Old Spice has taken the use of social media to the next level. Recently, Old Spice launched a YouTube viral video campaign, with their spokesman responding to comments left on the Old Spice Facebook and Twitter accounts. Each video included the name of the original user who made the comment or statement – most responses lasted 30-60 seconds. The Old Spice spokesperson even goes as far as smashing a pirate pinata with a freshwater fish in a video response made just for Demi Moore. The Old Spice YouTube profile has total upload views surpassing 59 million…not too shabby.

If you haven’t seen one of the Old Spice TV commercials , you probably live on another planet. If that is the case, you are probably more worried about your crazy neighbor parking his Corellian YT – 1300 freighter too close to your Naboo Royal Cruiser. Since we are on Earth, I will try and focus on what is going on with us boring Homo sapiens.

For a long time, social media represented a channel where your customers talked about your products or business, and you prayed that discussion was positive. Now, organizations continue to find and experiment with new ways to penetrate this channel and find new ways to interact with their target customer base instead of sitting on the social media sidelines.

However, before you jump into the “game,” make sure you stretch and remember these 3 things:

• Use the dialect and language your customers are using. If Old Spice sent a formal press release responding to tweets and posts, the message would’ve been lost because of the way it was delivered.
• Keep your communication short and to the point. Diatribes are meant for Shakespeare and your journal; meanwhile, your audience prefers frequency and freshness.
• Keep the conversations going. Don’t try to stop them. Your tendency will be to resolve things, but whether it’s positive or negative, showing the interaction and attention is where you score brownie points with your audience. Facilitate and encourage additional participation and you will learn that much more about your audience.

Does your social strategy stink? Reach out to me to learn more about what we’re doing to help our clients cash in on social media…

Check out The Old Spice Experiment

1. Provide All the Information
I am impressed by how many websites don’t provide their menus or hours online. Checking a menu or checking the restaurant’s hours are the number one and two reasons why people visit a restaurant website. Oh, you managed to have a professional photographer take photos, upload them to the site, and write captions, but you can’t tell me if you’re open past 10pm on a Thursday night? Sure, I might call you to find out your hours, but not if I have a second or third choice for dinner whose websites I can skip on over to. And who really calls to ask about the menu? Do you really want your staff occupied taking these phone calls?

The point of your website is to give potential diners information. Yes, photos, history of the business and chef, etc. is all pertinent information, but it’s second tier when compared to the menu and the restaurant’s hours (and location). Don’t forgot to include this information, and don’t forget to make it easily accessible—hours on the homepage, and a link to the menu on the homepage. And if you must use a PDF for your menu–alert the visitor. Opening a PDF can crash browsers on older computers, and there’s nothing more frustrating than to click on a link and have a browser crash (a good reason to avoid PDF menus all together.)

2. Be Relevant
If there’s one thing the internet is good for, it’s up-to-the-minute updates on just about everything. This is why it is a cardinal sin to have a menu online that’s not in season. Okay, your menu changes daily, but you don’t have the time update the website daily, that’s forgivable. Just make a note that says, “Our menu changes daily, here is a sample of our typical menu. Please call us if you have any questions.” And don’t forget to date the menu with at least the season or the month. Don’t think because it’s not labeled, your visitor won’t know it’s old.

It’s nearly May, and on a nice day it’s almost 80 degrees F, I don’t want to be reading about pumpkin gnocchi in some heavy, cream sauce. Every chef and restaurateur spends hours, days planning a menu. Don’t let your menu do a disservice to your business online. Update it at least seasonally or whenever any major change takes place – including any change in price! No diner appreciates that little surprise, and it could even be viewed legally as false advertising.

3. Build Your Brand
Some restaurant websites go off the deep end when it comes to recreating the restaurant’s atmosphere online. While other restaurant websites look as though the owner’s nephew hacked together something in Microsoft Office. A restaurant website should absolutely reflect its company and branding through and through. And that usually means having it professionally designed. Do you want the owner’s nephew making your dinner? Do you want your online visitor to think he did? A fine dining establishment should have a refined and sophisticated website design. Even a low-key bar can create a cool web presence with a grunge design. The internet is your opportunity to reach an audience who might not normally step foot in your restaurant.

I’ve visited many restaurant websites, and granted I haven’t visited them all in real life, but at least I have noticed them. They are present in the back of my head as potential places to go for certain occasions. Or when someone else mentions how good the restaurant was, I can reply how good (or bad!) their website is! Your online presence stretches much further than just your patrons. Make sure it’s a positive one.

4. Keep Distractions Minimal
Oh the music. Restaurant websites love music and they love Flash. I like to think that when I walk into a restaurant your hostess isn’t going to scream at me. That’s essentially the equivalent of playing music when a site loads when I haven’t requested that music start playing. If you absolutely MUST have music on your restaurant site follow these rules:

Short music clips or sounds work much better than full songs on repeat. Eventually, what was a pleasant surprise (hopefully) becomes tiresome to the user as they browse your site for what they’re really looking for—information. Woodberry Kitchen is a site that chooses to play background sounds/music. I think the site would be lovely without it, but they chose smartly using background music – just as it would be in real life – to enhance not overshadow the website.

5. You Must Socialize
You’d have to be living under a rock to not realize that there is a food revolution going on in America. From eating healthier to eating local, from dressing up the simplest foods to simplifying the most expensive, from picking out a farm to picking a chemical reaction, from televisions shows to movies to books, the average American restaurant diner loves food. And not just the food itself but everything that it means. And almost more than anything, food represents coming together, socializing. If it’s appropriate to your brand (and it probably is) you need to be interacting with your loyal diners and potential diners online. You have to constantly remind them of your existence.

Through e-mail lists, Facebook, Twitter, Four Square and Yelp, you should be telling your customers about happy hour specials, giving loyal customers discounts and generally creating buzz about your food! Not to mention it’s an excellent way to monitor the good and the bad about your restaurant. I’ve tweeted about how much I enjoyed my entree at a certain restaurant during Baltimore’s restaurant week (as well as the great service I got!), I’ve also tweeted how I wish restaurants would have more/better vegetarian options. That was a direct opportunity for a watchful business to tweet me directly and suggest their vegetarian dishes. The other great thing about all this online socializing? Virtually all of it is available for free.

I hope this helps you avoid some potential pitfalls when creating a restaurant website. These are basic, but can easily get overlooked when the owner wants more “wow” factor or when the owner doesn’t give the site a second thought. Your restaurant website is a powerful tool to keep your afloat in any economy. Use it!

Mentioned in this post:
Meli : Provide All the Information
Joe Squared : Be Relevant
Clementines : Build Your Brand
Talara : Keep Distractions Minimal
Woodberry Kitchen : Keep Distractions Minimal
Miss Shirley’s : You Must Socialize

Kooper’s Tavern out of Fells Point began its “Chowhound Burger Wagon” service this summer and slowly but surely has developed a loyal group of followers. With their Twitter account @BRGRWagon and their Facebook page, they continue to release updates on their location for the day and other promotional information through these different channels. By utilizing these tools to deliver specific calls to action Koopers is able to see a direct return and reaction from their fan base, thus delivering the element that currently eludes and frustrates most businesses trying to grapple with their social presence.

So while we may not all be serving up the tastiest burgers in Baltimore and sweetest potato fries on the East Side of the Harbor, there are definitely some clear takeaways from Koopers’ efforts:

• Keep your social media efforts tied to goals. The Chowhound Wagon location goes out daily and through their lunchtime service, the team is able to see just how successful their message was in reaching their followers.
• Find ways to encourage interaction with your followers and fans through these channels and not just back to you directly. Allowing other fans to see that you do respond and how you respond brings them further into your social sphere.
• Keep your brand consistent. Do as much as you can to keep the look and verbiage the same across all of your different channels. Inconsistency in the way you speak or the look of your brand can be jarring, and thus prevent people from joining.

So here’s to Kooper’s and the Chowhound Wagon as this month’s recipient of Groove’s Golden Shopping Cart award in Social Media. Keep those burgers coming!

Do you know a company that is cashing in because of excellence in their online presence? E-mail info [at] groovecommerce (dot) com with a nomination for next month’s Golden Shopping Cart Award.

Photo by Lee Odden

One of the main topics of discussion was that ‘T’ word, better known as Twitter. It was pretty amazing to see #Pubcon as one of the top Twitter trends all week until SXSW started.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pubcon

People you should be following on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/ravenjon
http://twitter.com/chrisbrogan
http://twitter.com/joannalord
http://twitter.com/josephmorin
http://twitter.com/waynesutton
http://twitter.com/leeodden
http://twitter.com/ShariMcConahay

More recap here:

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/03/pubcon-south09-photos/
http://outspokenmedia.com/blog/

See everyone at Pubcon Vegas, November 10th -13th 2009!

The new Skittles.com home page features nothing but a navigational widget in the top left corner and a look at the (uncensored) live Twitter search stream displaying any Tweets containing the word “skittles”.

That’s right, I could tweet about a bag of skittles giving me food poisoning for three months and it will appear right on the Skittles home page. Or I could Tweet George Carlin’s 7 words you can’t say on TV, with a “skittles” thrown right in the middle, and appear right on the home page.

And its not just the home page. That navigational widget takes you to Skittles’ videos, pics, product information, and friends. Though I probably shouldn’t say Skittles’ videos, pics, product information, and friends, but rather, their YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Facebook pages. Through some nifty web development, the Skittles team were able to simply replicate the pages on these third party services underneath their navigational widget. Pretty clever, I’d say.

So, Skittles. Was handing over your entire site to the unapologetic, uncensored, and completely democratic web worth it?

Of course time will tell, but before today I had never been to the Skittles web page before. In fact, since I don’t watch much television, I don’t know the last time I even encountered the Skittles brand. Had Skittles launched a more traditional new web page today, the rest of the world and I probably would not have even noticed.

Who knows, maybe the next time I’m at the snack counter at the movies, I’ll actually put some thought into my decision, instead of simply asking for my go-to, the Kit Kat. And maybe in that crucial decision mode, my mind will run through the options, and spend a bit longer on Skittles.

The webmaster blog includes the announcement and a video introducing the concept. That video can be seen here:

We encourage all of our clients to get involved with social media in some way as it can lead to boat loads of traffic, and at the very least, expands the company’s reach and gets them a backlink.

What I like about Friend Connect is that it brings the social network to your site. Google includes gadgets that allow visitors to comment on or rate products/posts and “join” a site. There’s some flexibility with the styling so that it can be made to fit your site’s design. Seems like it could be a simple way to implement product reviews and comments for smaller eCommerce stores.

For blogs, Friend Connect’s ability to join a site could end up bringing bloggers more traffic through the network the friends create. I’ve added the members gadget to the sidebar of our blog, so join up if you want to give the service a try. Each joined member is clickable, and their other joined sites are listed. Additionally, friends can suggest links to other friends with ease. With enough support, the members gadget could serve as the social network version of a blogroll, where like-minded readers can share sites and links. If a reader likes your site, they could read similar blogs from your blogroll or now with Friend Connect the reader can read similar sites from your other readers’ profiles.

Some sites that have had the Friend Connect service for awhile now might demonstrate this better, with their active communities:

• Billboard for the People
• GO2WEB20 Blog
• Qloud

Users can sign in with their Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID’s and begin creating their networks on participating sites today.

It’s about time! The potential value of Facebook has not even been fully realized because a system like this is not in place. The overwhelming benefits of the social networking giant are in their hierarchical organization and the vast amount of information they’ve compiled on all of their users. What have they been waiting for? It’s time they man up, and start using these benefits to their advantage.

Even more interesting is how Facebook plans to develop and serve their ads. They’re going to be based on keywords, which will be placed next to search results within the site. This new system will allow anyone to bid on a given keyword or key phrase and have their ad target specific user profiles. Although it’s the same basic concept as Google’s Adwords, it can potentially be much more powerful. In using its more focused keyword targeting to serve ads to Facebook’s coveted user base, the new ad system has the power to increase advertiser’s conversions and ROI.

The ad system is still in early stages of development and is planned for a beta launch in the fall. The full article can be found here.