Starbucks Coffee now has 10 million Facebook fans, more than any U.S. food and drink company—including Coca-Cola. But should the Coffee King get too foamed up over its achievement, it should know it’s trailing Lady Gaga by 400,000 fans. (The ONOSYS fan page is lagging by, um, slightly more.)

According to research MediaPost.com research, clever online promotions led Starbucks’ fan base to grow from 1.7 million to 10 million in one year. With the bait of a buy one coffee, get a free baked good promo, it hooked 200,000 loyalists in a single week!

 We know what you’re thinking: “How do they really know those fans are buying from them and not just signing up?” Good question. And here’s the answer.

Online ordering software tracks every customer move on your Web site, and follows all your Internet marketing campaigns: every banner click, e-mail offer and traffic from your Facebook page. You know who visits, what they bought, how much they spent and to which promotion they responded. In an instant, it pinpoints which of your marketing programs work and which don’t.

You’re right, American football fans, soccer will never be as popular here as the gridiron game. But crowds gathering at restaurants and pubs this summer to watch the World Cup tournament prove “European football” is finally catching on.

What’s that? You say that’s not happening at your place? No semi-rowdy foreign jersey-clad fans arriving for a sunrise breakfast and soccer with friends? Based on what some of your competitors are doing, you might be missing an opportunity:

• An Indiana brewery created special beers using ingredients specifically harvested in World Cup competitor countries—and sold out of them during matches.
• A Chicago restaurant is opening at 6:30 a.m. to serve a pre-match breakfast.
• Same for a Florida pub and restaurant whose World Cup morning munchies include foods found on foreign breakfast tables.

If you can’t accommodate customers that early, can you create a delivered breakfast special for groups at work? We’ve ordered such meals at our office, and we know we’re not the only ones having a bite while sneaking a peak at the matches.

Heard the one about the grocery chain that created a billboard that emits the scent of cooked steak? No, really, we’re not joking. Click here to see the mammoth and arresting display—complete with aroma-vision (or whatever they call it.) 

The blog and its comments prove people have noticed the billboard and that an unforgettable—though debatably good—impression was made. And despite some making a stink about it, they’ve got to admit the idea is innovative and unique, plus nobody will ever forget the advertiser’s name.

Is your marketing program that memorable? Are you doing anything that’s so comparably dramatic it always leads your customers to buy? No, an advertising pitch needn’t be scented to make a point, but your message better be pointed if you want customers to eventually enjoy the aroma of your foods.

An effective online marketing program is but one benefit of using the ONOSYS platform. We don’t do billboards, but we can show you how to cook up some sweet-smelling sales using the Internet.

And in case you’re wondering, our programmers are working round the clock to bring scented advertising to the Web. No, really, we’re not joking.

They were dancing in the aisles at this year’s National Restaurant Association show in Chicago—kind of. For fun, organizers started a Lady Gaga mob dance in the main entrance area, and as this entertaining video shows, it created a stir.

Truthfully, that silly jig reflected the lighthearted mood at the show: an encouraging departure from the dour disposition of recent years. With the worst of the recession in the rearview mirror, attendance was solid and operators and manufacturers reported modest increases in sales.

Heartening, too, was the repeated call in seminars for the increased use of technology in restaurants—not by manufacturers, but by operators who see it as a means of modernizing the industry and helping it meet changing customer needs. Not surprisingly, among the tech-tools mentioned often were online ordering and social media. Why? Because youngsters prefer both. Tech is your link to their foodservice future.

As the video proves, mediocre dancing is funny and entertaining. But a mediocre tech plan is no laughing matter. The good news is restaurant tech isn’t a brain buster; it’s easier than ever to use computerized tools to manage and market your business.

Betty White, the legendary 88-year-old comedienne on a renaissance run of late, recently hosted Saturday Night Live—an achievement she owes largely to a Facebook group that helped her get onto the show. Ironically, White didn’t even know what Facebook was until recently, when she took a look and surmised it “a huge waste of time.”

That joke got lots of laughs, but the truth is her words echo the thoughts of many restaurateurs who’ve tried social media marketing without getting results. If that’s you, marketing expert Lisa Barone says not to blame it on social media channels.

In an article she penned for the website Small Business Trends, Barone says most operators attempt social media marketing without a defined strategy. They also typically delegate the effort to employees ill-prepared for the task, and the result is off-target content that doesn’t create interest in the brand or drive sales. In the end, she says, operators who merely dabble in social media should expect poor results.

The week’s Restaurant Leadership Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., gathered 1,000 top industry executives to discuss the terrific news that industry sales are finally rebounding. GE Capital shared encouraging survey results showing “pent-up demand” for restaurant meals, and multiple April reports of positive Q1 same-store sales at U.S. chains reinforced those findings. With such evidence that the worst of the recession is over, you can imagine the gathering’s mood was highly upbeat.

And there’s more good news! Other GE findings show the immediate future is even brighter if you have an online ordering platform:

            ● 30.3% of Gen X diners use a restaurant’s online ordering service, as do 43.6% of Gen Y customers

            ● 56% of all consumers visit restaurant websites

            ● 54% use the Internet to learn about a restaurant they have yet to try

            ● 40% of all restaurant visits are now influenced by online media (i.e. traditional news outlets, blogs or social media)

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the critical movements afoot in the restaurant industry: 1. upward sales trends; 2. growing customer preference for restaurant buying opportunities and information gathering through online channels. If you’ve got point 2 covered, your sales are now positioned to soar. If you don’t, give us a call and let us show you how to change that and avoid missing out on point 1.

The IRS says 20 percent of taxpayers file on April 15, and 61 percent who owe file later. That means a lot of worried citizens aren’t thinking of how they’ll manage meals for the next couple of nights. Luckily, many restaurant and hotel companies are helping.

* At the Deer Creek Inn in Nevada City, Calif., a licensed CPA will do your taxes while you rest, making the visit tax deductible! At Cameo Heights Mansion in Touchet, Wash., staying on the “1040EZ Stay” plan on April 15 gets you $40 off your room and $10 off dinner.

* Morton’s The Steakhouse and McCormick & Schmicks are smartly showing some love to tax preparers by offering deals on April 15 and 16—presumably since every accountant in the country will work late on the 15th.

Got a special for weary taxpayers? It’s easy to do through an online ordering channel: post it on your web site, send an email to your customer base and tweet or Facebook it to others. Simple and free—just the opposite of filing taxes. And since the IRS wants Americans to eFile anyway, your customers likely are already online and waiting to receive your offer.

It may seem like madness to advertise in March, when every advertising channel is choked with NCAA basketball tourney pitches. But it’s in these situations that restaurant chains have proven clever in getting the word out and scoring sales.

Ruby Tuesday promised to award $1 million to anyone who submits a perfect bracket (which, given this year’s insanity, likely won’t happen). And Pizza Hut said it will buy pizza for an entire college campus of a No. 16-seeded team that upset a No. 1 seeded team. (Hasn’t ever happened and didn’t this year, but the bet got a lot of buzz.)

Papa John’s paid major funds to become the NCAA’s “official pizza of March Madness.” But it also went to the other extreme and spent next to nothing on a social media campaign centered on a Facebook offer for Final Four tickets.

And have you seen the masses thumbing their smart phones during games? Between “smack texting” their buddies’ teams and cheering on their own, many are using those devices to order food—because you know they’re not cooking. What restaurateur doesn’t want a chance to feed that need?

With an online ordering platform tied to a simple social media campaign, you can create a little tourney time madness in your own restaurant by making it “a layup” for customers to order from you. Give us a call and we’ll coach you through it.

Facebook Vs. Twitter

Regardless of whether you like or understand social media applications, their popularity continues to soar—because they work. During the Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology show, a.k.a. MURTEC, one speaker said these progressive marketing vehicles “is about knowing your business, knowing your customers, and engaging in a conversation with them.” Social media works by touching people in highly personalized and effective ways, and when that happens, they usually become customers.

Many of our customers know this. Recently, one pizza chain client ran a sales promotion on Facebook and Twitter to see which best spurred online ordering transactions . To track which channel drove the most traffic, each was given a specific code identified by its ONOSYS online ordering system. Using these tools, every order, every dime spent and the advertising channel that delivered the message was 100 percent trackable—a feat feasible only with online ordering.

Ultimately, customers using Twitter bought the offer more often than Facebook users. Why? Likely because Twitter makes its point quickly and clearly using 140 character messages. Messages sent to Facebook pages land in a sea of photos and “friend” posts that could make the message harder to find.

That brings up the question:

What works better for your brand: Facebook or Twitter?

This year a prime-time Super Bowl TV ad costs an estimated $2.6 million for a 30 second spot. Those commercials typically are fun to watch—hilarious even—but you have to wonder whether such broadcast messages ever yield real sales.That’s a question you don’t have to ask when your restaurant has an online ordering platform with an e-mail marketing component. Every targeted message you send goes directly to qualified customers who’ve already purchased your food and told you their preferences. Better yet, sending those emails out cost only the time you spend making your pitch.

Come Sunday, all 450 Hooter’s restaurants will give away a 40-inch high-definition TV. The following Tuesday it’s expected all 1,500 Denny’s Restaurants will repeat last year’s smashing promotion when they gave away free Grand Slam breakfasts to 2 million people. Heaven only knows what Coke, McDonald’s and E-Trade will spend on squeezing a few laughs out of us.

You, on the other hand, have made the investment in your online ordering and marketing system, so your spending is over. Using it wisely to score some serious Super Bowl sales is all that remains.