Almost every problem we have,  had or ever  will have -  has already been solved by someone, somewhere who had the same or a similar problem and we just don’t always know it.

Fast forward to the present – I had a problem  collecting restaurant reviews  and a feeling  answers to the problem I have/ had, already existed somewhere else.

It’s like that with restaurants – based on the restaurant I’m working with – reviewing Yelp, CitySearch, OpenTable, SeamlessWeb, to name a few of restaurant review sites into one place, and adding additional social media monitoring with semantic analysis – this reporting appeared last year with Boorah reputation reports for restaurants.

Note: I suspect Boorah was bought by Intuit – as not all the links work on Boorah and there is a link to the updated reputation monitoring on  Intuit.

One of the reasons to have reputation management automated is to save community managers who work with social media the task of manually going to rating services and noting reviews for a weekly or monthly report; this seems like it’s a prime example of a common task that ought to be automated – whereas, people are much better focused on engagement and customer loyalty – and if you can find a solution that avoids having to manually compile all the ratings from Yelp, Citysearch, OpenTable, SeamlessWeb, etc – into a spreadsheet, so much the better.

Another reason to have reputation management for restaurants automated – most owners and managers of restaurants don’t know how to work with social media yet, nor do they have the time or inclination by default.  As a result, the task of monitoring the online reputation of a restaurant or any business has barely been touched upon by most people.

Besides, I noticed that all the Social Media Monitoring platforms I have looked at do not track Yelp, or CitySearch, or OpenTable (reservations manager) – even Radian6 does not track Yelp – and adding Yelp/OpenTable as sources of traffic doesn’t help (Radian6 allows you to add sources you wish to monitor that are not tracked by default).  So, even if  you wanted to use Radian6 to track your restaurant reviews – you’d be out of luck, today.  The rest of the platforms also fail here  – no one got it right, yet.

Though Boorah doesn’t appear to work that well anymore – at $99.00 per month,  a service called Reputation Ranger might be the best answer.  Here’s a description from Reputation Ranger’s site:

Reputation Ranger for Restaurants and Bars tracks review activity on over 40 food and drink review websites.  We filter out the chatter and deliver all the meaningful and important customer comments to you in one, easy to understand, reputation report.

It seems to me, again, if your promoting a restaurant using Social Media – or if a Social Media Community manager had been hired to represent the brand, online -  keeping a list of reviews from  restaurant review sites might be part duties being assigned to the Community Manager – but I think such as decision is  not the most effective use of time and money for  someone who is tasked with representing the brand as  a researcher for online sentiment about a particular restaurant.

Another solution to reputation management of restaurants is Google Places – see Google Looks Beyond Review Sites: Now Aggregates Posts from Local Blogs on Place Pages -

The Google Places review acts as a hub – providing links to all the other online review sites and a summary (excerpt) of what some people  have said about the restaurant in each place – but Google’s service is not designed to be a monitoring solution .

However, by creating these review aggregation pages, Google  magnified a reputation monitoring problem most restaurants have.

” …. For users, this means that Google’s meta-analysis of customer reviews is now able to look at a broader base of reviews. For businesses, however, this means that they now have to pay more attention to reviews on blogs. For local bloggers, as Blumenthal rightly points out, this means that their reach and influence could increase exponentially once Google includes their blogs on these pages.”

And that gets back to reputation monitoring of restaurant sites – I suspect Social Media Monitoring platforms will catch up and capture the data from CitySearch, Yelp, etc – but for now – you might want to try reporting that focuses just on that – like Reputation Ranger.

But since I haven’t tried Reputation Ranger I can’t tell you how good it is – but I would welcome the opportunity to try it.