SMBs’ Confusion with Online Social Promotion Tools
Are SMBs confused about new online marketing strategies? A recent article on the Sf Chronicle sparked up quite a few reactions on the blogosphere. At the center of the debate is Yelp, a San Francisco-based platform for user-generated reviews of small businesses:
Last week, Yelp purged an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?
Will Scott from Website Promotion is not Voodoo thinks this situation reflects the overall confusion that most SMBs are facing with social promotion tools. For Will, times were simpler for SMBs when the major online promotion tool was YellowPages: Buy ads, get more exposure, sell more.
Today, with the new online social trends, SMBs have to push people to talk about them, and this kind of public relations is hard to handle when you are not a killer online PR pro. How do you tell your customers to spend half an hour on a website to create a profile and rate the transaction they just made at your store (something customers automatically do if the transaction went bad btw)? When it comes to reviewing a business, the incentive is small for customers, but extremely high for merchants wishing to increase their exposure. Therefore, it becomes much easier to create strategic partnerships with other merchants who profoundly understand the benefits of writing positive reviews about each other.
Greg Sterling calls this a gray area:
The reviews may be entirely legitimate in many cases. But, as the (SF Chronicle) article points out, it underscores the influence and impact of Yelp. It’s very much like Google and people trying to game or improve their ranking on Google because of how that maps directly to the bottom line.
If this is a gray area (and I agree it is), then the whole Web 2.0 is a gray area: The line between power users and system gamers is too thin. The PageRank fiasco that hit Google a few month back reflects the same problematic. Is Robert Scoble gaming the system by being omnipresent on Friendfeed? Is Friendfeed gaming the system by sucking up all of Twitter’s juice? Let’s not get too excited here…
Back to SMBs: if small merchants’ strategic alliances are not permitted, then how do you boost your online presence? What do you do if your customers are not user-generated review enthusiasts? Here at Click2Map, we are very SMBs oriented. We do not provide a solution for businesses to improve their ranking on user-generated review sites, but we surely help them build their presence on Google. How? When people search for a specific location on Google, a Google Map is the first organic result that pops up on search result pages. Here at Click2Map, we make Google Maps creation a breeze: It’s easy to upload spreadsheets of geographic data, to manage a wide number of map markers, and to publish it on the Google Maps platform. This is a valuable tool to help you optimize your natural presence on an increasingly popular medium (Google Maps). Check out Click2Map’s free version to see how easy it is to be mapped in.
Xavier Vespa
http://twitter.com/xavierv
Tags: click2map, greg sterling, Mapping, reviews, will scott, yelp
Visit Click2Map