More Changes for Google Local Business Places

Talking the time to make it as easy as possible for customers to review your business on a variety of sources just got a big shot in the arm. Google made the decision to place the third party reviews above the fold and above Google’s own reviews. Most people do not scroll so reviews that are placed directly on Google may not be seen. Potentially, your best reviews on Google will be hidden behind old content from years ago on third party sites. On the positive side, a review on Yahoo shows not only on Yahoo local, but in Google as well. Total exposure is the goal, not just showing well on Google.

The first third party site displayed is the review site that has the most reviews (opentable.com above), then up to two other third party sites (yelp.com & tripadvisor.com) are displayed.

It is somewhat technical, but Google has also announced the development of “Rich Snippets” for local search which means that testimonials placed on your website could be aggregated on Google Places and treated as a review.

Key take home points

• Create a review page to make it easy for people to see and review your business
• Consider updating testimonials on your website so Google will capture and place them on Google Places
• Do not concentrate on Google as the only place to direct good customers to review you.

My guess is that Google is continuing to develop Google places as the prime access point for smart phones to use for local business.  So keep up and continue to provide and link information about your business on a variety of local third party websites.

How to use Facebook Places

Facebook’s How to Video
A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places
Keep Facebook Places From Driving You Crazy

Marketing Opportunities of Facebook Places

Three ways business can take advantage of Facebook Places
What Facebook ‘Places’ Means for Marketers and Developers

Competitors & Partners – Facebook Places

Why Recommended Places Are the Next Big Thing in Location
To 100 million and beyond with Google Maps for mobile

The Dark Side to Facebook Places

How to Almost Sabotage a Dinner Party With Facebook ‘Places’

Is it Time to get on Board the Facebook Train?

Facebook Places (just announced) is a direct competitor to Google Places.   Any small business that wants to take advantage of people shopping, and looking for places & services with their Smartphones should consider developing their Facebook presence.

What is Facebook Places?

Facebook Places is a mobile product that  can be accessed through Facebook’s most recent iPhone app or via on other phones by accessing touch.facebook.com.  If a Facebook Place is already created, a business can claim its Facebook Place and merge their existing Facebook Fan Page with Facebook’s Place page. Facebook Places is similar to Google Places because information about the business is created and available.  The extra spin is that Facebook allows Facebook users to “check in” themselves and any of their Facebook  friends.  Check out Facebook’s video below to get a better understanding of Facebook Places:

Why should I care?
Remember that Facebook is the #1 application used on iPhones and Droids.  When people check into a Facebook Place, they are broadcasting that business to their Facebook network and any network of a friend they may have also checked in.  Right now if  10% of FB users use Facebook Places , that’s 50 Million people!  Over 100 Million people a month using Google Maps on mobile phones to find local businesses, Facebook Places may instantly have 50% of the value of Google Places.

I am not yet recommending investing in Facebook Places for all businesses. But if you are a restaurant or a business where people meet their friends,  Facebook Places could become as useful as Google Places, Review sites (ex. Yelp or UrbanSpoon) and Twitter combined.

For some large consumer brands such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks, their Facebook Fan page is becoming more important than their own websites.  Kraft Foods’ Oreo is the No. 3 brand page on Facebook with an 8.7 million fan base growing at a clip of 71,000 a day.

At a minimum I would recommend that you search Facebook to determine if they have created a Facebook Place for you business.  If Facebook has not I would create one.  This is a small effort for any small business, that could be the next big thing in promoting your business.  As always if you need help give me a call or send me an email.

This is a big topic and Part I of a series of Posts about Facebook Places I look to develop.  If you want more information now, here is a list of useful Facebook Places Articles.

Customers seeing wrong review ratings

The greatest asset for a business’s  Local Business Listing is favorable reviews placed on the listing  by satisfied customers.  New customers seeing a poor review rating can drive customers to pass you by and contact your competitors.

Hopefully this will be a short term problem, but you should check your business listing on Google Places.  Hopefully only a few unlucky business owners are having the problem of Google  displaying the opposite star rating of review sites that it imports.

An example is The Paper Place.  Their ratings have been reduced from over 4 out of 5 stars to less than 2 out of 5 stars.

The Real Story - Good Reviews

The real data from the imported review sites are:
Ourfaves.com
13 reviews – average 4 stars
Toronto.ibegin.com
5 reviews – average 4.25 stars
Blogto.com
average 3 stars
Yelp.ca
8 reviews – average 4 stars

The good news is that The Paper Place posted this in the Google Maps Forum and Google’s Joel H states that this is now a problem that Google hopes to fix in the next few weeks.

Thanks for letting us know. We’re working on a fix and hope to get it resolved soon. It will likely be a multiple weeks before it’s resolved.   Thanks for reporting the issue!

Joel H

Google Employee
7/14/10

So check your Google Places listing to make sure you are not one of the unlucky. All you need to do is search for your business on Google Maps.  Click here http://maps.google.com/ , type in your business name and city, and search for your Google Places listing. Take a minute and make sure your business is not effected.

Tell us if you are experiencing this issue.  If you are we can help mitigate  the issue.

Internet Search continues to explode as total number of Searches increases 31% between June 2008 and June 2009 (21.9 billion total searches in June 2009). The main findings of the TMP Directional Marketing survey are:

• Print media continues to decline in a growing digital marketplace, as consumers reference local business information through alternative methods.
• Google has developed applications that have overtaken online business directories in both IYP/local and local portal searches.
• Mobile search continues to experience growth, as more consumers have access to mobile devices with Internet browsers and applications.

This excerpt says it all

Other Key Study Findings
The closer, the better: Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents in 2009 stated that they expect their search results to reveal businesses within 15 miles of their homes or places of work. This statistic is significantly higher compared to 2008 (59 percent) and 2007 (52 percent), proving that consumers expect more relevance in their business searches.

Click here for the article

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

One of the changes is that unlike the local business listing where information is collected by Google’s search engine, anyone can edit the info until the business owner takes ownership of the business listing.  So if you have already taken ownership, no worries, but if you have not people are going to start providing their slant on your business.  How about changing the website, address or catagory of business.  It is a little scary.

Example of edit info on Googles Place Pages

The main reason is that they want $399.00 to be listing in their Electronic Yellow Pages.  At best this is a poor verison of what you can get on any of the major search engines for free.  So be wary of anything like this..  And believe me when I say that spending $400 with them will not ” Validate your Internet Listing”.

Here is the Email and PDF I recieved:

Invoice for YellowGoesGreen

Dear Customer:

Please verify your ACTUAL LISTING by printing and completing the attached form.

FAX THE COMPLETED FORM TO: XXXXXX

Please make payment by check or credit card as listed on the form.

Return the stub and payment to the following address:

Yellow Goes Green!! (save a tree).

We have taken the phone book out of the desk drawer and placed it on the desktop! We offer a dynamic and interactive product that can be quickly and easily accessed by you and your customers.

We have eliminated what advertisers do not like about the printed Yellow Pages books, and we are far less expensive. Because we do not bear the expense of ink, paper, binding, and distribution, we can pass the savings on to you!

For example small applications (Networking 2.0) for iphones translate Google Business Listing & Google Maps and translate that information on the fly to direct a user to the top BBQ listing along a freeway and then the user is directed to their restaurant choice.

Where to Eat? Finding restaurants using GPS

There are two take home messages from an application like this. First you need to continually work on being on the top 10 box of Google maps.  In this example the iphone application starts with a list of the top ten BBQ restaurants that the odds are great that the user will select from.  The second point is that the Top 10 lists are not perfect as the #8 choice is not even a restaurant.  This shows that developing this information is still in its infancy and you, as a smart restaurateur, can quickly get on this list, as it may not be very competitive.

The other finer point is that as a restaurateur, if you really want to work on this aspect of your advertising you need to make sure that you are categorizing your business around the list of options in the GPS software.  In this application the list looks like this:

Restaurant Categories

I have not researched if most of the applications use the same catagories, but I would bet that the developers of these applications are not trying to change the world on the data side, but like most databased applications are looking to use standard data-sets, that Google and other large search engines supply.