Flash Websites In And Around Philly

I've been reaching out to a number of advertising and marketing agencies in Philadelphia in advance of a trip I'll be making there shortly to help plan our Hotlist year-3 celebration. I stumbled upon this firm about an hour outside of Philly in New Jersey and wanted to share their website with you:

http://www.1trickpony.com Spend a few minutes clicking around. It's very clever. I love the bus. I think you can even buy a belt buckle.

I also dig this one: http://www.redtettemer.com. Bold.

Flash is a wonderful technology in the hands of people who know how to use it.

More than 3 Million Votes and counting...

Today, CityVoter announced in a press release that we have passed an important milestone for the company and for our partners nationwide. We've verified more than 3 million votes on behalf of local businesses and media companies. We stand by the results of our contests because we go to great lengths to make sure votes are valid and there is no ballot stuffing. People are encouraged to get people to vote for them, but we make sure votes are legitimate so our contests are fun and fair.

Why is this big news? We only had 2 "best of" city contests in 2006 when we launched our website. This 3 Million number represents a huge amount of engagement, growth, and energy in our cities over the past 3 years. For example, we just finished our 3rd year of voting in Detroit and they had more than 180,000 official votes. We just finished our 3rd year of voting in Denver and they had more than 109,000 official votes. We're smack in the middle of our 2nd year contest in Seattle, and that city is cooking with more than 86,000 votes. Year-over-year, media brands are building social media experiences with CityVoter that really engage their local audiences.

We're proud that people are passionate about local businesses and take time to register to submit their vote. We're even more proud that they take time to write recommendations to help others. In San Diego, our year three contest yielded a 76% increase in recommendations from the year before. And in Indianaopolis, we had 100% increase in recommendations. This is tens of thousands of recommendations in just a few weeks.

I'm very happy to share the news and congratulate our partners and the CityVoter team for keeping true to our mission. There are many online contests that trade integrity for web site traffic and let people vote as many times as they want. We remain focused on discovering the "best of" every city by encouraging people to share their genuine recommendations. Business owners appreciate this and tell us all the time. They love reading all the great feedback from their fans and friends...as of today, we all have more than 3 million reasons to say thank you to their loyal local customers.

Does this taste local to you? Mmm sure does.

"Your taste. Your town." That's what Frito-Lay's potato chip display reads at my local deli. I've been meaning to collect more photo examples of this, but I tend to have one hand on the steering wheel or one hand on my son when I pass a great example of national advertisers trying to extend their brands locally. For example, there's a billboard I see every day heading home from Citgo gas. It says "Loyal. Local. Like it should be." Not sure what that means, and I'm not sure how my taste in potato chips can be more Boston-ish than Atlanta-ish, but I certainly understand WHY brand advertisers want to connect more deeply with local consumers. We're helping that happen online and in-store. We just need a billboard.

CityVoter's local social media campaigns defined

CityVoter believes all brands are publishers – especially online. To help brands surround their products and services with quality, dynamic, and local content, CityVoter develops and promotes localized “best of” contests that engage consumers to vote for and share recommendations about their favorite local businesses. We develop a series of white-labeled mini-sites where consumers vote for art museums, salons, gyms, and more than 100 other categories. More importantly, we activate local markets through email and viral marketing. Our engagement model gives brands an immediate online presence as well as point-of-sale and email marketing reach in the markets and content categories they care most about. An example of our “best of” campaign for FOX Television in LA is here: http://myfoxla.com/hotlist and an example of a "best of" campaign for Nature's Cure is here: http://naturescure.everydaydecisions.com. The by-product from all of this is great free promotion for local business owners. That's positive engagement.

Bing now has advanced image search

Bing is Microsoft's new search engine. It is designed to compete with Google and give you a whole new way to find things on the Internet. I'm starting to like it. I really like their new image search. It is much better than Google's because I found it more consistently provides the correct CityVoter link to local business photos.

Below is a screenshot that does a great job capturing the essence of CityVoter. You have a photo of Bristol Brewing Company in Colorado, Corona Cigar Company in Orlando, Muskego Country Club in Milwaukee, and Franco Ristorante in Philadelphia.

Check it out when you have time.

If I were a small business owner

If I was a local business owner, I would be too busy in this economy to worry about how the internet is changing and effecting my business. I would hear from my friends or my customers that I need to be on Facebook. I would say I am, but they would say, "no, you need to set up a separate account for your business." I would say, "why? who wants to be friends with a business?". I may give it a try, but I would struggle to log in as my business because my browser keeps my cookies and I would post family photos to my customers. I'd be embarrassed but I'd figure that out. Ultimately, I would see that my business way lonely, and I'd feel badly for leaving it there unattended and unloved.

I would see a review written about me on Yelp or CitySearch, and I'd feel helpless and want to fight back. Who was this person writing about me? Why are they so mean? I'd assume it was probably a competitor. They're so jealous. I'd get angrier and really want to fight back but I wouldn't know how. So I'd probably write something nasty to the website and even post my own review saying the other reviewer was wrong. We'd go back-and-forth in public...and eventually the reviewer would have the last word, because that's how those sites work.

Someone would tell me to sign up for Twitter. I would and realize, wow that was easy. Then I would stare at my screen and wonder what should I write and why. I would be confused that people are following me and unsubscribe because I don't like being followed especially by people in other countries who have very explicit photos. Hmm...

What small business owner has time for all of this? Not me.

So I'd go to Google and search the internet for help with the Internet. I'd see search engine optimization companies and consultants. I'd see word of mouth marketers and reputation managers. I'd see digital mavens and gurus and social media conferences. I wouldn't know where to begin...so I'd sign up for Google. That must be safe. That must be what all the other businesses are doing. I'd get an adwords account. I'd spend a few nights reading how it works and I'd set my budget. I'd start getting lots of clicks on my website but I wouldn't know if more people are visiting my store. I would question whether or not I was spending enough money to get results. Google's business center would make some helpful suggestions: spend more and don't run your ads in cities where you don't have a business. I'd try this advice and get more clicks, but still wouldn't be able to tell if more people were coming into my store.

This all brings me back to my first point: If I was a local business owner, I would be too busy in this economy to worry about how the internet is changing and effecting my business.

At CityVoter, we speak to thousands of business owners each month. We worry about promoting their local businesses, so the local business owners don't have to. We've begun using Twitter to promote our contests and our businesses, and we're about to launch new features that make our coupons/insider deals even better. We're even promoting our winners' photos on the iphone app. I would love your feedback and suggestions on what else we can do. It doesn't need to be this hard. You've got a business to run. Give us some great photos...we'll do the rest.

LA Email Newsletters Get a FaceLift

Next week, we'll be launching new and improved dedicated email newsletters to our 30,000 plus subscribers in that market. Our new email is designed to showcase one great offer. It's been working extremely well in Dallas, Indianapolis, and Houston so we're looking forward to seeing the response when Los Angeles customers feast their eyes on their local deals.

A CityVoter dedicated email: reaches opt-in consumers, can be targeted to people who voted in particular categories, showcases recommendations written by real customers, and has one terrific offer.

Exhaustive directory versus local best of lists

David Mihm, a writer for Search Engine Land, kindly mentioned CityVoter in a recent article he wrote, and he gave our website credit for doing a great job helping Google maps find and showcase local businesses. He also pointed out that our website is limited because we don't do a good job of providing a longer list of business categories to help small businesses categorize themselves correctly. In his article, he mentions it was hard to find a good place to list a company that specializes in "Environmental Services".

It's a valid point, but it's purposeful. While we welcome all kinds of businesses so people can recommend their favorites, our site is designed to focus on the categories consumers are most passionate about: arts & entertainment, beauty, fashion, weddings, restaurants, health and fitness, etc. We're about best of lists. We focus on these categories and use our voting to filter these lists down to the most popular top 5 businesses in each category. This does not provide a valuable exhaustive directory, it provides an invaluable cheat sheet of must dos/eats/visits.

What if I'm passionate about my environmental services vendor? You can tell us, but we're going to try and stay focused on what we're best at. While we provide useful advertising for contractors, plumbers, and other service vendors, who want to reach local consumers, we would expect consumers to use Angie's List or the Yellow Pages to locate and research those professionals.

We remain stubbornly focused on our core at CityVoter because we believe there is too much noise on directory and review sites to help people use these sites for things they are most interested and passionate about. SEO experts continue to battle us on this by putting their plumber clients in our burger categories, but fortunately our contest and monitoring services work hard to highlight and filter the most popular businesses.

Thanks for the mention, David. Now...if you can just convince KATU or KPTV or KGW to launch their best of Portland, we'd be all set.

Detroit's 4 The Best List is The Best

I've been speaking with a lot of ad agencies recently, and they all make up clever words for their services: Socializming, WOMing, exBrandocity, Momania, etc.

Anyway, I have big news, so I want to make up a word too. "Defraudulizing". It's something we do to make sure when people in a city are done voting each year, we have the most accurate "best of" list possible.

The big news...we just finished defraudulizing Detroit (Phony word and alliteration = two points) and it's official: Detroit crushed it. In year 3, WDIV, our partner, collected more than 180,000 votes in two months. That's a new CityVoter record.

More than 65% of voters took time to leave a recommendation for someone else. That's more than 80,000 recommendations this year alone. We'll be announcing winners shortly, but CityVoter and WDIV are enormously proud of our 4 The Best list. It is a wonderful feeling to know we were able to generate all this publicity for local business owners.

Congrats to all the businesses who participated. And congrats Detroiters...this is a phenomenal resource for people trying to discover something new and fun about the motor city. Thank you Heather and team for all your hard work.

Hit and run soapbox blog entry on web advertising

If you're an advertiser who notices that your ad on media company's website isn't performing well, you have a few options. 1) You can pull your ad. 2) You can make your ad more prominent (bigger, blinking, etc.). 3) You can target your ad so it is in front of the right audience.

For a number of years, advertisers have tried all of these approaches with varying degrees of success. Despite their efforts, consumers continue to learn how to avoid advertising to get to the content they want - Tivo, YouTube, blogs...etc.

I want to point out an approach that I think is a best practice and a 4th option to advertising on the web. Take a look at this site: http://petcharts.purina.com/. In this situation Purina has developed a content site that is the advertisement. It is an area pet lovers can read stories, vote, and engage with others around a topic that is central to Purina's attempt to sell pet supplies.

More brands want to do this yet media companies want to avoid being associated with content like this since it is advertorial. The argument goes: How dare the NY Times get paid for allowing Purina to republish a pet story from their website. Use on Purina's website would be an implied endorsement of their products.

It's a longer discussion, and a more complicated debate, but I do simply want to point out: a) this is the direction brands are going (acting like publishers) and b) with the proliferation of better paying rich media ads and other large branded advertising elements on media web sites, there is a tough argument to make that helping a brand create a special website like http://petcharts.purina.com/ is any different than allowing the brand to takeover a section of your website with an expanding ad.