Warning: this post is not about food in any way, shape or form. If you want to read something food related, that really pissed me off this morning, check this out: McStatins with your fast food? Background in The Independent.
We will now resume abnormal service:
Recently I have taken up blogging in a more "professional" capacity. That means I get paid to do what I do here just for the hell of it.
As part of my employment at Livebookings, where I hold the fluffy title of "Strategic Advisor", my role now involves scouring the net for great ideas and articles; trying out new technologies in the fields of online restaurant marketing, SEO and social media; assisting our UK and US restaurant customers with advice on our products and related tools; and spread that wealth of information in house to our product development teams and through blogging on the Livebookings corporate blog theblackboard.net.
I also do a lot of presentations on our Livebookings Academy events, and conduct workshops for smaller groups of people on various best practice topics like how to use Twitter for restaurant marketing, what is SEO and what are the cornerstones of getting it right, and optimising your website for booking conversion.
In short, a lot of my time is now spent on information gathering, and content creation based on what I learn and test. Needless to say, I am quite chuffed since this is the type of job role I have tried creating for myself for years.
Hopefully, leveraging my decade and a half of software, web development, and online marketing related experiences gives me a really good platform for quickly assimilating new ideas and get a grip on how they can contribute to restaurant business value.
That said, I will still be heavily involved in several product development projects running in Livebookings, often of a more experimental and "skunk like" nature. A few of the most exciting developments right now are the ability to take deposits in our online booking tool; embedding our booking tool in Facebook; and a number of mobile projects that I can't really say much about at this stage...
Busy busy.
So. If you are interested in restaurants, online marketing and the occasional video of me talking incessantly, head over to theblackboard.net and sign up to follow our updates!
