This Week in Social Local Media

Our first official week of Social Local blogging is just about under our belt. So let’s wrap it up with some of the more interesting posts we came across:

First on the blog I started out the week with my takeaways from of the Conversational Commerce Conference. Jed followed up with the news that measurement of social media metrics can be a bit tricky. We looked at a couple of new local Q&A services, checked out BuzzLabs‘ new self-service rep management tool, marveled at Google trying to catch the bouquet with Google Weddings and finished up with Jed’s look at Postling.

Now let’s look at what we uncovered out there in socialsphere:

Managing multiple social presences isn’t easy, especially when trying to monitor the progress of thousands of local agents and franchises at large corporations such as Starbucks. Ben Parr describes technology from Hearsay that feeds signals from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter into one dashboard. It lets marketers monitor corporate and local social media efforts on sites across the Internet.

Craig Donato tells us why social commerce, which focuses on relationships and conversations, will likely have a major impact on local businesses such as service providers, real estate agents, landlords and employers. This year businesses will hear more about re-humanizing the Web, the basis for social commerce, not only from AOL and Facebook, but Twitter, too.

Social will bring to local what 140 characters brought to Twitter. Catching flak for, well, voicing an opinion on why Quora and social media experts don’t mix, Lisa Barone analyzes how people use social media and encourages them to reflect on whether it falls into line with their expectations for success. Borrowing a line from a speaker at a recent event in Schenectady, N.Y., Barone writes “people need to know how much you care before they care how much you know.”

That knowledge gained from the ability to search for information on a mobile device on the go turns the physical address of a business into the new link and makes link building more important when it comes to SEO, according to Peter van der Graaf. He suggests
using social signals.

More positive reviews could prompt people to click on results more often. Eric Enge serves up a survival guide for businesses to manage online reputations in local search results, and provides key takeaways from other posts. One of the most important reminders includes not giving in to a knee-jerk reaction when negative reviews surface. Cool down before commenting back.

When it comes to local social tools, Facebook has been a lifesaver to many small businesses. Michael Gray talks with Greg Finn, Victoria Edwards, and Marty Weintraub to discover new ways small and local businesses can use Facebook. (Apologies again to Michael for missing the deadline for getting in on this post!)

Roger Dean Huffstetler gives Twitter a bit of advice on what to do with Twitter Local.

And finally Rich Harris published an interesting piece on how Facebook Deals could be the first step towards Facebook’s domination of local and global e-commerce. Yikes!

Tip for the weekend — get local and social with your family and friends and try not to think too much about this stuff. There will be plenty more where that came from next week.