maintain the Urbanspoon brand.

"We will convert everything to Zomato," Goyal said. "The brand is important for us. A lot of people respect [Urbanspoon] for what they’ve done. But we have to make a long-term versus short-term decision. In the longer term it should all be one brand."

Psychology suggests this is due to social pressure as well as conformity pressure, experts say, especially if the server stays at the table to guide the guests through the iPad process. The server can use this time to leave a final good impression on the diners, which can also lead to a higher tip.

The fact that 41 percent of consumers said the close proximity of the server would "definitely" or "probably" increase their likelihood to tip was the most surprising aspect of the study, Guinn says.

"This has huge implications for full-service restaurants using these systems for at-the-table paying,” he explains. “Servers are expected to be close to customers to assist them with the iPad payment process. Since they're already there, this allows them to increase their likelihood of getting a tip without unnecessarily loitering around waiting for the customer to input it."

Part of the reason customers are willing to leave higher tips is because paying on an iPad makes the exchange of money less obvious, researchers say: Consumers aren't fiddling with dollar bills, thinking through tips in their heads. With an iPad's smart tip accessory, all consumers need to do is press a button signifying the percent tip they'd like to leave, or adjust accordingly.

www.mashable.com January 12, 2015 Article by Seth Fiegerman Urbanspoon was one of the early breakthrough hits on the iPhone, thanks to some early promotion from Apple and the novelty of shaking your phone to pull up random restaurant suggestions in the app. Urbanspoon continued to add restaurant discovery features before and after its acquisition by IAC, but the space for restaurant apps became exponentially more crowded.

“Zomato’s significant investments in people and technology will bring Urbanspoon customers, restaurant owners, and food bloggers a number of new capabilities and features," Keela Robison, Urbanspoon's CEO, said in a statement. What that really means, though, is that Urbanspoon users will be pushed over to Zomato's website and application.

Zomato has raised more than $100 million in funding and has now acquired half a dozen companies, including Urbanspoon, to expand its presence in new and existing markets.

You can now pay your friends through Facebook Messenger www.mashable.com

March 17, 2015

Article by JP Mangalindan

Facebook's long-awaited payments feature is finally here.

On Tuesday, the social network announced a new feature for Messenger that lets users send and receive money to one another.

The feature will roll out to Facebook users in the U.S. across desktop, Android and iOS over the next few months.

Users who add their debit card information in Messenger's settings section can send payments by striking up a conversation with a friend, selecting the "$" icon that will appear in the row above the software keyboard, and tapping "Pay." Users who receive money do so by opening up that friend's message and accepting the payment when prompted. Like bank deposits, payment may take up to three business days to go through.

Facebook users can only add their debit card information for now, a decision the company said was made to minimize fraud and avoid fees. (Popular peer-to-peer payments app Venmo lets users add credit cards but charges a 3% fee on each transaction.)

People already pay each other for various things like paying the rent or splitting the dinner bill, "so why don't we finish those conversations in the same place we started?" Steve Davis, Facebook's payments program manager, told Mashable.

With the new payments feature, Facebook is making a play to get users to stay on the social network for longer time periods, plain and simple. Digital marketing firm eMarketer estimated that adults in the U.S. averaged 21 minutes per day on Facebook in 2014 — the equivalent of 6% of their time spent online. Those are some solid stats, given Facebook remains the second-most trafficked site domestically and globally (behind Google), but like any Internet company, the longer people spend using their service, the better.

“It's really about, 'how do you keep Facebook sticky?' How do you get users to play in a different way that’s beyond just communications?" explained Forrester Research Vice President Sucharita Mulpuru.

Higher engagement lowers the odds of Facebook users resorting to outside services that may be competition now or in the future.

Persuading users to share their payment information with the social network also opens the doors for potential revenue-generating opportunities down the road.

"If Facebook gets a ton of credit card and payment details, and if consumers could complete transactions for physical goods on Facebook, and if Facebook actually chooses to do so in meaningful ways, they would be able to better target buyers, which could raise

their advertising rates," said Mulpuru, conceding those are a lot of ifs. It's also unclear how much Facebook needs payment data to punch up its advertising, given ad revenues are already on a tear.

(Its ads raked in $3.59 billion during the fourth quarter of 2014, up 53% year-over-year.)

The move makes more sense given mobile payments' fast-growing popularity. Forrester Research estimates mobile payments will nearly triple in volume from $52 billion last year to $142 billion come 2019. Entering the space is a no-brainer for a player like Facebook, which sees 745 million of its users — roughly half its user base — sign on via phone or tablet.

It also could help improve Messenger's image. The social network ruffled feathers last year when it split off Messenger into its own separate app. For Facebook users who wanted to continue messaging one another, it became a mandatory download.

Baking payments into Messenger has the potential boost the app's utility for some.

With mobile payments in particular, Facebook is entering a crowded space. There's Venmo, the PayPal-owned app that is particularly popular with teens and twenty-something adults, and Square Cash. Heck, even Snapchat wants in. The ephemeral photo-sharing service launched Snapcash in November, a partnership that lets Snapchat users pay each other inside the app.

It's unclear yet how Snapcash is doing, exactly, but it's supposedly popular with a scantily-clad subset of folks who use it to charge for virtual lap dances.

Still, Gartner research director Brian Blau pointed out that none of those services have Facebook's potential reach. "Some app providers have offered person-to-person transfers for some time now, but not on the scale of say, Facebook," said Blau.

Users may have concerns about sharing their banking information with the same network where people post animated GIFS and party pics, but Facebook says they shouldn't worry. According to Davis, the software and equipment are PCI Compliant — the same security standard applied to credit card transactions — and stored in a secure environment separate from the rest of Facebook.

An anti-fraud team will also track payments for potentially fraudulent transactions.

Whether enough Facebook users feel comfortable enough sending and receiving payments on the same platform they share updates with friends and family will be the big question in the months and years to come. But clearly it's a question Facebook felt worth asking.

Want A Last Minute Table At A Sold-Out Restaurant?

There's An App For That www.forbes.com March 6, 2015 Article by Eilene Zimmerman Revenue: Diners pay for the privilege of last-minute reservations and the fee ranges from $20-$30, depending on the restaurant and the number in the party. The company doesn’t have much material revenue yet.

Financing: $7 million in venture capital and from “a few prominent Silicon Valley angels, he says. Table8’s biggest investment partner is Concur Technologies, an $8 billion travel and expense management services company, which was acquired in December by enterprise software company SAP. Traction: Business travelers are the mainstay of Table8’s business.

A recent American Express survey found that business travelers take anywhere from 21-30 trips a year on average.

Santosh Jayaram and Peter Goettner, cofounders of Table8.

Startup: Table8 is an app that allows users to find last-minute reservations at some of the world’s most sold-out restaurants.

Founders: Santosh Jayaram, COO and Peter Goettner, CEO Goettner founded one of the first software-as-a-service companies, Digital Think, in 1996. Jayaram is a veteran of both Google and Twitter. At Google he ran the search quality operations team for its English search and left to become the first executive hire at Twitter, when the company had just 16 people.

Launched: April 2014 How it works: Table8 is like StubHub, only for restaurant tables.

In the same way you can find tickets to ostensibly sold-out concerts and sporting events, Table8 gets you tables at ostensibly sold-out restaurants, during prime dining hours.

Users open the app or log onto Table8′s website and see restaurants in their city where last minute tables can be reserved. Right now, that includes restaurants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Miami. Jayaram says Table8 only offers tables at restaurants that have been deemed “fabulous” by Virginia Miller, a former managing editor of the restaurant guide Zagat. Those includes restaurants like Kapnos and Osteria Morini in Washington D.C., Waterbar and Aziza in San Francisco and Bestia and Smoke.Oil.Salt in Los Angeles.

Users find the restaurant they want and plug in their date (even if it’s that very night) and if there’s available inventory, Table8 reserves it.

Jayaram says top restaurants generally hold back a few tables for last-minute VIP customers or celebrities. “We manage a chunk or sometimes all of them,” he says. “We democratize them, so now a business traveler, or a the local guy who forgot his wedding anniversary, can get a table at a nice restaurant.”

Jayaram actually faced the restaurant reservation dilemma in his own life. While he was incubating the idea for Table8 (he and Gettner started an incubator, Daemonic Labs, to incubate their business ideas), he and his wife were working full time, had two young kids and no time together. They decided to get a babysitter two nights a week and go to a restaurant together. It was Jayaram’s responsibility to find the restaurant but he usually wound up trying to book a table last minute and, finding he couldn’t get in, settled for a place he didn’t really want to go. “Every week I would complain about this to Pete (Goettner), that I couldn’t find a table at a good restaurant last minute.”

Jayaram says Concur’s management system processes more than $50 billion in expenses annually and of that, the majority–about $33 billion–is spent on corporate business travel, including $7.5 billion on dining/entertainment. “They could see that business people book thier flight with less than 10 days’ notice. So we knew there was a market for last-minute entertaining. And when you think about it, business diners are the most lucrative demographic. They aren’t spending their own money, and they have to entertain clients.”

Table8 launched in four cities in 10 months and works with 15-25 of the top-rated restaurants in each city. Jayaram says they often sell out of inventory and for the past three months, have had to go back to restaurants, asking for more tables. “We’ve seen considerable growth month-to-month in both revenue and reservations,” he says.

Restaurant marketers increasingly tap social media www.nrn.com January 21, 2015

Article and photo by Ron Ruggless

Restaurant marketing is consuming a growing share of IT budgets as brands put more resources toward promoting and maintaining their reputation online and in social media, panelists at the 2015 Global Best Practices Conference said this week.

That has been the biggest shift in restaurant marketing over the past 10 years, panelists said during a Sunday session at the Irving, Texas, conference, which was sponsored by TDn2K, the Dallas-based parent of People Report and Black Box Intelligence.

“Now it’s much more about engaging the customer,” said panel moderator Stephen Farr-Jones, president of Burbank, Calif.-based ADM Marketing. “People in the trenches have seen that change over the past 10 years.”

Farr-Jones led the "Navigating the Shift from Traditional to Engagement Marketing" panel, which included Kristen Jones Colby, senior director of marketing for Addison, Texas-based Front Burner Restaurants and Twin Peaks; Amanda Hite, founder of Washington, D.C.-based social media consultancy BTC Revolutions; and Stewart Slocum, vice president of marketing for Dallas-based Groupe Le Duff and its Mimi’s Café brand.

“Your brand is not what you say it is; it’s what they say it is,” Slocum said. “Over the past 10 years, all these new channels have allowed us to have two-way communication with them, and you have more knowledge about what your brand is.”

Social media in particular offers companies a way to assess their brand image without the laboratory-style focus groups of the past.

By monitoring social media channels like Yelp, “you can find those people who most passionately love your brand,” as well as those who passionately express negative opinions about the brand, Slocum said.

For Front Burner Restaurants, which owns Twin Peaks, as well as other brands, the new channels allow for more targeted messaging, be it Facebook or some other platform, Colby said.

“It all boils down to messaging and finding out who your core target is,” she said. “It’s not just creating a national TV spot or network radio or an ad in USA Today. Now there are a lot more tactics. You still have your strategic plan. You still have your marketing calendar. You still have what you had 10 years ago, but now there are a lot more segments. Digital media is a big part of that.”

“You may have women over here on Pinterest, or guys over there on Twitter, and you have to think about how to segment your message and create ideas for those platforms,” she said.

Hite of BTC Revolutions said her consultancy remains medium agnostic but works to engage those consumers, as identified by the brand’s demographics, where they are using the social media tools.

“Our agency operates a lot of times more like a newsroom versus a traditional agency with campaigns,” Hite said. “In real time, we are watching word of mouth and what people are talking about.

It’s not so much ‘our message to them,’ but rather, ‘How do we get them to talk about us?’”

Hite added that it's less the social media platforms they are using than the users themselves that her company — which works with such brands as Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar and Cinnabon — will target.

“People are the medium,” Hite said. “Sometimes they are on Instagram. Sometimes they are on Facebook. You just have to get stuck in their heads, hearts and minds.”

All four panelists said human resources is playing a larger role in helping screen and train team members to use social media wisely.

If something does go wrong, Hite warned, it usually indicates a problem that is only manifested online and needs to be repaired by managers. “If you have something going bad online, you have to fix it offline first before you can fix it online,” she said.

The rewards of successful social media marketing tap into customer advocacy, Slocum added.

“That’s where these channels become so successful,” he noted.

“You can take those promoters — the people who already love you — and give them the stories and they will go tell them for you.”

Slocum cited the marketing funnel theory — the process of awareness, interest, desire and action — that companies can enhance by engaging brand advocates in social media. “It becomes a virtuous cycle of engagement,” he said.

Like the fragmentation of television advertising with the expansion of channels over the past decades, Colby said social media comes with its own growth in the number of segments and varying demographics that use them.

At the Global Best Practices Conference panel, from left: Stephen Farr-Jones, ADM Marketing; Kristen Jones Colby, Front Burner Restaurants and Twin Peaks; Amanda Hite, BTC Revolutions; and Stewart Slocum, Groupe Le Duff.

15

Forget Apple Watch – Restaurants need a SCiO www.restaurant-hospitality.com March 13, 2015 Article by Bob Krummert

A new tech device could quickly—and cheaply— solve many problems that bedevil full-service operators.

Calorie counters, fitness fanatics and others eager to embrace a data-driven lifestyle will be early adopters of the much-touted Apple Watch when it becomes available on April 24. But another new tech tool, the SCiO, could wind up having a bigger impact on the restaurant industry. It’s a hand-held spectrometer that analyzes physical objects—including food—in real time, returning relevant information to the user’s smartphone in seconds.

The device, which sells for $295, starts shipping in July. It’s meant to become “a Google for the physical world,” says Dror Sharon, head of Israeli company Consumer Physics, SCiO’s maker.

“SCiO is the world’s first molecular sensor that fits in the palm of your hand,” Sharon’s company says. “It is a no-touch optical sensor that provides a seamless user experience. With SCiO, you can begin exploring what physical objects are made of, for example, how much fat is in cheese or salad dressing, how much sugar is in a piece of fruit, checking the freshness or pureness of cooking oil, knowing when an avocado will ripen, understanding the well-being of plants, identifying what medicine one is about to consume and much more.”

Labs and factories have used large-scale near infrared spectrometers to ascertain the chemical composition of materials for decades.

Consumer Physics has figured out how to cram the same technology into an inexpensive hand-held device. Low-cost optics and “advanced signal processing algorithms” make it possible.

At present, SCiO’s usefulness to restaurant operators is limited by the relatively small number of food-specific apps that are available. The company expects both in-house and third-party developers to release more soon. But the ones that are part of SCiO’s starter set still enable restaurant operators to do several things: • read the nutritional values of different kinds of food: salad dressings, fruits, vegetables and dairy products (“More foods will be scanned and added on a regular basis as our database expands,” Consumer Physics says) • assess produce quality: determine the sweetness and ripeness of different produce • monitor cooking oils: quality and oil type identification

16

From there, the sky is theoretically the limit. SCiO could become a restaurant operator’s best friend every time a food order arrives from a distributor. Are the salad greens fresh? The tomatoes ripe?

Is that fish really grouper? Does a processed food item’s nutritional profile match what the manufacturer promised? SCiO could answer a lot of questions.

The potential downside: customers will be able to buy their own SCiO and monitor the freshness, ripeness and sweetness and other qualities of many items a restaurant serves. Let’s hope some busybody doesn’t go crazy analyzing your salad bar. And if your menu lists nutritional information, get ready to respond when a SCiO app tells a customer the meal you served him or her doesn’t measure up.

So is SCiO a good idea that will work in the real world? Its nearly 13,000 Kickstarter backers think so. Consumer Physics sought $200,000 in development funds from the site, a huge number for Kickstarter. No problem: $2.8 million was pledged.

Tech geeks see SCiO as the next big thing too. The device was the online winner of the “Last Gadget Standing” award at the giant Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas this January.

Watch the awards ceremony, which includes a live demo of SCiO taking and winning the Pepsi Challenge.

The Apple Watch may become useful in some ways to restaurant operators, too. Apple c.e.o. Tim Cook told a press event earlier this month that “People are beginning to think about doing not only cool things with their apps, but how it changes their whole business.”

Panera Bread is first up with a Watch app in the restaurant space.

It enables Watch wearing-customers to pay for their meal by flashing their watch over a reader, the same as they would with a smartphone. If your restaurant is looking to increase its throughput during extremely busy times, the Apple Pay/Apple Watch combo could help speed things up.

We’ll find out later if any new Watch apps will be game changers for restaurants. In the meantime, you may wish to investigate whether the SCiO could help solve some of the problems that keep cropping up at your operation.