I was surprised at first when I read this, but given the proliferation of Smartphones, it’s actually not that hard to believe. Even my 64 year old father uses a Blackberry and my 10 year old nephew has an Iphone.  Yelp has become the trusted go-to resource for anyone searching for local businesses. In June 2010, Yelp announced that every 5 seconds, someone uses their mobile phone app to call a local business.  During the month of May, Yelp for iPhone had over 1.4 million visitors.

Continue reading “1 in 4 People Searching Yelp are Doing So from their Mobile Phone” »

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

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” »

Small business owners that I work with continue to have mixed feelings about Yelp today.  Many wish it would die off along with online reviews, but it seems that Yelp and customer reviews are here to stay.  Yelp had over a 60% increase in traffic in 2009.  Furthermore, the recent rumors of a potential acquisition (Google and Microsoft) along with a $25 million new investment have provided greater validity to its business model.   Inc. magazine recently published a great article about the Yelp model, along with its benefits and challenges included.  In addition, with AT&T’s announcement of Buzz.com (soon to be released consumer site that allows customers to create favorite places and share positive, brief comments with friends via their social circles, like Facebook), the world of online customer reviews will continue to grow as well. Forbes just provided some greater insight here. Buzz.com is set to launch in the next couple months.  Small businesses must continue to stay on top of their reviews and continue to encourage new ones in order to properly manage their online reputation. Yelp has had a very busy couple months. Here are some of the key points: Continue reading “Keep an eye on Yelp’s Growth: Key for Reputation Management” »

If you are a local business and don’t have any online reviews or even just a few, you’re putting your business and your online reputation at tremendous risk.  Just 1 bad review could instantly start driving business away.  Today’s consumers are all turning to local online reviews as a vital piece of the decision making process on who to call or what store to visit. Therefore, here is a list of the top 10 ways that you can generate new reviews.  To be successful, you need to initiate a review campaign company/store wide and get all your employees behind it. Continue reading “Top 10 ways to get (and profit from) online customer reviews” »