Did you ever notice that the best local restaurants are the ones you never see advertised?  That’s because successful local restaurants wouldn’t see a high ROI on print advertisements.  They see a much higher ROI by focusing on their values. 

Hometown Heroes have 3 things in common

1. They know their customers.
2. They care about their customers.
3. They evolve with their customers.

Here are 10 ways you can know your customers, show you care about your customers and evolve with your customers by using social media.

1. Listen, listen, listen!  Smart social media marketers make friends way before they earn customers.  If you don’t feel like you have time to listen, hire someone to do it!  It’s one of the most important parts of seeing a return on social media marketing!
2. Set up Google Alerts. Include alerts for your name, your restaurant’s name, your competitors, restaurant associations, restaurant trends, etc. Incorporate your findings into specials, events, adjustments and coupons.
3. Monitor specific phrases on Twitter that potential customers might be tweeting about. Use a free tool like Tweet Deck or search.twitter.com.  Respond to these phrases.  Chat with these people online. 
4. Run a fun and interactive Facebook fan page. One way of doing this is to make your customers into local celebrities.  For example, consider featuring local high school athletes, veterans, new Moms, grandparents or college graduates depending on your target market and offerings. 
5. Offer a discount to those who show they are a fan on Facebook or check in using Four Square. 
6. Post pollson your website, blog or Facebook fan page to engage visitors and find out peoples favorite dishes.  Use the results to improve your business.
7. Address customer service issues as they happen by monitoring online “chatter.” If someone complains about bad service or cold lasagna, apologize and offer something to them to prove you really care.  Not only have you learned a valuable tip on how to improve your business (perhaps a staff member needs to go if several people share the same complaint) you’ve left that customer feeling surprised and satisfied that you were listening and addressed their issue personally.
8. Make sure your restaurant is on Yelp.  Monitor the comments from “yelpers,”address and adjust as needed.  Remember, one dissatisfied customer can send one tweet, blog post or status update to thousands of people with the click of a button!  Encourage your customers to write Yelp reviews and provide a small incentive for those who do.  It’s ok to ask for Yelp reviews! Edit: Thank you to reader Jane who informed me that providing incentives in exchage for Yelp posts is NOT allowed or looked highly upon by the community.  For more info, see her comment below.  Thank you Jane for pointing this out!
9. Consider starting a blog.  Blogs provide fresh content which makes search engines happy. Happy search engines means more visitors to your website, which equals more customers at your restaurant. Again, if you don’t think you have time to maintain a blog, hire someone to do this to stay consistent with your posting frequency. 
10. Add interactive media to your restaurant’s web site or blog.  For example, you could use short videos to introduce the chef and staff.  If you want to get really into it, show how the food is prepped or share a simple cooking technique.  You could get really creative with interactive media! Now your customers can “try before they buy,” a winning strategy for any busines!

Bonus Tip: When writing blog posts or copy for your website, incorporate relevant keywords.  For example: the name of your restaurant, the name of your town and/or neighborhood and other phrases that people put into Google searches. Incorporate these keyword phrases into the text as much as you can (without losing readability of course!).  Over time, this strategy will make it easy for locals to find you in Google searches.

So, in review…

Keep 3 things in mind when you use social media marketing for your local restaurant or small business: Know your customers,  care about your customers and evolve with your customers.

You’ve heard the statistics before…

Gen Y doesn’t trust advertisements; we trust the people in our social networks.  But overall, Gen Y doesn’t trust much at all.  If you’re a big company of any kind, you will have to work much harder to win over the 70 million Gen Y consumers living among us.

How Should Marketers gain Gen Y’s trust?

Well, besides Corporate Social Responsibility, you’ll need to prove your brand to us.  Let us touch it, try it and talk about it.  And let us hear about it and experience it from “real” people. In order to gain our trust, you’ll need to focus on experiential marketing.

Experiential marketing 2.0 means offering your product or service to the right people at the right time. A simple example is the nice lady at the grocery store who hands you a sample of fantastic cheese spread while you are exiting the cracker aisle.  Do that online. 

Technically, paid search campaigns attempt to reach the right customer at the right time. When I Google “smart phone” for example, paid ads for Sprint, Verizon, ATT, wirefly.com and Apple appear. There is one huge problem though:  a vast majority of Gen Y consumers will never look at, trust, or click on sponsored results.

Nor will most Gen Y’ers take the time to go through each of the companies’ websites.  We like instant gratification and that takes way too long. Plus, we’d much prefer to read a short aggregated review of the phones on a blog and buy based on a “real” person’s opinion anyways. 

Here are some ways that companies have used experiential marketing to catch me at the right moment and convert me into a customer.

• WalMart.com.  I thought hell would freeze over before I bought any furniture from Wal-Mart (and then blogged about it) but I did.  And I love my $99 kitchen table.  Why? Because I knew exactly what I was buying before I bought it. Walmart.com had great multi-view pictures, tons of honest reviews and they were willing to ship the product to my local Wal-Mart for free so I could see it before I brought it home.  
• Groupon.  Groupon is the best way to experience something that you never would have tried thanks to HUGE discounts on local products and services.  If I were a marketer, I’d make sure my stuff was on Groupon so people could experience it with for little risk, talk about it and experience it again.
• MattChevy.com. A long time ago I sent out a frustrated tweet saying “can anyone in the Chicago area help me with Wordpress?!” Matt responded immediately with a friendly (and calm!) tweet saying he could help me.  He caught me in the right place, at the right time.  He gained my trust.  We are now close friends and I refer people to him all the time.
• Amazon.com: “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” and “Best Value.”
• Ulta,  Hairuwear.com, YouTube demos, Ulta.  Worst hair cut of my life + obsession with Ulta + panic = temporary solution via J-Simp’s “Hair-Do.”

Readers, where have companies presented themselves to you at the right moment?

What’s the best example of experiential marketing you’ve seen?

What makes marketing financial institutions very different today than ten years ago?  Trust.

Ten years ago, trust was assumed.  The stock market was booming,successful dot-coms were popping up everywhere and jobs were plentiful. But then September 11^th happened.  And  the dot-com “burst.” And let’s not forget about the stock market crash, the fall of Lehman Brothers, government bailouts, the real estate market hitting an all-time low and the highest unemployment rate in decades. Today, trust is non-existent.

Marketers who focus on regaining trust will make it into the next era.  Companies- especially financial institutions- will start earning trust by reaching their customers exactly when and where they need something.

Simply put, that means better customer service.  But today’s definition of superb customer service goes beyond, “thank you for your business ma’am.”  Customers today expect instant gratification.  Customers want to be seen as individuals.  And today’s customers have bigger problems to solve and bigger voices than ever before.

Old Components of Great “Customer Service Marketing” for Financial Institutions

• A friendly smile and a thank you.
• A fancy lobby, suits & nylons.
• A call center.
• Great interest rates.
• Online banking, conveniently located ATM’s and longer hours of operation.

New Components of Great “Customer Service Marketing” for Financial Institutions

• A totally awesome iPhone app.
• A response from a real person when tweeting a complaint about the financial institution.
• Listening to the blogosphere and making adjustments.
• Creating financial products that offer value, rather than offer high interest rates.
• A customizable online banking interface that allows the customer to create a budget, track investments, create a plan to payoff debt, get financial education and earn rewards that are relevant to their situation.

My online marketing business card says, “get into your customers hands” (yes, it’s a sassy play on another common phrase). Today, customer service marketing is about getting in your customers hands-meaning getting into their iPhone, Blackberry, text messages, emails and social media networks-at the right moment.  It’s about paying attention to individual needs and providing ways to solve their financial problems.

It’s easy for consumers to blame large financial institutions for the economic downturn.  Smart financial marketers should accept this and turn their focus on regaining trust.  Financial institutions in particular should change their definition of “customer service marketing” and prove that they can once again be trusted by providing instant,  applicable and individualized customer service beyond high interest rates.

What do you wish your financial institutions would do differently?  Do you trust financial institutions?  What would make you trust them more?

Guest Post by, Jenny McCoy

They say it’s easier to get a job when you have a job, but I’m not so sure.

I launched my job search 2.0 last week with this site: SocialJenny.com.

Go ahead, check it out.

My reasons for creating this site were:

• I interviewed with a big NYC ad agency and they thought my resume was boring. I think this is a more palatable way of telling who I am, what I’ve done and what I’m looking for. And that damn cartoon is cute as hell.
• I live in Florida but I’m applying exclusively to NYC companies. They surely have countless local candidates, so I need something to make me stand out and show that I’m serious about relocating.
• It’s much easier to post a link on Facebook and other networks than it is to email my resume/cover letter to all of my contacts and I think this site represents me better anyway.
• In addition to a public listing on Monster and other sites, having a stand alone site gives me the ability to be “found” by potential employers.
• It shows initiative. One potential employer said she could tell I was a “self-starter” from this effort.
• I’m now using this site as a landing page for a Facebook ad campaign targeting NYC social media professionals (thanks to Nicole’s suggestion!)

The first week of my job search 2.0 went well. I landed two phone interviews with great companies, but I  was annoyed that because I was still employed my efforts had to be funneled through an anonymous Twitter account and DMs.

I wanted to openly announce my search and this site to my online network, but I couldn’t because unfortunately my coworkers were a part of the network I’d worked so hard to build. We’re Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, Twitter buddies and a handful of them read my blog.

So I quit. I gave three weeks’ notice with just a couple bites of interest in order to fully utilize my networks.

This decision received mixed reviews, as has my site. For me, both the site and the decision to leave my job only increase my ability to land my dream job in the big city. But I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Do you think a 2.0 approach gives leverage to candidates, or do you think I wasted a little sushi money on a pretty site? Do you think candidates are always more attractive when they have a job? Or it understandable to quit in circumstances like mine?

* Site was written and conceived by me and designed by the talented Andrew Norcross.

You may have noticed that Matt Cheuvront of lifewithoutpants.com and I hang out a lot online.  It all started over a meeting about this very website.  Since then, our friendship has grown and so has our list of co-projects.

Today we are announcing our first official project- Social Media 101.  We will be hosting social media workshops in the Chicagoland area to educate small businesses, entrepreneurs and non-profits how to get more out of their marketing while spending less money.  Since we love the online space and have experienced serious growth because of it, we thought we should let others experience the same thing.

The workshop will be held on Saturday April 10 from 9am-1pm in Elgin, IL. We are offering the workshop for FREE because in this economy, small businesses need to stretch their dollar as much as they can.

Social Media can change a small business. Yet small business owners are usually the ones wearing so many hats that they don’t have time to think about learning social media basics too.  After leaving our workshop, attendees will be equipped with the confidence and knowledge to have the voice of a large company with the marketing budget of a small company.  We will provide new ideas that are crucial to today’s small business marketing strategy.

Don’t believe it? We know it sounds far fetched for those who are new to the space.  Therefore, Mari Luangrath of Foiled Cupcakes will be sharing how social media has played an instrumental role in her business.  It’s no accident that Foiled Cupcakes are Chicago’s most coveted cupcakes.  Not only are they delicious, but Mari has relied on social media and online marketing to create the buzz.  She’ll be sharing her story and answering all of your questions.

Also, Matt and I will are co-authoring a “Social Media 101″ e-book which will be 100% FREE for all attendees.   The e-book includes some of our best practices and case studies from small business owners. We’re not reinventing the wheel here, but are instead focusing on providing a tangible resource to all workshop attendees and anyone else interested in learning more about Social Media.

I’m pretty excited to give back to my hometown community by doing something I’m passionate about.  Plus, working with Matt Cheuvront is an honor.  Our meetings are just as fun as they are productive (and trust me they are really fun!).  I imagine the workshop will be the same way.  Matt knows his stuff, he has a knack for design, and he knows from experience what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to small business marketing.

For those of you who are in the Chicagoland area, please pass this info on to anyone you know who may benefit from our free workshop! You can register using the form below or here.