Burgatory Bar is tucked away in the corner of a shopping plaza. The parties of families and friends clustered together with – you guessed it – their smartphones in-hand. With more and more people using their phones for entertainment, restaurants are riding the trend by incorporating smartphones into their dining process. Guests seem to have their phones out regardless, especially when they’re waiting, so it only makes sense to engage them this way. I approached about fifteen groups and asked them to share their smartphone activities.

Facebook was a popular answer, with many people admitting to cruising their friend’s profiles while they were waiting. However, when I asked if they “checked-in” to Burgatory Bar on Facebook, I heard a variety of responses. Some people loved Facebook’s check-in feature as a way to share their cool experiences. Still others refused to check-in because it was considered to be “creepy” or even believed to be “unsafe.”

Twitter was more polarizing than fried pickles: people either love it or hate it. No one admitted to following Burgatory Bar on Twitter, which I found surprising since Burgatory has an active and informative Twitter feed. When I asked the Twitter-lovers what they were tweeting, “pictures” was a frequent response.

As I continued to interview waiting patrons, I received a potpourri of answers: checking email, taking pictures with Instagram, reading on the Kindle App, surfing the web, and playing games. What surprised me was the variety of responses. Not everyone flocked to the major social media sites. In fact, most people found unique Apps that fit their personality. By the bar, a waiting party was rating beer on the Beer Buddy App. A group of high school girls were taking pictures with CamWow and cruising Pinterest. A father with his young kids was playing Words With Friends. Because of the sheer volume of activities available on smartphones, people filtered into specific categories that best suited their interests.

Burgatory Bar uses NoWait, which takes cellphone engagement to the next level. Guests give their phone numbers to the host, and the host texts them to return to the restaurant when their table is ready. Guests initially receive a confirmation text that also links them to a webpage where they can watch their party move up in the wait list.

NoWait’s
What’s My Place?™
Feature

A few people I approached were using the link in their confirmation text to see how close they were to getting their table. As I talked with the groups who chose to wait immediately outside the restaurant, I observed parties returning to Burgatory from the nearby Barnes & Nobles and TJ Maxx stores.  They used their wait time to do some shopping and returned to the restaurant when Burgatory’s hostess used NoWait to notify them.

It’s worth noting that the old fashioned way of spending time waiting for a table hasn’t died: many groups said that they spent the time catching up with friends or drinking at the bar. One mom wearily said she spent the minutes chasing her kids around. It appears that social media’s predecessor – physically interacting with others – still has a place in society. Regardless, the incorporation of the “new” smartphone social media into the “old” physical social interactions looks like it’s here to stay.

If you’re like me, you didn’t understand the Instagram fuss until you downloaded it and got hooked. Maybe you found yourself taking pictures of street signs and hubcaps (and altering them with Instagrams’s one-touch photo filter) like you were a born photographer. Restaurants are jumping on Instagram’s popularity too, using their Twitter accounts to blast Instagram pictures to their followers and inspire social media engagement.

What is it: Instagram is an App (iPhone and now recently launched for Android) that takes pictures and makes them “artsy” with a one-touch filter of your choice. It syncs with Twitter and Facebook so that none of your artistic gems go unnoticed, and like Twitter, you can follow people to see what beautiful things they’re snapping.

Social Power: Instagram has over 30 million users and 1 billion photos uploaded, which coincidentally is the dollar amount that Facebook paid for the popular App. Instagram is big, and with Facebook, it’s only going to get bigger.

Time Commitment: 30 minutes/week

What to do: Create an account and follow the three-step process: take pictures of the food and fun that happens in your restaurant, choose a filter to make it look great, and shoot it off to your Instagram, Facebook and Twitter followers by linking your accounts. Don’t forget to hashtag your pictures so that they’re searchable in Twitter, and make it personal: your Twitter followers will love a candid shot of the chef, or a heart-melting pic of the hostess’s dog. Encourage diners to take their own Instagram photos and to hashtag the restaurant in them for some spontaneous social media interaction. Visit your follower’s pictures and comment on them: this is their creative artwork, so a little attention can go a long way with building customer loyalty. Ava Kitchen & Whiskey Bar and Pizzeria Alto, both owned by Daniel Barrett, established a solid Instagram presence that can be seen on their Twitter feed: @AvaAlto. Their prowess over Instagram was picked up by an NRN article that also offers great tips on how to get your restaurant’s Instagram account up and running.

Pinterest

What is it: Users download a tool for their browser that allows them to “pin” interesting images to Pinterest, a virtual pin board. Everything is organized into sections on the site, and users can comment and “re-pin” the things they like. Pinterest users are mostly women, but brands are beginning to crop up on the photo-sharing social media site.

Social Power: Viewers can look at pictures instantly upon visiting the site without creating an account. With over 11 million unique monthly visitors, that’s a lot of hungry eyes on your restaurant’s food.

Time commitment: 30minutes/week

What to do: Create boards with your most spectacular dishes, and then use the images to link back to your restaurant website or your menu. Pinterest etiquette asks that users refrain from self-promotion, and pictures must be interesting if you want them commented on or re-pinned, so post pictures of restaurant dishes and events that are truly spectacular or beautiful. This is a social site that hasn’t been fully broken into by brands, so it’s still fresh and popular (the site is “invitation only” right now, making it a big deal, but you can request an invitation and it arrives in a couple days). Check out Austin-based Mama Fu’s Asian House Pinterest spread: it’s a nice balance of food, personality, and other creative ideas.

Foodspotting

What it is: Something about a big, beautiful restaurant meal makes people take out their phones and snap pictures. Foodspotting takes these pictures and makes them accessible, so people can post and view restaurant food.

Social Power: Since Facebook began the Timeline layout back in January, its support of Foodspotting has doubled monthly users. More people are adding Foodspotting as an App to their Facebook page.

Time commitment: 30 minutes every month

What to do: Create an account for yourself and go to “Create a Guide.” On the right, you’ll see your options as a small business. Take a few pictures of your most mouth-watering dishes, and upload them to Foodspotting under your restaurant (you may have to register your restaurant as a place). This will bring Foodspotting users into your restaurant and inspire them to post their own pictures, boosting your presence on the App. It differs from Pinterest by specializing in restaurants-only, and giving restaurants the interactive option of creating guides: rewarding guests who snap pictures of the items with prizes. Look at how San Francisco’s Nombe did it. Connect your Foodspotting account to your restaurant’s Twitter and Facebook to give your pictures more social punch.

Foursquare

What it is: We love knowing where people are and what they’re doing. Now, thanks to GPS-enabled smartphones and foursquare, we can. Users “check-in” to businesses to notify their foursquare followers where they are, and then have access to comments other people have made.  Upon check-in, or by search, foursquare promotes “specials:” deals that can be redeemed only if you check in through foursquare.

Social Power: Since launching in 2009, foursquare has amassed 15 million people world wide and 750,000 businesses. It hurts to ignore a crowd that big, and every check-in delivers valuable demographic information through the merchant dashboard.

Time commitment: 30 minutes/week

What to do: Make a foursquare account and claim your venue.  From there, you can offer specials to foursquare users. Ideas that have worked for other businesses are discounts, special treatment, or rewarding repeat business.  You can run multiple specials at once, and they go live instantly.  This is the perfect solution for a slow afternoon: throw up a special and inspire local foursquarians to make a beeline for your restaurant. See how AJ Bombers in Milwaukee leveraged foursquare’s interactive nature and his customers’ loyalty to boost his Sunday sales.

FohBoh

What it is: Think of FohBoh as the Facebook of the restaurant industry: users make personal accounts to establish networks and interact on FohBoh’s forums. Anyone can post to the FohBoh Community Blog, making it a great resource for varying opinions and updates.

Social Power: Most of FohBoh’s 40,000 users seem to be vendors. This is a great place to shop around, learn about, and contact suppliers and services.

Time commitment: 15 minutes/week

What to do: Create a personal account and select your community (Restaurant, Chef, or Wine) to check out the latest blog posts. While most of the members are vendors, they still blog about useful and interesting things, and FohBoh gathers them all together like a social media vendor catalogue for you to browse. If your restaurant business throws a curve at you that leaves you guessing, post a question on the Forums for quality advice from people who’ve been through it before. Check back at your leisure to keep in the loop.

Here’s a quick run-down of the top three social media sites you should be on, and how you should be managing them.

The Critical Three:

1. Facebook (Scroll to bottom for infographic)

What it is: This is the most popular social media platform, with personal and business pages.  If you’re not on here, you don’t exist.

Time commitment: 15 min/day

Mobile usage: Over 1/3 of Facebook’s 600 million+ users use Facebook Mobile.

What to do: Your restaurant should have a business page that has been optimized to gain new “likes” and gives valuable information (address, hours, phone number) to visitors. On March 30, 2012, all Facebook pages switch to the “Timeline” format. Here’s what you should look out for:

• Cover photo: This is the large banner displayed at the top of the page. It should be eye-catching, personalized, and informational. Check out these examples of creative timeline covers.
• Three image thumbnails: These are located to the right of Facebook’s native App icons (like “Photos”). Your information should be easily accessible through these boxes. They are your new “tabs.”
• The new “wall:” Use the Timeline feature to “pin” an important piece of information at the top of your timeline. Also, insert milestones (e.g. “Restaurant opened,” “New Chef Jones Arrives”) in your restaurant’s history to make it interesting and informative for visitors.

Make sure your page is planned out and functional before making the switch. As always, mix promotional status updates with fun updates (videos, shout outs, funny pictures) in order to appeal to your fan base and not always concentrate on sales.  Don’t forget to respond to posts and comments made by your patrons.

2. Twitter

What it is: “Follow” accounts (businesses or personal) and receive mini-updates at 140 characters or less.  Often used to show pictures or link out to other sites.

Time commitment: 5 min/day

Mobile usage: Half of Twitters 165 million+ users use Twitter Mobile

What to do: Create an account and encourage your guests to follow you for restaurant updates by putting your Twitter handle on menus, checks, and your website. A quick tweet and a picture only takes a minute and can promote a new menu item or drum up some guest interaction. For example, Burgatory Bar uses their Twitter account to announce the new “Burger of the Day” (B.O.D.) to followers. Most importantly, Burgatory uses their account to respond to guests and spark conversation for repeat business.

3. Yelp

What it is: Consumers post ratings, reviews, and pictures of businesses. People go here for a quick and honest judgment of your restaurant, as well as for all the technical information (location, hours, cuisine, atmosphere). Restaurants have their gripes on the fairness of Yelp, but Yelp isn’t going anywhere, so it’s better to address it than fight it.

Time commitment: 15 minutes/week

Mobile Usage: Over 40% of users access Yelp from a mobile device.

What to do: As one of the most prominent review sites, restaurants shouldn’t let bad Yelp reviews go unanswered. By opening a Yelp business accounts, restaurants can reply publically or privately to a sour review. Yelp lets businesses link their OpenTable accounts and create deals for customers that they can buy from the site.  For a well-managed Yelp page, look at Ala Shanghai in Latham; most of the reviews are positive, and the few negative reviews have a personalized response and apology from the management.

There’s a quick run down of the three social media sites that your restaurant needs to be on. Check back later for some of the additional social media sites that you should keep tabs on.

Facebook Infographic (click to enlarge)

The new wait list technology market is growing, and it has seen the entry of no fewer than 10 competitors with a mobile waitlist product that replaces pagers. So at NoWait, as we develop our native iOS App to manage the wait, we are challenged daily to stay focused on development in order to remain competitive with the rest of the mobile waitlist competition as well as provide a valuable service to customers. At times, we have encountered our competition out in the field, and we’re often competing for the same business.

In spite of this, NoWait has grown to lead the market for the mobile waitlist solution. To achieve this success, the most important factor that has given NoWait an advantage over the competition has been our commitment to develop a quality User Experience (UX).

What is User Experience?

User Experience is the way a person feels about using a product or service, highlighting the experiential, affective, or other meaningful aspects of the human-product interaction. It addresses the person’s perceptions of the product, such as its utility, ease of use, and efficiency. UX is subjective in nature because it concerns a person’s feelings and thoughts about the system, all of which may change over time.

The Qualities of a Great User Experience

It can be challenging to limit the factors creating a great User Experience to universal themes. That is, UX is subjective in many ways. It’s important to consider your specific product or service, your specific industry, and any use cases and needs that may be unique, which in turn will help define the key factors of your product’s UX. That said, and considering the subjective feelings and emotions a person develops for a product, practical aspects typically include utility, ease of use, and efficiency.

An excellent, modern example of a product that embodies these traits is the iPod. Before the iPod was created, the first mp3 players weren’t being adopted well. They had too many small keys and too many functions, both of which made these mp3 players difficult to use. What Apple’s designers observed was that a small device like an mp3 player would be best if it only had a few functions and simple buttons. The result was a physical product with a track wheel and few buttons. Creating playlists and modifying songs could be done, but only when connected to a computer, which would be easier due to the large computer screen and keyboard. The track wheel and buttons themselves were made fairly large for easier use. Further, when designing a future version of the iPod that would be limited to 1 ‘shuffled’ playlist, the screen was removed altogether because it wasn’t needed.

In the case of a restaurant waitlist, we made several observations that would help us decide the key factors of NoWait’s UX:

• Restaurants with waits are busy and thus operate quicker than an average restaurant. A new software tool injected into this environment wouldn’t be given many chances to succeed
• Restaurant patrons can be fickle (think every angry Yelp review), so if a new method of communicating with them failed, they might not return
• The 270,000 table-service restaurants in the U.S. all have unique methods of operation, so a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach would be difficult

These observations then translated into how we created basic features of the product:

• NoWait doesn’t require training; hosts pick it up and already know how to use it.  The iPad itself is rather intuitive, so it creates a basis for an easy to learn software application. We kept NoWait simple by design, with easy and fast features.  The result is an exceptional intuitiveness.
• Instead of building a browser-based solution, NoWait is a native iOS App.  The speed and responsiveness of the native App, combined with the secure iOS platform, provide it reliability.
• NoWait was initially designed for the iPod / iPhone, but also has a separate iPad App. The text messages that restaurants send their guests are customizable.  With many different restaurant concepts to satisfy, NoWait succeeds with its adaptability.

Developing a User Experience Organization

Making UX a high priority may mean taking a difficult developmental road. The urge many product development teams have is often to develop as many product features as quickly as possible. However by adding too many features and/or not taking time to consider how they will operate, the product itself could easily become more difficult to use and not respond well to the needs that demand it.

In the case of NoWait, we made many difficult decisions to stay on our development path and reduce the “noise” that might distract us from developing a high quality product. Indeed, our competitors were moving faster with browser-based solutions, and it was a challenge to ignore the press that they were receiving and the market share they were developing.  NoWait instead took a slower route in developing the native iOS App. The discipline paid off, as NoWait now continues to win customers from competitors with inferior software. In the end, our experience has proven that there is simply no substitute for good design, and the success achieved is itself a reward for focusing on developing a great User Experience.

According to Nielsen, in 2011 the amount of mobile phone subscribers using smartphones grew to 44%, more than double the 18% it had been two years prior. That number is expected to grow at an even faster rate throughout 2012. Smartphone usage is most prominent among the 18 to 34 age bracket, showing that young adults are most likely to be affected by smartphone marketing. What tools can businesses use to effectively capture the attention of this younger demographic when there is so much data to sort through in the world of smartphone technology?

Of the three main mobile marketing tools businesses can incorporate into their marketing plan, mobile applications are quite popular. According to a December 2011 article in Information Week, last year there were more than one million active web applications for smartphones. Many leading companies, such as Yelp, Netflix, and Facebook, have their own mobile application that customers can load to their phone to access personalized information at any time. An interesting, well-designed app can generate buzz among users, however Mobile Apps are not inexpensive to develop. Businesses seeking a less expensive option might choose to develop a mobile website. A mobile website does not have to be downloaded, has wider availability to customers, and is much easier to create than a mobile app. A novel way to load mobile web pages is through the use of Quick Response, or QR codes. Smartphone users are able to scan these codes using a barcode scanning app, and they will be linked back to a business’s website or to special web offers. QR codes have been picked up by many advertisers, including restaurants. By using a QR code in an advertisements a business or restaurant can offer coupons or discounts to smartphone users, making them more likely to use their service or go to a particular restaurant.

Within the restaurant industry, savvy operators have found interesting methods to develop smartphone marketing. For example, Applebee’s offers the option of creating a digital gift card that customers can both give and access on their smartphone. OpenTable, which for over 10 years has provided online reservations from the web, now offers an App that allows customers to make reservations from their phone. UrbanSpoon, also an App for restaurant patrons, lets customers “check in” to a restaurant and leave reviews and ratings. Also timely are Groupon’s mobile App which gives customers access to deals and coupons and the Tabbed Out App that gives a customer the capability to pay a bar tab digitally without having to catch the bartender’s attention.

Thanks to the exponential growth expected to take place among smartphone users in 2012, smartphone marketing is a very viable option for businesses to take when looking to reach a wider market, as has already begun to take place. Mobile apps are an effective marketing tool, but are not the only option a business is limited to. Companies can also start their own mobile website and use QR codes in advertising campaigns to link smartphone users back to their website or to special web offers. Restaurants will particularly benefit from smartphone marketing because they can reach out to customers in real-time, providing up-to-date information and current specials and offers. Patrons are more likely to return to a restaurant they feel they have a connection with. Smartphone marketing is all about generating interest among customers, and with a little creativity, it is simple to create a marketing tool smartphone users will be excited about.