Live tweeting the CRFA Show

Subject line pretty much says it all!

Follow along under the handle jeninewsbite.

See you there, or, if you’re at the show — and you should be — see you here!

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Food fraudster foiled by Facebook

This news is actually about a week old, but I’m thinking of it as that delicious leftover I just rediscovered on the third shelf of the fridge: Restaurateur tracks down bill dodgers on Facebook.

 

Peter Leary from seafood restaurant Seagrass on Melbourne’s Southbank was fuming when the diners ate their way through the menu, pairing oysters, trout and red emperor with some expensive wines, slipped out for a cigarette — and never returned.

But Leary, left with an unpaid bill of A$520 ($340), remembered one of the diners asking about a former waitress, whom he then contacted and she suggested they check through some contacts on Facebook.

“We searched a few names and there in front of us his face came up,” Leary told Reuters, referring to one of the diners.

If you or your staff have ever been burned by a dine-and-dash, you’ll love how this story ends …

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To blog or not to blog?

The September edition of QSR magazine challenges businesses — quick-service restaurants, specifically — to think about whether or not a corporate blog might be a good addition to a marketing plan.

I am not going to tell you what a blog is — I trust that if you’re reading this, you’ve got some sense of how these crazy old intertubes work. The article does include a brief description, though, so if you’re not sure, give it a read.

I’m in a kind of ornery mood today, so I’m going to pull out some of the key points of content from this article and support or refute them one by one. Join me, won’t you?

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Spies like us

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to know what your competitors were up to, you’d hire a private investigator or plant a spy — serious, dangerous, not-so-legal stuff! Twenty years from now, we’ll probably all share the same hive mind and the very concept of competition will be obsolete.

But in the meantime, the now time, if you’re looking for an easy and 100% free way to monitor what your competition is up to, check out Google Alerts.

Google Alerts isn’t a new service — curiously, it’s been wearing that beta tag for a couple of years now — but its power and effectiveness continues to grow.

With Google Alerts, you select a key word or words, identify what kind of alerts you’d like to receive (news alerts, blog mentions, video clips, etc.), indicate how often you’d like to receive the alerts (daily, for example), enter your email address and in a couple of clicks you’ll be receiving that information delivered directly to your email inbox. New hires, new locations, new products, new PR challenges — you can track everything with Google Alerts.

The sign-up process is delightfully intuitive, but if you’d like to see the process from start to finish, check out the short video included at the end of this post — it does a good job of walking you through each of the the steps.

A few things to remember that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the video:

1. You do not need to sign up for a Google account, or have a Gmail address in order to use Google Alerts (though you will need an account if you wish to manage your alerts). All you need to get started is an active email address.
2. The key words (aka: search terms) you use will determine what kind of results you receive. If you want alerts on “labour shortage” be sure to put those words side-by-side and in quotation marks (that indicates that you’d like to do a search on the phrase “labour shortage” Without the quotation marks, you could receive alerts about a shortage of doctors leading to problems in the delivery room.
3. You can also use Google Alerts to check up on yourself! It’s a good idea to set up an alert using your own business name so that you can track what others are saying about you, too.

Google’s full FAQ on Google Alerts is another great resource if you’re looking for more love before you leap.

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Faster, technology! Fulfill! Fulfill!

I love technology. Even though it’s been nearly a decade since I pitched story ideas to itbusiness.ca, I still check out the site, because I know I’ll read something there that registers on my neat-o-meter.

So it was pretty neat-o to see this story, posted yesterday: How cool technologies help fast food move even faster.

The article shows how chain and independent restaurants are making use of technology to speed up order fulfillment, improve customer service and reduce costs.

All three are key to success in this industry, and with the labour shortage in foodservice showing no signs of slowing down, it’s definitely worth a read — if you’ve got the time.

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