MySpace Local Launches (with help from CitySearch)

MySpace has launched a local section of their site, using Citysearch data (although it looks more like a White Label than Co-Brand integration). Most of it seems focused on reviews, which puts them in competition with Yelp as a local social review site. I'm not sure if the reviews will be 2-way (publishing back to CitySearch), though I imagine they won't, as MySpace tries to build some footprint in the area. I think this makes a lot of sense for MySpace, to keep users on the site, provide them more valuable content and information to share, and CitySearch is the right partner for them. There are a lot of local content providers they could have worked with, but looking at MySpace's core demo, the categories that most YP providers focus on (home services, dentists, doctors, etc) are not as relevant as Restaurants and Entertainment, which are CitySearch's focus. It will be interesting to watch what happens with this, but it could be really successful.

MySpace and Citysearch Team Up to Challenge Yelp

Yelp's Entering Dangerous Territory

(image from the East Bay Express)

I posted a while ago about the issues with reviews and the things you have to concern yourself with in the generation of that kind of content. In the local space, Yelp is definitely the leader in review content, but a while back they had an article written about them (more than one actually) indicating that they basically engage in extortion, offering to remove bad reviews only if advertisers pay them and removing good reviews for those who don't.

After that initial wave of stories came out, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman came out and vehemently denied them. He posted on their blog and stated they were outright lies. However, the stories didn't stop coming and now a new story has been posted (by the same person writing the original one) naming names of businesses that received this treatment and going into a lot of detail about these practices (even naming salespeople). I have no idea whether this is true or not, but even allegations of impropriety like this can permanently damage a business. Stoppelman really needs to come forward and, if this is true, needs to be clear about it, make a mea culpa, and outline how they are going to make sure it doesn't happen again. If it isn't true, he needs to go open kimono and show the world just how their process works, so he once and for all disproves this before it gains (additional) life of its own. It may not be the best option, but this could go downhill quickly.

East Bay Express | News | Yelp Extortion Allegations Stack Up

Even in a Recession, You Can't Afford to Pass on Social Media

It's a recession, and a lot of companies are looking to cut back on Marketing spend. However, a new Forrester study says that, even in this economy, more than 50% of companies are increasing their spend on social media. This makes a lot of sense. Social media is fairly cheap to invest in and provides inexpensive content for your site. And, in a good scenario, it can create an ongoing content creation machine that can power your site far more cheaply and effectively than paid media.

In the local space, many of the traditional YP companies have been slow to adopt social media (in fact, some might say they haven't adopted it at all, with the exception of Reviews and Social Bookmarking). Instead, they are allowing insurgents like Yelp and Angie's List to take the lead on that, and as a result, those companies are gaining quickly. YP companies, and others in the local space who have yet to adopt social media, must look on it as an integral part of their content and traffic strategies and move forward now, not just integrating reviews, but other basic social features, such Commenting, Topic Forums, Local Content creation and more. If not, the Yelps of the world will no longer be the insurgents, they'll be the incumbents.

Despite Recession, More Than 50% of Marketers Increase Spending on Social Media - ReadWriteWeb

SuperPages will be guaranteeing some advertisers' work

This is interesting. In around 300 categories (they don't mention which here, but I would imagine most are service-based categories like plumbers, locksmiths, etc - but ones where success or failure are fairly clear-cut), SuperPages will be insuring work done by specific advertisers who have opted in. If there is a dispute that can't be resolved by SP, they will pay the user up to $500 to make up for it. There's also some mention of potentially "punishing" the advertiser if they misbehave on this plan.

It's an interesting move, and a potential differentiator in the market. SP may have some issues getting advertisers to opt-in, but nonetheless, it could work (and I doubt they'd end up paying much out, though I don't know if they're prepared for the volume of problem resolution they might be dealing with). To me, though, the whole point of this is getting users engaged. SP is using this as a way to get users to register and leave reviews, which is becoming more and more important in the space (especially given the success of Yelp).

Superpages’ New ‘SuperGuarantee’ a Bold Move « Screenwerk

CitySearch vs. Yelp Apps

CitySearch launched their iPhone app today. On the surface, it has a lot of the same data as Yelp, although Yelp has better deeper reviews (it is their specialty after all). However, CitySearch did one-up Yelp in one area: While Yelp allows image uploads from their app, CitySearch allows reviews to be uploaded through their app as well...

Citysearch Vs. Yelp On The iPhone: Can You Tell Them Apart?

Yelp's iPhone App gets even better (and smarter)

The Yelp iPhone App, which I already thought was the best in local, has now been updated with a bunch of new features. The most interesting, though, it that it allows users to upload pictures of the businesses straight to the site. With so many users running around with camera phones, this only makes sense. For the broader "local" business community, though, this doesn't necessarily provide a lot of content around the big revenue categories (most of which are services), but a cool feature for those categories Yelp specializes in...

Yelp Updates iPhone App « Screenwerk

Yelp Stats

Some great stats from Yelp. 15MM users a month is nothing to sneeze at, and if they start to trust Yelp for Restaurants, etc, it's only a matter of time before they start using it for high-revenue categories too...

Kelsey Group Blogs » Yelp Traffic Stats Suggests Broad Local Usage

Yelp 2.0 for iPhone on its Way

According to Greg Sterling, the next iteration of the Yelp iPhone app is coming. The first version is by far my favorite local app on the iPhone, and it sounds like this one will only improve on it, offering more information, more search options and some other fun things on top of it. These guys definitely get how to build an iPhone app.

Yelp 2.0 for the iPhone Coming Soon | LocalMobileSearch

IYP Reach in the US (according to Google)

Via TechSoapBox:



IYP Reach in the US (according to Google) - Tech Soapbox

User-Generated Reviews and Their Impact on Local

We talked about reviews and the ability for businesses to respond to them last week. Today on Valleywag, there was some discussion of a company possibly offering to push negative reviews to the bottom if businesses bought a paid ad with them (I'm not mentioning the company's name here, because Valleywag thinks this was just a rogue salesperson, not a real policy of that company).

However, this brings up some of the complexities of reviews and serving two masters: users and businesses. For users to really find the reviews content useful, it has to be real information that cannot be "bought" by businesses. Of course, if this is the case and a business already has significant numbers of negative reviews on a given site, it will make it more difficult to sell paid products to that business.

On the other side of the coin, there have been stories about consumers/users threatening businesses with negative reviews if they don't get what they want (which many times includes them demanding free product or the like). This is the downside of user generated reviews. While they give users the ability to provide information to others, there will always be some that abuse them.

So how can businesses solve this problem? To me, the answer is twofold:

1. Do the best you can to keep your customers happy. This may seem simple, but if you want good reviews, provide good service.
2. Promote your customers' involvement on the sites where you advertise (and for sites, this means give businesses the means to promote you on-site). Put up stickers in your window letting consumers know where to post reviews. Tell your staff to promote this (especially to happy customers). Happy customers will go out of their way to send you more business, but you need to give them the means to do so.

Finally, as we talked about last week, it is important that sites provide businesses with the means to respond to negative reviews and even challenge their validity from time to time. The purer the review system the better, but as local Internet companies, we always have to balance the needs of all of our constitutents.

Commentards: Yelp protection racket alleged by anonymous cowards

Women are more likely than men to be IYP users

I saw an interesting tool on another website today (it can be found at the link below). You activate this tool and it will go through your browser history, analyze the sites you've visited, and tell you if it thinks you're male or female. When I ran it, it said with 100% probability that I'm male (I am). But more interesting to me was the male/female ratios it displayed for various IYP/Local sites I've visited. Here they are:

• Yellowpages.com - 0.72 male/female (1.38 women per man on that site)
• Yelp - 0.77
• Yellowbook - 0.8
• ServiceMagic - 0.71
• DexKnows - 0.79
• Google - 0.98

As someone working in the local space online, this tells me that, across the board, 55-57% of our users are women. That's without any specific outreach effort to that group. Perhaps we should consider market more directly to them, or at least focus on the sites they're using, as they seem more predisposed to using us to start with.

Mike On Ads » Blog Archive » Using your browser URL history to estimate gender

iPhone Apps - 4 of Top 5 are Local

There are now over 1000 apps in the iPhone store and if you look at the top 5, 4 of them are local applications:
1. Google (the only non-local)
2. UrbanSpoon, with its cool "shake me and get a surprise result" feature
3. BoxOffice, with an easy to use local movie time application and Rotten Tomatoes critic ratings
4. WeatherBug
5. Yelp, which in my view has the nicest local implementation, with the ability to easily search near you, a map view, and the ability to read every review in detail (so many apps do shortcut reviews, including the iTunes store, which doesn't give you anything beyond the star rating

It really seems that the iPhone is the platform that will finally drive broad acceptance of mobile applications and mobile search. Approx 10MM iPhones are out there in the US right now and with their ease-of-use and full-time access to the Internet, they will become the local platform of choice. And they're just scratching the surface of what they can do.

» Local Mobile Search