Austin has some amazing restaurants and coffee shops.

With increasing frequency, these businesses are getting on Twitter. Most, for now, are taking their first steps by establishing a personality and communicating with patrons.  These are fantastic, necessary firsts.

As Robert Scoble mentioned in a recent blog post, though, “Twitter has the potential to be a powerful business interaction service”.  Interaction. Restaurants need to move beyond conversational rapport-building and put Twitter to work for them. Here are three ways that they can use TweetRiver to help.

1. Publish customer testimonials
On Twitter, so very frequently, your customers are not talking to you. They’re talking about you. By constantly running Twitter searches for mentions of your business, TweetRiver captures these customer comments. After automatically categorizing these tweets into a ‘testimonials’ stream, you can moderate the stream to approve the most flattering messages, and then embed these customer raves into your restaurant’s website with a single line of javascript.  Voila!  Instant, fresh, spam-free site content from your customers saying how delicious your food is!

2. Extend service beyond the dining room
You are probably already tweeting about your updated hours, daily specials, and time-limited offers. There’s more to Twitter, though, than just broadcasting your message; success will follow those businesses that listen and respond to their customers.

TweetRiver analyzes each incoming tweet and uses rules you define to intelligently route it to the appropriate topical streams. Set up a stream for ‘customer service’ and funnel in tweets with specific positive or negative keywords. See a particularly positive customer comment? Want to handle a particularly negative one? Reach out and respond with a special offer or discount.

3. Accept to-go orders and reservations
Houston’s CoffeeGroundz got some great press last year when they began to accept customer drive-through orders via Twitter direct message. With TweetRiver, it’s a piece of cake for your restaurant to do the same.

Use the same rule-based routing to put ‘online order’ tweets into their own stream; it doesn’t matter if they’re sent publicly or via direct message. Not following some of your customers yet? Multi-select them inside the TweetRiver admin console, and then follow them all with a single click. Once you’ve handled the order, either respond to the customer directly or add an internal-only note to the tweet, marking it as handled. Order up!

When I head out to eat, I normally consider just a few things in choosing a restaurant: price, quality, and convenience. Restaurants will soon learn that they can improve in all of these areas by tapping into Twitter; those that do will be the ones that win my business.