Small businesses can’t afford to ignore online review sites.  CitySearch, Yelp, InsiderPages, and basic reviews consumers make on Google and Yahoo business pages – they are incredibly important to your online reputation.

IMPORTANT: new customers are reviewing these reviews to make their decision on whether to do business with you or not.  Even if they are staring at your mailer that came in their mailbox, or seeing your fancy custom Facebook Page, they are still going to do their investigative research.  Most of us take the time to do this on books we’re going to by, movies we’re about to shell our $12 for, gadgets we’re eager to consume or hotels we’re looking forward to enjoy.  We are sophisticated consumers who know we have the power of the internet at our fingertips!

If you are a business and you have a negative review, the only way to overcome it is to overpower that one negative review with a dozen GREAT reviews!  Eventually not only will that bad review fall off the front page, but you’ll also see your 1-star rating move up to 4 or 5 stars!

To assist you,

• Randy Vaughn writes, “Managing Your Online Reputation“
• John Jantsch writes, “5 Ways to Get Rockin’ Reviews“

Church leadership – pay attention to this!  Love this podcast interview from @evangelismcoach:

The best quote comes at the end of the interview (about 40:30) as to WHY churches should use press releases:

“Churches do many more wonderful things than most people realize. Press releases aren’t just about helping a church increase its attendance or increase its contributions.  When you publicize the wonderful things you are doing for the world, you are helping the church at large – because you’re helping change the image of what it is that Christians do.  Alot of people just don’t know that and we aren’t effective enough at telling.”

Listen in as Richard Hong, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Englewood NJ shares:

• on different types of press releases
• what makes for useless press releases
• how his church distributes press releases
• How they get free professional videos made
• How to effectively position your press release in community newspapers.
• The nuts and bolts of formatting a press release for your church.

Finally, he wraps it up with some specific action steps you can take if you want to develop a press release strategy for your church.

Whether you are a church, nonprofit, or even a small business, you will learn something from that 40-min recording!  (yes, I learned some things, too!)

Here’s a couple of posts we’ve done over the years on how small businesses should use news releases as part of their marketing strategy (note: on one of the articles, I link to Grazr.com which is no longer available).

-Randy

Here’s a replay of a blog post from last year called “What I Learned from Africa about Niche Marketing”

Enjoy!

-Randy

image source: jokeemail.com

OK – first of all I haven’t checked-in anywhere yet!

But I plan on it.

I have been using Foursquare for a while now and Donny has been using Gowalla.  Competiting location-based services (LBS), we decided we could divide and conquer and compare the two major LBS giants (there are plenty of other sites, not to mention Yelp).  There are others out there as well, but these are the ones we wanted to play with.

• If LBS is new to you, here’s a Wiki page about it (make sure you got your coffee first!)
• Here’s several articles about Foursquare that could help explain its advantages
• Here’s a forum on Gowalla’s site that (obviously biased, but they make their case why they are better)

Now Facebook Places is announced yesterday.  Rather than writing my own review (since I really haven’t experimented enough with it), here’s a good one from TechCrunch.

A couple of surprises:

• It’s only available in the U.S. – really?  I know they will roll it out internationally, but Foursquare did a huge deal with the recent World Cup in South Africa – why roll out something in a global social media economy that is only available in one country?  I think I would have waited.
• I also hear that it is not available everywhere in the U.S. yet.  Same question as before.  Really?
• Why call it “Places” when Google just recently announced their new “Pages” feature which is more geared toward local search?  Confusing.

I’ve got alot of ideas on how these LBS tools can be used by businesses and even churches to reward loyalty and encouraging social word-of-mouth (aka, “word-of-phone”).  This article from the NYTimes also highlights how Places will be used to compete with Google for advertising space (although I really don’t pay attention much to Facebook advertising now).  I’ll be curious if Facebook Places offers something special that taps into their overwhelming dominance in the social networking world.  Alot of research still to do.  But know that we’re looking into it for you!

-Randy