Feeding Your Yelp - Feral Rogue Monster or Loyal House Pet?

Chew on this: 30,000,000 unique users in the last 30 days. Ten million reviews. The very socially networked review site Yelp serves many uses for many netizens. For some it’s Extortion 2.0, for some a free promotional tool, but for all of Arizona small businesses, Yelp isn’t just another site — it’s a site that, at least for the foreseeable future, requires your business’ participation. Yep, giddy-up! From BoBo’s to college-aged urbanites, more people are using Yelp with more frequency to choose where to dine, what to wear, and how to see and be seen. Whether you like it or not, educated consumers with cornucopia shaped wallets decide where and how to spend their disposable income using Yelp, so if your business is local (and it wouldn’t hurt chains to do the same), cultivation of your business’ Yelp page is absolutely essential.

"When you're in a trend-driven business, if you're not keeping up with the trends, you're just going to get old with your clientele and die," says Lauren Hart of the Root Salon in a recent Inc. Magazine article on Yelp. If your business is well-established, you probably already have a page and you may feel a mild sense of disquiet knowing how little content control you have, which defines the very nature of social media’s relationship to business. But by accepting and embracing this new trend, this new reality, you can grow your business with escalated loyalty and prevent less than positive word of mouth from defining your growth and success. But you’ll want to take the reigns and facilitate an upbeat, positive conversation in the areas you do control as soon as possible.

Properly updating your Yelp business page or creating a new one if its not up yet is easy; in under five minutes you will need to fill out a couple forms and answer a quick, automated phone call. Once complete, you’ll have immediate access to some very powerful tools that will help you engage your future and current customers and advertise your product or service to the community. Below are a few basic tips for successfully leveraging the no cost tools Yelp offers for the benefit of your local business.

Hazy and Lazy is Crazy

Typically, customers refer to Yelp business pages to learn about a business before going out to visit in person. If the information on the Yelp page is incomplete, they’re likely to move on to a competitor that provides more details or that advertises on your page, as you’ll see below, simply because they’ll better know what to expect and are less likely to be surprised, disappointed, or waste time and money. 180 Degrees Automotive is a perfect example. It’s one of the very few car repair shops in Phoenix where the owner has taken the time to fill out the info page, which includes detailed information about their specialties and history. Because of this, some of the most influential “Elite” Yelpers, including the well respected Thomas S, have reviews raving about this shop after seeing it on Yelp, while very few other shops have the same owner investment or review showcase. Just as in the car repair world, in the social media world trust and presence are the currency so don’t skimp.

The business owner administration page offers a wide array of fields and choices for sharing information to show Yelp users exactly what to expect and what you offer. It really is that simple! If you provide the information they’re seeking, chances are they will become reliable, repeat customers. But remember to give without any expectation of return and fill out as much information as you can and keep it up to date. Do all this, stay on top of your messages and post pictures and you’ll be a highly value business in this community.

Be Your Yelp-Actualized Higher Functioning Self

If the Inc. Magazine article on Yelp taught us anything, it’s that emotions can run high for small business owners who put everything into their business and see it criticized online.

Last Spring, Yelp gave business owners a virtual outlet to respond to negative reviews. Owners may privately apologize to reviewers or publicly correct misinformation. Don’t be afraid of using this feature for fear of making things worse; it can and often does turn a bad situation around. Dissatisfied customers will often give you a second look if you communicate to them that you value their input and are making changes to improve your business. For example, in a recent review, Georgie S. lamented about the cost of her dry cleaning bill and damage to one of her dresses. To their credit, Organic Dry Cleaners sent her a message apologizing for the damage to her dress and offering to buy her a new one. The owner also gave her credits to return to have future garments cleaned on the house. Georgie recently returned to Organic, had a much improved experience, and said she intends to update her review to reflect the good will of the owner towards dissatisfied customers. Good will towards tough customers and humanizing your business can go a long way.

Yelp publishes an easy-to-use guide to constructive user review responses. It includes examples of how not to respond to user reviews and some of the best methodologies for when you do move forward to begin a dialogue. Some of the tips are common sense-based, but some of them aren’t as intuitive. In addition, you may want to check out “How to Deal with Negative Feedback in Social Media.”

No Surprise, Yelpers Love FREE & Discounted

Yelp allows you to share special offers and announcements not just with the people who visit your business’ page, but with members of the larger community who might not even be aware of your existence. By creating an offer or announcement on Yelp, it automatically appears in the local offers and announcements directory and on your Yelp page. People who have never heard of your business may see them and is a great opportunity to drum up some free exposure. What’s more, your business shows up in the Yelper’s search results.

The more of these offers and announcements you make, the more opportunities you’re creating for Yelp users to discover your business, so come up with creative ways to draw people in and share news. This is also a good way to cross pollinate your social media strategies by offering specials for people who join your Facebook Fan page, follow you on Twitter, or check-in on Foursquare. You’ll find many Yelpers on other social media sites.

Promote Your Yelpresence

Yelp provides badges that you can embed on your business’s website or blog that show that you’re on Yelp and engaged with your community. They even tell visitors how many positive reviews you’ve had.

These badges demonstrate to potential customers that you have existing satisfied customers vouching for you thereby giving you an immediate level of “street cred.” The badges also act as a link between your Yelp page and your other social media efforts. Yelp users who click your badge will read reviews, see your ranking, and gather other information that will hopefully lead them to purchase your product or services. Another excellent benefit of the badge is those happy customers who visit your site or blog, see the badge, and write the corresponding positive review.

To Advertise or Not to Advertise?

Advertising on Yelp costs between $300 and $1,000 per month. It buys you additional exposure as you’ll appear at the top of the list when users perform a search related to your business or industry.

Other benefits include advertisements located directly on your competitor’s page like the one seen here and being able to feature one good review of your choosing at the top of the list on your business’ page. You cannot edit, move, or delete negative reviews, however. Like many aspects of social media marketing, it’s difficult to quantify or reliably calculate the return on investment for these premium services; a number of factors unique to your business, competition, and region will ultimately demonstrate the value or lack there of. That said, if you have advertised, we’d love to hear from you about your results.

Foursquare for Profit?

If you’re anything like me, you’re state-of-mind young and dog years old. Not really old, but old enough that you have live-action commitments. A brick and mortar life with time enough for minor indiscretions like Twitter. It’s so easy. It’s right there on my phone! I also have time enough for Facebook. It’s right there on my netbook! I read a couple blogs. I am able to scan 1000 news articles in minutes with my Google reader. I check out Yelp when I need a recommendation. You’re reading this on Blogger. I dig Digg. There are other pleasures, some more guilty than others.

But I don’t have time to be an active participant on everything...

During my misspent youth, during the hey day of pay to play, I spent a lot of time trying to early-adopt any new SM sites/trends. Most accounts went Mad Max with a screen name and little else. Today, while I don’t have time to sign up for, let alone participate in, all the new sites that pop up daily, I keep my ear to the ground for the next up and comer.

foursquare is singing the Sirens’ song. I’ve been thinking ear plugs. I don’t want to be theMayor of anything. It’s enough responsibility keeping our Digis fed. Plus, my Starbucks addiction is embarrassing. But maybe there’s something to it...

In case you aren’t familiar, foursquare “is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things.” The designers “aim to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.”

Like many new SM technologies, few could blame a business owner or manager, such as a restauranteur who has a thousand other concerns, for thinking this is

little more than an adult hide and seek game with a very limited ability to noticeably impact their bottom line. Why bother when its chances of truly becoming a widely-adopted phenomenon are so slim? But if SM power users have taught us anything, it’s that tech geeks travel in packs and ePacks and they like this particular technology. Look to the various Phoenix Metro Friday night groups or Phoenix’s Social Media Club as examples. This is a small but influential community of mid to upper income, educated consumers. According to Quantcast.com, current foursquare users are 18 to 34 year old college educated males who make between $30-60k per year and have no kids. Not bad. In Scottsdale, this demographic spends like millionaires.

All joking aside, can it really bring customers in the door? Maybe. Try announcing specials for the Mayor and allow the competitive juices to flow. Adding a competitive component to a coupon-like reward that can, by its nature, only be allocated to one person at a time is a small investment with a limited cost, zero upkeep, and has the potential for wide distribution. Additionally, reward users who visit your establishment frequently. After a certain number of visits, offer a small token of your appreciation, because not everyone will want to be the Mayor, but many people carry a broad array of loyalty punch cards around in their wallets. This can easily, and with no cost, serve the same purpose.

If you want examples of local companies that are already taking advantage of foursquare’s pack mentality and competitive allure, look no further than some of the hottest new businesses and one that has been in the Valley for years. Sidebar, a popular lounge destination located

above a Starbucks in downtown, offers the first drink free on Tuesdays and Thursdays to the Mayor, and a free shot every 10th visit for everyone else. Sweet Republic, a SM savvy ice cream shop in Scottsdale, offers a free single scoop for the Mayor. Even Monti’s La Casa Vieja, an institution and landmark in Tempe for decades, sees foursquare’s potential and asks users to help them get acquainted with it in the form of a nickel drink to everyone upon check-in.

It’s too early to know with any certainty whether using marketing tactics that rely on your customers’ competitive nature will pay off but rewarding frequency is a well-supported tactic and you’ll soon be able to stop printing stamp cards if foursquare gains any more steam.

Please let us if your business monitors foursquare or whether you intend to or, if you’re a customer, if you have a favorite local business that offers rewards.

Pimp My Fan Page (by having one)

Let’s say you want to create a start-up, or you already sell goods or services, and it’s legitimacy you seek. If you are like most business owners, you weren’t born incorporated, nor is there an “LLC” after your name on your birth certificate. Fortunately, recognizing this simultaneously deoxyribonucleic and juristic deficit in our humanness, our state and federal legislative branches created the legal entities necessary for the American entrepreneurial spirit to flourish, such as Inc.’s and (P)LLCs and Sole Proprietorships, etc... You may be the business, Ms. Plastic Surgeon, Mr. Realtor, but the government wants a delineation, for which there are many reasons both good and cumbersome.


And let’s just assume your business is a baby blanket boutique or a coffee cafe or widget warehouse. Most goods and services vendors require physical space to operate. Before the modern agora, our fore-bearers may have thought, “I already own a hut. I’ll use this space for sleeping AND selling the recently invented wheel.” Nowadays, we have a pretty well-established system separating business and home. While some of us have found amazing downtown work/live spaces, most customers would find it bizarre to shop in our closets or pantries.

These same comparisons hold up surprisingly well in social media, networking, and marketing worlds. Too many businesses create personal Facebook pages despite a well-developed Fan Page system with markedly more business functionality. Not only is it against the Facebook terms of service, but the Social Media savvy are not typically receptive to a friend request followed by a bombardment of unsolicited messages, invitations, and promotions. This business has not only lost a potential customer who has a voice online, but actively turned them off because it demonstrates several factors almost guaranteed to be oppressive to your potential “fans,” including:

Your naiveté and/or apathy for the rules.
“Social” is missing from your social networking.
A talking at-based approach instead of providing quality, usable, or interesting content.
Your disinterest in customer feedback, since you provide no real outlet for it.
An inconsequential connection to your customers.
You are quite probably annoying.

The list goes on...

So you want to create a killer fan page? Great! Here are some excellent resources to give you some ideas...

For the technically savvy, Mashable helps you to build a professional landing page for your fans and provides sound advice about making it successful, but remember, a very basic Fan Page is far superior to a busy personal page. To see some fantastic examples of what other companies have done, check out Baby Gap, Adidas, Dell, and last, but not least, Victoria’s Secret. If you recognize the importance of a great landing page, but are not sure about what features you want to include, check out 30+ applications here and here... Remember, this requires a minimal upfront investment of time, is free, and will payoff in spades in the long run. In fact, the Coca-Cola Fan Page is a result of passionate customers who created it before Coca-Cola even saw the value. It continues today as an Fan-run project. Don’t delay, Fan Page today!

Having said all that, we’re here to learn too. If you have reasons you prefer the personal Facebook page over the Fan Page, we’d love to hear from you.

Buzz Saw

The interwebs are buzzing...

Can you feel it? It’s the vibration of a new assimilation tool for social media’s Borg-like interconnected collective. Is resistance futile? With 176 million Gmail accounts and growing, is Google poised to usurp its competitors as the SM hive Queen? With the introduction of Buzz, the question of the moment, quite literally, is no longer “What are you doing?” or “What’s on your mind?” Instead, assuming Google’s social (media) engineers have truly tapped into the missing link in our minute by minute collective connective, and that assumes plenty, we’re being asked (or have the opportunity depending on your world view) to go beyond the status message. Buzz’s conversation starter is reminiscent of that first comfortable, quiet moment in a new relationship when your partner asks slowly and with marked sincerity, “What are you thinking?” Google's verbiage is only slightly less smooth, “Share updates, photos, videos, and more. Start conversations about the things you find interesting.”

Whether Buzz is busy buzz-sawing and cannibalizing its cousin, Wave, or helping to groom it as the future of email (too bad the Gmail moniker is taken), for the foreseeable future it will be locked in an unmistakable three-way battle for your online “me” time. With 400 million friends, the juggernaut, Facebook, is not going away anytime soon. If its proof you seek, think about this... According to the site, there are 89,000,000 active e-agrarians using the Farmville application! Yep, that’s an eighty-nine with six zeros! Twitter, by comparison, boasts somewhere between one and six million active users based on a which web analytics site you trust. One fact is obvious, however, the number of tweets per month is GROWING!

In November of 2009, the popular SM blog Mashable asked readers to vote on their favorite SM service. The results favored Facebook with 48 percent of the vote to Twitter’s 40 percent. Fast forward to two days ago and Mashable asked its readers the same question, only this time throwing the mere days-old Buzz into the mix. This time, 47 percent of respondents displayed Facebook favoritism, while 18 percent feel the Buzz and 26 percent plan to continue tweeting with Twitter. Pretty clear evidence, at least in SM circles, that baby Buzz is taking candy straight from Twitter’s beak.

Let’s face it, in a time-constraint free world, Facebook is our own personal website, Twitter satisfies our need to quick-connect and emote, and Buzz allows for content heavy conversation with cleaner multimedia and location sharing. And while Facebook and Twitter updates can be programmed as mirror replicas, and you can gadgetize your Gmail to include Facebook and Twitter a mere mouse click away from Buzz, staying abreast of all three will be a challenge to all but the most devoted social mediaficionados. Ari Milner describes this embedded SM set up as his “social command center.” Typical drone terminology. Maybe resistance is futile.

POLL
What do you think:
A. Facebook is my one and only
B. Give me Twitter or give me death
C. Who's the pretty new girl in school, Buzz?
D. I like to "play the field"

Give (more) and ye shall receive

In a recent tweet in Innovate AZ’s Twitter stream, the author seemed compelled to explain the defriendship of Facebook connection. Citing “Far too frequent” and “impersonal messages” from a particular campaign staffer, at least one door was closed on that campaign’s social media message. For Innovate AZ, that begs the question: even for candidates you support, is there a point at which the use of SM as a megaphone rather than interactive tool becomes counterproductive? While the tweet described above could be an isolated incident, the tech savvy certainly have appreciation and respect for those whose SM presence is marked by genuine participation and a value-added contribution. And while it is still in its infancy and effective strategies are ripening, it is difficult to deny that there are two (albeit ambiguously outlined) camps in the SM marketing world: those who participate and those who shout.

It turns out, it doesn’t take a Herculean research effort to find others who are asking similar questions. In a recent eye-opening SM experiment, Phoenix Children’s Hospital Marketing Manager Jessica Catlin tested the virtual ears and eyes of her 50 incumbent and candidate Facebook friends. Jessica explains, “I'm so grateful to get status updates from elected official/candidate Facebook friends, but I'm hoping more will embrace the ‘social’ aspect of social media.” So she asked them to respond to her post. Her prize: glowing public accolades to the first ten respondents. As it turns out, ten responses was an aggressive goal as she only received comments from five candidates. Of the five who responded, three currently hold office and are running for a statewide office, one is a legislative candidate and one is seeking re-election to a city council seat.

It seems fair to say this is a territory where many campaigns have room for growth. Tamar Weinburg, in her book The New Community Rules, states that too many view SM as a goal-achieving tool. She argues that like conventional communities, SM communities are built on giving and receiving. Since political campaigns, like businesses, live and die by goals, whether fundraising, signatures or votes, many are susceptible to overreaching on this platform to achieve those ends. While national level candidates can get away with using SM as an information distribution and a high level goal seeking apparatus, local candidates should be especially cautious of over-asking and under-participating. Bombarding friends and followers with requests and not participating could, in some cases, be worse than not participating in SM at all if your method is turning off current or potential supporters.

In a less than scientific survey, Innovate AZ has been asking local social mediaphiles the following question: What is the perfect mix of genuine participation and SM marketing to keep a cause or message relevant instead of automatically sifted out with the “chatter,” as one person described it? While the responses have been mixed, it is a pretty safe bet that if a campaign or organization’s ratio of participation to message marketing is 10 to 1, they are in the 98th percentile of successful SM message conveyors. Yuri Artibise, a Phoenix SM media guru and policy enthusiast, made the following observation: If you get a 1 to 1 ratio [of participation to SM marketing], that’s something noteworthy. If you find a campaign with a 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 ratio, well, that’s amazing.

So who's amazing? We would love to hear from you about political campaigns whose SM messages are not lost in the crowd. Please share examples of the shining SM stars and the methodologies they are employing to keep you engaged.