Restaurants on the Web - Part 2 of 3

Hamburger Hank's is a clean, presumably friendly burger joint found in Fountain Valley, California. If you search Google for the words "Hamburger Hank's" (in quotation marks), you get only 14 pages returned. So, this is clearly no Wendy's or Burger King mega-chain.

A page from Pubcrawler.com is the first result, and nobody on that site has bothered to review the restaurant. Just a bit lower in the results, we see our very own blog, thanks to our most recent post mentioning that we'd be talking soon about Hamburger Hank's.

There's another link not far down that mentions Hamburger Hank's merely because it's an establishment where you can pick up a copy of the Huntington Beach Wave weekly newspaper.

Clearly, this hamburger emporium has made little effort to establish a "brand identity" for itself on the Internet.

Suppose someone wanted to at least see if anyone had ever taken a picture of the hamburgers (or the front door, or the cashiers, or the parking lot) at Hamburger Hank's. You know, just to get a better "feel" for the place. Then they might look up "Hamburger Hank's" with the Google Images search.

I'm not sure the ownership of Hamburger Hank's would be pleased with how their restaurant is being presented in visual form online. The array of four photos that come back does not particularly evoke an establishment where I'll enjoy a delicious hamburger.


Nor do these images inspire me to place Hamburger Hank's toward the top of my gastronomical "to do" list. She doesn't look like a particularly cheerful cheeseburger chomper, does she?


Companies sometimes spend 10% of their revenues on advertising and marketing, so that a consistently positive image of the corporate entity is firmly imprinted in the target market's mind. It doesn't look like Hamburger Hank's is spending one-tenth of 1% of their revenues on advertising and marketing. At least not on the Internet.

I'd be interested in hearing comments from restaurant owners here. Would you be satisfied with the web presence of Hamburger Hank's, if it were your own establishment?

Stay tuned for the final of my 3-part series:
Part 3 – Can a wiki directory change the web landscape for an unpublicized restaurant?

Restaurants on the Web – Part 1 of 3

I love good food. Bestowed with a metabolism that allows me to eat until full, three meals a day without blimping out, I consider it a true blessing.

So, with that in mind, I tend to hold in high value the restaurant industry, though I wouldn’t know the first thing about managing a restaurant. I probably know a bit more about Internet marketing, though; and that's going to be the topic of discussion in this post. Specifically, why do some restaurants fail to market themselves on the Internet?

CASE STUDY: The Georgia House Restaurant

My in-laws live in Lower Delaware. This affords me the opportunity to visit Sussex County every 4 or 5 weekends, and that thrills me because I never miss the chance to have a dinner at The Georgia House in Millsboro, DE. It's my favorite restaurant in Delaware. There isn’t a fancy thing in the dining room or the kitchen -- it is simply unadulterated Southern-style and Chesapeake regional "family food". You can sample a catfish po'boy sandwich, Memphis BBQ ribs, Miss Vicky's meatloaf, prime rib (try the Cajun-spiced version!), or my trusted go-to dish, the buttermilk fried chicken. Chicken is the area's primary agronomic business, so of course Georgia House has to know how to prepare it well. Whatever you do, don't miss the "soup that made them famous", a cream of crab concoction that you'll regret having ordered only a cup. Upgrade one of your two side dishes to the classic green salad, and you've got your fiber for the night. Finish off with another salad, the Eastern Shore picnic favorite Jell-o pretzel salad.

Sounds like a perfect restaurant, huh? But it has no website. Why, then, doesn't co-owner Sean Hall publish a website about his Millsboro restaurant and its several satellite locations in Selbyville, Milford, Laurel, and Georgetown (take-out counter only)? I can't figure that out, and Sean was unavailable for my call. Just a couple of years ago, people would pack the place and wait 45 minutes for the next available table, but now business has dropped off to a relatively slower "at capacity" pace. I have to imagine there are tourists traveling to the area who have never heard of the Georgia House, or may have been referred to it only by name but would like to see the menu before trying. Most of the clientele is over the age of 50, so maybe Sean doesn't think this market avails itself of the Internet. Think again, though -- seniors constitute the fastest-growing Internet demographic. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, those age 50 and over experienced a 26% growth rate in home broadband adoption from 2007 to 2008, with half of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 having broadband now. Some 19% of those 65 and older had home broadband access as of April 2008.

Consider the following possible web searches a hungry diner might conduct. For the tourist who has never heard of Georgia House, but happens to be rambling through Millsboro and has a craving for the regional favorite soup, they might go to Yahoo! on their mobile web browser and type 'millsboro delaware crab soup'. Here's their search result:



In the top 9 results, there's not one hit for the Georgia House, despite it being founded in Millsboro and famous for its cream of crab soup. Is it just me? Wouldn't that be maddening if you were the owner of this restaurant?

On the other hand, consider the diner who may have had a local resident advise them, "You should go to the Georgia House in Millsboro," but they’d like to see the menu, evaluate prices, get directions, and perhaps confirm whether the establishment accepts Discover card. Their Google search might be constructed as '"Georgia House" Delaware menu map'.

In the top 9 results, four of the links do contain info about the Georgia House restaurant, but these specific links are not particularly helpful or flattering to the business.



I don’t understand why the Georgia House would settle for these various pages representing (or, failing to represent) their establishment on the Internet. Maybe some of my readers will have some thoughts why.

Later in this 3-part series:
Part 2 – The imagery of Hamburger Hank's
Part 3 – Can a wiki directory change the web landscape for an unpublicized restaurant?

Internet users per household

I'm looking for data that would help estimate the number of Internet users per household (or, rather, "per Internet-connected household") in the United States.

If you perform a web search for "Internet users per household", you get a bunch of sites -- all of which are addressing this question in a country other than the United States.

Isn't this the sort of information our government should track in some way? There's a bill that wants to mandate a study of applying net neutrality regulations to high-speed Internet access services, but we don't know how to count Internet users per household.

Somebody help me!

Bradley Joseph atop Wikipedia

The featured, front-page article on Wikipedia today is about musician Bradley Joseph.

His musical talents include "hired by Yanni", "lead keyboardist for Sheena Easton", and "included in multiple various-artist compilation albums, most recently the 2008 release of The Weather Channel Presents: Smooth Jazz II".

I can't imagine how many iterations of smooth jazz from the Weather Channel will ultimately be necessary to exhaust the genre, but apparently we're already up to Volume II.


There is some debate on the Wikipedia talk page about whether this article is truly encyclopedic, as it seems awfully self-promotional, and it lacks even one mote of negative criticism.

"Taking a look at the references it appears Joseph doesn't seem to register outside of the musical circles in which he is appreciated, a very unique situation which causes the article bias."

I do have to wonder how it is possible an article of this length and detail did not involve a financially-interested party at some point.

We all know that Wikipedia can be, in many cases, a marketing dynamo for the subjects portrayed within. Prior to today, Bradley Joseph's article was getting approximately 70 views a day. Now that it's on the Main Page, it will be opened today by between 30,000 and 100,000 people, and the intro blurb on the Main Page itself will capture the passing attention of at least 10 to 15 million additional people.

Joseph's music is backed by 15 talented musicians, some playing three or more different instruments, that make up a symphony of sounds ranging from quietly pensive mood music to a rich orchestration of classical depth and breadth. "
—Ken Moore, Naples Daily News

Loyal Wikipedians will tell you that they have a strict policy against exploiting Wikipedia for marketing or self-promotion purposes. Uh huh.

That's all I have for today, other than to mention that FCC chairman Kevin Martin was recently outvoted 4-1 by his fellow commissioners. Boo hoo.

Multi-level marketing research

One of my favorite marketing research vendors is a San Diego firm that specializes in Internet panel surveys. The panel is SurveySavvy.com, managed by Luth Research. What makes SurveySavvy different from most other online panels is that they pay a small amount of cash to every survey respondent, instead of entering them all into a sweepstakes drawing that leaves 99.5% of the respondents unrewarded. This has the effect of boosting SurveySavvy response rates to an amazing 25%-30%, rather than the 1%-2% other panels might achieve.

There's one other cool thing about SurveySavvy's panel rewards. Panelists who invite other people to join the panel also receive a cash incentive ($1) when those referrals complete surveys! What a fantastic way to build a panel with the "snowball" method.

When I was employed by ICR, I never promoted the SurveySavvy panel here. While we partnered frequently with Luth Research, they were still our competition in some ways.

However, now that I'm no longer on the vendor side of research, I have no hesitation to invite my readers to take advantage and sign up for Luth Research's SurveySavvy panel and start getting paid regularly for EVERY survey you complete with them. If you click this link, you may register for SurveySavvy as my referral, so I'll also earn a dollar when you complete a survey!

If you like the experience SurveySavvy offers, you can then start to build your own pyramid of referrals, so that you too will earn money even when you're not personally completing research surveys.

(Disclaimer: I have already earned a few hundred dollars over the years with this program, and Luth Research has not asked me personally for this endorsement. It is my personal recommendation.)