TasteTrend.com is poised to become a high growth web marketing provider to the hospitality industry. We are very excited to help university students gain first hand experience in B2B sales while also earning full commissions. This is a 12-week program. Successful interns will also be offered the opportunity to join TasteTrend.com upon graduation.

Intern responsibilities:

• Qualify new business opportunities
• Educate target audience in the benefits of online marketing tools
• Learn high level B2B sales skills
• Become proficient in presenting online content management application
• Proposal creation and delivery
• Negotiation skills

Successful candidate qualifications:

• Qualifications
• Proficient in use of social media technologies
• Proficient in use of MS Word and Excel
• Complete understanding of Google tools
• Strong ability to think creatively
• Encouraged by the opportunity to fail and yet win

Geographic location of internship:

• Initial training sessions to be held in Delano, MN
• Weekly Team meetings conducted online
• Day-to-day communication processed via Web tools

Hours/work schedule:

• Flexible work schedule
• Meetings held Monday Mornings between 9 – 11 AM

Intern Compensation & Start Date:

• Commission earning potential
• Start date: June 15th, 2010

How to apply:

• Submit resume to Chris@tastetrend.com
• Preference will be awarded to applicants received prior to May 20, 2010

Contact person

Chris Murphy
chris@tastetrend.com
800.473.4509

Formerly known as the Shorewood restaurant, it re-opened in the fall of 2009 and new they needed a solid website to market their establishment.

The website features a rich design that uses colors and elements you find in their interior, a variety of menus, a wine list, music calendar and more.

With Taste Trend, the Shorewood Bar & Grill has complete control to manage and update their website. The ability to change menu items, pricing, upcoming bands, happy hour specials, wine selections and more is a must.

Due to the Shorewood’s close proximity to our offices, we also did all of their photography.

Restaurant Web Design features include:

• Semi-custom web design
• Content management platform
• Dynamic menus
• Wine list menu
• Interactive event & music calendar
• Photo gallery
• Contact form
• Integrated Google Maps
• Basic search engine optimization

We’re excited about another great restaurant web design and to have the Shorewood Bar & Grill as a Taste Trend client.

• http://www.shorewoodgrill.com

The Technology Evangelist blog covered our service in a post called Restaurant Web Design Done Right.  Ed Kohler is a savvy Internet marketer and praised our service for it’s ability to allow restaurants to keep their information and menu up to date online.  Ed outlined many of the problems he sees with restaurant websites and we’re happy to note we help overcome all of them.

The LocalMN blog linked to Ed’s post on TasteTrend and also pointed out our iPhone friendly “click to call” feature in a recent post.  LocalMN blogger Paul Jahn is a local search marketing specialist, so we were again excited to have gained his attention.

Heavy Table is an online food magazine for the midwest.  Heavy Table has linked to our service and pointed out our web design offering for restaurants on a few different occasions and we can’t complain that their experienced food writers see the positives in our offering.

On Twitter, iHospitality tweeted about us to their 10,000 followers stating that “These guys are seriously doing it right”.

Many Web Design galleries have featured our TasteTrend.com website in the past weeks. Here are a few:

• CSSmania
• Screenalicious
• DiggCSS

We’re going to keep doing what we do and roll out some great restaurant websites on the coming months … and maybe we’ll turn a few more heads.

Here are just a few of the ways a Restaurant can use Twitter:

• Feedback: listen & monitor what others say about you
• Connect: find local people and others to interact with
• Market: announce specials, coupons, events and more
• Communicate: show your expertise, offer advice on items to try

Have A Purpose With Twitter
One thing I would stress to any business is to have some purpose or strategy on Twitter … not  just shouting out your marketing message. Anyone can jump on stage and say “look at me”, but that gets old fast.  Your audience will tune out and your credibility might completely fade.   Think about the kind of info/tweet that will benefit your followers besides specials.  Can you show your food quality?  Can you highlight fun events?  Can you link to newly posted photos? Run a contest on Twitter?

As you can see, there are tons of options to use Twitter to interact and to market.  We’ll look into more of these as time goes on here on the TasteTrend blog.

Some Restaurant & Twitter Links Of Interest
Below are some articles, restaurants on Twitter and other resources you might find interesting.

• Pancheros (@pancheros) does a great job of utilizing Twitter for interaction, contests and more.  I have met with Joel from Pancheros, their Socail Media guy, and love what he has done and is doing.   Other bloggers have even given Pancheros more ideas on integrating Twitter into their business.

• Punch Pizza (@punchpizza ) has been using social media for a while with contests involving Flickr and a blog.  They only recently joined Twitter, but thanks to their grasp of SM and other efforts they quickly are up to over 1400 followers.  The Minneapolis Fox TV affiliate recently did a Twitter marketing story on them as well … so their Twitter use transformed into traditional PR too!

Those are just two Twitter examples and there are many more.  This blog post has a list of Restaurants using Twitter and no doubt there are a ton more not on there yet.  We’re looking forward to bring you more on this topic as other online marketing only contributes to your restaurant website success.

Feel free to chat with us on Twitter: @tastetrend

Blackwater is a Minnesota coffee shop and cafe about 10 miles from where we office.  I’ve used their place to meet with other clients as they have a great place and Wifi.  When we went to move our TasteTrend service from idea stages into reality, Blackwater was an easy choice to approach to be our first TasteTrend client.

We’re excited to put out a coffee shop website that is well designed, easy for a consumer to use, search engine friendly, full of accurate information, photos and menu items.  All of these items are core features of every restaurant, bar, coffee shop website we’ll be putting out in the coming year.

*NOTE:  We’ve since added a photo feature per menu item with a thumbail and blow-up version. Blackwater will be adding photos to their menu soon!

Website: http://www.blackwatercc.com

Thanks to Blackwater Coffee Co. & Cafe, you’ll always be our first.  With that said, we already have 3 more web designs underway!

In the summer of 2008, we put that focus into the food and beverage industry. Our solution aims to be the most robust and value packed offering a small business could ask for. The TasteTrend service fits perfectly for restaurants, cafes, bakeries, delis, coffee shops, juice bars, ice cream parlors, bars …. you get the picture.

So with this first blog post, we know it’s just the start of something great. We have a lot of information to share on our service, web design, the food service industry, marketing and more. This whole interweb deal is pretty cool and we look forward to helping others maximize it’s offering.

Welcome, subscribe, grab a beverage and let us know what’s on your mind!