An Open Letter to Googl...

Dear Google Places Team, Google Places has the potential to truly help businesses of all sizes since virtually every business be they large or small, has a place page for its location as well as its satellites. That’s very cool. We as regular folks using the Internet like the potential. I use the word potential only because while there can be great benefit to a business with regard to Place Pages and now with the added Google+ brand pages (why aren’t these two integrated in some way anyway but that’s for another letter, I guess?) yet you still don’t seem to understand some simple concepts. First is customer support. I realize that place pages are free blah, blah, blah but even free deserves some help especially when you make random changes to how pages are displayed, you merge listings without warning and you change data in listings that are supposedly controlled by the very business owners that were aware and conscientious enough to verify and claim their listing so THEY could give the correct information rather than the outdated info you have gotten from one of your data warehousers. Your approach to your “customer” is incongruent at best and pathetic at worst. You want everyone to claim pages and take control then you change things without sufficient warning etc, etc. Could you explain that, please? Even more interesting though is your attempt at building community around place pages. Your blog is filled with profiles of people that are our “neighbors”. Well, for about 99% (number pulled out of the air for effect, I admit it) of those seeing the profiles, we don’t know this hyper cool person and likely will never meet said person, let alone really care about their likes and dislikes etc etc. You know what would build community around Place Pages? Information about how to get help that isn’t in a forum that is manned not by someone who is not being paid to help and yet does an infinitely better job of helping others understand the whole process than most folks on your team, aka Mike Blumenthal . No actual regular Google employees who deal with these issues from your side of the table on a day to day basis so us commoners can get a better grasp of how to use these offerings more effectively. Oh and not to mention the fact that you have introduced the ability for a competitor to actually place an ad inside the map bubble that appears for a business listing? That’s just plain lame. ( I just remembered that one so I threw it in here so I wouldn’t forget). There is SO much more but I wanted to really write this letter to see if anyone in Mountain View is actually listening to people who use your systems and services for local reasons. I know you will say there are gobs of people working full time to make sure that things are running smoothly but why don’t you give us names? Give the local search community our own Matt Cutts or something. Throw us a frickin’ bone here (I used by best Dr. Evil typing motion with a pinky up to type that one). So that’s it for now. I know there are a million other issues to address and I can only hope that some of the real local experts will chime in with comments to help share their level of frustration with your efforts to build community that is surfacey and does nothing to actually make your service work better. After all, if you paid real attention to the actual business owners’ needs, we will actually spend more money with you because it is generating revenue for us. How about that?! So Google Places team, is there anybody out there?

Google+ To Take On Four...

It looks like Google+ is adding a feature that will allow users to “check-in” via the Google+ mobile application in order to receive a time-sensitive deal or discount. This feature is mentioned in Google Places’s help documentation , but has not yet been made available to business owners using the Google Places service . Google check-ins have a confusing history, it has to be said. To be clear, the ability to check in via Google+ is not new. Google’s location-based social service  Google Latitude launched checkins in February, prior to the launch of Google+. And when Google+ arrived on mobile , it offered a check-in feature of its own, seemingly based on Latitude, which pulls up a list of nearby Google Places. Google Latitude also allows you to sync your Latitude check-ins with Google+, as Google explains here . Other documentation refers to check-in offers for Latitude users ( link ), but again, nothing that specifically says these offers will show up for users checking in on Google+. Whew! Yeah, it’s kind of a big ol’ mess right now. Google probably should have killed off Latitude when Google+ launched to avoid this kind of confusion. Maybe it still will. After all, now you can checkin on Google+ and there are so many other places to find Google’s Offers, including the  Google Shopper application  (iOS/Android), the Google Offers application for Android , and the Google Offers website . And soon, apparently, Google+. The new help documentation was spotted by Mike Blumental , who also notes that Google has recently started cracking down on businesses whose offers don’t include a real discount of some sort. Business owners are receiving emails explaining that offers should provide “a monetary discount or an additional good or service that is not normally included.”  (That’s per the Offers Guidelines here .) As for the forthcoming Google+ check-in offers, here’s the Help Documentation that explains how Google+ users can receive the deal or discount. It reads (emphasis mine): If your customers have to visit your locations in order to do business with you, you can request that they check-in on Google+ in order to redeem your offers . They can choose to share the check-in publicly or with some of their circles, which helps spread the word about your business on Google+. They can also choose to keep their check-in private and still redeem an offer. Again, this is not a “Google Places” check-in offer or a “Google Latitude” check-in offer being discussed here, it’s a “Google+” check-in offer. So is this new? It appears so, because the option for a business owner to actually include the Google+ check-in offer hasn’t yet gone live within the Offers tab of Google Places, which is here such things are maintained. This is what it looks like now (see below): This all seems to imply that Google+ is going to soon encourage more check-ins through the integration of check-in deals and discounts, similar to Foursquare. It’s an obvious next move, of course, but it’s good to see it all confirmed in black & white…help documentation.

LocalVox Launches Full-...

Hyperlocal is all the rage these days, and content companies, deal sites, and everyone in between are trying to find better ways to access (and advertise to) local markets. Over the last decade, the majority of media companies have attempted to launch internal or on-site outlets that cover local news, but most have met with middling success. NearSay , a New York City-based startup that launched six months ago, began by asking a simple question: “Where do we get our neighborhood news?” NearSay’s founders, Trevor Sumner and David Pachter, were startled by the lackluster and confusing responses to that question and, in turn, the dearth of valuable neighborhood outlets for local news. So, for their answer, they started a platform that began as a realtime business newswire to allow local businesses in New York City to publish announcements (on events, deals, etc.) to the NearSay platform. Now an aggressive publisher of neighborhood lifestyle news, the startup has partnered with small, local publications (where they exist) to allow local businesses to target their content to the people who can actually benefit from — and want to hear about — local news. To add to their platform, the startup launched LocalVox , which is (among other things) a white label advertorial publishing tool that allows niche publishers to syndicate their clients’ content across the startup’s network and blast that content out to social media outlets. The idea was to create a Yellow Pages 3.0, which not only serves as a tool to help readers or searchers find telephone numbers or addresses of local merchants, but to actually help those merchants optimize their placement in search results and get found by the people who need them. Today, the company is now calling itself LocalVox Media, and NearSay, its contextual newswire service, has become a feature of the platform. As a part of this rebranding, the startup is launching LocalVox 2.0, with which it is hoping to become a full, multichannel marketing tool for local businesses and publishers. The white label tool it launched initially was aimed at larger publishers which already had sales and customer service teams, but Version 2.0 makes the company a full-service solution for all publishers and local businesses. To date, the platform has attracted 270 clients which are using the service to publish company events, promotions, and community programs through NearSay’s network; so, with LocalVox 2.0, the startup is looking to become a full-service tool for its clients by integrating Google Local optimization and social media management services. Leveraging Google Places and Google Plus, social media, email marketing and more to create a simple way for their clients to generate news and target new and existing customers, LocalVox wants to enable community businesses to attain optimized Google placements — all through an all-in-one marketing solution characterized by a user-friendly interface. This last bit has become increasingly important, as local marketing solutions are realizing that products that sound technical or rely too heavily on self-service models are failing to see the adoption among small merchants that many hoped they would have. Thus, LocalVox sees itself as a long-term marketing partner for its clients, not a quick fix. So, in contrast with Groupon’s model, which creates episodic bursts of activity and exposure for small businesses, LocalVox provides a searchable history of news content that lives on each business’ web page that is optimized for search engine placement and social media integration — all of which is intended to create additional exposure over time. Or looking at LocalVox in juxtaposition with Aol’s hyperlocal news outlet Patch, for example, LocalVox sees its value not as a destination site, but in leveraging programs that engage consumers across multiple channels and take the pain of managing search engine placement, social media, and multichannel marketing strategies out of the hands of the merchants themselves. What’s more, local businesses often find difficulties in updating and maintaining their websites with relevant content, and making their sites into workable, valuable communication platforms. So LocalVox wants to help them, say, upload customer lists and avoid going to a third-party source to upload a newsletter. According to LocalVox Co-founder Trevor Sumner, it’s this approach that has led the startup to a 95 percent retention rate among participating businesses — compared to Groupon’s retention rate at 18 percent. To date, the startup has raised a small angel round, but it is in the process of raising a series A round, Sumner says. Currently, LocalVox is only available in New York City, but the startup plans to expand into new markets beginning in early 2012. And, for TechCrunch readers interested in testing LocalVox 2.0, the company is offering five local NYC businesses a free month of social media strategy and implementation as well as a free month of Google Places optimization. The startup will select the businesses from those who send emails to LocalSales@LocalVox.com with “TechCrunch” in the subject line. For more, check the startup out at home here .

Stamped Is Now Ready Fo...

One of the great pastimes of the Web is rating places and things, but now with mobile phones you can rate them anywhere, and not just things but experiences. Enter Stamped , a New York City startup founded by ex-Googlers that wants to be your go-to app for rating restaurants, books, movies, and music. The iPhone app just launched on iTunes . Stamped simplifies ratings . Gone are the five stars. You either stamp something with your approval or you don’t. But don’t stamp too liberally because you only get 100 stamps to start out with (you can earn more by being active on the service). You can follow what your friends are stamping to get a steady stream of recommendations. The app will also feature suggested users like chef Mario Batali (an adviser to the company) and Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers. Share your stamps more broadly on Twitter.Open up the map view to see stamps near you. Put some to your to-do list, add your own stamp. If you don’t want to waste a stamp, you can show your approval with a weaker “like.” The app is comparable to Kevin Rose’s Oink in that it lets you rate things at a very granular level, but it is much more structured than Oink, which is organized around free-form hashtags. Stamped steers users towards rating restaurants (pulled from Google Places and OpenTable),books (pulled from Amazon), movies (pulled from Fandango), and music (pulled from iTunes). If something is not in the Stamped database, you can add it. But for those categories, the app does a great job. You can filter the stream of your friends’ Stamps by category, and often there is the option to book a table at a restaurant through OpenTable or download a song through iTunes. The more you stamp, the more the app knows your interests. Down the line, the company could possibly target offers or ads based on your interest profile for places, books, music, and movies you’ve explicitly said that you like. Co-founder Robby Stein worked as a product manager on Google’s Ad Exchange and co-founder Bart Stein (not related) worked in marketing. The third co-sounder, Kevin Palms, was rescued from a hedge fund. The company is backed by Bain Capital and Google Ventures, and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom (also an ex-Googler) is another adviser.

Google Further Personal...

It’s a full time job just keeping up with and understanding the reason behind all the changes that Google makes regularly. The latest is and addition to maps that allows you to see the places you have reviewed on a map along with some Google suggestions. The more I read about these changes the more I realize just how little I go out (don’t feel sorry for me because I actually like it that way). But as with any marketing update in the online space, how I use it doesn’t matter a bit. In a post from the Google Lat Long blog comes an explanation of this newest maps feature. Since the My Places tab was released earlier this summer, you’ve been able to view all the places you’ve rated in one manageable list. This list is now being used to personalize your view of Google Maps, enabling you to visualize all the various places you’ve visited, loved, loathed, and might want to check out right on the map. Starting today, business labels for locations you’ve rated with Google Places will be highlighted on the map with your corresponding rating beneath it. Additional places that our system thinks you might enjoy visiting — either to eat, shop, or more — will be highlighted as well. These personalized recommendations are based on the places and ratings you’ve already shared. his could be good for the “out and about” set. My question is, how many places does the average person go out to eat at and do they actually forget whether they rated it as being good bad or indifferent? And do they just wander about and look for recommendations to something else in the vicinity? Anyway, it doesn’t matter how I see this. It’s how the target market does that counts. Are you one of the targets for this kind of map functionality?