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"The Smarter Cities series is supported by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog.\nSocial media has certainly changed the way we interact and the way we do business, but the way we eat?  No really, it's true: social media is positively affecting virtually all aspects of our lives, including how we find, sell, and eat food.  From helping restaurants connect with customers in new and innovative ways to helping consumers locate good eats, social media and the web are making our cities more delicious places to live.\nIn this post we'll look at some of the ways that social media is giving small food businesses the power to promote themselves and find new customers, as well as how it is providing city dwellers with the tools to find great (and safe) food.  How else is social media making your city tastier?  Let us know in the comments.\nFor Food Providers\nFood vendors have put social media to some incredibly innovative uses in order to better locate and connect with their key demographic.  The Albion Cafe in London, for example, uses Twitter to automatically alert customers when fresh baked goods have just come out of their ovens.  Using a specially built box called BakerTweet, the people at Albion are able to automatically update Twitter any time something new comes out of their ovens.  The result is that their customers know exactly when the freshest cookies and scones are available for sale.  BakerTweet is a clever way to use social media to connect with customers on a new level and get them more interested in coming into the shop to purchase food. \n\n\n\nSocial media has also proven invaluable to the food truck business.  Mobile food trucks have embraced the mobile web in a big way, by using status update services like Twitter to communicate with diners.  By utilizing Twitter, food trucks have found they can create demand by keeping customers apprised of their whereabouts, and effectively advertise their good by running promotions, posting pictures, and announcing their menu.  \nRestaurants with more permanent locations are finding social media tools valuable as well.  New Orleans pizza joint Naked Pizza has famously used Twitter to connect with the people that have eaten at their restaurant and turn their customers into die-hard fans.  That attention to social media has created an exceptional amount of buzz for Naked Pizza and brought them national press coverage.  Another pizza place, the Pie Hole Pizza-Joint in Chicago, effectively uses Facebook and Twitter to accentuate the fun atmosphere of their restaurant. \n\n\n\nPromotion, of course, is one of the main reasons food merchants are using social media.  In addition to helping restaurants connect with current customers in new and more personal ways, social media also allows restaurants to better connect with new customers.  By making their establishments more easily discovered, food vendors can use the web to grow their business.  Local guides like MerchantCircle.com, Judy's Book, and even Google Maps make restaurants easier to find and allow business owners to advertise directly to their most likely customers: hungry people searching the web for food.\nOnce people find a place to eat, social media is making it easier for them to order.  Creative online ordering applications like the one employed by Pizza Hut on their Facebook Page or the iPhone app from Starbucks that even lets you pay for purchases using the app, are big wins for both consumers and restaurateurs.  By making the order process painless using social media tools, restaurants are encouraging more business, while customers are getting their food more quickly. iPhone applications like the ones from OpenTable (iTunes), CityMint (iTunes), and GrubHub (iTunes) are allowing smaller restaurants without the resources to create custom online ordering apps get in on the action, as well.\nFor Food Consumers\nSocial media and the web are also changing food from a consumer perspective.  The most obvious way is by making good food easier to locate.  Social review sites like Yelp, the Chowhound discussion boards, and FriendsEAT help hungry Internet users to find the best places to chow down based on the advice of their peers.  Mobile applications, such as Urbanspoon for the iPhone (iTunes) and WHERE for the BlackBerry, do the same thing for people on the go. \nOnce you find a place to eat, you can view menus online at sites like Menuism to figure out what you want to order and which items are the most popular.  You can even order your food online and have it delivered via services such as SeamlessWeb, Delivery.com, and Campusfood.com (specifically for college students). \n\n\n\nBut web-based tools aren't necessarily just helping people find the best places to eat, they're also helping people locate the safest restaurants.  Sites like EveryBlock, which lets users access visualizations and information about restaurant inspections in a number of cities, and SafeFoodFinder, a Seattle-based site that puts local food inspection data on a Google Map, are making data about food safety more accessible to consumers.  \nFurther, social media has acted as whistleblower and exposed unsanitary conditions at restaurants, such as those in the infamous Domino's Pizza video that surfaced on YouTube in April and garnered national attention.  Because social tools have a tendency to spread things virally, stories of import to the safety of restaurant goers can be spread quickly and social media can act as an alert system to help keep people safe. \n\n\n\nThe social web also offers tools specifically designed to help you in your goal to eat healthier food. Applications like GoodFoodNearYou for BlackBerry and FoodScanner for the iPhone can help you find the healthiest food at restaurants and in the supermarket, and get nutritional information about things before you eat them.\nFinally, sites like NutritionData can even help you analyze recipes to get nutritional information about the food you eat, even if you're cooking at home.\nSmarter Cities series supported by IBM\nThe Smarter Cities series is supported by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog.\nMore food resources from Mashable:\n- Tasty Tweets: 55+ Foodies to Follow on Twitter- Top 15 Social Media Resources for Foodies- 15 More Fantastic Social Media Resources for Foodies\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, loooby"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/10/07/social-media-food/>