We’re to a point where even, some may say especially, small, independent business have figured out that this whole social media thing is something that’s needed. Social media for business: but the great divide is how to unite the two.
In many cases, there are two camps here: those who know business, and those who know social media. But very few understand the relationship between the two.
Ask any current college student to pop open their Mac, and odds are, the homepage will be Facebook. The most infamous bane of the GPA nowadays isn’t parties, but Facebook. It’s midterm season right now, and with everyone “studying,” Facebook has never been busier.
So yeah, college students get social media. Most people under the age of 30 do. But knowing how to post your sweet mardis gras photos isn’t really a marketable skill.
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Over the past few months tons of innovative companies have been facing lawsuits and legal challenges: Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp.
The Yelp cases offers the clearest example of the Law vs. Innovation. Over the past few weeks Yelp has been sued twice. Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc. and D’ames Day Spa of San Diego County v. Yelp Inc. accuse Yelp of running an “extortion scheme,” that punishes businesses who do not pay Yelp’s $300/month advertising fees. Cats and Dogs accuses Yelp of offering to remove negative reviews of their business if they started paying $300 a month to advertise, while D’ames claims that Yelp removed 13 positive reviews that were posted about the business.
Both of these cases are fascinating examples of an antiquated legal system failing to understand innovation. I have managed dozens of our client’s Yelp presences. In some cases paying for advertising and in others using the free business owner tools the company makes available to everyone. To explain why both of these suits are misinformed let’s take them one at a time.
In the D’ames case the owner of the San Diego Day Spa was trying to run a promotion on GroupON – a popular deal of the day website. GroupON told D’ames that she needed more online reviews to be featured. So D’ames started asking her customers to write reviews of her spa on Yelp. Fourteen reviews were posted quickly and thirteen of them were removed. Why? You ask.
Innovation.
What separates Yelp from all other review portals is two things, really: community and authenticity (a product of innovation). Yelp’s founders noticed that most local business, review sites were stuffed with glowingly positive reviews that the owners asked friends to write (and in some cases wrote themselves!) Dubbed, Citysearch syndrome, this rendered almost all of the digital directories of the late 90’s totally useless.
Yelp’s founders came out of Paypal where they cut their teeth smoking out the fraudsters and scammers that plagued the early consumer web. So when it came to restaurant reviews, they easily developed an algorithm to automatically remove all reviews that appeared to be fake. In practice, this means if you sign up for a Yelp account solely to rate your friend’s business with five stars, your review will be removed. Reviews that stick are active participants of the Yelp community. They seem to come from people who review multiple businesses and don’t simply lavish praise (or harshly criticize) every business they rate.
Though Yelp keeps most of the details of their secret sauce under wraps, Yelp is completely transparent about the practice of removing solicited reviews. The company offers education on its website and via one-one-one conference calls with Yelp Community Managers for free to all businesses listed on the site. In both cases Yelp says its algorithm aggressively removes reviews that appear fake or solicited.
The Cats and Dogs case at least accuses Yelp of doing something the company says it doesn’t. The veterinarian claims that Yelp offered to remove one bad review if they paid for advertising. Yelp does offer fringe benefits to advertisers, such as a cooler photo gallery and the ability to highlight one good review by posting it at the top of the business’s profile. However, Yelp does not allow business to pay to remove reviews. I know. I’ve tried!
In the past I have worked with the occasional business with really bad Yelp press. I have asked, even begged to make bad reviews disappear, but Yelp has a firm policy against removing any review unless it is done by the Review Filter algorithm.
Today 25 million people turn to Yelp for reviews every month. It is the most trusted source of local reviews online. This is all a product of a company innovating. These recent suits are the result of a legal system failing to do the same.
Over the past few months tons of innovative companies have been facing lawsuits and legal challenges: Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp.
The Yelp cases offers the clearest example of the Law vs. Innovation. Over the past few weeks Yelp has been sued twice. Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc. and D’ames Day Spa of San Diego County v. Yelp Inc. accuse Yelp of running an “extortion scheme,” that punishes businesses who do not pay Yelp’s $300/month advertising fees. Cats and Dogs accuses Yelp of offering to remove negative reviews of their business if they started paying $300 a month to advertise, while D’ames claims that Yelp removed 13 positive reviews that were posted about the business.
Both of these cases are fascinating examples of an antiquated legal system failing to understand innovation. I have managed dozens of our client’s Yelp presences. In some cases paying for advertising and in others using the free business owner tools the company makes available to everyone. To explain why both of these suits are misinformed let’s take them one at a time.
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Hulu has made some pretty good moves in its few years of existence, good enough to make it to the second most watched video site on the web, only to YouTube. But, yesterdays news may be a sign of growing pains. It was announced that Viacom has decided to pull Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report from its line up of streaming and easy to watch episodes. Despite Hulu’s public begging on its blog, it wasn’t enough to stop Viacom from walking out on their deal.
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When I’m pitching a client on social media services they inevitably ask three questions:
1) How much do I have to spend?
2) Where will you spend it?
3) What is my ROI going to look like?
It’s this third question that I struggle with. No matter what anyone tells you Social Media ROI cannot and will not ever be projected as accurately as other forms of online marketing like SEM, SEO and banner advertising. Social Media is about brand building, buzz generation and customer engagement, and while all of these things can be quantified and measured, none of them lead to a precise ROI.
ROI insecurity is the biggest hurdle we address when acquiring new clients. The expectation is that Social Media Marketing should work like the other forms of marketing that clients have invested in in the past. Many of our customers expect to be able to track dollars to clicks to conversions in real time using their Google Analytics. Other customers, with less digital experience, expect similar metrics using the conversion measurements of the brick and mortar marketing world. When it comes to social media these people scoff at the idea that ROI can’t be precisely measured.
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At the dawn of the new millennium there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no LinkedIn. Blogs, text messages and email enabled phones had only just been introduced. I played snake on my Nokia and used the internet to buy the occasional gift from Amazon and read headlines of NYTimes.com. Today I have a more powerful computer in the palm of my hand (iPhone) that I sat under my desk in the year 2000 (Mac G3). Imagine what the next 10 years will bring!
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Last week we published the list of the 100 Smartest People in Social Media. We received a huge response. Many people commented that they were honored to be on the list, while others questioned our methods for compiling it. In reality the list was a based on the subjective judgments of the Smarter Social Media team. But the demands for a quantifiable system has gotten us thinking.
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As you can probably tell by now we are in the process of redesigning the Smarter Social Media site. It has taken us a while to get around to redesigning the site because we have spent most of 2009 working on client projects. But over the holidays we found a few hours to sit down and bring our look into the new decade. We would love to hear your thoughts on the new look and feel.
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Smarter Social Media founder Bryce Maddock was interviewed by Rick Lugash of Next for Small Business last week. In the interview Bryce talks openly about the challenges that social media presents for business owners. For business owners, “It’s important before you dive head first into social media to take a step back and ask is this the most effective use of my time?” Rick and Bryce explore the nuts and bolts of social media for small business over an hour long conversation. They discuss measuring ROI, transparency and confidentiality, and the best free tools available for running a seamless campaign. The two minute intro is available here and the entire hour long interview is a available on the Next for Small Business membership website. It is definitely worth checking out.
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