The engineers at Google have recently been throwing a lot of new ingredients into local search, working to improve both user experience and merchant visibility. This week’s announcement of a new local recommendation engine called Hotpot is the latest culmination of those efforts.

Hotpot is an extension of Google Places, the local search database of more than 50 million locations in which merchants can claim their businesses, provide their addresses and other information, and engage with customers. Hotpot adds two important new features into the mix: user ratings and recommendations from friends.

The ratings are done on a five-star system, and a user can share a business’ ratings to get further recommendations from friends. One example of this would be if a user is visiting a town for the first time and has an online friend that has also visited that town or is a local resident. That friend’s recommendations for restaurants and hotels will provide an added, trusted element to the ratings the user discovered during the original search.

Google’s new feature is not exactly new in that it essentially provides the same service as Yelp and other local-recommendations services, but it confirms Google’s growing interest in local search – not to mention some poorly named new features lately. The mere fact that Google Places provides Hotpot with a database of 50 million businesses out of the gates means that it may very well catch on – and local businesses that aren’t already in that database should change that right away.

Posted Nov 16 2010, 01:44 PM by Linc Wonham

Yes, we always need to capture more customers, but we have been training our clients for the past ten years as internet marketers, that we need to spend more on search marketing, convincing them its better because we can track your results and look at the analytics to see what works and what doesn’t. And yes again, this is all true; however, traditional marketing does have a place in today’s electronic world.

So what do I consider “traditional” advertising? I look at television, radio and local newspapers to be the “traditional” forms of advertising. These traditional formats have always been the foundation of most marketing campaigns and still are. However, in today’s marketing strategies, we’re looking at Search engine marketing (SEM), Banner advertising, email marketing, and even search engine optimization (SEO), to stay competitive in this global market. I have recently talked with some clients who are struggling with their choices on where to advertise and which platform has the best results. I stand on the belief that you need to do all of the above. If you’re able to funnel your customers through the use of traditional advertising, in combination with these new internet strategies, you’ll not only see higher traffic, but a much higher return on investment.

For the past twelve months, we’ve been looking at the website analytics of a local car dealer, and comparing our SEM efforts to his television campaigns in a head to head type competition. Our goal was to show the dealer the impact of internet advertising and how to increase website traffic with our SEM campaign. These experiments opened my eyes to a wider way of thinking.

 When the site only used television and radio advertising for promotions, the site lost 40% of its traffic than when we applied our SEM advertising. Great news for us right? However, after this study, we came across a cool fact that maybe we should have already known. When we applied both methods of advertising at the same time, the site had a 17% increase in overall traffic with the same money spent. This was the eye opener for me.

We also took a look at the newspaper which everyone is calling a dying industry. This dealer implemented an SMS marketing piece to their newspaper ads which would allow a customer to interact with the paper right on their cell phone. This has shown a tremendous increase month after month to their mobile website, and with more and more consumers using their cell phones to shop every day, has only given more validity to this technology.

There are hundreds of examples of companies combining the efforts of online advertising to traditional advertising and showing it works. Remember, when planning your advertising strategies, to look at all the baskets. If you simply put all your eggs in one basket, you might just miss out on a sale.

FIrst off, you need to understand what social marketing is because I would argue that it is really not a marketing platform as many will suggest. Dave Evans wrote a book on “Social Media Marketing – An hour a day” and stated “Social media involves a natural, genuine conversation between people about something or mutual interest, a conversation built on the thoughts and experiences of the Participants”. I believe in this statement full heartedly and is the one thing to really remember when starting your social networking. IT IS A “SOCIAL” NETWORK You can’t just throw up some stuff now and again and hope someone notices. This is your chance to show your involvement, communicate with customers and genuinely interact with them.

You’ll find there are many companies who will help you with setting up a network (including us) but really the challenge is not setting them up, it’s keeping it updated with genuine comments and interactions. People don’t want to see just posts of “hey look at us, we offer nothing but please look!!”. You want to try to provoke conversation, interaction with you and your company. Can you throw in a special now and agin? sure, but with tack. If all you’re doing is selling, they’ll block you and your time and effort is wasted.

When we get to the office, we will log on to our network and see what customers are talking about and try to interact as much as we can. Birthday’s, announcements or just a “howdy” can go a long way when building relationships on-line. Many of the network services like Facebook make these types of interactions very easy. This is why I would suggest starting there on Facebook.

There is literally hundreds of social networks to be evolved in. Some are very cool and some are really bad but Facebook has created the largest and easiest tool (in my humble opinion) to get started with. Keep in mind however that Facebook is not designed for companies. It is design for personal interactions not advertising so creating a page for your business is sometime challenging. In many cases, you will need to create a personal page then add the “like page” to your site that will act as your business profile. Like I mentioned before, we can help with this process and is usually free (depending on how crazy you’re wanting to go).

This gives you a starting place anyway and I am hoping to create some more tips in this section because of the number of questions we get over it. So keep checking in every week for more updates.

Thanks!

Travis Hall

Fussing About Facebook
Protests Have No Impact On Social Giant
Article provided by compete.com

There has been a lot of noise lately about people publicly announcing that they’re quitting Facebook. The recent gripes are focused on Facebook over revisions to its platform and privacy policy that encourage its members to make personal information more accessible. People go through great lengths to maintain privacy. We put curtains up in our homes and locks on our doors, so it’s no surprise that people are concerned with sharing their information with the world wide web.

According to an article in the New York Times, “Analysts and industry experts are quick to point out that Facebook has dealt with a number of user protests in its six-year history and emerged unscathed each time, continuing to add new users at a record clip. For many users, the Web site is an irreplaceable nexus of friends, relatives and colleagues online, making it difficult to abandon.” Besides, how are you going to get through the 4pm slump on a Friday without Farmville?

Data infers that the past may predict the future of Facebook. Daily Reach for Facebook is up over last month and unique visitors reached an all time high of 135MM in April.

If you are not interested in deleting your Facebook account and want to connect with Compete on Facebook, we’d love to see you there. Or, join us on twitter @Compete.

Traditionally when we think to market our products we go out and hire photographers and graphics designers and stage the perfect image and graphic to promote our products. I think with today’s social mind set, you should consider using real people in real situations within your store or business. Get out your pocket camera’s or flip’s and get shots with your customers really enjoying themselves with or at your business.

As an example, if you’re a restaurant, get pictures of customer actually eating at your store. While walking around, let them know they’ll be a part of your advertising and watch them perform for you. At minimum you will have accomplished two things.  One, you had fun with the customer and interacted with them which will most likely bring them back and second,  that customer is going to tell their friends to go see them on the front page ad at Joe’s Restaurant. Everyone will talk about their fifteen minutes of fame for a long time.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for conventional advertising graphics, but change it up a little bit. Feature a new customer on the site every month. Show the local bands playing in your bar, show people having a great time right on the front of your site. People like to see real situations with real photos. Even an insurance agent can show the before and after of when a customer got in an accident and totaled their car how you were able to help her get a new car.

Ford has been promoting the swap my ride which features real people getting their cars swapped to try a new Ford. Why is affective, because it’s real. The reactions are real; the people are real and are not perfect models in a perfectly staged set. Get your camera out and just start shooting. It won’t take too long to get that perfect shot.

Social marketing isn’t restricted to Facebook and MySpace; let your site show a real side of your business. Give your company and websites a face when clients are searching for you. People like to see people. Show them you care about your customer and you’re not just another company looking to take their money. Show them something that sets you apart from the corporate store down the street. It will pay off in the long run.

Our first goal is to achieve a better since of maintenance for our customers and there sites. Websites need to be fresh and ever changing. Content management is more than placing text on a page and letting it run, it’s about understanding the company and how they want to be heard on the internet. My goal this year is to prove the relevance of proper content and the value of staying on top of current market trends in each of our client’s individual fields. My clients will become the experts in their fields and their websites will become a place where people know they can get the answers their looking for on the products they sell.

Our second goal for this year is customer retention and segmentation. Many focus studies were done this past year about understanding customer trends and how to segment your analytics to follow trends and activities on your site. We will be launching new segmentation tools this first quarter to not only help create a more effective way of understanding our client’s customer’s needs, but be able to follow up more effectively and respond quickly to trends that are happening on your site today. Understanding what your customer are looking for will help in designing SEM and email campaigns that will be more cost efficient and targeted to what your customer are looking for. To be able to know what your customers are looking for on your site or email campaigns, and then send them follow up information on the exact product they were looking at is a powerful marketing tool that I am excited to share.

Then finally I would like to expand our portfolio into markets we’ve never been. My goal has never been to focus on one market, we need to expand our knowledge base to other industries and get out of our comfort zone and take on projects like ecommerce, restaurants, Real Estate and much more.

Like I aid earlier, we had a pretty good 2009 but we need to grow. Growth takes knowledge and planning. You will see a more active role this year in the success of your websites with changes and improvement all year long. I am excited about 2010 and look forward to helping our clients achieve better return to their sites.

I have been in business since August of 2008 but have been in the computer and web business for over 13 years. I have worked on the lines as a pc technician, to working as a district manager for a large electronics chain in Tulsa. I have spent the past six years working as the internet sales and marketing director for auto dealers while finishing my degree in Business Systems Analysis and Visual Communications.

I am building my company around a simple concept:

“Excellent customer service is the ability of any organization to constantly and consistently exceed the customer’s expectations”

I believe we need to take care of our customers and learn the industry they’re in. A website is nothing more than an expense unless it grows and evolves with your customers. Your website is the extension of your business and for some, the only real window to customers looking from the outside.  The internet is consistently changing and it’s my job to make sure you’re changing with it. I don’t stop at simply putting your site together, in fact I never stop. There is always opportunity to grow and to be better no matter what we do.