Two short but interesting articles popped up this week that are worth sharing in the context of restaurants and the web. The first is a summary of recent stats about the growth of mobile technology use. Luke Wroblewski (known around the web as LukeW) is famous for summarizing and sharing research findings in an easy-to-read manner. His latest post shows some critical trends emerging in mobile tech use by consumers.
Luke has posted links to the sources on his site, and it's worth reading in full (it's also short and easy to read in full). Where the US goes, our own Canada and many others tend to follow, so we can expect to see similar stats trends in other industrialized nations. The translation here for restaurants is that it's increasingly likely that people will visit your website on a mobile device. And that if they have trouble with your site on their mobile device, they're not going to use a PC to get a proper view.
Hearing that can feel like a tech shift headache, like when you looked longingly at your hard-earned DVD collection only to find out that everything was going Blu-Ray. Or your album and cassette collection when music went to CDs. Do you really need to keep up, or can you just get by? That's where the next article comes in.
Jane Bird's article uses banks as a case study of where adopting mobile technology has become a way to win and retain customers, but the lessons can easily be applied to restaurants as well. Earlier, direct engagement with potential customers simply makes it more likely that you'll win their business, and mobile is a way to get in front of them as early as possible.
Mobile growth isn't just a new thing to keep up with. It's a way for businesses to take back the direct relationship with customers. With the rise of intermediary services like Open Table and Yelp!, the relationship with diners has drifted and loyatly now often sits with a third party web service rather than any actual restaurant. That reality was a big motivator in creating Menutio, which works hard to bring back those direct connections.
Doing the math from these two articles isn't hard: people are jumping online exclusively through mobile devices more and more, which means a good opportunity for restaurants and other businesses to reclaim old relationships and build new ones with direct engagement. Naturally we're big on this idea, and Menuito is just one way for restaurants to join the mobile world and build better bridges to customers, without other websites getting in the way.