Marketing Restaurant Online

Kevin Rose is an entrepreneur who is well known as a co founder of the social-bookmarking website Digg. He lives in Bay area and  has a finger on the pulse of what is going on in the tech world and what future holds for these new location sharing services. He shares his thoughts on FourSquare and Gowalla.He is convinced how it is changing the landscape of restaurant businesses in his bay area when leveraged with new way of marketing via Foursquare or Gowalla which is well worth taking a note.

I also believe that location sharing services like FourSquare and Gowalla are going to be huge this year and in the future. So why not get familiar with these services and take advantage of a new medium for marketing your restaurant to tech savvy customers like Kevin Rose. So now without further due let me explain what really is Foursquare and Gowalla.

What is FourSquare and Gowalla?

Four Square and Gowalla are location sharing services based on apps on smart phones like iPhone that enables any one to share their location they visited with their circle of friends in their network and shout out any information that they want to let their friends know about.

Why is Foursquare and Gowalla getting popular?

I believe Foursquare and Gowalla is getting popular because it is a new way of communicating with your close friends and knowing their where abouts without having to call them or text them. It can be useful during any days of the week but this seems to be more handy during the weekends when you want to know which local restaurant, bar or night club you want to visit based on your friends preferences and where they are at the very moment.

The another driving force to make it popular is that it adds game aspect to this service which makes it even more attractive. Who doesn’t love game and wants to win. It becomes exciting to brag about being a mayor of a restaurant and that you got a Free Beer and Pizza like Kevin Rose’s friend Jeff.

It encourages people to compete for that mayor ship which is good thing for your restaurant.It becomes a game to your customers and has a chance of getting viral with all their circle of friends.

Why your restaurant should care about these location sharing services?

These services are new and so many restaurants are trying to figure it out how to best leverage this to attract new customers. It is exciting and experimental as Kevin Rose says. I believe that your restaurant should at least understand the concept and if possible sign up too. That way you get to play around and dip a toe into the water and see for your self if it does work for your restaurant. If it is working for other restaurants then it should be working for you too, Right?

The main reason why your restaurant should care about these new location sharing services is that it gives you the exact demographic information about your customers. Where they are ? Where they are headed to? and so many other important datas of your real customers in a digital format at a click of a mouse.

In the past and even now so many restaurants have a static website with no way of collecting the real data that is useful to the restaurant business. As Kevin Rose says, restaurants typically have email collection mechanism via their website or questionnaire survey bundled with the check. They are better than having nothing. But with the tools like Foursquare and Gowalla you have a chance to collect useful and relevant datas like male and female ratios, time they normally check in at your restaurant and many more that you could use for marketing your restaurant better with the existing customers and potential new customers.

Viral- Another reason is that your marketing becomes viral. How?  Let’s say one of the greatest fan- a loyal customer is in you restaurant. He checks in with Foursquare or Gowalla and informs his private friends on the network and possibly to Facebook and Twitter if he or she chooses so. First of all all his friends on Foursquare or Gowalla are gonna know where he/she is and therefore encourages them to visit your restaurant without even having to call him/her. This can now multiply to number of other friends. The more popular the friend is the better for your restaurant. Imagine high profile tech savvy customers like Kevin Rose or Tony Hsieh from Zappos checks  in to your restaurant and made a shout out to their friends and followers. You could have floods of their fans coming to your restaurant just knowing that they could hang out with them or at least be around them.

How you can create a loyalty program with Foursquare?

Mayor ship- On the video you heard the story from Kevin Rose how his friend Jeff gets the FREE pizza and beer once every week for being the mayor of the Pizza Place in San Francisco. Basically the mayor ship is won by one of your loyal customer who visits your restaurant the most. He or She is the greatest fan of your restaurant. So it does make sense to reward him or her for the loyalty. In turn it creates a competition among their friends to take that position and thus encourages other friends to visit your restaurant or bar often.

Thus it becomes one of the most powerful loyalty program that can go viral.

Points for automatic update on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare-This is the loyalty program that I have seen Tasti Dlite doing it with great results so I thought of sharing this with you though you might have to adjust to your available resources.

Right now Tasti Dlite is using their plastic gift card to give the points for their loyal customers who visit their physical store but they take it one step further by integrating it online with social networking site like Facebook,Twitter, and Foursquare. I believe this is powerful in the sense that it has viral effect to spread through out the social networking site like Facebook and Twitter among tons of friends and followers.

How do they do it? Let’s say a Tasti Dlite customer comes into their store and buys an ice cream. They get the point for that purchase and now if they opted via online allowing for automatic check in  update on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare they get 1 point for each. This helps to spread the word out to the entire friends on Foursquare and Facebook, and followers on Twitter.

New Advertising opportunities for your Restaurant?

Since Foursquare or Gowalla is an app in smart phones like iPhone it is a new platform that didn’t even exist few years ago. It has now become a new medium for advertising your restaurants. It even has a new name and is now known as appvertisement.

The core idea is to have your targeted advertising appear on these app on smart phones like iPhone. Let’s say a person checks in to one of the restaurant across the street. Since app recognizes where you are with their GEO location based technology, they can pull out your bar or restaurant deals in to their app saying something like ‘happy hour starting at 6pm or 20% off on your entire check” at your restaurant. I’m just giving you some examples. It could be anything you wish. All you have to do is sign up your business with the service and subscribe to their advertising.

I hope you take advantage of these new advertising medium which can be far effective than the old style advertising on Yellow Pages and newspaper which are not laser targeted to  local customers.

I hope you see the benefits of using these location sharing services like Foursquare and Gowalla and integrate it into your marketing mix to attract new breed of customers. Please try to understand the concept and at least start playing around with it. Once you  grasp the idea you can go with full blown marketing promotion with Foursquare or Gowalla.

Have you used Foursquare or Gowalla? Do you see some more benefits of using it for restaurants? Whether you are a manager, restaurant owner or simply a customer, if you have tried these services , I would appreciate if you could suggest some unique ideas to promote and attract new customers or simply your thoughts about the service by commenting below.