A Social Media Snapshot:Have We Forgot Zagat? Hardly ... They Were So Ahead of the Social Media Curve

It's hard to walk more than a few blocks in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York City without seeing the signs. You see them in windows and on doors. Those unmistakable placards are everywhere, at least where restaurants, bars and hotels are concerned.

Zagat has survived for more than 30 years by selling a product that is essentially the result of user generated content (UGC). The company has managed to leverage the wisdom of a nationwide restaurant-hungry crowd and convert those ratings into publications and promotional products that are sold to consumers and the businesses who feed their desires. And Zagat did it before social media and online rating tools were popular. While other rating and review portals have come online and added additional competition and perspective to this space, Zagat has been able to leverage a strong brand name.

Just ask Starbucks, Subway, and Red Robin, who all scored #1 in the 2009 Zagat Fast Food Survey, how much the Zagat brand means to them. Over 6100 respondents rated more than 100 fast food chains nationwide. The CEO's from the top chains are no doubt celebrating, and publicising, their consumer-generated ratings. Some of them have even posted the news on their company Facebook pages--an interesting comingling of old and new media.

If social media is about engaging people in conversation, it can be argued that Zagat was ahead of the curve. Started in 1979 by Tim and Nina Zagat, the Zagat Survey is now the largest source of worldwide ratings of restaurants, bars, hotels, nightclubs and even golf courses. Over 350,000 reviewers (Zagat calls them surveyors) from around the world provide reviews, express their opinion and help others in their search for a good place to eat, drink and be merry. Over 40,000 restaurants, hotels, nightclubs, golf courses, etc. are represented in the Zagat guides. As the social media ecosystem has evolved, so has Zagat. They now have over 1,600 fans on Facebook and 14,000 followers on Twitter.

A typical Zagat Guide is $15.95, or you can subscribe on their website for $24.95 and gain access to their worldwide ratings. There is no charge to do a review. Anyone can be a reviewer of a neighborhood restaurant--just ask President Obama who did a restaurant review himself for a local Chicago public television show while a state senator. Who knows, you might even see a Zagat review from this blogger...

Just in case you're wondering if the Zagat name really means that much, Starbucks recently incorporated the number one Zagat rating into their new advertising campaign. It must mean something. Read more...

A Social Media Snapshot:Street Food Meets Social Media

If you're hungry in New York City and want something quick, find a food cart vendor. These ubiquitous wheels with meals serve up a wide variety of surprisingly good things to eat. Once you've found a Big Apple vendor you really like, however, the challenge is finding him again.

Unlike restaurants with addresses and yellow page ads (remember those?), food carts can't always be on the same corner. So if yesterday you enjoyed your Jamaican jerked chicken with peppered rice on the corner of 48th and Avenue of the Americas, there's no guarantee you'll find the same food cart there tomorrow.

But now, thanks to Twitter and some social media-savvy food cart vendors, there's no need to let your lunch on the street be left to luck. A growing number of street food vendors in the city are using Twitter to keep satisfied customers coming back ... or two blocks east of where you were yesterday.

Vendors are tweeting their customers details about what's for lunch. Some even include pictures. (Indeed, a thousand words may be worth more than 140 characters when you're hungry.) Come 11:30 and a tweet comes up from a favorite noodle cart touting the special of the day and the cart's location ... well, there's a good chance that's what's for lunch. But more than that, these vendors are combining social media with street smarts in a traditional strategy of retaining customers by making it easy to buy again. And it doesn't take 50,000 followers to make it work. As long as you've got the right followers, the world can be your oyster ... or green chile pork burrito as the case may be. Read more...

A Social Media Snapshot:Babes in Tweetland

Think comic books and women and the images that come to mind (at least if you're a teenage boy) are of scantily-clad, large-busted, tiny-waisted illustrations with long legs--whether they're Cat Woman, Lois Lane, or just some bystander in a street scene. So it's no surprise that Comic-Con, the mega comic book convention oddly enough having it's 40th birthday this year, launched a "Sin to Win" contest that resembles a frat hazing initiation: he who picks up the most babes, and can prove it, using FaceBook and Twitter (hashtag #lust), wins.

Not surprisingly, the outrage among people in general, and women in particular, has been pretty strong (although probably not among convention participants). Even after an apology (the whole thing was in fun, after all, and really not meant to demean anyone), the rumblings are still being heard. Comic books can be confined to bedrooms or backpacks; tweets and FaceBook postings cannot. Can even Superman save Comic-Con from the negative publicity? Can anyone?

Oh, right...

This is about comic books and video games, and targeting a specific audience. As a social media strategy, was the contest offensive? Perhaps. Silly? Quite possibly. Effective? Absolutely. Nothing ignites conversation faster than controversy. It's a sure bet Comic-Con isn't suffering because of it. Read more.

Snapshot Post--Mini-Musings on The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly Wanted: A $70,000 a Year Tweeter

When Multnomah County, Oregon decided to hire a social media savvy person for a senior PR position, the public outcry was more than just a tweet or two. County citizens who had witnessed budget cuts, job losses, and general economic woes just didn't take kindly to a sexy new $70,000 job on the social media frontier. The job plan was nixed, but the social media strategy will live on ... with a twist. Read more.