This Week in Social Local Media

This week I sat down with Matthew Goldman of ATTi  to explore how executives can better manage their companies’ reputations while Mike was busy moderating a panel at Mediabistro’s Socialize conference on developing real-world products at the intersection of mobile and social. Mike also told us Facebook reported reaching 250 million mobile active subscribers.

Jed told us about Travidia’s Find-n-Save app, which helps publishers promote local social deals.

Here’s what we uncovered this week in socialsphere:

How to Get Started With Social Media
Where do I start? That’s the most asked question by marketers at small-and-mid-size businesses when first considering creating social media campaigns in Facebook, Twitter and similar social sites, according to Anne Field. So, she gets advice from three experts: Rhea Drysdale, Lee Odden and Wendy King.

Are You a Q&A Expert?

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Social Local Interview With Matthew Goldman of ATTi on Reputation Monitoring

This is the first in a series of interviews we will be doing with executives focused on Social Local Media

While much has been made of how social media is changing consumer behavior, advertisers are struggling to keep up with and make sense of this shiny new toy. Matthew Goldman is the executive director of product management for subscription ad products at ATT Interactive (parent of YellowPages.com). Goldman is ATTi’s point man on social strategies for its advertisers.

What Products Are You Responsible For?
I am responsible for Consumer & Advertiser Products including IYP products, YP 360, websites, mobile websites and social media products.

How Does ATTi Think About Social Media Regarding Its Advertisers?
Social needs to be interwoven into everything. Three years ago there was hardly any focus on social within the organization, and perhaps in the industry. Now it’s everywhere and we’ve bought into that.

We are providing the basics. For example, when we build a website for an advertiser it will have FB like button and Twitter feeds. If you add video there are video sharing tools and virtual tours. In addition you can add a Facebook Fan page to your site.

What Are You Doing for Reputation Monitoring?
In August 2010 we rolled out our Online Presence Manager, which allows a business to review its reviews from a variety of review sites. We are private labeling Marchex’s platform and integrating it with ATT’s single sign-on. Any ATT customer who buys any ad product, including a bold listing in the book, is provided with ability to sign up for a free/lite version. The lite version limits the number of trends you can track and provides a monthly email summary of activity. For businesses that don’t get a lot of reviews, this is a good way to start. The paid version is about $30/month and includes unlimited history and alerts and competitor comparison view, so you can see how the guy across the street is doing. We are seeing pretty strong take rates and now have over 10,000 customers, many of which are paid.

ATTi’s Online Presence Manager Reviews Dashboard
OPM-Reviews

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This Week in Social Local Media

While we were recovering from ILM East this week, Google decided to unveil +1, the search engines answer to social networking. Not all were impressed. It’s about time, though. We have been waiting for months. While some industry experts suggest the symbol is Google’s answer to Facebook’s Like or Twitter’s tweet, I’m still digesting the impact on local and social marketing and advertising. And just to show Google that people still like it, they really really like it, Facebook announced that it now has more than 250 million mobile users.

On the blog we also covered Closely’s debut of Social Select, a way for merchants to share deals with their best customers that they can share with others. And we uncovered a post by Ross Mayfield, who strikes a chord with insights and anecdotes about how social engagement empowers organizations.

Here’s what we uncovered this week in socialsphere:

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Is Google’s New Social Service a +1?

Google launched +1 today, basically its answer to Facebook’s Like button. When you click on a “+1″ icon displayed on a URL, it shows up in Google search results when you are signed in. And if you have social connections within the Google empire (e.g., Gmail contacts) you will see which of your connections has +1’d the URL. While I am digesting the possibilities I thought it might be helpful to summarize some initial reads on the +1:

Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button – Danny Sullivan

Google did say that if someone does a +1 on a web page, then that will show up to others who find that page in search results. That’s going to be a huge bribe, in my view, for getting wide adoption of these buttons on web sites.

Now Google Social Search will gain +1 recommendations, content that people are explicitly recommending using Google’s +1 buttons. Google Social Search remains, but in addition to the first two items below, it now gains a third feature:

Show content created by those in your social network
Show content shared by those in your social network
Show content recommended by those in your Google +1 network
Social search signals, including the new +1 recommendations, will also continue to influence the first two things below plus power the new, third option:

Influence the ranking of results, causing you to see things others might not, based on your social connections
Influence the look of results, showing names of those in your social network who created, shared or now recommend a link
Influence the look of results, showing an aggregate number of +1s from all people, not just your social network, for some links

What’s +1 mean for Facebook? A very good chance that Facebook’s seeming monopoly on how people “like” pages will be over.

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The Social CRM Iceberg

I just stumbled onto a post (thanks Twitter!) from 2009 by Ross Mayfield, Co-Founder of SocialText, called The Social C.R.M. Iceberg.  It’s a long piece but Mayfield’s insights and anecdotes about how social engagement is empowering organizations is worth the time for any of you who are pondering your company’s social strategies.

Some excerpts to whet your appetite:

Greg Oxton from the Consortium for Service Innovation (CSI) shared with me a model for understanding how engaged enterprises really are:

  • 1% of customer conversations are assimilated as organizational knowledge
  • 9% of customer conversations touch the organization, but no learning occurs
  • 90% of customer conversations never touch the organization

But before you leap into reinventing your processes for transformative value, step back. You can’t collaborate with your customers before you learn to collaborate with your employees. In the spectrum of risk taking, its best to deploy from the inside-out.

In larger organizations such as Intel, if you measure it, you will find people spending a day a week searching for people and information. This isn’t just a search problem, its a sharing problem.

Have you ever asked a question on Twitter?

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This Week in Social Local Media

We had a big week at ILM East. The conference got under way with David Weinberger focusing on the use of social media by local businesses. In the post, Rick follows the keynote by Weinberger, the author and the senior researcher at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University. Gail Goodman CEO at Constant Contact kicked off the second day with a call for the industry to collaborate.

I did some live blogging at ILM East when Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz spoke about the ticket-selling service riding social media to about $500 million in sales this year.

We also gave details on ILM East panels from hyperlocal to Hotpot to mobile group-buying from Monster Offers.

Here’s what we uncovered this week out there in the socialsphere:

What We Know That You Should Know Too
Lisa Barone gets with Gregg Stewart, Dilip Venkatachari, Ryan Fritzky and Andrew Lovasz to discuss local and social. She packs the post full of stats and useful tidbits. The group shares numbers and insights such as nearly half of people searching on social networks select a local business based on consumer ratings and reviews.

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This Week in Social Local Media

LivingSocial stepped up to the plate Thursday with the ultimate daily deal. On the blog this week, Peter tells us that for every $5 donated for Japan Relief to the U.S. Red Cross, LivingSocial will match it.

Social dominated much of the news this week. I looked at how Google slowly continues to reveal its social search strategy, while Jed summarized Google’s Marissa Mayer’s keynote at South By Southwest (SXSE), the focus on Hotpot.

Jed wrapped up our continuous coverage of SXSW from the check-ins to the daily deals and how Twitter continues to save broadcast TV. (What a week.) Wait, there’s more. Mike told us about the mobile and social scene at ILM East, and Peter dealt us the details on Yellowbook’s Pat Marshall.

Here’s what we uncovered this week out there in the socialsphere:

Nobody Ever Gets Fired for Hiring Gilbert Gottfried
What happens when word come across on Twitter or Facebook as “tasteless, inappropriate and insensitive”? Aflac and Chrysler Group struggled to answer that question this week, according to Stuart Elliott. He tells us one expert calls it the “amplified effect” of social media and provides insight on what to do if it happens to you.

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This Week in Social Local Media

On the blog this week, Mike B. covered the big news about Foursquare’s new app and introduced us to Lolay. Jed shared some thoughts about the deal between Bing and The Dealmap to aggregate deals while AT&T announced its own group buying platform as did The NY Times. Jed also answered some questions about social media data from last week’s webinar and I previewed DemandForce’s new Facebook product.

And we shouldn’t pass up pointing to Charles’ post on the survey from Suffolk University that suggests the most overlooked element of small-business marketing is the uniform. The survey found 80% of general building contractors believe their uniform was more effective than Internet advertising. Really, no fooling.

Here’s what we uncovered this week out there in the socialsphere:

What the $%@! Did Your Agency Just Tweet?
Picture 13
Chrysler had to fire its social media agency for tweeting smack about Detroit. No bail out for that tweeter.

Citibank Goes Long on Social
Citibank’s CEO spent a fair amount of his company’s annual report talking about how it needs to embrace social media (and make money), not necessarily in that order of course.

SCVNGR Combines Groupon and Foursquare
LevelUp, a new service from SCVNGR, teaches marketers how to combine game dynamics, social media and location-based services to turn customers into regulars, according to Erica Naone. SCVNGR, financed in part by Google Ventures, makes location-based services a game.

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DemandForce Connect For Facebook Gins Up Demand From SMB Social Profiles

I first came across DemandForce because it was popping up in Google Maps a couple of years ago. DemandForce was started in 2003 by Rick Berry and Sam Osman to help dentists and auto shops market themselves online. Today, with more than 7,000 clients across a variety of local service verticals, it is a fast-growing local SMB software service company located in the Bay Area. I caught up with Bonnie Wang, DF’s manager of professional services, at SMX West today to get an idea of DemandForce Connect For Facebook, its recently launched social media service.

DF has three apps that help customers generate more demand from Facebook. People can request an appointment via the SMB’s Facebook page with DF’s Easy Scheduler app. Once a customer makes an appointment, it shows up in the SMB’s DemandForce dashboard and will show the source of the lead. Currently more than 1,000 DF clients are using this app. According to Wang, those businesses that are active on Facebook are seeing the greatest use of the app by customers.
Picture 10

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The Local Reviews Ecosystem — Threats and Opportunities Abound

One of the slides we presented at last week’s Social Local webinar was from my Local Reviews Ecosystem post. We sped through it and given the brouhaha that has been bubbling up between Google and reviews sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor over the past year, I thought it might be of interest to repost it.
local reviews ecosystem

As I mentioned in the earlier post, in my survey of 20 SMB SEM consultants about their top social media client priorities for 2011, review generation and review management was by far the highest on the to-do list.

As you can see from the infographic, the ecosystem is complex, just like the entire local search ecosystem is complex — David Mihm’s chart on how local search services are connected deserves to be included in a Where’s Waldo book. But within that complexity lie amazing green fields of opportunity for innovation. Some thoughts on how you might approach the sector:

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