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Good discussion.  Things not to do are:

1. Using a weak password
2. Leaving your full birth date on your profile
3. Overlooking useful privacy controls
4. Posting your child’s name in a caption
5. Mentioning that you’ll be away from home
6. Letting search engines find you
   1. This is an interesting one as for people that are trying to promote their business, want this to occur.
7. Permitting youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised.

I think this is something that could be great for a lot of small businesses. The only problem I have so far I have not been able to figure out how or where on Google to find this new service on Google – Anyone have any ideas? Is it just for business that are located only in the City of San Diego?  I have been looking but so far the information I have found does not work for me.

If first came across this in a nice article in Ad Age by Michael Learmonth:

Google Lures Local Advertisers by Subverting Its Own Search Policies
Two-City Test Takes on Yellow Pages With New Pricing System, Ad Model

But those companies aren’t Google, which for many people has become the de facto yellow pages as it improves local search relevance. Google believes it could vastly expand the number of local businesses using AdWords by allowing them to easily convert an organic listing into a paid ad for a flat fee.

Max Kalehoff, VP of marketing for Clickable, said Google’s move may address the tendency of local advertises to “churn,” or start a campaign and give up on it for whatever reason. “Some businesses don’t want to do search advertising; they just want to put a dollar in and receive phone calls,” he said.

For the full article click here

I also found this video from Google that says that the place to create / place the Ad is next to the Dashboard and Coupon tabs.  But I did not see this option on any of my San Diego Area  Based Customers

Below is the Google Video about the new service

My key point is that all these applications are going to use content that is already developed by Google Local Business or similar content from Yahoo, MSN, etc….

In the article they highlight an application from Layar :

One company working to make this happen is Amsterdam-based Layar, which recently released an augmented-reality browser by the same name for Android phones. Layar lets you search for things on Google but delivers the results based on your location, which it determines from the GPS readout. So you can search for, say, a bike shop or a pet store close to where you happen to be.

As you can see above Layar is using data sets like Google Local Search for their application

Love them or hate them Yelp (Review Service) is going all out for the iPhone crowd:

For a year, Yelp, a Web site with business reviews written by customers, had an iPhone app that used the device’s GPS and wireless Internet connectivity to deliver local search results. But when the iPhone got a compass, bloggers wondered whether Yelp would go further and make its app overlay information onto a real-time view of the world. After noticing the speculation, Yelp quietly created such an app this summer, spokesman Vince Sollitto said.

The augmented-reality program, known as Monocle, was built for Yelp by an industrious intern and originally hidden in Yelp’s app. (It was activated if you shook the iPhone three times.) Monocle is a formal feature that combines the iPhone’s camera view with tiny tags indicating the names, distances and user ratings of proximate bars, restaurants and more. Poke a floating tag on the screen with your finger and up pops detailed information about the business.

All business need to get their best reputation they can out on services like Yelp ASAP.

Click here for the article in the San Diego Union-Tribune

Google local is an amazing tool for promoting local business, but search engines like Google bring all the information together and takes away the ability to own the perception of a company. Hopefully business owners are pleasantly surprised that people have positively reviewed their business. But what gets most business owners attention is the negative review. Those negative reviews are out there and being spread across the internet. Unfortunately they are also listed on a company’s Google Business listing. It is not all bad and here is a nice article discussing this issue: (Good or Bad – Reviews are important). Business need to embrace internet reviews and motivate their happy customers to review.

The natural way of life is that customers are more motivated to complain than praise. Many customers want to help local businesses, but for the customer there is a effort involved in providing a review. Most review services (Yelp, Yahoo, Google) require registration to provide a review. It is my experience that registering is too high a hurdle just to provide a positive review. The angry customer is more that motivated, but the good customer has better things to do.

So what is a business to do? How does sites like Amazon and Ebay get people to review others. The answer is they are already have an account and can simply write the review. Using that information, you can greatly lower the hurdle of reviewing a business. If a small business gets 4-10 reviews a year, they are way ahead of their competition. The secret is asking your customers with Gmail (Google) accounts to review on Google, your customers with Yahoo accounts to review on Yahoo and so on. My experience is if you have 1,000 emails around 200 to 300 of them will be either Gmail or Yahoo accounts. Getting 1-2% of these customers to favorably review your business should be easy, if not, you have greater problems than building a positive internet presence.

You Can’t Edit Your Way Out of Negative Reviews by Jeff Saxon

….Very simply, reviews increase conversion rates. And several studies point to the fact that, yes, even negative reviews help.
It all boils down to credibility. Customer reviews simply have more credibility than your sales copy, so they inspire more confidence in the buyer. And negative reviews lend credibility to the review process itself, standing as visible proof that the reviews are not edited….

…The point: Your brand and product perception is not what you say it is anymore but what Google says it is….

Click here for the Article