Saturday, December 20, 2008


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?

This has been Part 2 of a 3-part series:
Part 1 – Restaurants on the web
Part 3 – Can a wiki directory change the web landscape for an unpublicized restaurant? (Still haven't completed this part, but the attempt to build data was made here.)

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7 Comments:

At 7:48 AM, December 21, 2008, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree that it doesn't seem like Hamburger Hank's put any effort into branding themselves online. It's too bad, really, because there are free easy-to-use web services like LookupPage that could help them get jump-started on an online presence.

 
At 10:31 AM, December 21, 2008, Blogger Gregory Kohs said...

Word up, Reuben. LookupPage is a nifty site. Except, a business must pay $95 a year to promote itself there. On my site (MyWikiBiz) their annual cost commitment is ZILCH. Heck, they might even make a few bucks at MyWikiBiz, if they embed their Google AdSense ad.

 
At 3:29 AM, June 26, 2009, Anonymous Donald said...

I share the same views. Liked your blog very much.

 
At 8:07 AM, July 24, 2009, Anonymous Clare said...

I just cant believe that restaurants dont take there web presence seriously!

It is essentially their restaurant shop front online, so it gives people a sense of what the restaurant is all about. What does it say if they cant be bothered to do it?

Plus they are missing out on huge traffic from visitors to their area that do a quick search to see where is good to eat/drink etc.

I guess a lot of business owners dont understand the internet and its power and so dont embrace what they dont know, instead of employing a professional to deal with it!

 
At 6:09 AM, September 01, 2009, Anonymous Monty said...

Interesting text. You have a nice blog. Keep it up!

 
At 6:38 PM, March 05, 2010, Anonymous Sydney Bookkeeper said...

The online medium can b a powerful marketing channel for restaurants too. It allows for seductive images of food, promotion and coupons to drive traffic to the restaurant. Many restaurants do not utilise the medium well enough.

 
At 6:36 AM, July 22, 2011, Anonymous Laura said...

While people may have different views still good things should always be appreciated. Yours is a nice blog. Liked it!!!

 

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