After a two week beta period, MerchantCircle is out with a new mayorship title for its SMBs that are the most “networked”.

One mayorship is given for every city/town,  and is achieved by engaging in the standard b2b activities of the site (connecting with other merchants, inviting others to join, etc.). This is all managed through a dashboard where merchants can view points, leaderboards  and top chanllengers for mayorships.

Like on foursquare, this is meant to create a sense of competition that drives engagement. But beyond the game mechanics seen on Foursquare and other recent success stories, mayors are also given a financial incentive to the tune of free advertising on MerchantCircle.

Read More from Local Media Watch BIA Kelsey…

As anyone with a following can tell you, there will always be critics.  This is doubly true in the information age, where expanding your reach through blogging and social media opens you up to a world of new opportunities, and new criticisms along with them.

Outside the net, we hear the echo of our parents in our ears, saying, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”  We try not to openly complain—especially when someone gives us something for free!  Often, this rule gets thrown out the window when it comes to our interactions on the web.

Read more: HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Google just announced their plans to roll out “Google Tags” this week. They initially started in select cities across the U.S and now plan to expand the feature to small businesses across the nation.  From what we have seen and read here at chatmeter it seems like a great tool for SMB’s to separate themselves from the clutter on google maps. The article below from the Google Maps & Earth team describes the feature in more detail…

For a flat monthly fee of $25, businesses can enhance their listings that appear on Google.com and Google Maps with a yellow tag that emphasizes specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos, or a custom message. Tags do not affect the ranking of the listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.

If you try out a query for “massage houston,” you’ll see that two of the businesses whose listings appear have created coupon Tags to promote their current offers:

Tags now appears on mobile web searches as well, helping your local customers quickly identify what’s unique about your business while they’re on the go.

Posts, a new kind of Tag that enables business owners to create a custom message, is also live. These messages can be changed as often as the business owner would like, making it easy to let the world know about a special discount or limited-time offer.
Source: Lat Long Blog

Catching up on notable items in the local space over the past week, you may have heard that Yelp has partnered with TurnHere to exclusively offer video to its SMB advertisers.

This will include a few different tiers of service that should appeal to the wide range of businesses Yelp works with. These include:

Standard Video: Advertisers receive a 30-second video slide show made from a series of photos provided by the business with music and custom voice-over narration.

Premium Video: Advertisers receive a 30- to 60-second custom video shot at their place of business by a professional filmmaker from the TurnHere network.

Yelp advertisers can also opt into TurnHere’s additional promotion packages that include SEO work and distribution to YouTube, Google Places, Facebook and Yahoo Video.

Yelp is on a roll lately. Like the OpenTable partnership last week, this falls into the category of “why didn’t this happen a long time ago?” Video capability makes a lot of sense for Yelp as local competition heats up. This comes not only from the Citysearchs of the world but also the mobile/local/social upstarts taking mindshare like Foursquare.   Read More…

Source: BIA/Kelsey www.kelseygroup.com

David Mihm has done it once again and published another edition of Local Search Ranking Factors.  This year David surveyed 32 local search geeks to get their takes on the top factors for ranking high in Google Maps.  The entire set of results is well worth the time for any business that wants to do well in local search.  For those of you who just want the goods without the verbiage, here are the top factors:

1. Claiming your Google Place Page/Local Listing
2. Have a Business Address in the City That is Being Searched
3. Associate Your Google Place Page with the Proper Categories
4. Put Your Product/Service Keyword in Your Place Page Business Title
5. Proximity of Your Address to the Searched City’s Centroid
6. Product/Service Keywords in your Google Place Pages Description
7. Associating Photos with your Google Place Page
8. Associating Local Area Code with your Primary Place Page Phone Number
9. Associating Place Page with Marginally Related Categories
10. Location Keyword in Place Pages Business Title

Source: Local SEO Guide

As my colleague Mike Boland has reported, OpenTable has opened its network a bit, allowing registered Yelp users to directly make reservations from Yelp — whether they have registered with OpenTable or not. Users who have registered with both services will automatically get the benefits that OpenTable provides (i.e., dining credits). But they don’t have to. The immediacy of linking Yelp’s reviews with reservations should prime the pump for OpenTable, and get more customers to ultimately register. Among OpenTable’s 11,000 restaurant customers in North America, there probably isn’t a single one without a Yelp review. OpenTable also says it won’t water down the comprehensive customer info that OpenTable has on every registered diner (i.e., missed meals, preferences, etc.). It will simply keep files on customers that come in with Yelp IDs.

Continue reading “Implications of Yelp’s Deal With OpenTable” »