TechCrunch Disrupt: Yext Gets Into the Rep Management Game
Yext just announced at the TechCrunch disrupt conference here in New York that it will launch a reputation management platform called Yext Rep.
Joining its “pay per action” management dashboard (and products in the market from Marchex, AmIVisible and Chatmeter), this is meant to allow small businesses to establish and manage the things that are being said about them.
To do this, it scrapes and federates the chatter occurring on Yelp, Citysearch, Foursquare and Twitter. As we’ve mentioned, this is a growing area within the local space, given the volume of this chatter that is occurring on a growing base of local sites.
According to CEO Howard Lerman, this growing area of presence management has three main components they’re shooting for: 1. Listings accuracy and claiming listings 2. Active listening to what’s being said about your business. 3. Speed in responding.
To hit up all these points, Lerman claims a breadth of sites that are monitored including the main ones listed above as well as vertically oriented sites (“Local is verticalized,” he argues) such as health forums for fitness clubs. Speed is meanwhile accomplished with push notifications to SMBs for new comments, reviews, tweets, etc.
But what mostly differentiates Yext Rep, according to Lerman, is how it plugs in with Yext’s existing call management system (see our writeup) — as well as other ad products, like Citysearch’s CityGrid. It will move its advertisers over to Yext Rep as the main product, while its call management and pay-per-call will be a central component.
“Just like users check Facebook to see what their friends are doing, SMBs can check this to monitor all customer activity,” he says, adding that Yext Rep will also be a free and open platform on top of which developers can build features.
Good coverage, Mike. Question in my mind is how many of these businesses, especially local ones (other than a cool restaurant or club), have much buzz and chatter about them. The accurate listings part makes sense, but many of them will have challenges, due to the nature of their businesses, generating buzz and having much to really monitor. It will only take a couple checks of the site, with no new buzz, to make a busy business owner disregard the service and its value. Will be interesting to monitor how they do with it.