"I have more reviews, why am I not winning?"

Recommendation: In addition to asking for votes, make sure you ask customers to leave thoughtful recommendations that help you attract new business.

A question we get from business owners a lot at CityVoter is: "I have more reviews than the other businesses in my category, why am I not ahead in the voting?"

The answer is:
1) The winners of our contests get the most votes.
2) The businesses who are ahead in the competition have more total votes than their competition.

While our contests are designed to collect recommendations from people who voted, not everyone who votes submits a recommendation. We do ask everyone after they vote to tell us why they'd recommend this business. In this way, we hope to help you see exactly why people love your products and services.

If you notice you have more recommendations below your business profile than the competition and they're ahead, chances are you have more passionate, loyal, and thoughtful voters (customers) than your competition, but they have more votes. Personally, I would rather have fewer votes!

More Evidence Email Newsletters Work

Recommendation: When requesting email addresses from customers, be sure to tell them what you will use the email address for so they expect (and look forward) to hearing from you.

A few days ago, I wrote about an email newsletter I received from a local jeweler around valentine's day that was offering me a special last minute deal. I mentioned how I like getting deals like this when I've given permission to a business to use my email address.

Today, I read an article that provides some more evidence that email is an effective way to reach consumers. The article and the data are probably artificially high since the company that published the study makes money from email marketing, but the trends are interesting. If you have a moment, give it a read.

This is the most important paragraph: "What actions did respondents take as a result of receiving permission-based email from a retailer? About 88% reported downloading or print coupon, while 79% clicked a link in an email to learn more about a particular service, product, or promotion."

Why does CityVoter care if you use email newsletters? Each year, we run a contest where people get to vote for you. During that time, we engage tens of thousands of consumers in your area. They use their email addresses to vote, and once they vote, we have an opportunity to introduce them to you. Like all matchmakers, we'd love for the relationship to be a valuable one for both parties. We'd love for consumers to get something special (deals, services, product offers) and we'd love for our business owners to grow their business.

In the end, we're being a bit self-serving too. Email newsletters bring consumers back to our guides and our contests. The more people use CityVoter, the bigger and better our contests and local guides become.

Creating and promoting your Insider Deal (it's free)

Recommendation: Create an insider deal that gives people who visit your profile a reason to call or visit -- use fun language and compelling savings to make sure there is a clear call-to-action. Insider deals are free and you can update them as often as your special offers change.

For the past few years, we've allowed business owners to create their own coupons on our site.

Last year, we had more than 4000 coupons on our sites -- all of them created by local business owners. Today, we're announcing another enhancement to our product. Coupons are being replaced with what we call "Insider Deals".


Why the change? Coupons aren't what we're about. We are about sharing the inside scoop directly from business owners. We want to help them give consumers great recommendations on when they can save or why they should visit. For example, an insider deal could be an event: "Show up at special wine tasting for a free bottle of wine" or "first 20 customers at our trunk sale get..." Whatever the deal is, it is designed to be information you won't learn about anywhere else. That's the inside scoop.

Consumers will be able to immediately browse through deals by category on our Insider Deal pages, but most importantly, they'll see the deals about to expire so they act now.



The best part...it's still completely free for business owners to create their insider deal in our business center, and business owners can still change their deal as often as they like. When it's helpful, businesses can still request customers print out the insider deal (complete with a map and directions).


We intend to reward business owners who come up with creative insider deals by highlighting them on our site and making sure they get top billing in our monthly eNewsletters.

Helping local business owners build customer loyalty

Recommendation: Send email newsletters when you have something interesting to announce. Don't let too much time pass between when you receive someone's email address and when you first use it. It's important they remember they gave you permission.

No one likes email spam and no business wants to be accused of sending it, but sending emails to your customers can be a great way to build loyalty.

Here's an example of a recent email newsletter I received from a local jeweler just before valentine's day. I shopped here a few years ago and signed up for their email newsletter.

First of all, yes, my wife is not happy I didn't act on this special offer. Second of all, this is a great example of a timely and helpful message I want to receive from them.


These simple rules can help local business owners use email newsletters to keep their best customers coming back:

1. Make sure you have your customers' permission - ask your customers if they want to receive news and special offers from you. Do not use their email address if you haven't made it clear you will be sending them something in the future.
   
   
2. Make sure you use a service that allows customers to unsubscribe - CityVoter uses Constant Contact and Vertical Response to send out communications to our customers. Both work extremely well and we make it easy for business owners to use Constant Contact through our business center* (see graphic below).
   
   
3. Make sure you have something valuable to say - This rule goes hand-in-hand with rule #4. Your customers want to hear from you when there is something new and exciting going on. If you do this well, you'll see great "open rates" on your emails -- this means your customers have learned to expect good things when they get an email from you and they cannot wait to open your message.
   
   
4. Don't abuse this privilege -- If you do any of these things poorly, you will have a big "unsubscribe" rate. This means, your customers don't value your news and have blocked you from sending future emails. You will get a few unsubscribers every once in a while because people have moved or other personal reasons, but anything above 3-5% is not a good trend.

We are strong believers in local email newsletters, and we'll continue to try to make this easier for you. The people who vote for you during our contests love you, and if you offer them smart reasons to stay in touch with you, then you'll be rewarded with repeat business.

* Here's a view of the business center. You can sign up here to start your own enewsletter:

The Best of the Northwest on King5

Recommendation: Visit the Pacific Northwest.

Ok...I know I'm not supposed to have favorites, but I absolutely love what King5 is doing with our product in the greater Seattle market. We normally run contests to determine the best salons, the best museums, and the best restaurants -- and we collect thousands of votes. This is the first time we've had a contest where locals are helping to pick the best place to go fishing, the best place to go whale watching, and the best place to go sky diving. I love it.

You can check it out here as part of their Best of the Northwest Escapes. This promotion is showcasing lots of categories we normally don't have on our websites -- and voters are providing some great recommendations. Here are a few of my favorites:

gailgarrett says... "the owners [of San Juan Whale Watching] have been involved in eco-tourism for longer than the word has been around."

dkd says of Spot Tail Salmon Guide..."Keith's method of fishing allows the client to truly experience the Puget Sound. "Mooching" means the motor is off, the rod is in the users hand and the excitement of the Hookup is fabulous"

JDMichaelson says of Skydive Snohomish... "couldn't get my wife to join me, but it was a blast! a must try before you die!"

I'm buying my plane ticket once this contest is over. Voting ends April 13th.

Happy Birthday To KCRA's A-List -- 3 years old this week

Today, CityVoter will invite more than 3100 business owners from the Sacramento area to compete in the 3rd annual KCRA A-List competition. To-date, more than 1900 business owners have logged onto KCRA.com to manage their profile. Each year, our partner does a great job getting people excited, and we continue to receive wonderful feedback from the Sacramento community (we have more than 45,000 comments and reviews from local consumers).

Voting in this year's competition will begin on Monday February 23rd and will end April 18th.

This is CityVoter's first city to run its annual contest 3 consecutive years. Throughout 2007 and 2008 more than 500,000 people have visited the KCRA A-List website. The A-List has truly developed into a powerful local brand.

In 2007, we collected more than 88,000 votes.

Last year, we collected more than 120,000 votes.

We are genuinely very excited to see how the city responds again this year.

Open letter to A-List business owners in Cedar Rapids

Business owners in the Cedar Rapids area can no longer log-in and use their A-List profile on their local television station website, KCRG.com. KCRG is no longer working with CityVoter, but they are still promoting something called the A-List (which may cause a little confusion).

In 2008, CityVoter partnered with KCRG to develop the A-List brand and help more than 1000 local business owners in Cedar Rapids get great exposure for their businesses. More than 470 of the local business owners uploaded photos and updated their profile.

We sent out a note to all business owners today to let them know that their accounts will be moved over to CityVoter.com. We welcome all business owners to use their profile on CityVoter.com immediately and let us know if you have any challenges doing so. Your profile will continue to showcase all the great reviews you received in 2008, and you'll still have full control over your profile to upload photos, change locations, and promote your business.




CityVoter.com also offers a number of exciting ways you can participate in your city. You can ask questions and get answers from locals using our question and answer tools, and you can create a personal guide to Cedar Rapids and the surrounding area using our "local guide" tools.

Most importantly, CityVoter will be announcing its plans to run our 2009 contest soon. We hope to collect even more votes this year! Stay tuned.

New business center for local business owners

Today, CityVoter released the first in a series of improvements to our business center -- an area where we provide local business owners a lot of free services to promote their products and services.

The older version of our business center was used by more than 25K business owners in more than 20 cities, so we had a lot of data to use to determine what business owners were doing and what they wanted.

You can see the old version here:

We noticed business owners were spending a lot of time updating their photos, but we needed to make sure that we helped them find the other services we were offering like free business cards and signage for their stores and restaurants.

We also have a number of ways to reach customers on the web either through email newsletters or links (badges) people could put on their own website.

Most importantly, we noticed that we weren't thinking like business owners. When we're on the phone with business owners they tell us in very clear terms: we want new customers and we want our loyal customers to come back.

So we redesigned our business center to organize our services in the way business owners think. The new design helps business owners: 1) Showcase their profile on our site 2) Acquire new customers and 3) Reach their existing customers to build loyalty.


We look forward to your feedback on these enhancements and any other ideas you have on other ways we can be helpful.

You cannot avoid competition on the Internet

Last week, CityVoter rolled out a new feature on our website that allows us to suggest that people who are looking at one business consider other businesses on our website that are similar and have been recommended by other consumers. This feature is designed to continue to help consumers understand that CityVoter is a place where you can get great recommendations so you can make better decisions. After all, if we only showed consumers one salon or one museum, how would we be helping them compare and be more informed?

Needless to say, the feature is working very well with consumers who visit the site. Immediately, we noticed that consumers were eager to see other similar businesses, and they're staying on the website longer -- helping all businesses get better free promotion.

Unfortunately, some business owners are not happy with CityVoter listing their competition on their profile page. "Why would we want to promote our competitors?"

This response is understandable, but not really consistent with how consumers shop or behave on the Internet. Most consumers find our website because they've searched for a local product or service using Google or another search engine. They're already in shop and compare mode. It is a huge benefit to the business owners on our site that we give them so much control to promote what makes them different and great. The fact that we allow consumers to compare you side by side with your competitors should allow you to stand out. If you need help standing out from the crowd, let us know. The answer isn't "buy advertising" (although that helps), it can be free and as simple as uploading new photos, highlighting some of your customer reviews, and providing an insider deal (a special offer).

Best of college and university campuses

Businesses that operate near or around college and university campuses know the joys and pain of relying on student customers. They are fickle, they are transient, and they are social. These characteristics make students hard to reach with a consistent message and the concept of a loyal customer is fleeting.

For decades, one vehicle local business owners have used to reach students has been their student run newspapers. However, on campus, these printed editions are competing with portals, student websites, and social networks like Facebook and Myspace -- where students spend most of their time and share most of the news they need to figure out what to buy and where to go around town.

To help reach these students online, we've begun to build guides to college and university campuses in major cities. Our first guide launched with a "best-of" contest this month with Boston College. We allowed the college newspaper staff to determine a radius around campus that defined the area where students generally shop and go out. For the past few weeks, we've been collecting student votes and reviews. So far, we have well over 1000 votes -- not bad for a new concept -- and the student paper is getting some great content to publish before the end of the year.

The businesses on the guide and competing in the contest have all kinds of Boston area customers, but some of them truly covet Boston's large student population. This is a great way from business owners to see exactly how they fair with the college audience and then respond with the right kind of marketing message.

Social Media's Impact on Your Offline Business

I've written a couple of articles for Business Week to help small business owners understand some of the trends on the Internet. Like this blog, the topics are really designed to give local business owners the tips and tools to promote their businesses better without spending a lot on web designers.

Here are some of the past articles:

1) Don't fear consumer reviews.

2) How to improve search results.

3) Another article on improving search results (not the actual title)

Here is the full-text of a tip that was posted most recently on February 19. This one was designed to get the non-believers over the hump.

You may think not having an online presence means the Internet does not have an impact on your business. The truth is consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for information to help them in their offline buying decisions. In fact, according to a recent study by comScore, nearly one out of every four Internet users reported using online reviews prior to paying for a service delivered offline.

This means that it’s critically important to be aware of what customers are saying about you online. Even if you don’t have a Web site, comments about your company may appear in any number of sites—from consumer review sites to social networking sites.

Capitalize on this increasingly consumer-driven economy by participating in the online dialogue. Monitor and manage comments about your business. Encourage your customers to share their positive experiences online. Reward customers who recommend your business through loyalty or coupon programs. Use negative comments to your advantage. Respect valid customer criticisms and make changes when warranted in how you run your business. Respond to negative comments and reach out to those who have had a bad experience with your company. The bottom line is your customers are using the Internet to talk to one another. For the benefit of your business, join the conversation.

Personal guides make anyone a tour guide

A few months ago, CityVoter released what we call "personal guides". I don't know if that name will stick, but it is a helpful description of what we allow people to do. They can create a personal guide to where they like to shop or how they spend a rainy day. They can plan trips and organize a night out with friends.

Over the past few months, we haven't really promoted these guides much. We really wanted to see what people would create. In our home town of Boston, we've built a good foundation of guides. While we know there are lots of ways personal guides will evolve, the early indicator is that people are most comfortable and familiar with creating travel advice guides. Here's an example of one of the more popular guides on our site.


This user organized some popular spots in Charlestown into a guide telling visitors in what order to visit these locations and what to do when they get there -- like a conceirge at a hotel.

The personal guide concept is simple: Give people a way to easily organize, rearrange, and comment on all the great business profiles we build during our best-of city contests. When they are done, give them an easy way to share.

The "personal guide" opportunity for local business owners and media companies is huge.

• Business owners get even more free promotion -- and some creative ideas on how to market their business. "Visit us when you're touring Charlestown"
  
  
• Media companies get unique travel advice and local feature content that they normally have to pay journalists to create.

We'll continue to improve personal guides over time. We've received some great feedback already on how we could organize these guides, make them easier to build and more personal for the author, and make them easier to share.

If you want to try it out, please give it a shot and let us know what you think. You'll need a CityVoter account.

A warning to business owners though: We've had a number of business owners who create guides that are self-serving. For example, "Guide to best salons" and then the owner only lists him/herself. The audience on our site will reject this content and it will get harder to find. If we find it, we'll reject it too. The best guides will get highlighted on the site. So, if you are a business owner, and you're an expert in your local area, have fun, but understand the checks and balances are in place to reward stuff our audience really likes.

Local event websites

One category of local websites I haven't yet mentioned is what I would call local event websites. The ones I pay attention to are Zvents, Eventful and Going.com. Going.com has morphed a little bit recently into more of a slideshow social networking site for the clubbing scene and is probably pretty popular with the same kinds of local businesses that tend to advertise in trade in city weekly magazines -- bars, nightclubs, limo services, etc.

Zvents and Eventful are different. They aggregate event listings across the country and then license this information to media companies who put this content on their websites so that they can have a calendar of happenings or promote "what to do". Newspapers in particular understand the paid listing model for advertising -- after all, they fight to hold onto every dime of their classified revenue while craigslist eats it up. The paid event listing model is no different so local event sites have taken off.

Zvents and Eventful have both lined up dozens of media partners at an impressive clip, and they're are trying to invite local business owners to add to their event listings for free. They (and their partners) will make money when someone wants to promote their event above the other events listed.

The problem I see with this content is it is ephemeral. After an event occurs the content is useless. No one needs to archive and search things that happened in the past -- and reviewing something that only happens once does no one any good.

As a small business though, these sites do offer you a way to list events for free -- and they really want your information so they're pretty lenient when it comes to their definition of an event. A smart thing to do is create a recurring event, like a wine tasting, trivia night, or a open house kind of event that happens every Tuesday or every two weeks. That way, this listing will stay on these sites longer than the one timers. The good news for a small business too: Zvents and Eventful license their content out to many different websites so your listing can immediately appear in multiple places increasing your exposure.

We plan to help business owners share this kind of news and event information (we call it the inside scoop) on our site soon in the form of a news ticker. We hope by collecting this information directly from the business owners who are in our business center, we'll be able to share unique content -- not stuff you can find on any old event calendar. The inside scoop concept is really important for how we are evolving, so stay tuned.

Smokin in Orlando

Recently, we've been asking business owners who win our local best-of competitions to share with us their story. How did they get started? What are they known for? And of course, how do they promote themselves? Storefront signage is a big part of how our contests establish legitimacy year-over-year in each city. Harry Smooth's Tobacco Shop takes advantage of this to promote its victory -- it also uses contest logos for its websites to drive visitors to its winner's profile.

We profiled Harry Smooth’s Tobacco Shop -- which is outside of Orlando in Titusville -- last October because we love the note the owner sent us about his family business. We also want to let you all know that if you're looking for a great place to view a Space Shuttle launch, this could be the spot.

Here's the note:

Harry Smooth’s Tobacco Shop began long ago when Harry was just a boy, watching his Father light up Big Cuban Cigars with his friends. I loved the Smell of them even back then, and my Dads favorite Cigar Shop, which was on Orange Ave near the Firestone Building in Downtown Orlando, was old, and Dusty, but all the “Old Men” would gather there, most of which were prominent Orlando Businessmen at the time. I remember they would light up, have a belt of Bourbon, and tell lots of stories, while giving us kids a little bottle of coke and a pack of Toms Crackers. With this in mind I started Harry Smooth’s back in 2003 in Historic Downtown Titusville and been going strong ever since. Keeping with the history I remember, Harry Smooth’s is reminiscent of an old time Cigar Shop, with lots of Curios, Leather, and Oddities and of course the Finest Super Premium Cigars available in Central Fl. Harry Smooth’s is in the Historic Downtown District, perfect for watching the Shuttle launches from our back deck. We have our “A-List 2008 Winner” status prominently displayed on our Front Glass Windows, Doors, Website and Our A-List 2008 Winner Certificate is Framed and hangs proudly on our wall.

Here is an example of how Harry Smooth's is using a contest logo to let people who visit their website know they're one of the best businesses in the Orlando area.


Our partner in Orlando is a local NBC affiliate www.wesh.com. They call their contest the "A-List". In 2008, they collected more than 44,000 votes to determine approximately 100 local winners.

Do you trust Brittanya or Nikki?

Reality TV is about real people doing real stuff, right? I mean, my wife talks about the characters on The Real World and The Hills like she went to high school with them (I would have said college, but I realize that would be stretching it for some of these stars).

The point is, like friends, we learn to trust or distrust characters we see on these programs. That's why we were excited to work with vh1 recently to help promote their show Rock of Love Bus with Bret Michaels.
The show concept is simple (no offense). Bret is a rock star and he needs to find love. Finding love is hard because Bret's always on the road touring. So, it made sense to bring along 20 or so women (they call them girls) on a bus to figure out who would be his life partner. If a girl is not compatible with Bret, she is asked to leave the bus. All very civil.

To help promote this concept and give these characters a stronger connection with their fans, CityVoter worked with the show to develop guides to where these girls live and hang out. The girls created guides to their favorite boutiques, beauty salons, and partying hot spots. These guides certainly give a you a flavor of each hometown. Places like Oxnard in Ventura County, Vegas, Johnson City, and Honolulu.

More and more frequently, television productions are being designed to connect to local audiences and advertisers. Promotions like we did with vh1 can take national concepts and make them very real for the audience -- especially the local businesses. How many times have you been to a restaurant and seen the famous people on the wall who have eaten there? This web promotion should evolve to be similar in its design and intent. For businesses on these guides, it's driving a nice amount of traffic. We're continuing to explore this concept with home improvement, travel, food, and beauty cable shows. There are lot of interesting ways this can develop.

Video ads online

One of the most shocking things I learned when I started CityVoter was just how much it cost to produce and run a television advertisement on local network television -- ABC, NBC, CBS, or FOX. I had no concept of all the different ways business owners got charged for coming up with these ads, shooting them, and then of course making sure they were played on TV.
Recently, the cost of making these ads has gone down a lot. Some of this is due to cheaper equipment and better editing tools. Some this is due to the economy and competition driving down prices advertising agencies and media companies charge.

In many cities, CityVoter partners with local TV stations. These groups are working hard to come up with cost-effective ways to help their existing TV advertisers put their ads on the Internet. Often they have a difficult time doing this because they're not set up to support this kind of production.

That problem has given birth to a number of young companies who are building internet video expertise. Since it is a big problem, there are many interesting companies who are thinking about how video will be played and shared across different websites, but I wanted to introduce you to two companies who work directly with local business owners:

1. Mixpo -- which is based in Seattle -- is developing a really cool tool that business owners can use to create their own web video advertising. They take a smart approach that assumes that most business owners have photos of their businesses and don't own or know how to make videos for the internet. This approach allows business owners to easily string together photos into what looks like a basic cable commercial. You can see an example here: VideoAd by MixpoThey help upload music, photos, logos, etc. and for business owners with video, they provide simple tools to edit a commercial.
   
   
2. The other company is TurnHere. TurnHere is also based on the west coast. They have hired videographers in cities across the world so that they can immediately send some body out to your location and create a quick video for your business that will be ready to play on the Internet. They do everything for you, but they make it clear to customers that this is a point-and-shoot documentary style commercial. To customize your video, they will charge you more, so be clear you understand what you're buying. You can see examples of their work here. Just be sure you're looking at local business videos. They also do high-end work for bigger clients.
   

Crash course on web advertising

After I spent a good amount of time learning about the different kinds of local websites there were out there, I spent even more time trying to figure out how they all made money. I could not imagine that the world needed this many places to find out where an Italian restaurant was or if a plumber handled water heater repair. It turns out the answer was simple...and then again, not so simple. The simple answer was advertising. The problem is, many of these sites use different kinds of advertising. I'll try to explain.

1) Some sites use what is called "cost per click". Cost-per-click or CPC advertising is a form of advertising that only charges the advertiser when someone clicks on their ad (this is most commonly a text ad, but sometimes it can be a graphic ad). This is a very common form of advertising for Yellow Page companies and search engines like Google and Yahoo. Google and Yahoo actually allow advertisers to determine how much a click is worth. They do this by creating an area where advertisers can bid on what they're willing to pay for a click. The idea being that if someone clicks on your ad, you will turn some of those clickers into customers. It's a straightforward idea, but it requires a lot of time to figure out how much you should be paying and why.

2) Other sites use what are called "display ads".
Display ads are like print advertisements, except they show up on a website and often link to another website. They come in different sizes and if you are going to use a display ad for your business, you are going to need one designed for you. Unfortunately, few websites use display ads well. Most are designed to be annoying and capture our attention. For example, by now, most of us have been to websites where people are dancing because mortgage rates are so low. These are display ads. Display ads can generate money for the website owner in a couple of ways:

• Volume. The website owner gets paid every time he/she displays 1000 of these ads. If someone says we charge a CPM rate. That's a cost per thousand ads. CPMs are higher (around $10-$20) on quality websites with quality audiences and dirt cheap ($0.15 - $1) on sites that don't help put your ads in front of the right people at the right time.
  
  
• Effectiveness. For example, this ad is for mortgages. If my website shows this ad, and the person who clicks on it actually fills out an application for a mortgage, I've created a qualified lead for that mortgage customer. They would pay me per lead that I sent them.

There are a few other important considerations, but these are still the dominant ways websites that are supported by advertising make money. A lot of this is changing, but if you understand these approaches, you'll have a good foundation for figuring out what could work best for your business.

Making sense of all these local websites

Up until now, there have been a number of companies that have attempted to build local websites that help neighbors share information. Many of these sites such as Judy's Book and Backfence have been started with the best intentions, but few have helped local business owners grow their businesses and many have gone out of business.

In fact, there have been so many failures both small business owners and consumers remain skeptical of the value of joining a new site that promises to give them the local information they need. It is easy now, and it continues to get easier, for anyone to develop a local blog or website. So clearly, it is difficult to figure out which sites will work and which ones will not. When I set about starting CityVoter, I took a hard look at all the different kinds of local sites out there, and I created a way to group them together. Here's what I came up with:

1) There are online directory websites. Think of these as online versions of the Yellow Pages. They are really good at listing businesses in categories and providing basic location and contact information.

2) There are local search websites. These sites like Local.com, Marchex, and CitySearch provide an easy way to search and find information about local businesses beyond simply their contact information and address.

3) There are review websites. Sites like Angie's List, TripAdvisor, and Yelp are really good examples of these sites. They ask people to comment on what they like and what they don't like about businesses and then let consumers see which are most popular.

4) There are specific local websites that focus on one industry. The Knot, Spafinder, and findlaw.com are good examples of these kinds of directories that specialize in one category so they can offer deep expertise in local markets.

5) There are traditional media company websites. The local newspaper, radio station, magazine, and tv station all have some version of local directories or yellow pages. These sites often use information they buy from the yellow page companies or data aggregators.

6) Personal blogs and community websites. Lots of new neighborhood websites have popped up recently because it is so easy to post photos and create a website. Individuals can now set up a website that is all about the block they live on. Here are a few local examples I really like in Brooklyn, Seattle, and Boston.

The groupings could go on because there are lots of ways the internet is displaying local information, but it is helpful think about this different groupings when you see your business listed somewhere. It will help you understand what the site is trying to accomplish, how much control you will have over how your information is being displayed, and most importantly, how to manage your reputation.

Do you trust your local TV anchor?

When you talk to people who have lived in a city for a while, they're pretty passionate about their local news station. They may not know it, but poke around a little bit and they'll start admitting how much they love John on the morning show or cannot stand Jane on the evening news. Anchors are celebrities in cities. You see their faces on billboards lining the highways, they emcee events, and they visit schools. We watch the ones we like and trust. We avoid the ones we simply cannot stand to watch. We know when our favorites change their hair styles, and we probably follow them if the switch stations.

The celebrity status of an anchor is something that is arguably on the decline because of anyone can be a star on YouTube and reality television. But I'm betting the need for local talent (news and entertainment anchors) will continue to make local television stations relevant in years to come. Yes, the format of nightly news will continue to change, and yes, there will be more blurring of the lines that divide news departments and advertising sales so it is even harder to tell who is a pitchman and who is a journalist. But there will always be a place for developing personalities we trust. Since video is the best way to do that, I believe the television networks know how to do this better than anyone. Therefore, I believe local TV stations are in a unique position to develop websites that feel more personal and more relevant that national websites. I'm eager to see how this unfolds as more and more video programming comes on to the web. I believe the audience response to online anchors will be positive and lasting.

Would you take recommendations from a 13 year-old?

Obviously, the amount of time I spend on the internet is increasing because I do more things there -- pay bills, manage my finances, connect with friends and family, and share photos. Despite all the time I spend on the internet, I have still found very few websites that can recommend I do something. The Internet is still more like the Yellow Pages where I go to find things than a concierge at a hotel where I go to ask and learn things.

There are a lot of reasons for this. First of all, the Internet is still relatively young. I know the technology has been around a long time, but Yahoo, Netscape, and Microsoft really only made it easier for us to use around 1996. So, that makes the Internet like a 13 year-old. It's been collecting information and learning to speak for 13 years. I've met some pretty smart kids in my day, but I don't know that I'd trust a 13 year-old's recommendation on where to buy my wife an anniversary gift (although given my track record she'd argue that I should seek one out for advice).

We do see some websites that are able to make suggestions. Amazon is probably the one we are all most familiar with. They use technology to suggest books and products based on what other people have bought. They are able to do this because millions of people have purchased products on their site. They've got an IQ that is much larger than a 13 year-old's because they've sold so many things. Through their millions of sales, they've learned or can assume (often correctly) what people like to buy at the same time. For instance, if you bought a handbag and a pair of boots on Amazon (and hundreds of other people bought that same handbag and pair of boots) Amazon would begin to assume that those boots went well with that handbag or they represented the same fashion taste ie: trendy, conservative, funky, etc. By figuring out what people are buying, Amazon can suggest to the next visitor that "people who bought this bag also like these boots".

Out of media chaos springs opportunity for local business owners

There are a lot of news reports and research that forecast that the internet will make our local news irrelevant and kill newspapers. I put one here so you can do a quick study. You can see from this chart from the PewResearchCenter that young people are increasingly turning to the internet to get their information. This isn't shocking to anyone, but you should pay attention. Why? Because as a wise man once said, "knowledge is power".



This is a trend most local advertisers can use to their advantage and get the best promotion for their companies. The trend has your local TV stations and newspapers scrambling to see who can write stories and broadcast information differently so they grow their audiences. After all, the next generation demands it. To respond to a younger populaton, media companies are pushing more video and hip entertainment and event information online and to mobile. But it's not just how they are delivering their information, it is what they are delivering.

Media companies are not only shedding audiences, they are losing national advertisers. National advertisers see these charts too and realize there are better ways to reach larger audiences now. For example, cnn.com, espn.com, and weather.com all offer stronger outlets for brands like Toyota, Bank of America, and Verizon. Local news outlets no longer provide the best exposure for their national products. So, local media companies are looking to build new shows and new sections that can really focus on what to do tonight, what new restaurants are opening up, and where to shop. This is a bit of a return to local journalism. The only challenge for these media companies is they have to do this kind of reporting now in an environment where they cannot afford as many journalists. Therefore, you should keep your eye out for programming that requests you submit your story or enter your business. Media companies are increasingly relying on their audience to generate story ideas and contribute videos and photos they can use. We have a show in Boston where a local spa owner gives beauty tips and has become somewhat of a celebrity herself. To me, this is a perfect example of one long running commercial for her local business.

Risk and rewards of letting customers speak out

When we approach media companies with the idea that they should help us run local contests in their city where people will vote and review local businesses, they immediately ask us what happens if a local business owner gets upset or complains that the contest is rigged? Worse, what happens if they read a negative review that a customer has written about them? Will we remove it? How long will it be on the site?

If you put yourself in the shoes of someone who works at a large newspaper like the NY Times or a television network like NBC, you can start to understand why they have an aversion to letting their audiences write something on their website or post a picture or a video. They have a brand to protect. Their brands have been cultivated, and they're protected to ensure advertisers want to align themselves with their content and programming. Proctor and Gamble wants to put its ads for baby shampoo next to quality news programs built on journalistic integrity. If our contests soiled our partners' website with racy photos or aggressive complaints from dissatisfied customers they would run a legitimate risk of losing advertising dollars. But a couple of factors came together to make it possible for media companies to really get behind these promotions:

1. They were losing on the web. TV stations, newspapers, and radio stations were all lag significantly behind other kinds of websites. With weather.com, cnn.com, and espn.com, the local news sites were struggling to provide information consumers couldn't get elsewhere.
   
   
2. National advertisers were going away. For decades, TV stations, newspapers, and radio stations were able to support their operations with national advertisers who would place national buys. TV stations would benefit from auto companies doling out funds to their local dealers and large advertising agencies would still set aside budget for the dominant media companies in each market.
   
   
3. Consumers were learning to behave. The self-policing of communities on the web by 2005 made it clear that users who were not contributing to the benefit of the greater good online would be called out. People were able to flag inappropriate comments and tools got better to identify and reject explicit content before it made its way onto a website.

There are a number of other factors, but these definitely played a dominant role in media companies permitting more user generated content on their websites. To be clear though, this still is an evolution. Our first contest did not include consumer reviews. Just a few years later, we now have more than 700,000 comments and reviews across our platform. The tide is definitely shifting to more consumer input, not less.

Most importantly, we started to receive some great positive feedback from business owners. Sure there were a few squeaky wheels crying foul, but the vast majority of business owners were enormously grateful that we were collecting their customers' comments. As the first stories and thank you letters came in from owners, we circulated them to the entire company and often tried to gather as a company and read them aloud. It was, and still is, a huge motivating force behind CityVoter to know that local business owners are using our technology to gain insight into what their customers love. Many are too busy to gather this feedback and even if they had time, they would be challenged to collect as many great responses.

The positive response from business owners was equally important to our media partners. They took a risk by letting consumers have a voice on their website. They may have alienated national and potential local advertisers, but the opposite was happening. All this activity was attracting national advertisers because it was clear this voting was a sign of an engaged audience, and most importantly, all these grateful local business owners were considering (often for the first time) advertising with our partners.

Giving business owners control of their profiles

CBS television in Boston helped CityVoter get on the map in 2006. Our first couple of contests proved that we could reach business owners and get them excited about free promotion on the Internet. But what was really exciting was business owners were doing what we wanted them to do most. They were using their passwords to log in and manage the way their business looked on our website.

In 2006, a lot of people had begun self-publishing webpages and blogs without the help of web designers. People were already exploring MySpace and Facebook and more and more people had used Kodak or Flickr to share photos. However, very few websites were doing this for business owners. Even websites like CitySearch and AOL City Guide didn't allow this. These sites were inviting people to vote on their favorite businesses but were not letting the business owners change their photos or their descriptions. This meant a business owner could only hope that the photos they posted were good ones or that the write up the editor chose to put together was accurate. We felt that if we allowed a business owner to own their profile page, they would keep it current and really showcase their business in a way that helped consumers learn as much as possible.

The early results were promising, but frustrating too. We were providing all this opportunity for business owners, but they were too busy running their businesses to take advantage of the tools we had built. So we had to make it easier. In addition to helping them manage their profiles, we began to develop what we call the "business center". This area started to include a lot of tools and ideas for business owners to help them promote their businesses and compete in the contest promotion. One of the most successful tools we made available was a print marketing and direct mail service called VistaPrint. VistaPrint allowed business owners to order free (shipping not included) business cards to help let customers who visited their store know that they had been nominated as one of the best businesses in the area. The cards printed really well and included all the logos and branding of the media partner in that city. More importantly, the cards could be customized with the businesses address and contact information so they had a new kind of collateral to us. Here are some examples:

A large number of business owners not only order these promotional materials, but many of them get very creative with point-of-sale signage they make themselves. This is one of my favorites:



This pizza shop, nominated as the best in Philadelphia, delivered all their pizzas with this flyer during the contest.

Who was the right partner to promote local businesses?

After speaking with Boston Magazine, The Boston Globe (Boston.com), and The Herald, I had pretty much exhausted the dominant print scene in my home city. The print media companies clearly had other priorities and weren't focused on the local businesses -- at least not online.

Someone recommended that perhaps radio stations who have strong relationships with local businesses (lots of them are advertisers) could be a great place to develop this kind of online contest. They could use their promotion skills to drive audiences online to vote. This would be no different than the contests they were currently running all the time -- DJs were already comfortable incorporating giveaway promos, name that song call-ins, all the normal radio attention grabbers. We figured this made a lot of sense until we began speaking with the leading radio stations in the market. Most of them had just begun promoting their websites as a place to get streaming audio, and all of them were a collection of blinking ads and eye-popping neon graphics. Not surprising, they had very small online audiences. Even if they helped us get people to go online and vote, no one would stay. There just wasn't enough content to entice someone to stick around.

Our break came when someone at the Viacom radio station took us next door to meet their sister company, the local CBS television station. TV was just emerging online as well, but they had a lot more content and base recurring audience. Most importantly, they have a megaphone that most business owners still revere more than most other media: television (especially the local news and weather). In 2006, we launched our first contest with CBS 4 in Boston. As our first partner, they had to create the promos and walk the church and state line between editorial and advertising that continues to hamstring so many media companies. Here's an example of what they put together (and what the first generation of our website looked like):


As we started to reach out to business owners and let them know about this promotion, they were skeptical but energized. Skeptical, because no one ever gave them something for free. Where's the catch and hidden fees? Energized, because many businesses were fed up with editors sitting around determining what was best. The idea that people could vote made even the smaller businesses feel like they had an opportunity to be named the peoples favorite.

To be legitimate, we had to spend a lot of time in the early days helping business owners understand that our voting tools protected against fraud -- but more importantly that we focused on creating a level playing field. This remains a core value of CityVoter. Some people hate our name, "makes me think of politics", and it does. But "CityVoter" also communicates that voting is at the heart of what we do. If we do it well, we build trust. If we build trust, our results and eventually our recommendations will be more valuable.

CityVoter's beginnings...free publicity gone wrong

Back in 2004, I had been helping out some friends in England think about bringing their website business to the US. They designed a site that helped people compare services companies in the UK and make decisions on which company was the best. It was all very exciting, but I couldn't figure out how to make their idea work here.

I figured for a service like theirs to get any attention in the US, it would need to be sponsored by a larger media company. After all, Boston Magazine had a service like this, but for retail businesses. They published the "Best of Boston" for years and even expanded their list concept to schools and doctors. I called them incessantly for a few months trying to see if they'd be interested in my idea to develop a people's choice version of their editor's picks that could be run on the Internet. It was 2004, and they were pretty well committed to their print version and their editor's perspective on what makes a great business.

It was around that time that I walked into my dry cleaner. The owner gave me a card and asked if I wouldn't mind voting for him as the best dry cleaner in North Cambridge. He said the web address was on the card, and it would only take a minute. I looked at the card. It was a simple white card with a web site address on it but not much else. Since I do all my dry cleaning there, and I really do appreciate their service, I was happy to go home and help him win this recognition...(and if you could read the banner in the photo taken years later, you'd notice my dry cleaner sweeps this thing every year).

This contest promotion got my head rolling. Part of me was really eager to see how it worked. Was it legitimate? Could I vote multiple times? If this was working well, maybe someone was already doing what I was proposing to help Boston Magazine do. After all, if I could vote for dry cleaners, what else could I vote for? And if I was voting, who else was voting? What could I learn about my neighborhood? It seemed that if the owner of my dry cleaner was telling all of his customers to vote, then so would all of the other dry cleaner owners, and the bar owners, and the salon owners, and perhaps I could discover a whole bunch of places I didn't know existed. It seemed like a really good idea. I was curious who was behind this.

When I logged on to my computer at home, I found out. It was our local community newspaper group, which at the time was powered by the Boston Herald. It took me a while to figure this out, because the website was a basic polling page with a few business names listed next to buttons. I couldn't click on the businesses to learn more, and I couldn't see any results or other categories. (Sadly, not a lot has changed. They still publish their results online using PDFs.) The next day, I called the Boston Herald and set up a meeting. I wanted to help them do this better. I wanted to help the businesses who were getting all this great free publicity showcase their businesses. Most importantly, I wanted to help clueless people like me who don't get out enough learn more about where they live.

It is this experience and this goal in mind that ultimately gave shape to CityVoter. During the past four years, we've collected more than 2 million votes and CityVoter continues to expand nationwide. More than 100,000 business owners have free photo and video based profiles on our website and millions of visitors have seen these profiles to learn more about their cities. Over the next few months, I hope to showcase the business owners out there who are doing some really innovative things to use our company, CityVoter, to grow their local businesses and keep their loyal customers happy. I also will share all the ways we're growing to deliver local recommendations to people when and where they need them.