28 Oct 09 New Study: A Restaurants Website is Most Important

Just in case you had any doubts. A study just released by ad-ology has shown that a Restaurants online presence is most influential in convincing customers to visit a restaurant.

Online media influenced 40 percent of recent restaurant visitors, with restaurant Web sites having the most influence. Traditional media proved more effective than social media for these consumers. Twenty-seven percent were influenced by newspaper, and 25.4 percent said the same for direct mail.

“People are still eating out and ordering out, but want to make sure they’re spending their money wisely,” said C. Lee Smith, president and CEO of Ad-ology Research. “Restaurant Web sites can really drive traffic by providing menus and prices, plus details like hours and location so consumers feel like they have all the information they need,”

An old study done by Com-score delves further by showing the specific impact that online reviews have for a restaurant.  See the discussion in an earlier post here The findings are no suprise but thought they might be interesting for you to know.

05 Oct 09 Skype launches into pay per call for business.

Skype just announced its partnership with European directories one of Europe’s largest yellow pages companies to enable its listings with a Skype powered click to call button.  This kind of functionality has been available for a while with the browser plugin available for skype that turns any phone number on a web page to a button that launches a call in skype like below.

So whats new? The new Skype functionality allows directories to put a link which they or the business pay for instead of the consumer. This is a nice additional business model. This could get even more interesting if and when Skype starts advertising category related either in the call or within the skype software ie you click on a plumber in your area to call them and the skype software also suggests - sponsored listings that the plumber pay a premium for receiving the phone calls.

I also look forward to seeing what kind of reporting metrics the directory can pull in to show the business how many leads they generated for them and whether they have a solution that doesnt involve the customer needing the skype software ie just enter their own phone number and be called.

Exciting times in the voice / web world, especially in local.

19 Aug 09 Urbanspoon is going to have the same problem as Open Table.

I was reading about Urbanspoons foray into the online reservation market. Its a clever strategic move. With innovations like the iPhone and soon the apple  tablet PC it doesn’t make sense for companies like Open Table to force restaurateurs to use an old school point of sale system. But will new restaurants throw away their paper and pen diary. I dont think they will - at least not quickly and certainly not without a huge and expensive sales effort from Urbanspoon / IAC.  I have no doubt that restaurateurs who are sick of paying the $300 a month to Open Table for the PC might switch if Urbanspoon can demonstrate they will bring as many customers. Which they should as Urbanspoons 1 million shakers a day and Citysearch / IAC’s (who recently acquired them) users of slightly less than that is more than Opentable or anyone else in the restaurant space. - yes including Yelp or the Yellowpages.

The $700 million question is. Can Urbanspoon sell it to restaurateurs. It took Opentable $52 + million in venture funding and 10 years to sign up 10,000 restaurants. Admittedly the market is easier now, restaurants are better informed but still a little over 50% of them have a website are they really going to throw away their paper and pen for any kind of technology. Only if it brings them more business. You have to prove to an owner that it will bring them more business, when only a maximum of 10% of a restaurants reservations currently come from online its a matter of waiting until you prove that to an owner.

If Urbanspoon can prove they will bring the restaurant more business before the restaurant has to commit and come up with a cost effective way to sell to restaurants then I think Open table and its shareholders should be shaking in their boots.  That’s what we see as the opportunity - deliver online reservations without the restaurant having to change any behaviour. Then when we know who is getting the reservations . he proven the restaurant will get more business, we know who is going to be interested in a software as a service reservation system. Whether we are re-selling something like Opentable or Urbanspoon or something of our own development remains to be seen but its critical whoever wins in this market think of a way to take it mainstream and acquires new restaurants cost effectively.

15 Jul 09 How do you make sure online reviews are real

Greg Sterling just posted an article about a plastic surgeon in New York that was recently fined $300K by the Attorney General for posting fake positive reviews on the Internet. It highlights not only how effective and mainstream reviews are becoming but also how it is important that review publishers take steps to advance the technology they use to prevent fake reviews from being published.

I’ve been thinking about this  a lot and think the best solution is two fold. First some advanced device identification. There is technology that is around at the moment that is mainly used in online fraud detection to identify a particular device ie computer using more than IP address and browser information.  A friend of mine works at a company Threat Metrix that employs this technique to prevent credit card fraud and I think an adaptation of this to manage online reviews would work really well. This could particularly work out if the same device that registered or claimed an account is now leaving a review. Or that this same device has already made a review for this particular venue and you can simply take the most recent as the most relevant.

If you combine this with some verification techniques like did the person redeem a voucher, that they paid for with a credit card or did they make a reservation you have some excellent validation point that the user has the right to leave a rating and you can trust it is real.

In a world where so much trust is being placed in reviews and there is also a growing volume of reviews its the publishers that display the moste credible reviews in the future that will garner the most trust from thier users and in tern retain the most traffic.

08 Jun 09 The answers to the problems with paid search for SMB’s.

A report was released to today by Borrell and associates showing the huge churn there is in small to medium sized business customers buying paid search. Greg Sterling and David Mihm gave some excellent analysis on the report but in short it said that:

• The local search advertising market is huge and there has been some significant growth by industry players such as Yodle, Reach Local, and Local.com
• Being a great sales force is one thing but re-sellers of the major paid search need to find ways to add value. This make sense as a smart business will always be asking what are they paying for and will eventually go direct if they dont see the value.
• The biggest challenge for resellers is churn. Estimates are that 60% of customers leave every 12 months. The biggest reason is that the small businesses not perceiving a return on investment, particularly in the first 90 days.

The reason for this failure is the failure for the re-sellers to clearly understand the amount of business being brought to the small business and clearly and easily communicating that to the owner. To a business owner that has just made thier first purchase of search engine marketing campaign to expect them to immediately understand the value of a click is naive.  If I own a local restaurant do my 500 extra clicks on my website per month result in a good investment of my $500 per month. When they read that i bet most owners dont think it does. If they can show it resulted in 50 new reservations, then it is so much easier for the owner to understand without having to be an SEM expert.

Tracking online reservations and calls sent to a business is the only way to determine the true effectiveness of a local search marketing campaign and until the business models and sales commission structures are based around that then there will always be some misalignment between the business, the local search directory and their users. The industry isnt there yet and its because half of the 100,000 sales people selling to these businesses are yellow pages and local newspaper people so its the history of those industries that are still leaving thier legacy.

If you are interested in learning how to re-align your online directories to be more inline with business owners and users get in touch with dean (at)bookingangel (dot) com or follow me on twitter