Miami, Fla., February 21, 2011 – Rivvid (http://www.rivvid.com), a new video trivia gaming website, announced today that Steve Haas, restaurateur and founder of Miami Spice, has signed up to launch City Hall, his newest Miami restaurant, with the help of Rivvid Channels. With Rivvid Channels, Haas has created a custom branded video trivia channel for City Hall (http://www.rivvid.com/channel/city-hall-the-restaurant-miami) where he’s uploaded brand related videos and created trivia questions to accompany each clip; quizzing players on what they watch. The respected marketer has set the stakes high for City Hall’s Rivvid Channel, offering the player who earns the most points by midnight on March 10, 2011 a complimentary cocktail hour for 10 guests, valued at over $2,000.

Rivvid, which is free to play, serves up 15-second video clips before testing the viewer on what they just watched in a time restricted, multiple choice style Q & A session. “Rivvid offers an innovative approach to branding and message delivery that I’m excited to adopt for City Hall, to get the work out on my latest restaurant,” Steve Haas, CEO and founder of City Hall, states. “It creates a fun environment for consumers that requires them to pay close attention to the message of the videos displayed. By allowing me to upload my own videos and create my own questions, Rivvid enables me to control the messaging points I want to communicate to the consumers I attract to my channel.”

In addition to being a seasoned restaurateur and acclaimed marketer, Haas is chairman of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau (GMCVB). Acclaimed chef Tom Azar, previously with Chef Emeril Lagasse’s restaurants in New Orleans, Orlando, and Miami, has teamed with Haas at City Hall restaurant.

Slated to open later this month, City Hall will offer guests a down-home, brasserie-style dining experience.  The two-story, 6,000 square foot eatery, located at 2004 Biscayne Boulevard (just five blocks north of Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts) will feature a chic ambiance, catering to the area’s business and political folks, residents and theater aficionados. Opening for lunch and dinner daily, the moderately priced menu will feature Chef Azar’s comfort food specialties, as well as a selection of classics with a twist.

“We’re thrilled to introduce City Hall and Steve Hass to Rivvid’s influential marketing platform,” Chris Hubert, CEO and founder of Rivvid, states. “Their interest in Rivvid Channels only reinforces the significance of the marketing tool and its vast capabilities for engaging and influencing consumers in the social media spectrum. We look forward to witnessing the awareness and success that Rivvid Channels brings to City Hall as the restaurant prepares for its launch,” explains Valeska I. Jacques, Managing Partner of Rivvid.

Rivvid Channels is an influential marketing tool that provides brands with a first-of-its-kind platform for engaging consumers around controlled video content and messaging. With Rivvid Channels, companies of all types can effectively put their video assets to use by integrating them into Rivvid’s video trivia platform. By dictating the trivia questions to be asked, companies can create customized brand experiences that engage consumers; providing intimate interactions with their brand(s).

Rivvid Channels features custom channel branding, customizable sidebar widgets, the ability to upload your own videos and much more. With packages ranging from free to $30 and up, Rivvid Channels provides cost effective marketing solutions for any company.

In addition, Rivvid offers targeted advertising to organizations seeking access to their growing user base. For more information on Rivvid or to play it for yourself, visit http://www.rivvid.com.

About Rivvid, LLC.

Rivvid LLC’s mission is to provide an engaging, family-friendly online gaming experience while providing a unique and customized vehicle for brands and celebrities to market to and educate their consumers.

Rivvid is ‘the new online video game,’ designed to test viewers’ cognitive awareness in timed trivia quizzes featuring a series of 15-second video clips. Rivvid enables companies to leverage the marketing value of its simple, yet addictively challenging gaming platform by way of Rivvid Channels. Rivvid Channels is a social media tool that provides intimate brand experiences, which enable companies to control the messaging and content of the trivia at hand.

How can you engage a consumer  at every ”meaningful” media touchpoint?

• How can you move consumers emotionally as well as physically with your brand?
• How can you establish the connection between the player and your brand?.
• How can you get your consumers to spread the word about your brand?
• How can you measure and directly learn from your customer?.
• How can you build an interactive relationship with your customers?
• How can you differentiate yourself from the competition?

Because of all of our connections, attention is becoming what is most scarce. More impressions are being created every second. But much like real estate, they’re not building any more attention.

When marketers choose to truly engage audiences (and that means something different for every brand), it requires more custom thinking, more custom execution, more attention paid at every turn, more real-time interaction with consumers, and a more integrated delivery of creative, media, and communications services

This why Rivvid, LLC. launched a video trivia platform called rivvid.com, allowing you to strategically deliver a mix of services that reaches consumers at every point at which they engage each other: the intersection of creative and technology, media planning and buying based on ACTUAL ENGAGEMENT rather than pay per click or impressions, and communications that foster and builds an ultimate brand experience

Benefits of using video trivia:

• get people paying attention
• establish how consumers engage with brand
• track user interests by the kind of quizzes they play and how questions are answered
• improve brand perspective (how consumers see it)
• help the brand reach its customers
• community management
• message from brand may be generated as video trivia
• getting brands to commit to social media
• interact with customers in real-time and two way. NOT just one way as it exists.
• create the experience
• increase facebook fans since video trivia is integrated with channel’s facebook page
• find out brand ambassadors by reviewing the list of players on brand channels

For agencies wishing to help their clients engage social network users, clients, or prospect clients -Rivvid’s platform allows agencies to easily create and distribute interactive campaigns across multiple social networks and on their client website for just a fraction of the cost and time usually required to create such campaigns.

The challenge with any given brand is creating a buy in and then staying committed. Since the launch of Rivvid, 52% of visitors return to the brand’s channels to see what other quizzes have they posted.

The answer is that the video trivia ENGAGES the customer. Once customers are engaged, they help build your brand by thinking and talking about your brand more, spending more time with your brand, and getting others excited about your brand.

As part of Phase I, for the social media management, Facebook was the selected choice to stay in touch or prospect directly with homeowners or buyers looking to find a home. Phase II will be to expand their ties with real estate professionals through an online community called e Real Estate Social.

Profile Page : click here to see

PURPOSE:

• use this as a conduit to attain friends and convert them to become involved in the group (if they are current homeowners)or company page (if there’s potential for them to become homeowners OR if i see they are “cheerleaders” and will create buzz)
• allows me to reach out to current friends by tagging on their pics, post on their walls to expose Berkley’s brand
• important to establish repoire and get people to like the brand so they will like to do business or give referrals to Berkley

Abovewater Homeowners GROUP page : click here to see group and click here to see press release

PURPOSE:

• focused on homeowners
• no self advertising
• all about helping and getting discussions to spin amongst each other

Berkley Business PAGE : click here to see

PURPOSE:commercialize all we want

Real Estate Social Community Portal: click here to see

PURPOSE:

• focused on networking with others in real estate community
• build relationships to increase referrals

CLICK HERE TO SEE ADDITIONAL CASE STUDIES.

• Believe in Brand
• Emotionally Identified with Brand

Some Traction Strategies:

• Find bloggers, twitterers, people on online social networks that have a “large following” and make them the contibuter
  for your cause
• People like to look good in front of others in the social space, so give them a reason to look good in sharing what you
  have to offer. What can you talk about to encourage them to “retweet” or “repost” on their page?
• What’s in it for them to talk about you? Are you giving away a free coaching class or free facial if they refer a certain number of friends?
• What kind of experience are you creating with your service or product offering, so they can boast about it in their wall?
• Any articles you provide to bloggers, make sure to hyperlink SEO keywords within your article back to your website

Tips

• Make your community/users feel they have ownership of what they have to say or share-
• What they have to say is important so if you plan to provide feedback make sure to leave enough information so they still have more to say
• Have transparency
• The social community platform is a listening tool. Make your community feel you are listening and doing something about it. Respond to comments..

Click here to find out how !

1. Link Popularity: how many incoming links are pointing to your

2. Relevancy: content needs to be relevant to what the user is looking for

3. Repetition: how often are you using the keywords within your text for web crawlers to detect?

4. Fresh Content: People like to know about the latest developments in their particular industry or area of interest. In order for search engines to stay popular they must deliver the newest news. Therefore, search engines have an insatiable appetite for new information, a.k.a “fresh content”. If your blog generates fresh content, you can bet on the search engines visiting often.

5. Navigation and Topic Organization:
navigation on the blog is the links from the main blog page to each topic category and article so as the blogger adds posts, it is linked automatically from the home page to the specific category and also to a specific page that contains the content of the article

Why Should You Blog?

• Boosts credibility
• Creates traffic to your site
• Easy to set up and available when you are inspired to share stories or post articles on your expertise
• If one of your readers has a question, chances are others have it too. What better way to answer it than in one place where everyone can see and hopefully benefit.
• When someone comments, others start to interact with each other based on that comment

Giangi Ratto, Ivan Lopez, , and Valeska I. Jacques spoke with SPEAK OUT, INC., President, Anne Freedman about cost effective ways restaurants can promote themselves during slow economic times. This panel was provided by the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Technology Council.

The Miami Beach Technology Council mission is to educate businesses on how to use technology to streamline operations, effectively market products and services, all while providing value to their clients and business partners.

Q: Anne Freedman: What do you recommend to improve customer service?

A: Ivan Osorio: Miami is known as a cold town in terms of customer service. Gone are the days of small restaurants where the customer and owner or waiter would know them by first name. Creating those personal relationships by using an ACCOUNT SERVICES system would allow you to create a network of preferred customers with personal relationships. By ACCOUNT SERVICE I mean a person preferably the host who would personally handle a preferred guest and keep contact throughout the year by contacting that client on special occasions.

A: Valeska I. Jacques: It starts with leadership and how every person in the work environment embraces the restaurant values and incorporates it as part of its culture. After the process of what the restaurant owner creates for their corporate culture is in place the buy in for the waiters to have a positive attitude easily reflects at every point of contact. One of the incentives restaurant owners may instill are Custom Design Comment Cards. Based on the positive feedback and tracking improvements, waiters and waitresses should receive a bonus based on good customer experience. There is a system called Biz Grader that allows you to report on day to day or month to month to track improvement in customer satisfaction. Rather than pay your servers based on how much your client spent, the incentive should be on how well was their experience.

Q: Anne Freedman: What would you recommend restaurants should do to attract clients locally and internationally?

A: Ivan Osorio: Not enough restaurants take the time to capture data. Most restaurants depend on word of mouth advertising, yet do not go the extra step of tracking who are their best customers or how frequently they visit their place of business. Standing out this way in terms of accurate information of birthdays, anniversaries or favorite meals of your best customer is a very powerful tool which many restaurants are not taking advantage of. Imagine walking into a restaurant and the waiter asking you if you will have what you had last time, calling you by your name and having polite conversation.

A: Giangi Ratto: Many restaurants these days are offering free WiFi for their customers. This is great to attract not just the local business lunch crowd, but tourist eager to check their email and find out things to do while in town. What a lot of restaurants do not realize is that they are not taking full advantage of all the benefits from offering free WiFI to their customers. By using a commercial grade WiFi solution, restaurants have more control over their customers browsing. Having users provide their email in order to sign into the wireless service, restaurants can create a database of their clients. This will enable restaurants to data capture who has frequented their restaurant and eriodically email them specials and promote special events. Please click here to see how a restaurant can have a “landing page” that a customer first sees upon logging on to the WiFi. On this page the restaurants can post menu’s, specials, and even generate advertising revenue by promoting third party services. A commercial grade WiFi solution is a lot more secured. Customers are not able to access the restaurants network and therefore gain access to sensitive files. Restaurants can be held responsible for the users of their network activities, say someone running an internet scam. Without a commercial grade solution, a restaurant has no way of providing additional security.

A: Valeska I. Jacques: Restaurants may locally and internationally attract clients through online strategic alliances, and online social networking platforms. Some are Yelp.com, miamibeach411.com,urbanspoon.com. I recommend Google cuisines (Italian food) or restaurant names to see what ranks on the top 10 and keep a list of where you plan to create a profile. I recommend to start with 4. What’s most important is to monitor what people are saying. Periodically, restaurant owners should google their own restaurant names to do quality control on what’s being said in other websites. I have here a statistic from AIS Media: 89%– Percent of consumers who say they have researched a restaurant online before dining there. Using the Internet to check out menus and other information about a restaurant is most prevalent among consumers age 25 to 45 and those in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast. Of those 89% of consumers, 57% indicated that prior to selecting a restaurant they view the restaurant’s Web site. And 33% view other consumer’s reviews online prior to dining. I came across ONE comment that was posted in Yahoo about Tantra restaurant. It was a very negative comment and so you can imagine how ONE comment stuck out like a sore thumb on this page. If they wrote in the comment to answer the user’s response or if they had another client provide a positive experience to offset the balance this will help even out the good and bad responses. I have another statistic from AIS Media for International Clients: While traveling, 43% of consumers used a search engine to find restaurants. While searching for a restaurant while traveling: 32% of consumers would like directions on Web site. 28% wanted menu selections with pricing on Web site. 23% wanted an online rating/review system on a restaurant’s Web site. Imagine the impact that negative remark can leave on those who base their decisions off of ratings.

A: Giangi Ratto: I have some statistics for online shoppers, but this should help put it in perspective how user ratings are considered. 77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing (Jupiter Research, August 2006). In a study of 2,000 shoppers – 92% deemed customer reviews as “extremely” or “very” helpful. (eTailing Group). 59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews. (Bizrate). 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions. 86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (MarketSherpa)

A: Valeska I. Jacques: Other ways to attract clients locally or internationally is increasing your Incoming Links on your website that RELEVANT to your content. What I mean by relevant is not asking everyone you know that have website to link to your website, thus restaurant websites should link to travel agencies, hotels, or their restaurant blog. Thorough ad words, you can also get paid for those who click on those names. In regards to Internet Marketing Strategies in the restaurant industry 64% of restaurant owners polled nationwide are using Internet marketing because of its increased exposure and profitability. (AIS Media, 2007)

Q: Anne Freedman: What should restaurants do to encourage customer loyalty?

A: Ivan Osorio: As mentioned previously, expanding the roles of the host to an Account Executive role would create a personal point of contact for clients and business owners. Also creating customer rewards packages such as a Guest of the Month packages where a preferred guest is chosen from a lottery of the receipts and is allowed to host a party of 10-20 guests at that restaurant with discounted food items. In this, you create more advertising for 10-20 brand new clients and cement your place as a restaurant of choice with the preferred guest.

Q: Anne Freedman: What should restaurants doing to increase customer retention?

A: Ivan Osorio: Restaurants may locally attract clients and increase customer retention through text messaging. You can text message clients on their anniversaries or birthdays. You can set it up so it auto text them special promos on those special days so they have a reason to return.

A: Giangi Ratto: One provider by mobilesmsmarketing.com charges 10cents for 500 people versus 8 cents for 5,000 people. There is a minimal monthly fee associated. They provide you with an online software to track what the message will say and group your contacts. It’s very important to ask permission from your clients (from comment cards, website submittals, etc) so your list are from client who opted to receive your text message. Clients may also opt in to receiving text messages from your restaurant by texting the service directly. You should place the number on your website, receipts, or comment cards so are aware. I suggest you also provide on your website how they can opt out which typically is the same code.

A: Valeska I. Jacques: We have local .com business here at the beach called Sweetslap. It’s an online service catered to provide couples with ideas as to what to do for each other on anniversaries, birthdays, romantic get aways, etc. I think this will be a good strategic alliance. Their website is sweetslap.com

A: Ivan Osorio: A tool local restaurants should take more advantage of are e-newsletters. Some statistics on how e-newsletters increase customer retention are:
i. 79% of consumers are very likely to frequent the restaurant when they receive coupons or specials. (BizGrader consumer survey)
ii. 60% of consumers feel more loyal to a restaurant when in their email club. (BizGrader consumer survey)
iii. 62% of consumers have used coupons from restaurants in the past 6 months (BizGrader consumer survey)

Q: Anne Freedman: What would be ideal as to what the food service industry should strive for and what would you like to see in place to get there?

A: Valeska I. Jacques: What would be ideal is when every point of contact made with restaurant is consistent to ensure good experience. The ideal scenario will be where the individual answering the phone can pull your information in the system so you don’t have to repeat your phone number and when you arrive they may refer to you by name. Track your food history so when your waiter arrives he is aware of how you like your coffee served, what you had before, or suggest an alternative meal that’s similar to what you had before.

Q: Anne Freedman: Are there any other technologies that you would like to mention?

A. Giangi Ratto: We held a restaurant focus group recently where we asked how they feel about Wireless Credit Card. One of them mentioned that there is no insurance guarantee on these devices in case his staff drops the equipment and breaks it.

A: Valeska I. Jacques: Most of them mentioned during the focus group how they prefer to wait a year or two before adapting new technologies.

A: Ivan Osorio: Plasma tv’s displaying ads of what’s going on in Miami Beach or other restaurants. There are service providers that allow you to upload your ad through the internet and as a vendor hosting the TV you may make money off of the advertisements! You can monetize the service or opt to use the plasma TV to create a network of referral business that can be used among each other.

A Giangi Ratto: You can also set up Tablet PC’s and PDA’s to take orders, which works like a standard POS system, except they are hooked up to the restaurant’s network wirelessly. The technology is already out there, and it is no less secure or efficient than standard POS systems.

A: Valeska I. Jacques: Another interesting technology that may used in restaurants is the only patented technology that’s called Menus that talk. It’s a menu that reads for you by the press of a button. She is actually here with us today and can show everyone how it works. Here is a link to one of the interviews from NBC: http://menusthattalk.com/videos/clip2.wmv

Biography:
Giangi Ratto
Title: CIO South Florida
Geeks on Call (1800-905-GEEK) is a nationwide company that provides on-site Computer and IT support to small businesses and residential customers. As your “Part-Time IT Department,” 1-800-905-GEEK™ delivers on-demand, on-site computer and network services that are convenient and reliable. Their commitment to world-class customer service has made them the most respected on-site computer repair and support provider in the nation.

Ivan Osorio
Worked with Condo.com, Miami HEAT and works extensively in the Hospitality Industry. I van went to school at Florida International University where he studied Psychology and has worked in Sales, Advertising and Marketing for various companies. Ivan currently manages a business development team with the Miami HEAT and works with restaurants in the Miami area to help increase revenue through community events, customized marketing programs, promotions and networking events.

Valeska I. Jacques:

Valeska I. Jacques is Founder and President of uVium, an organizational consulting and training firm with a focus on the Internet for the past 6 years. She has helped clients in various vertical markets increase value through operational improvement, internet business strategies, blog coaching, and web software training. She is a Certified Business Process Management Consultant and has 6 years of experience in all aspects of internet technology.

Valeska is actively involved in the Miami community. She serves on the task force for the City of Miami Beach, the Board of Directors of the National Association of Women Business Owners Miami Chapter and recently partnered with Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce to pioneer the Miami Beach Technology Council.

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