E David Callender Consulting » Internet reviews

Google’s Offical FAQ on Reputation Management

Dave Callender — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:54:16 +0000

When I first start working with small businesses, they can be surprised at the information that is out on the internet both about their businesses and themselves. Yesterday, Google put out a nice overview of how they recommend managing internet reputations.

In a nutshell they direct you to:

Try to remove the offending information off the original website and then expedite the removal from Google’s indexing (Google URL removal tool).
Proactively Publish Favorable information on your Google profile

The post is mostly obvious stuff, but it is interesting that they point to your Google Profile which each business and owner should develop.

Click here for the Google article

Augmented reality will be using Local Search

Dave Callender — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:30:23 +0000

Today there was a nice article about people using smart phones and integrating local content with the GPS abilities of cell phones. Start looking for “Augmented Reality” as a new buzz phrase.

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

Making it Easy for Customers to Review your Business

Dave Callender — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:09:00 +0000

As small business owners become aware of all the information about their enterprise they can find both good and bad news. They are irritated that somewhere there is information about their sales revenue, who owns their business or other things that they view as company only information.

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.