We gave an honor roll of companies that we predicted will have the best restaurant marketing tools in 2012. Now we will look at companies (Groupon, Yelp and LivingSocial) that, if you rely on them for marketing, are most likely to wreak havoc rather than bringing prosperity. They are not safe bets. These are the tools and companies that aren’t improving restaurant marketing. In our opinion, they are more hype...

People love the saying: “you get what you pay for.” With that logic, if you don’t pay anything, all the services you receive should be worthless. Freebookings, Livingbookings’ newest online restaurant reservation service, proves that some free things do have substantial value and performs better than like products of Openable and UrbanSpoon. After months of mystery, Livebookings has just recently launched Freebookings. It is a pure “Freemium” service where there is no monthly subscription fee and...

Restaurants are not like retailers. The price doesn’t start high when it hits the shelf and bottom out on the clearance rack. Many restaurant owners think it works as simply as that (simple supply and demand: when you lower the price, you increase traffic). In actuality, restaurant owners have to be very careful to distinguish between discounting and devaluing. Thousands of restaurant owners think that their promotions are providing a...

Adobe Flash’s days as a platform for websites are nearly over, which is good news for restaurants. When we say Flash, we are referring to Adobe’s multimedia creation (which does video, music and animation) for websites that can work inside a page or be the entire page. Website Made From Flash: Number Days Websites made entirely of Flash were never a good fit for restaurants. They are slow to load....

No. Who knows who started the myth that music playing on a website was a good idea. But unless it is a musician’s website, music should be treated as if a dangerous substance. If you are skeptical, ask around. Most people who rely on the Internet for restaurant information hate unexpected music. They are the ones searching for your restaurant online. Unexpected automated videos also drive people nuts. Let’s go...

Yelp is suggesting that gaming (fake reviews) is eliminated by their filter based on a working paper by Michael Luca of Harvard Business School. I think that is going too far. Yelp Ratings and Statistics Yes, when there are enough reviews, statistics allows filters to find abnormalities in the ratings. With enough data, ratings will have a certain distribution, unless we have a full-on statistically-managed assault on a business. Most...

Restaurants should no longer dismiss Facebook Ads as Ads has become progressively friendlier for small businesses. But problems remain. I’ll try to give you a balanced look. Here is some reasons (the positives) why it might be the right time for your restaurant to try out Facebook Ads. I also review the problems (the negatives) that remain and must be taken into consideration.  Let’s get started: Reason #1: Targeted Advertising The...

Our own Marc Liu spoke at a fascinating panel on Daily Deals. It covered the future and effect of daily deals. We wanted to give you some of the highlights, as this information may be hard to find underneath all the hype about Groupon and LivingSocial. HIGHLIGHTS 1. The connection between local businesses and online commerce isn’t going anywhere although it may not play out in the same daily deal...

Attacks on Groupon are coming from all sides. LivingSocial is eating up marketshare. Foursquare is becoming an able broker and has vanquished Facebook Places. Google Offers is positioning itself (whose Android is in a big chunk of smartphones) with better terms for restaurants. But the biggest sign of weakness is that Groupon is letting some merchants get better terms than others. The rumor is some merchants get as good as...

Much has been said in the last few weeks about restaurant websites and how they lag behind other industries. To summarize these articles, most of these websites don’t provide customers what they want and many companies are substandard sites. Anyone who knows websites can see that many restaurants have deplorable websites. A particular pattern  is spreading across the web (especially in New York City), and restaurants don’t know what they...