Yelp routinely highlights negative customer reviews unless business owners agree to advertise on Yelp.
“Lady Justice needs a lawsuit filter,” writes Yelp Co-founder Jeremy Stoppleman. PUHLEASE. The arrogance! Yo, Stoppleman: you are supposed to be the champion of small businesses. How about answering the way a small business has to answer: “Gee, that’s terrible. We are looking into it immediately. If anyone is doing this heads will roll, we promise you that.” He is nothing but tone deaf. (The tone deafness only a $100 Million in VC funding can bring!)
Small business people know that there will always be wing nuts who sashè into their shop with an ax to grind. AND consumers know that there are businesses out there who are schysters. Traditionally the Better Business Bureau served as the wing nut/schyster filter. Overall, they did a pretty decent job of it. Beyond being tone-deaf, Yelp needs a wing nut/shyster filter, but being a free-wheeling open forum, Yelp simply cannot provide that on the scale required by the millions of small businesses.
Yelp is most likely, voraciously burning through its $100 million. I can hear the VCs, putting pressure on Yelp to deliver. And why would small businesses pay for what Yelp is offering – which is essentially bupkus? Their businesses are listed on Yelp already. I have no doubt Yelp resorted to shaking down small businesses, because that is the only “value” they can offer.
If it happened to you, join the suit. Make it a class action. They deserve it!
SMBs whether selling B-to-B or B-to-C find themselves confronting two voracious converging online trends:
1. Intense flattening of our markets: regional enterprises go online to find they are now competing with other regional enterprises around the nation – and the world. Price wars ensue, in a race to the bottom. 2. Ever increasing customer expectations: first it was web 1.0, then web 2.0 filled with engagement mechanisms and video. Mobile is on the horizon, if not already here. With each iteration, SMBs find themselves having to spend more to keep up. Even though programming development costs are going down, the average cost of a full-featured web site has not changed much since 1995 – it costs to stay in the game.
An environment this chaotic is unforgiving. SMBs find themselves in the challenging position of having to out smart the web to succeed. Our new offering will help them do that. Stay Tuned!
Love it or hate it Facebook is the elephant in the room. Funny, I said that about Google back in 2004. Speaking of which, I should remind everyone, that Google will become increasingly less relevant and sooner than we think. Google will face that Microsoft Moment. That Windows vs. Mac moment. I’ve been saying this and writing about it for a long time. Typical of tech cycles, we work from chaotic fragmentation to behemoth to orderly fragmentation. Facebook will be going there too, not to long after Google has its moment of truth.
But the death of Kumaritashvili changed all that. Now I see that all these years I was swept along with a throng of millions by the emotive visuals, the excitement and the drama as all the while the sports got increasingly insanely dangerous. The truth? They were always insanely dangerous. And now, so insanely dangerous that I have discouraged my children from watching the Winter Olympics, these are not behaviors I want them to aspire to or emulate.
And in this blog, which more often then not questions the throng rush of millions of businesses to the latest big thing, it is not too trite in light of Kumaritashvili’s death to question, with even more vigor, the rush to the latest shiny objects dangled before us.
His death is a cold cruel reminder to all of us that if we don’t stop to question the mindless dash of the mob, we too could end up in disaster. Not a life and death disaster, no. But business disaster or personal disaster with pervasive impacts on our lives and those of others.
Every business is individual. The road taken must be right for that business. The biggest mistake businesses make is not asking “why?”. Why are we doing this? Does it make sense for us? Conventional “wisdom” may not be wise. If used it must be kept in clear perspective.
My condolences to the Kumaritashvili’s family. And my concerns to all of those who participate in Olympic Sports and especially to those who promote them: is running with the mob to push the envelope on danger for excitement’s sake a worthy aspiration?
This is a wake up call, for ALL of us.
I was speaking to a family member. A savvy young woman in her early 40s who I would call an average computer user. Her work does not keep her at her screen 10 hours a day, in fact she uses her computer to augment her work and to support her personal needs (kids’ homework, occasional shopping, email etc). The rest of the time she works face-to-face with retail customers. Here is what she said, “I hate Google, because when I go there to help my kids on their homework I just get shopping information. I don’t want to buy, I want to know. I use Wikkipedia.”
And there you have it. A regular Joe/Josephine who has discovered that there are other more effective places to get answers than Google. Google will go the way of the IBM. Too big, too cumbersome, too out of touch. Too worried about being gamed on a meta scale to deliver anything relevant on the user scale.
Enter Bing. A compelling hybrid. Ironically this Microsoft product learned a lesson from Apple: Beautiful to look at, solving a chosen group of user needs. It is clear that the folks at Bing asked themselves: what do users use search engines for most? The answer: Entertainment, News, Travel and Shopping. “Let’s place ourselves there in a most aesthetically pleasing and robust manner.” Bing will become the go-to consumer search site. But don’t go there to research your term paper, or to conduct any other type of muscular search. It just won’t return good information. And the truth is, neither does Google. It is only slightly better than Bing in that department. Doing robust deep research still involves endlessly long search phrases and serious poking around over an extended period of time.
We are actively engaged in researching new technologies here at Camarès and we are finding that it can take weeks and hundreds of searches on Google alone – never mind Wikkipedia, YouTube and other engines. Invariably we find our answers nested deep in blogs that are linked to each other and NOT as a direct result of a Google or Bing search. Our Josephine described the essence of the problem: “Half the time I don’t know the right question to ask.” Well the truth is she does know the right question and so do we at Camarès, it is the engines themselves that are not indexing information in a way that humans actually search for it. I call this the Nuance Gap. Humans are nuanced, search engines are not. And it is the one place that Google has consistently failed the user since day one.
Until Google bridges this gap (and my bet it will never, ever be able to do this) it will die a slow twisting death, nibbled away by more compelling vertical competitors. Right now it is skating on its huge cash reserves and the fact that companies are willing to auction up the price of keywords beyond anything that is affordable. It is also skating on all the other Joes & Josephines who have not yet changed their behavior, but will over time. Traffic will diminish – in fact it already is. Right now, Google may simply be calling it “market saturation” but if it were doing its job right, it would have out Binged, Bing a long time ago.
But here’s the catch: ACTUALLY MEASURING. The online analytics that were made to measure web “traditional” activity (referrals, uniques etc) are pretty useless. They give you a baseline, but they don’t measure sentiment. That comes down to mushy qualitative grunt work. And there is a point where measuring that is just too costly. Tools are emerging, but OMG they are not close to prime time yet! For example, the Camarès Team had a simply miserable experience with Kontagent a product claiming to measure viral spread of Facebook efforts. Miserable! We could not get it to work to save our lives and when pinging tech support we were told: “We only help paying customers.” That was exactly what we were attempting to become! (Having seen way too much vapor ware in my lifetime we always try before we buy.) No money lost there, just a lot of time.
The meta challenge is that Social Media remains fragmented and not yet fully understood. SEO and Paid Search and the Web in general were in a similar space in 2004. But there are a few things that the Camarès team has come to understand about what works on Social Media. And by that let me be very SPECIFIC: “works” means gets traction relatively quickly on social media platforms:
•Consumable products that are shared: specifically hard-to-find specialty foods.
•Consumable products given as gifts: Flowers, as an example, are given on holidays, birthdays and for celebrations.
•Products that are related to an already passionate OFF line market: Snowboarders, snorkelers, musicians — in this case the Passionista networks are already in place off line and the on line world simply supplies the platforms for increased communications.
•Information to already highly networked political or religious organizations: as with recreational and professional Passionistas mentioned above, these are highly engaged off line networks that are super charged by on line tools.
•Entertainment products with a good hook: for example, books, movies, music that reach into an under served markets.
There are many many products and services that will simply not get jet-fueled social media traction. The question for marketers: Does this product or service have a highly engaged off line network of passionate users? Is this product one that is shared or gifted? If not, then look long and hard at why people would even care to talk about the product. It is extremely difficult to generate passionate responses if the passion is not there to begin with. OR if the passion is highly individualized as in: in my service you are buying my unique genius, I don’t share my trade secrets. OR even if your product/service falls into the categories above you must ask, is the market large enough to support the effort?
Aside from these general broad brush strokes, there is very little more we know about how effective Social Media is – no matter what the “experts” are saying.
No camera. Does this make sense? With all the cool Iphone apps that rely on a camera, Apple comes out with a new dohicky without a camera. That means no cool Augmented Reality games or Augmented Reality GPS apps, NADA!
The obnoxious video on the Apple site. Opening line uttered by an unshaven overly hip, bald, bug-eyed Brit looking inhumanly earnest: “You know it is true, when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works it sort of becomes magical. And that’s exactly what the Ipad is.”
Magical???? I’m not sure how my fridge works, but it keeps my food cold – no frisson there. An overgrown Iphone with no camera leaves me cold. And a pretentious Brit who claims stupidity is aspirational insults my intellect.
Mobile will remain totally chaotic, zillions more apps will be launched. A platform fight will ensue making it costly for companies developing mobile to push out new apps across multiple platforms. I don’t see that issue settling out for sometime. So if you are going mobile build to sustainable development models or simply take a vacuum to your wallet.
Facebook will remain relevant so long as it continues to be compelling to users. That means that it is in a race with itself to become more exciting. Already we are seeing it disrupt the photo sharing market and it is disrupting the gaming market too. But to stay alive it must re-think its unintuitive interface, kloogy fan pages and make video easier to share.
Rise of vertical social networks. Yes, people have varied passions and sometimes they like to keep their lives compartmentalized. So Ning will re-emerge and become highly energized as the platform where Passionistas start their own, smaller more intimate social networks.
Engagement mechanisms and rich media will steam roll the web. Look for better video production values, more interesting games and more sophisticated applications across the board as GPS joins Augmented Reality and more. And speaking of Augmented Reality all it is lacking is great creative energy. As I write the Camarès team has that tiger by the tail and is deep into development. More news coming soon!
She does make an excellent point, and it is one we should all remember as we reach for our pocket computer – Iphone, Blackberry, Android – whatever: the action being taken is more about the user reaching for their phone than about the message received. It is a selfish act that screams, “I’m too fabulously important!” like the old song screamed “I’m too sexy for my shirt!” (At least the song was ironic).
Screaming into cell phones, going into Blackberry prayer mode at the conference table, taking calls in meetings – I once had to listen to a client talk to her housekeeper about her dog’s rash and visit to the vet – simply declare that you are the most important person in the room and frankly telegraph that you are taking pleasure in dissing anyone nearby.
Facebook is the narcissist tool de jour. Ironic isn’t it? Narcissus stared at his face in the water and we stare at our faces on Facebook. Most posts are self-serving complaints, breast-beatings or promotional. At Camarès we are creating Facebook games, the most viral ones let users show off how smart or clever they are. And if you want to go super viral, do it with a laugh.
There is an explosion of personalized products enabled by technology: my face on everything! If the 80’s were the decade of logo’d apparel and accessories, the 00’s has been the decade of me-logos. The final death knell of the logo’d outfit maybe the recent infamous launch of SouthButt by a young college student – reversing the NorthFace logo – as a commentary on the mindless wearing of logos. “I know my face from my butt!” he says. But do we?
All this is really no surprise. And as a marketer, I’ll use any tool I can get my hands on that gets my client’s products into their markets effectively. But we all have to ask ourselves how do we use this technology to make our lives richer? (Asking this will serve marketers as well!)
Perhaps the answer is limiting it, making when you interact with it more thoughtful. (And marketer’s messages more relevant.) So here are a few ideas for the next decade:
Face-to-face interactions OF ANY KIND come first. That means no calls at the register when purchasing something, no taking calls in meetings, no shouting on phones anywhere (truthfully all you have to do is speak normally, its a technical thing, the phone doesn’t feed your voice back to you as the old Bell phones did, so you feel a need to shout when you don’t need to), no phones in the restroom — now really must we?
Look at your Facebook page no more than once a day preferably once a week – and when you spend some MEANINGFUL time there, do take care to comment compellingly on your friends’ posts. And conversely say something remarkable in your comments box.
On January 1, Unsubscribe from EVERYTHING that comes into your email box. De-friend anyone who is annoying you with vacuous comments. Un-fan any page that dishes self-serving junk. Then re-subscribe to only those that feed you. And for those of us marketers who send emails, email only when we have something important to say.
“What, this is coming from a marketer?” Well yes, aside from finding incessant messaging overwhelming, I’d like to return to RELEVANT messaging, distributed with care to the RIGHT people. The good news is that technology enables us to do that. And in doing so it will serve us all better.
