Restaurants and Institutions

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Web 2.0 or Die
November 29, 2007

You’ve probably read about Web 2.0, and maybe you use some of the tools now associated with the concept of seeing the Web not as an endpoint but as a platform that enables expanded opportunities. If, like many in the restaurant industry, you think that because your company has a Web site, you’re in the game, you’re wrong.

Chris Muller

Most employees in the restaurant industry are under 30. Tomorrow’s core employees (and your best customers) are part of the new “Millennials” generation—just turning 21. Ask around your restaurants—see if you can find someone who doesn’t use MySpace or Facebook. See how many of your cooks or servers spend their free time in an online multi-user game. Does anyone not have an iPod or MP3 player?

Look at the list of online marketing tools below. Then ask your marketing folks how they are incorporating Web 2.0 thinking into plans over the next 12 months.

How many are you using today? Burger King, Red Lobster, Subway, and McDonald’s are already there, next year might be too late.

• Blogs (short for Web logs) are online journals or diaries hosted on a Web site (you’re reading a blog now).

• Online games include both games played on dedicated game consoles that can be networked and “massively multiplayer” games. These involve thousands of people who interact simultaneously through personal avatars in online worlds that exist independently of any single player’s activity.

• Podcasts are audio or video recordings—a multimedia form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed through aggregators, such as iTunes.

• Social networks allow members of specific sites to learn about other members’ skills, talents, knowledge, or preferences. Commercial examples include Facebook and MySpace. Some companies use such systems internally to help identify experts.

• Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are highly social, three-dimensional online environments shaped by users who interact with and receive instant feedback from other users through the use of avatars.

• Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with each other automatically to pass information or conduct transactions. A retailer and supplier, for example, might use Web services to communicate over the public Internet and automatically update each other’s inventory systems.

• Widgets are programs that allow access from users’ desktops to Web-based content.

• Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion.

• Mobile marketing is direct cellphone text couponing and personal messaging.

• Collective intelligence refers to any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions. Technologies that contribute to collective intelligence include collaborative publishing and common databases for sharing knowledge.

• Mash-ups are aggregations of content from different online sources to create a new service. An example would be a program that pulls restaurant listings from one site and displays them on a Google map to show where they are located.

• Peer-to-peer networking (sometimes called P2P) is a technique for efficiently sharing files (music, videos, or text) either over the Internet or within a closed set of users. Unlike the traditional method of storing a file on one machine—P2P distributes files across many machines, often those of the users themselves. Some systems retrieve files by gathering and assembling pieces of them from many machines.

• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to online distribution of news, blogs, podcasts, or other information.

• On-line gaming & simulation uses video game technology for training and development.

• Google Map and GIS technology combine for target market identification and customer tracking.

• YouTube is made from user generated video uploads, often including customer testimonials or other feedback messages.

• Call centers are Web-based customer order consolidation systems.

• Webinars are on-line information sharing seminars where many individuals may join in to a single Internet site from the comfort of their own computers—these may be highly interactive or simply passive.

Posted by Chris Muller on November 29, 2007 | Comments (1)