Monday, May 5, 2008

How can Restaurants Reach Out to Community?

Restaurants are great places for people to socialize, throw parties or hold business meetings. Restaurants are the popular dating spots. Restaurants provide a platform for families to meet and spend some quality time together. The hosting of food festivals provides a way for entertainment that also adds to a veritable dining experience and knowledge of various cuisines.

Restaurants are no places you visit for just food. They are social platforms for community building. If you’ve finished your graduation, what’s the next thing you want to do? Or if it’s a birthday today or any occasion to celebrate, is it not a party or a visit to a restaurant that you’ll think of?

And how do you find the ideal restaurant that serves your needs? Say a birthday party. Search engines and review sites are the usual hangouts to find local restaurants that can offer special service for birthdays. With the Netizens sharing their real reviews on real restaurants; choosing a good restaurant is far easier these days.

A restaurants directory is a great place to search restaurants that suit your social occasion. User-generated restaurant recommendations are automatically summarized from a collection of online reviews from bloggers, professional critics and consumers; and this allows consumers to search restaurants based on their personal preferences. They spruce up the search for good restaurants by capturing the community vibe and social essence of existing online groups, and comparing these results to an individual's search criteria; thereby delivering unsurpassed relevance with the broadest community reach.

The growing search engine technology is also helping local business owners track their reviews reputation online and capitalize on the growing trend of user-generated restaurant recommendations. Restaurants are hosting online services giving users an easy access to their menus, rates, services like home delivery and party arrangements.

People can find out what others are saying about a restaurant before they choose to eat there. With the web full of restaurant recommendations and reviews based on the diner’s experience – hunting for restaurant reviews has surely become the first step while choosing a restaurant. Restaurant search engines like BooRah have an algorithm that captures this wisdom of crowds to bring it back to the users.

With user-generated reviews, people can make an informed decision. Say you read ten reviews about a restaurant, of which eight are very good and only two user reviewers show dissatisfaction; it still assures that you are more than likely to have found a good restaurant recommendation. BooRah’s semantic scoring engine analyses what people have written and generates specific scores for food, service and ambiance from their sentiments.

Moreover user-generated content is more of a continuous process. A diner reads reviews and chooses a restaurant based on the community opinion. And whatever the diner experiences in the restaurant’s food, service and ambiance is back on the net as yet another review. The restaurant search engines encourage the community to write their own review, rate restaurants and submit updated information about local restaurants. In this way, local restaurant patrons help to keep the information current and can post their opinions about their dining experiences.

Restaurants and communities are interrelated. Restaurants provide a great social spot for people and people in return blog or write reviews on their restaurant dining experiences which adds to the information of the community at large.

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