BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Here at BooRah, we’re all about showing consumers what everyone is saying about local restaurants from across the Internet.  Now, we’ve added two features specifically for the restaurant owner’s benefit - track your reviews, and promote your restaurant.  And they’re both absolutely FREE.

Track your Reviews — When you sign up for an account on BooRah as the owner of a restaurant, we’ll keep track of all the reviews about your restaurant, and send you an email when we find that someone has written a new review, anywhere on the Internet.  So you’ll know right away what your customers think about your restaurant, delivered directly to your in-box.

Promote your Restaurant — Signing up as a restaurant owner on BooRah also means you can post your own information about your restaurant.  You can add a short description of your restaurant, upload photographs, upload menus, highlight special offers, and more — increasing the "attractiveness" of your restaurant on BooRah, and increasing the likelihood that an Internet surfer will decide to come in to your restaurant.

To get started, all you need to do is search for your restaurant from www.boorah.com, then click on the link:   "Are you the restaurant owner or manager?  Click here to get involved."

And Jimmy’s Diner in Brooklyn
is the first restaurant to take advantage of our new services.  Check
out his page (he added a description, pictures, and menus), and if you live nearby, stop in and have lunch, and tell
him you heard about him on BooRah.

USAToday ran an article a couple days ago where they solicited Zagat for 2 restaurants in 10 cities that were good, quality "cheap eats" places.  We wanted to tell you about some more –

Some personal favorites here in the SF Bay Area are:
- Pluto’s, with locations in SF (2), Palo Alto, Los Gatos, and San Jose - see http://tinyurl.com/35oy7b
- Andale Taqueria, with locations in SF, SFO, Palo Alto, and Los Gatos - see http://tinyurl.com/3yx3rh

Here’s some other ‘cheap eats’ in NYC, LA and SF - based on BooRah’s algorithms:

SF Bay Area - http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/t/156/CA/San-Francisco/1988/Cheap-Eats.html
LA Metro - http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/t/LA/1988/Cheap-Eats.html
NYC - http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/t/2126/NY/New-York/1988/Cheap-Eats.html

What are some of yours?

BooRah’s built a reviews syndication platform that gets pertinent restaurant information where it’s needed most — to the web page you’re looking at right now.  This means we can quickly add BooRah content to any website.  This is great for consumers, as they can quickly and easily see useful information on restaurants they might like to dine at; it’s great for site owners, as it improves the usefulness of their website and drives more pageviews; and it’s great for the restaurants (assuming they’re good restaurants) - because it gets more diners in the door.

Here are just three examples of BooRah’s restaurant review content widgets.

Blog widget for Zuni Cafe, San Francisco:

Review Summary widget for Foreign Cinema, San Francisco:

Latest Reviews widget for Printers Inc, Palo Alto:

BooRah’s system aggregates user reviews from across the Internet and provides summaries and ratings to simplify your selection process.  But what if you want a more personal recommendation?

Or, what if the restaurant you’re looking at doesn’t have any reviews at all?  We now let you ask someone in nearly real time - We’re engaging the vibrant Twitter community to participate by answering questions BooRah users may have or by simply sharing their thoughts on their favorite (or not so favorite) restaurant.

Twitter is a simple conversational system that focuses on active community building.  Also, twitter users are globally dispersed, so leveraging the twitter community gives us the coverage otherwise unavailable.

You can be a part of the Twitter Community as well. Simply sign up for a Twitter account on twitter.com. Once you’ve signed-up and activated your account, navigate to BooRah’s twitter profile  and select the "follow" button right below the BooRah Icon. You can now go back to your twitter home page and you’ll see various conversations people want to have with you. You will also now start seeing questions that are being asked by users on our website and you can respond to their questions by simply responding with "@boorah" at the beginning of the response. To encourage participation and kick start the program, we’ll provide the first 25 users with at least 10 reasonable responses (by January 31, as measured by number of "@boorah") with a $50 dining gift certificate for any restaurant of their choice that’s listed on the BooRah site.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment here.

On the road?  Looking for a good place to grab a bite?  Simply SMS “boorah” + your search term to 4INFO (44636).  You’ll receive a SMS response with the top 3 restaurants matching your search criteria.  Unlike other SMS services, the results you see are based on the user popularity of restaurants across the web from reviews - consumer reviews, bloggers, and pros - not just for restaurants that pay to be listed.Sample SMS search terms:1.  boorah Palo Alto (returns top 3 restaurants in Palo Alto)2.  boorah lobster bisque San Francisco (returns top 3 restaurants with most positive references to lobster bisque)3.  boorah Mexican Mountain View, CA (returns top 2 Mexican restaurants in Mountain View)