Seamless, the online restaurant ordering giant, wants to be as well known as CitySearch, Yelp, OpenTable etc.. That’s why, like the other companies, they started their own Restaurant Awards called Craved. Customers with Seamless accounts will be able to nominate restaurants until October 15th. Seamless will then allow restaurants to vote on the nominated restaurants.
This is smart marketing. With a name like Craved, Seamless is not giving up the coolness of their brand. Changing from SeamlessWeb to Seamless is one example of this.
Seamless understands customers of many generations may place reservations online, but young people are the one who primarily order their food online. So Craved has awards like “Best my-coworkers-will-love-me-for-ordering-this food,” not an award you’d find on Best of CitySearch. They have a whim and wit that goes with Seamless’ brand. Seamless’ awards are for restaurants that use Seamless’ ordering services, cutting out a huge chunk of the restaurant world. In contrast, nearly every restaurant is on CitySearch and Yelp. Only a rare fine dining restaurant has held out against OpenTable.
For restaurants with delivery, there is much more diversity. Not only is there Seamless but there is GrubHub. A couple of other online ordering services are popular along with many who still use phone and fax. As this is more of a marketing technique (as you can see buy the award titles), Seamless is showing off its restaurants and helping customers find the best ones. As Seamless has always had a rating system with their search system, this isn’t to be unexpected. By making the titles strange and eccentric, they prevent losers from being sore losers.
If your restaurant is on Seamless, it may be a good idea to share the link through Twitter and Facebook to your Fans and Followers so that they can vote. Of course, do not necessarily plug yourself for any one category but letting them know about it may help get you some votes and publicise your online ordering.