BooRah - Inside the Buzz

We’re excited to announce that BooRah is now a part of Intuit! Intuit has exceptional products and very loyal customers, and we here at BooRah are all very excited that we’ll be applying our technology and working with a top-notch set of people who understand the needs of small business owners. We look forward to working at Intuit to help local business owners stay on top of and improve their online reputations!

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We’ve talked on this blog about how restaurants can benefit from engaging (or at least understanding) their customers’ conversations about them on the Internet.  Now, BooRah is launching a new service for restaurant owners, marketers, and consultants that helps them manage these conversations — the service is a comprehensive “reputation tracking” report that pulls together these reviews on a restaurant into one place.

The San Francisco Chronicle writes about the service and some restaurant owner perspectives here:

“More and more, people are using user-generated reviews to make decisions about where to eat,” Hemmeter [Founder & CEO of E&O Trading Co.] said. “You have people who write fictitious things because they couldn’t get a table. And then you have people who write because they had a genuinely nice experience. All restaurant operators have to figure out how to get in on this online trend.”

The BooRah restaurant reputation reporting service executes an extensive search of professional restaurant reviewers’ online columns and blogs as well as consumer review web sites, and generates a concise summary, or “Restaurant Reputation Report,” for the restaurant owner.  The report details top review sources, overall ratings, top sentiments among reviewers (both good and bad), tracks trends over the past six months, and summarizes overall percentage ratings for food, service and ambiance for the restaurant.  You can see a sample report here:

More information is coming soon. In the meantime, if you are a restaurant owner you can sign up for a free version of our review tracking service here www.BooRah.com/owner

We’ve recently made a change to how we display restaurant search results on BooRah - we’ve always shown restaurants ranked by their ‘Buzz’ number, but what exactly does ‘Buzz’ mean?

Buzz is now calculated by adding up all the positive comments about a given restaurant across all reviews - with more “weight” given to the more strongly positive comments.  For example, if a reviewer writes “My waitress was very nice” that’s +3 Buzz.  “Tuna bolognese is also an exceptional dish” adds +5 to Buzz (”exceptional” is very strong).  And “Lovely atmosphere for a date night.” also adds +3 to Buzz.  However, “service was a bit slow” does not add to the Buzz count.  So, a restaurant like Masa (shown below) has had a total of 4,435 weighted-positive comments written about it.

When you search for a restaurant by city or by cuisine, we will show you the restaurants with the highest buzz (that serve the cuisine) first - helping you find the best restaurants in a city.

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The Chicago Sun-Times writes that president-elect Obama will be debuting as amateur restaurant critic on Chicago’s WTTW - Check, Please! television show.  It seems the station found some old footage from 2001 when the then-state senator Barack Obama appeared on the show.  We’ll add a link once the footage makes its way online… (via twitter.com/broylesa)

Here’s the restaurant he reviewed:  Dixie Kitchen & Bait Shop in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

UPDATE:  Here’s one of the segments from YouTube

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QSR Magazine writes about how to use feedback from blogs, consumer review sites, and other social media for your restaurant:

“Customer feedback found in blogs might reveal key information if you read between the lines…. Filtering through customer feedback on the various Internet blogs and social networking sites such as Yelp, BooRah, Citysearch, and others can be a very time-consuming endeavor, especially if your quick-serve restaurant boasts multiple locations. But reviewing these comments can lead to more targeted information, such as the favorite menu item, most-common dislikes, and the popular customer service aspects and could play a key role in marketing and advertising for the company.”

Building on this theme, BooRah is publishing a restaurant online reputation case study that analyzes user-generated content from across the web on Buca di Beppo, the 88-unit restaurant chain recently acquired by Planet Hollywood.  There are several aspects of social media helping and hurting a restaurant chain that are explored in the white paper, including:

• Analysis of the overall “brand promise” of the restaurant chain against high-level themes that are being written about in user-generated content.
• An example of how newsworthy events can be amplified by social media and online search to greatly impact the “message” that consumers see about a restaurant’s brand online (in this case, not in a good way!)
• A breakdown analysis of user comments and reviews posted on a location-by-location basis, and how each location’s ratings impacts the overall restaurant brand image.

In the end, a proactive approach to social media — starting with base-lining the existing user-generated content about your restaurant — can be used to benefit a restaurant’s other marketing efforts.  An important example sited in the QSR article:

“Responding to those who post such comments is a crucial component in monitoring customer feedback…you have to tell the customers you have heard them and are working to address their concerns.”

Otherwise, as was the case in the Buca di Beppo example, comments in the blogosphere can turn into user-driven speculation about your company and your brand.

You can download the BooRah restaurant online reputation case study here.

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Semantic search is now becoming a regular track at many search conferences.  I’ll be a panelist along with Yahoo, Microsoft/Powerset, TextDigger & Cognition to discuss new trends in search technologies at SES in Chicago next month.

Search engines have put major thrust on leveraging capabilities from semantic technologies to increase search relevance. This session discusses the various approaches taken by semantic companies and how they integrate with mainstream search to offer better customer experience.  Discussion will include natural language search versus vertically focused semantic search, meta data strategies and how each approach uniquely addresses relevance, long tail queries and local search opportunities.

The semantic search panel is at 4:30PM on Monday, December 8th 2008.  If you are attending SES in Chicago, please join me and other speakers for this session about next generation of search. See you there!

We are excited about making it to ReadWriteWeb’s annual top 10 list of Semantic applications to watch. There are some terrific companies pioneering the areas of natural language processing and semantic technology, and we are very happy to see the technology influence consumers in every day applications - such as restaurant search. Here’s the conclusion from the article -

“The Semantic Web continues to inch closer to reality, by being used in products such as BooRah, Inform.com and Juice. Let us know your thoughts on the above 10 products, and of course any that we missed this time round. “

Many thanks to ReadWriteWeb and for increasing number of consumers who are providing invaluable feedback on our web & phone applications.

We have also been selected to Mashable’s list of nominees for Open Web Awards for 2008. BooRah is nominated in the “Search and Social Search” category.

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We are excited to announce  a partnership with infoUSA (NASDAQ:IUSA)  to provide enhanced content to the Mobile, Navigation and Local Search Markets.  infoUSA is the leading provider of proprietary business and consumer databases, local business listings for directories, and  POIs for navigation systems.

BooRah’s unique ratings and summaries offer a simple and convenient way for consumers to evaluate what’s good and bad about a local restaurant. The ratings and other meta information are generated  by our patent pending semantic technology platform which extracts and tabulates sentiments from user reviews.

This partnership allows us to work with infoUSA’s customers and offer our proprietary ratings and reviews in a format  ideal for mobile, navigation and online directory applications.  Further, we have developed a simple integration procedure with infoUSA’s data to ensure easy and accurate enhancement to the data for their customers.

Last week Google launch Android Market, the platform for developers to upload their applications to the T-Mobile G1 phone. We launched our restaurant search application into the Android Market, along with apps by 100’s of other developers.

After a week of settling down, we are pretty happy to find ourselves at the top of Lifestyle Category with about 20,000 downloads, 3.5 stars and  100+ ratings*. I’ve been analyzing our data since yesterday and have found some interesting aspects to share.

 Geo-location & Searches

As expected, 3G coverage areas within T-Mobile network generated the most number of downloads. Here’s a map that we used to plot all the initial coordinates when phones downloaded our restaurant search application.

Thanks to Clusterer application which helped us map 10,000’s of coordinates on google maps to create this view.

The attached table  shows the number of unique locations where users performed searches for local restaurants. These do not include searches by cuisine, keyword or location separately.

Downloads & Usage

Android Market continues to grow steadily, and we are seeing similar trends for our application. We are also pleasantly surprised by the number of reviews we have received from the phone compared to our website and consumers seem to find it very convenient to write a brief review while at the restaurant.

User Feedback & Issues

One of the biggest complaints we’ve received is on missing or closed restaurants.   We’ve added user functionality to flag closed restaurants, and we plan to add a way for users to add new or missing restaurants – as well as working with new and existing sources to track down the latest restaurant information. Restaurants is one of the hardest hit industries due to the down economy and the convenience of updating such information is critical to managing it. We have received over 1000 updates on restaurants since launch. The street view that we’ve integrated into restaurant details also has raised some interesting questions about the accuracy of Google’s Street View data. The map coordinates seem to be accurate but the street view shows adjacent block view. Android also provides an easy way for users to communicate with the developers directly and we’ve received many emails with feedback and feature requests.

We are thrilled with the early success of Android  platform and hope to release consumer requested features as soon as possible.

If you have an e-mail account with Google, Yahoo!, or AOL, you have an OpenID.

With the largest e-mail providers now compliant with OpenID, most Internet users can now benefit from the OpenID movement.  So, go on and sign in to BooRah without having to create a BooRah password.