Social Media Review: City Tavern – Ft. Myers, Florida

Posted by ianmara on Jan 11, 2012 in Bar Marketing | 0 comments

This is the first in a new video series where we take a close look at the social media efforts of a bar or restaurant. First up is City Tavern in Ft. Myers. Enjoy!

If you have questions for Barry you can contact him at barry@thebarblogger.com. More information can be found at Interactive Hospitality’s website.

Behold the $100,000 bar tab

Posted by ianmara on Jan 9, 2012 in Offbeat Bar News | 1 comment

For those of you who think you’ve dropped a lot of cash on a bar tab in your day, we direct you to this receipt from the exclusive Cavalli Club in Dubai that made its way around Twitter last week. It’s from a Jan.2 birthday party at the nightclub that resulted in a final bill of 387,988 dirham, or $105,431.

For those scoring at home, the bill lists 16 bottles of Cristal champagne of various sizes, including a 6L entry that goes for $34,036.75 all by itself. Almost $80,000 was spent on bubbly alone.

Gulfnews.com called the party “generous.” Uh, yeah.

How does a natural disaster impact the food industry?

Posted by ianmara on Jan 5, 2012 in Food News | 1 comment

The immediate concern with a catastrophic event like a nuclear meltdown is going to be loss of life and damage to critical infrastructure. Soon after, however, issues such as long-term access to safe food takes center stage.

Gourmet took a look at the situation in Japan following the March meltdown and subsequent radiation leak at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The disaster was the world’s worst since Chernobyl, contaminating a 900-mile area around the plant.

The article details some rather devastating estimates as to the total cost to food production in the region of Japan closest to the plant:

-$5.15 billion in losses of unusable farmland
-$180 million in destroyed crops and livestock
-$740 million in damage to the farm fishing industry

A Japanese food expert is quoted in the story as saying it’s still too early to know the full extent of the damage or any fundamental change to the way the Japanese will approach food production.

A possibility is that the country will begin to explore greater use of “organic and sustainable farming.”

(Gourmet)

How mobile-friendly is your bar’s website?

Posted by ianmara on Jan 3, 2012 in Bar Marketing | 3 comments

It will come as a shock to no one that the use of smartphones is at an all-time high. At last check more than 1/3 of American adults own one of the devices. And according to at least one study, 90 percent of owners use their phones as an Internet portal, with 4 of 5 doing so every single day.

Which means if you’ve been listening to your friendly neighborhood social media marketing company and doing the right things with Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, quite a few folks are going to be accessing your website with their phones.  And it is up to you to make sure their experience is a good one.

Here are a few things you can do to ensure those who search you out on their cell phone (i.e. potential customers) are pleased with what they find:

Read more..

Are you fluent in the language of hashtag?

Posted by ianmara on Dec 30, 2011 in Bar Marketing | 0 comments

If you aren’t a regular user of Twitter, you may be confused as to why you’re seeing more and more words prefaced by the “#” symbol in your daily life. On the screen during your favorite TV show, in advertisements of various types — the practice is seemingly growing at an exponential level.

The “#” indicates a hashtag, something used by Twitter to organize dialogue on the social networking site. With millions of 140-character messages sent each day, hashtags are a way to group tweets based on subject matter. Events are given a specific word, sports leagues establish “official” hashtags for teams, and celebrities designate themselves with the moniker of their choosing.

Last year, for example, a hashtag appeared for the first time during a Super Bowl ad.

Read more..