It’s a great concept, really. In case you didn’t know, you have 10 “Best Ever” medals to award to your most beloved places, from your favorite coffee shop to your cable company. You may be able to go around handing out 5 star reviews to hundreds of businesses, but not so with medals. However, if you find a new place you love even more than the last, don’t worry—you can remove and reassign your medals. If your business receives—and keeps—a “Best Ever” medal, consider it an achievement.

If you’ve made it a point to follow all of Google’s frequent product updates, you might already be using medal ratings, or you at least know where to find them. Most of you who are familiar with Google Places probably recognize the reviews section. When you visit a business’s Google Places listing, you can leave a review if you’re signed into your Google account and have created a Google Places profile for leaving ratings. You can leave star ratings from 1-5 and you can also include longer reviews if you feel like it.

But you can’t leave a “Best Ever” review from the main listing page (or on your iPhone app). You also can’t leave “Best Ever” reviews by clicking on Google Places in your list of products, because it takes you here:

Because you are trying to leave ratings, not create your own business listing, the best way to access the Google Places dashboard where you can leave “Best Ever” reviews is by going directly to http://www.google.com/places/.  I mean, I could go into using the now technically defunct Google Hotpot, but to keep it simple, just take my advice and memorize the Google Places URL. Or bookmark it.

You should see this screen after going to the main Places URL. Click on the blue “Start rating” button on the left.

After you hit the blue button, you should see this screen. Once you’re here, you can finally start awarding those coveted “Best Ever” medals.

So, the next time you’re getting ready to leave yet another 5 star review for a place that you feel actually deserves a little bit more, remember the medals. And businesses, take note…it’s not quite as easy for someone to leave a “Best Ever” rating, and to make the top 10, services and products should be great, not just good.

Kristen Watson

Kristen Watson is a Search Marketing Associate at Direct Online Marketing.

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By making us wait so long (they kicked off notorious troublemakers like Sesame Street for trying to use the original launch of Google+ for persons as an organizational page), they really built up anticipation, so we were all pretty excited at the news today.  Heck, even SEOdog was running around and barking like a rabies-addled pooch.  Or maybe that was just because there were scary-looking 10-year-olds walking out front.

How Do I set Up a Google+ Page for My Business?

We’re glad you asked, Rhetorical Writing Device.  Just click here.  You’ll first have to sign in, so you’ll either need to have an existing Google account (maybe you have gmail or have hooked up your existing email to services like Docs or Calendar) or create a new one.

NOTE: Unless this changes in the future, this Google+ Page is going to be tied to your Google+ profile like facebook pages.  Therefore, you’ll want to make sure you’re doing it from an account with a person least likely to leave your employ.  I believe you could also set up a business account with Google Apps and tie it through that, but trust me – that’s a pain in the tuchus if a Google+ Page is your only reason for creating an account.

Once you get in, you have five basic choices for page type:

• Local Business or Place
• Product or Brand
• Company, Institution or Organization
• Arts, Entertainment or Sports
• Other

Even though it doesn’t have as many choices as facebook pages (6 basic variations: Local Business or Place; Company, Organization or Institution; Brand or Product; Artist, Band or Public Figure; Entertainment; and Cause or Community), I really like the Other choice as a catchall since you can’t anticipate all the different legitimate variations.

From there, you can write a short description of the page, upload a logo, and add a status update.  You should also be able to add photos and videos, but they don’t make it easy on you to do so, at least with videos – why no easy YouTube integration?

Alright, I’m Set Up.  Now What?

Well, there’s not really much to do at the moment besides update statuses and add folks to your circles.  It’s really kind of a letdown after so much time in beta.  But features will be coming soon and there may be some SEO benefits down the road.  It will also be nice to comment and like, I mean +1 things publicly as the company as opposed to needing to do it through a personal Google+ profile.  Update for clarity: You can only add individual Google+ ‘ers if they’ve added you to their circles.  Same thing about +1′ing their statuses.  There’s also no way currently to +1 search results or other pages off the Google+ site itself as your page.

Although, if you’re a big enough brand, there is one cool feature called Direct Connect.  If people type “+” in front of your company name in the search bar, they can be taken directly to your Google+ Page from the dropdown.  Here’s what it looks like if you search for “+Pepsi”:

See An Example of a Google+ Page

Want to see an example?  Check out our Google+ Page.  Not much going on so far, but be sure to check back soon and add us to your circles.

Get Found on

on Google+

One snark – Google makes it easy for you to create a Google+ Page badge.  I do find it amusing that the alt tag is neglected.  Call Matt Cutts!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

It’s personalized results, yknow. Just have a look at the following video if you’re a bit bemused by what I’m talking about:

It’s one of those things that still confuses certain elements as they’re not always aware of the changes in their own personal search results and are deliriously happy that their own site ranks in the top three for gold bars or something.

But, I get Google’s thinking – if it means something to you personally then it makes more sense for it to display more prominently for you than for everybody.

After all, one man’s #1 SERP is another man’s spam.

But, we’re interested to find out what the general feeling is about personalized searches since they’ve been in operation for a while.

Do you prefer them? Did you know they existed? Do you even have a Google account?

Or are you happy you’ve finally been able to work out why your search results pop around all over the place dependent on which computer you’re on?

Answers in the comments please.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

There’s only one thing worse than you thinking your kid is super special, and that’s somebody else vicariously thinking the same and you liking it on facebook.

As much as Simon Cowell must be stopped in his pursuit of destroying music, his ability to destroy a parent/child axis of delusion without flinching is worthy of a knighthood.

Or, maybe that’s the botox.

Only one other group fails the critical faculty test as regularly as parents (sports fans don’t count as they know their team is crap but love them anyway) and that’s an entrepreneur.

One only has to watch Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank to appreciate that.

There’s nothing like the Simon Cowell of search engines – Google – to raise the hackles of the online entrepreneur when they feel they’ve been wronged.

Take the case of ShopCity – a local shopping/business portal that serves thousands of locations across the US.

They’re in the process of “publicly challenging the fairness of the search giant.” I’ve no idea whether this means they’d like to take Google to court or are drumming up a bit of publicity for their recently banished sites.

ShopCity, the parent company of local sites such as ShopPaloAlto.com, ShopMountainView.com and ShopPleasanton.com, says Google provides it an unfairly low ranking, especially since those sites have the backing of groups such as the city of Menlo Park, the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and the Palo Alto Weekly newspaper. A search for “Palo Alto restaurants” on Google this week didn’t reveal a ShopPaloAlto.com result until the seventh page of results, while the site ranks at the top for identical searches on Yahoo or Microsoft’s Bing.

[…] ShopCity also says Google is taking its content and displaying it in Google Places, which like ShopCity displays business information such as location, operating hours and customer reviews. The practice is called “scraping,” and companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor.com also have complained about the practice.

Google spits back:

Google says its low ranking of ShopCity sites is fair because the vast majority of its more than 8,100 local sites across the U.S. and Canada do not feature original content. ShopCity acknowledges that all but 44 of its sites do not yet have original content, and the company says it has asked the search giant not to crawl and rank those sites. But Google says it must consider the collective authority of the company’s Internet properties, just as someone wouldn’t judge a supermarket tabloid as superior to a national daily newspaper based on the accuracy of one story.

“We’re committed to returning high-quality sites to our users,” said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman. “In the case of ShopCity, this is a network of thousands of sites that appear lower in Google’s rankings because nearly 100 percent of the sites violate our quality guidelines. For years, these sites have contained little original content, substantial duplicate content, along with cookie-cutter templates. Our users frequently complain to us about these kinds of sites.”

I have quite a bit of sympathy with site owners who have followed Google guidelines over the years only for them to shift the goal posts when they make an update. But, if you’re running an online business that piggybacks on Google rankings then you’re in for a whole heap of pain should those rankings ever evaporate.

Personally, I’d be asking if all those keyword domains that are now a reduced ranking factor with cross-linking from the cookie cutter areas of the template and no original content were/are factors.

Then, I’d ask you one SEO question: Have you ever seen Simon Cowell change his mind?

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

Of course we were going to pull this pic. We've only seen this ad 13,440 times. Yes, we counted.

If you weren’t paying attention last week you missed that Google Places has dropped 3rd party review ratings and stars from its pages.  That meant for many companies going from a dozen reviews to 0-1 or from hundreds to a handful.  Which makes this a big deal.

But what exactly does it mean for you and your Places Page?

Outside Reviews Still Matter

It appears – and only makes sense – that Google is still using reviews and ratings from sites like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Insider Pages, Citysearch, and dozens of others to determine how high your Places Page should rank for searches along with the other variables in their local algorithm.  Just because they pulled them off their pages, doesn’t mean that they no longer matter to how well you do in Google’s map results.

Third Party Reviews Still Easily Accessible from Google

Just because the reviews won’t appear on the page itself, Google will still link out to some of them.  Here’s one example:

So even if you don’t think that your clients and potential customers ever visit a particular review site, they can still get there very easily from your Google Places Page.

Update 1: Just as important – Google may show star ratings directly within its main Web results for other sites as well, such as Yelp.  Here’s one sample picked up today for Yahoo!  Funny to think of Yahoo! previously being their biggest competitor and now Yahoo! allowing users to sign in with Google accounts and Google showing star ratings from Yahoo! sites:

Update 2: 3rd party reviews are not removed from all things Google Places yet.

Getting Actual Google Reviews More Important Than Ever

Whenever speaking, I tell a story of a friend who moved to Mississippi and needed to buy a big-ticket appliance.  Based on a coworker’s recommendation, he decided where he was going to buy it.  Right before leaving his apartment to pick it up, he decided he’d better check his hours to make sure it was still open.  He did a branded search (meaning he looked them up by name) and saw a one-star rating.  So then he started reading reviews, reviews that were really awful.  So he took his key back out the door, sat down and started researching a new place to buy, in essence taking several hundred dollars out of the till from the original store.

Those star ratings are huge – look at this example:

Which local listings draw your eye?  Which ones are you likely to click to learn more about?

If you don’t have many reviews from Google users on your places page, you need to start getting them now.  As several dealers told Cars.com, it’s not just about preventing lost sales from negative reviews – it’s about gaining new leads and sales from showing off great reviews.

Have a Good, All-Encompassing Reputation Management Plan

A word of caution here: the temptation for many companies will be to just chase after Google reviews and stop worrying about other review sites like Judy’s Book, Kudzu, and various yellow pages sites.  While I agree that – depending on your particular situation – getting Google reviews up to snuff becomes your #1 priority short-term, nothing replaces having a strong online reputation management plan.  And that starts with providing great experiences to your customers and encouraging them to tell their stories.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Update: Google has emailed all or at least a healthy majority of its advertisers announcing the +1 button coming to ads, so looks like it’s ready to leave experimental land.  One line stood out in the form email: “The final landing page URL of your ads can also appear on the Google profile of any user who +1’s your ad.”  Guess that’s so they can argue there is some benefit.

Before I delve into +1 for AdWords, let me preface with two thoughts:

1. I don’t see +1 getting wide adoption, period.  The reason facebook like buttons became so prevalent is because they tie into an integral function on a social network where people have real social interaction.  People don’t have that same community with Google outside of geeks like us.  Therefore I’m guessing +1 dodo’s out like other Google forays into social like Wave and Buzz.*
2. I’m usually wrong in these predictions.

* If you’re thinking Buzz isn’t dead, you’re technically right, much like you would be if you said cassette tapes aren’t dead.  But they’re a shell of themselves.  I also allow that Google Buzz could make a major comeback if Google ever figures out social.  They’re making good in roads via local, so all hope isn’t lost.

The Basics of +1 for Google AdWords

For the time being, +1 is something you have to sign into your account to see and go to Google Experiments and opt in to the experiment.  It’s browser dependent and doesn’t work with certain ones like IE7.  You may also have to clear your cache if you’re seeing messages like “The experiment you’re trying to access is no longer available. Go to experiments overview.”

Once you get it working, you should see a grayed-out +1 logo next to search results – both paid and natural like this:

If you scroll over any listing or ad, then the +1 box motions in some color, which at the end looks like this:

Then, if you choose to plus one the ad or result, it’ll appear in dark colors with a notice reminding you you have +1′d the result / ad and allowing you to undo it.  If this is the first time you’ve done a plus-one, it will give you a pop up explaining what it means, how your name will appear next to it publicly, and if you’d like to continue.

If you’re wondering if you should opt-in or opt-out of +1, quit wondering.  You don’t have any choice.  Google’s just going to do it – and it might not be consistent.

They say not to worry and from a cost standpoint, you don’t have to – they’re not charging you for +1′s.  Also as of right now, it doesn’t affect your ad’s quality score (although it does affect natural rankings).  But who’s to say it won’t in the future?  I’d argue it’s ripe for gaming for both SEO and paid search, but certainly Google has a lot of engineers and resources at its disposal to check for these signals.

If you’d like more info, you can check out this Google AdWords post about +1.

Why +1 for AdWords is a Terrible Idea

My main beef with +1 for AdWords is that it becomes a popularity contest.  Google’s theory is that it will be used by people as a recommending tool.  But what’s more likely is that it will be judging ads themselves and not the advertiser or its products / services.

We all like to talk about and vote on what the best Superbowl commercials are each year.  How do most of us do it?  Which one was the funniest or most emotional without offending our sensibilities.  But do those ads move product?  Make you actually remember the brand or, heaven forbid, think about going online or to the store to purchase or learn more?  You might like that new Doritos ad, but hate the taste of their nacho cheesy goodness (how dare you!?!).

Put aside the potential for gaming the system, that’s what concerns me about the +1.  I’m not getting too worked up about it, because I don’t see it gaining too much traction, but if it does, color me very worried. Because if you need to be funny at the expense of selling to get better positions and cheaper clicks, doesn’t that defeat the whole point of advertising on AdWords?

If I were going to ask for anything, it would be the -1 button.  As much as I’d like an unlike button for facebook, the -1 would have even more value for ads.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

JS: One of the things I thought was interesting is that you have a partnership with Bazaarvoice, is that correct?

Nick: Yes.

JS: Have they had to scrub much so far in terms of profanity or some of those other things or have they not really had to remove many reviews so far?

Nick: The amount of reviews that they are scrubbing hasn’t changed much since we’ve launched. I looked today and I think we’re at about 14% that are being kicked back. I’m actually pretty happy with that because it shows that yes, we are finding things that we don’t want and are rejecting them but it’s not been overwhelmingly so.

JS: I would imagine, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes, are you kind of learning as you go along with seeing the kickbacks and changing your stance on things and modifying what you want to see and what you don’t want to see or are you like, ‘here are our guidelines and here’s what we’re sticking with?’

Nick: We’ve definitely been tweaking some things and I think one of the big things we’ve seen, and Bazaarvoice has been great – they do a lot of fantastic moderation, but one of the things that we’ve seen is that the dealer business is so different from a lot of other industries that we have found that we have to tweak some things over time, but more along the lines of really understanding that here is the type of experience that would lead me, as a car buyer, to leave a review.

So, I think one of the best examples that I’ve seen is that on most review sites, when you’re reviewing a product – a physical product – you don’t want to include that I got something that would indicate that I got X number of dollars off the deal because you’re reviewing the store or the deal. And what we’ve been seeing is we get a pretty substantial number of reviews that call out specific things like that. It’s one of those gray areas that we’re taking a look and trying to figure out what makes the most sense in our world because for the most part I say that we probably all know someone who has gone to a dealership and got a fantastic deal and they immediately came back and said, ‘oh my gosh, you should shop at this store because they gave me $400 off’ or whatever it was. We want to make sure that we encourage people to leave those types of reviews while also not setting a certain expectation that it’s always going to be done this exact way for every person who comes into that store.

JS: Ruins their leverage to be able to do those types of things. Do you have a breakdown of what percentage have been kicked out for being spam, you know some evil person in my industry automated that’s trying to build links vs completely flaming vs….

Nick: I don’t have anything that I can quote off the top of my head but I do know that I’ve looked pretty closely and I really haven’t seen very much spam at this point mostly it’s about specific content rather than the same review being posted over and over again by the same person …that type of stuff.

JS: Do you have stuff in place to kick stuff out for dealers trying to game the system, not for negative reviews, but trying to get people to leave good, fake astroturf?

Nick: Absolutely. It’s the first thing that brought up when we talk to site users or the dealers. And it goes both ways. It’s this fear that:

1. How do you make sure that a dealer is not leaving a lot of negative reviews, followed by ‘How do I make sure that the dealer down the road isn’t coming in each morning and telling his salespeople that they’re going to leave five glowing reviews today just to build up our volume.’ So there are a couple different things that we do and you’ll see this when you look at the screen shot [see below], we do ask whenever someone leaves a review, the last question that we ask is a check a box to certify that they’re not employed by a dealership. I realize that’s not going to catch everyone, but we do want to make sure that right off the bat that we are asking the question to make sure that people understand that if you are a dealer, leaving a review, we are going to pay very, very close attention to it and you really shouldn’t be using it for that.

JS: Because you have a little bit of a hammer that you could bring down on someone for doing that.

Nick: Exactly. It gives us the ability to come back and say, ‘you know what, you certify that you weren’t a dealership, but your IP address indicates that you are so we’re going to do something with this.’

The other thing that we do is we require that each and every review goes through a validation process by the person who wrote it before we even look at it. The example that I use, is that if I’m at work and I’m bored and I am going to go write 20 bogus reviews, I’m going to get 20 different emails, and I have to open up each and every one and validate it and say yes, indeed I did write this and I did mean to send it. So, as a first step if we get 20 reviews, we do take a look at where the reviews are coming from so we do have some threshold there that will kick-off something that says, ‘you know what this is a little suspicious or we just don’t want this at all.’

JS: I can understand why you might not want to disclose any of this information, but can you talk about anything that you have in place to guard against astroturfing or false-flaming or anything like that?

Nick: What I can talk about is pretty standard from what I’ve heard in the industry is to pay very, very close attention to the IP address of any dealership. I know some folks who go to the trouble of specifically collecting the IP address of every dealership and for other folks who just pay attention to once a response is written, capture the IP address and then sort-of flag that for any reviews that come later on. So, we do similar stuff there because we do want to make sure we are paying very, very close attention to. Once we feel like something is coming from a dealership, we don’t other different types of content coming from someone who may have a biased viewpoint there.

JS: Have you had any feedback…one of the things that … and almost everyone deals with this because anyone who has reviews, like you said, some kind of IP check…something along those lines, but one of those throwing the baby out with the bathwater type of issues, at least from my perspective, is that it’s really convenient if a dealer can just leave up a computer and have the new car buyer talk about their experience, right there in the moment.

Nick: It’s one of the hardest things in the world and it comes up so often and it’s such a great idea, you know ‘I’m in the store, I’m buying a car, I’m sitting there waiting for the financing to go through (or whatever it is)’, and they say, ‘why don’t you go ahead and leave a review for me while you’re here.’ We would love to be able to do it, it’s just that the number one concern, from both site users and dealers was that we’re filtering out those false-positives. We’ve suggested some things and I had one dealer come up to me at NADA this year and he actually suggested that he was going to create an entirely separate network at his store to have a separate IP address just so people could still leave reviews, but they would always be replying on different machines. I thought that was interesting.

JS: But, would he be recycling the IP address?

Nick: No, so he was actually talking about setting up an entirely different network with a different IP address that he would be paying extra money to support; just to be able to capture those on site.

JS: But, you would still see that there would be multiple, multiple, multiple entries from the same IP address.

Nick: You would, and that’s the type of thing that would have to be worked out with the concept of ‘how can I really verify that they have this kiosk in the store.’ And that’s something that I called out to him and I think that’s it’s something that we could probably do if we have someone going to that extent to keep things pure, but initially it would flag something on our side and probably other places to say that the volume coming in from one location is abnormally high. That’s where you would look at voice, you look at dates they came in, you look at scores…things like that.

JS: Makes sense. This is one of the most fascinating areas so I really appreciate you giving some thoughts on that. We have kind of talked about the dealers’ fears….How do you compare yourselves to a Yelp or Google Places or something like that?

Nick: And I kind of make a distinction between those two because Google is such a aggregator of all of the content that’s out there; usually the question that I’ll get is comparing us to Dealer Rater is the big one that comes up. Usually what I tell folks is that our goal was not to set ourselves up as a competitor to any of those sites. Typically when I talk to a dealer I tell them ‘the more places you have positive reviews out there, the better off you’re going to be.’ Because then, wherever people go, because we know people love Yelp, so all the more reason to have positive reviews there. The more places you have reviews, the more likely you are to catch all those various users across sites and see ‘yes, I’m going to have a positive experience at this store.’

I think this is one of the things that I strongly believe you want the content across as many places as possible and that’s when you start playing into Google, as they aggregate from every where, so once they see that there are enough reviews out there, all of a sudden on your Places page, you have a great amount of content, coming all across the Internet. All the more reason for who sees you on Google, says ‘you know what, I am ready to work with this store.’

Going further, I actually do suggest to folks who say ‘why should I be driving volume to Cars.com, rather than Yelp or Google or to Dealer Rater or wherever.’ I tell them, ‘you know, if you’re driving volume to three places just make us the fourth one.’ Again, it’s a win because they have more content out there. But I am not in any way trying to tell them that they should drive traffic to Cars.com because we have found that when people find the sites they like that’s the site they want to leave review content on. And that’s not a bad thing, whatsoever.

Really though, what we look at is, the story I always tell is one of our affiliate sales managers here told me back in December that she was shopping for a car, and she obviously went to Cars.com, she found the exact type of car she wanted. She then narrowed it down, she found the specific vehicle she wanted and she found the dealership where she thought she wanted to shop at, and then she left our site to go do additional research about that dealership. So, I just look at it as the more ways you can integrate that fantastic review content, where people are already digesting other information, the better off you’re going to be. And that’s really the whole reason we started getting into this. I say that the more places there are reviews out there, the better it is for everyone …. It’s just a huge win.

JS: Along those lines, do you have any agreements or discussions with Google Places, with Yahoo! Local, with bing Local, any of those places to use your material?

Nick: We have. I think what you’ll find with most of those places is that they all have their secret sauce and their own way of doing things, but typically the understanding is that you have to build up a certain amount of volume to be viewed as a credible source on this type of content, so we know that once we hit that it will be a lot easier to be aggregated, but our goal is certainly that once we have the volume we will make whatever site tweaks that we need to in order to be included in the aggregation.

JS: So, you definitely want to be included in the aggregation.

Nick: Absolutely. If it gets the content out there, it adds to the SEO value, so we definitely want that out there.

JS: Is there anything else you’d like to add as we wrap up the end of this?

Nick: The more places that content is our there, the better. We are certainly trying to encourage our dealers to view this as it’s an opportunity to really take control of what’s being said about you out there, so we’ve gone to the lengths of trying to provide them with various materials they can use in-store to drive volume. And again, I typically say, ‘if you’re already doing something, if you have banners for a different location, that’s fine. Just add us to the mix, one way or another. But you are driving the volume.’

I really look at it from a dealer perspective and one of the stories I heard from one of the dealers is that they’re viewing reputation management and reviews as a lead generator. So, what they do is look at it and track the number of phone calls they get, specifically from reviews, and they pay attention to the facts of how much more money can they make based on the fact that they have this great reputation that’s out there in the field. So, I’m just trying to convince people and say that this is a really good thing, assuming you really take advantage of it and you really start playing up your positive reputation, the better off it’s going to be for you.

JS: It’s interesting and we deal a lot of times with the opposite of it, where it’s not the wanting to get more leads (of course, they always want to), but when they look at online reviews and reputation management, at least in the beginning, it’s a question of ‘how can they stop any loss or perceived loss’ that is out there because they don’t have enough reviews or if there are some negative reviews out there. So, it’s really interesting to hear the flip-side of that, as well.

Nick: What we really have tried to talk to folks about, and we really have heard this over and over again, as we did our own market research…consumers kept telling us ‘you know, one negative review really isn’t the worst thing in the world and in a lot of cases it’s actually a positive. As when consumers see a lot of reviews that are all five stars as compared to similar scores that are 4.7, 4.8; that 4.7 has a lot more credibility because site users and digesters of information get the fact that every experience is not perfect and sooner or later, someone is going to have a bad day and it’s going to come off ‘not-perfect’.

So, when you do have some of those real-life experiences it’s actually a good thing. I also do try to convince people, when I do talk to them, that when you do get that person who did have a poor experience, it’s a great, great opportunity to leave the response indicating that they want to take personal responsibility for what happened, that it’s an aberration, that’s it’s not typically how you do business and you want to make sure that it goes right. Because all of a sudden, you’ve driven home to the people who come later on, that that’s not how you do business and that you really do care about each individual consumer.

So, yeah, we get it a lot, the first question of ‘what happens when I get a negative review,’ but we really do try to get people to understand that one negative review isn’t the worst thing in the world, and second there are all kind of ways for you to drive volume of positive reviews and the sooner that a dealer starts taking advantage of that and the sooner they start making it part of their process, the better off they’re going to be.

JS: My old boss used to say ‘You have two chances to meet someone….The first time you meet them and the first time you screw up.’ So along those lines, I’m a dealer and someone has just left a negative review. What mechanisms are in place to respond? Do I get to respond privately or only publicly, or am I able to respond to them at all? What are my recourses there?

Nick: This was one of the things that we debated most hotly before the launch; and so what we settled on was that anytime a review is posted the dealership always gets an opportunity to respond to it whether it’s positive or critical. And after they respond we close out the conversation. That was based on a large part on some of the feedback we heard from dealers that don’t do a lot in this space today. They were a little nervous about how much more process we’re going to build into this. So we didn’t want to get into the process of building a whole back and forth public exchange. I also think, anecdotely, I saw a decent amount of situations where that public back and forth just didn’t turn out terribly well. I think it’s just far easier, when you’re having that continued conversation, that you’re just going to regret one way or another.

The one thing that we’re keeping a very close eye on is the concept of allowing a private response before something gets posted. And originally, the way we landed is that we shied away from that because we really wanted the focus to be about your online reputation, less about a way to resolve customer service disputes. I think there’s a great amount of value in that and to be fair it’s kind of the norm in the industry right now. What we were really looking at is that we really have a substantial number of dealerships that don’t do this today and were very, very loud about the fact that they don’t want this proceeds to be complicated so we wanted it to be as simple as possible. That being said, we’re keeping a very, very close eye on the type of feedback that we get because we really need to make sure that if this is something we need to do, that we’re paying attention to it.

JS: Do you have any sort of automated notification system for the dealers if someone leaves a review or is it on them to check it themselves and monitor it daily?

Nick: We have a backend tool for dealers that we call My Dealer Center. And anytime a review is posted on Cars.com, meaning anytime it’s been through validation, moderation and it’s been approved, once it’s posted, the dealer automatically gets an email that says ‘You got a review posted on Cars.com. Please login by clicking this link and write a response to it’. We do make sure that we notify them, whether it’s a positive review or a critical one, we do notify them that it’s there and we do try to encourage them to reply to every single review not just to the ones that may be a review on a experience that was less than ideal.

JS: To me, I see a lot of fear from business owners about that….that it’s just going to be out there and they’re not going to know about it.

Nick: We definitely wanted to avoid that. I think it’s just one of those things that we saw as we got into this that there are places that have been aggregating for a long time and dealers just didn’t know what was there. So, we wanted to make sure that we are doing everything we can to warn them right off the bat.

I’d just like to publicly thank Nick and Cars.com for all their time and transparency regarding their dealer rating and review process.  If you’re shopping for a car, check them out.  Or if you’re a dealer, make sure you sign up for the My Dealer Center and start accepting reviews now!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

And it’s not just on branded searches – it can be for any specific company rating on an outside review site that shows up in their listings, such as for this non-branded search on “tuxedos lexington”:

I can’t say definitively that these haven’t been here before as I couldn’t find any announcement about this, but I checked around the office and we don’t remember seeing them.  The ones they’re pulling from include Yelp, Citysearch, and Yahoo! Local.  We’re not seeing it for other ones like Insider Pages, at least so far. If you want to sniff around and find others they are or are not using these logos for, add it to the comments and I’ll update this post.

What’s really interesting about this is that bing had been seemingly backing away from giving ratings prominence.  For one, users haven’t been able to write reviews directly on bing local listings for about two months now.  For another, they’ve removed star ratings from many local results that they list on the Web results tab (although they’re still in full effect on the local tab).  On that note, I did find some more examples of them including stars on the Web results tab, though they’re still very much far and in between:

The Bottom Line for Local Businesses

So what’s this mean?  While I’m not sure if this is a test or a “permanent” change, it does indicate bing’s getting more serious once again about providing user ratings to its searchers.  And with the logos and giant numbers, it makes listings stand out even more to searchers.  It will also surely make their partners like Yelp happy as it should lead to higher click throughs straight to their listing pages.

Note Bene: My Brave New Local / Social World: Recent Changes to Local & Review Sites and their Effect on Online Reputation Management presentation will be running once again with Online Marketing Connect next week as part of their Search Week.  Registration is free – just click that link.  The reason I bring it up here is that it’s a pre-recorded presentation, so there’s no mention of anything in this post.  Don’t think I’m the Absent Minded SEO or anything – just can’t go back in time.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

A silver lining – local and small businesses using Tags got April for free, so that’s $25 back in your pocket.  Download your performance data now, because that’s going away May 31st.  Billing histories go away 2 months later, so let your accounting department know.

Anyway, here’s the official email to Tags users with (of course) a coupon to try out Boost:

Google Tags have been retired

Dear Google Places user,

This notice is to remind you that we have retired Google Tags for all users as of April 29, 2011. No action is required on your part, and your Places account and listing will continue to work as usual. All active tags were free for the month of April, and March was the last billing month for active customers.

In your Places account, you’ll be able to see billing history until July 31st. Historical performance data will be available in your dashboard until May 31st. If you’d like to keep the data for your records, we recommend you sign in to your account and record the information you need.

You can visit our blog post and our Help Center for more information. There are still a number of options for you to reach more customers online, including our latest product for local businesses, Google Boost. Through the month of May, we are offering Tags customers like you $100 to try out Google Boost. Call 877-503-0841 Monday to Friday 8am-6pm to redeem your credit.

Thank you for trying Google Tags.

Sincerely,
The Google Places Team

© 2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043

You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Places product or account.

Boost Offer Terms & Conditions: Promotional credit is only valid when signing up as a new Google Boost advertiser. Promotional credit allows for $100.00 of free Google Boost advertising. This credit can be spent on 1 Boost advertising campaign per new advertiser. Advertisers will be automatically charged for advertising that exceeds the promotional credit. Promotional credit will be applied to customer’s designated AdWords account within 30 days. Google Boost ads are subject to ad approval, valid registration and acceptance of the Google Places and Google Boost program terms and conditions. Offer void where prohibited by law. Offer expires May 31, 2011. The promotional credit may not be sold or bartered. The offer may be revoked before acceptance at any time for any reason by Google Inc.

© 2010 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Googbye, Google Tags. We hardly knew ye.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Social Media Week

I customize virtually all presentations for the audience and always update older material with recent changes in the online marketing world, but here’s one that will be totally new that I’m really looking forward to.  Online Marketing Connect is hosting its Social Media Week this week and you can register for free for the entire week’s worth of presentations from a good looking group of speakers.  And by “good looking,” I mean in terms of their organizations and material.  I do not know what most of them look like, but I’m sure they’re all Greek gods and goddesses.

My presentation is more intermediate-level and will focus on recent changes in the local sphere and its effects on reputation management and, ultimately, profitability.  I hope you’ll join me this Thursday at 5PM Eastern for Brave New Local / Social World: Recent Changes to Local & Review Sites and their Effect on Online Reputation Management.

Association of Information Technology Professionals

On Wednesday, May 11, I’ll be sitting on a 2-person panel with fellow blogger and all-around smart guy Russell Dunkin for the Greater Wheeling Chapter of AITP.  We’ll discuss blogging and social media as often times organizations put these things in the laps of the IT departments.  Even when it’s not their core responsibility, developers are often tasked with setting everything up, integrating various platforms, and maintaining the technical aspects.

West Virginia High Tech Consortium Foundation

The next morning I head down to attend the Generation West Virginia Young Leaders Conference.  On the way, I’ll stop in Fairmont, WV to present an intro to social media benefits and pitfalls entitled Can Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Local Review Sites Help Your Organization?

Update with specifics: Attendees of this Do Biz U presentation – who include WVHTC Foundation Affiliate Members, the Marion Regional Development Corporation, and Create Marion – will be able to ask questions about their organizations to learn specifically if and how social media can help them.  As much as we marketers deal with social media, it’s still daunting to many businesses who want to ensure they’re not doing themselves more harm than good before jumping in.

Click here for more details or to register to attend this event at the Robert H. Mollohan Research Center in Fairmont.

Facebook Deals Getting a Push

When I logged into the Direct Online Marketing™ facebook page today, I noticed a big notice at the top for facebook Deals.  Nothing new here – facebook often uses this space for announcements and facebook Deals were announced back in November.  Here it is:

Now, this isn’t showing up to admins on all pages by any stretch, but I find the timing extremely interesting.  Google announced on Tax Day that it was discontinuing Tags, which was their product most directly comparable to facebook Deals.  Now just barely a week later, facebook is pushing its Deals.

So What the Heck are Facebook Deals

If you’ve not heard of Deals, they’re a pretty interesting concept.  You can make up offers to appear in your news feed that work either for a particular person or multiple persons,  i.e. “Check in here with three of your friends, show the phone to the bartender and get a half-priced margarita.”

(For now) there’s not cost to facebook Deals, so if you have a local physical presence and coupons or incentives work with your sales model, give them a shot.  It’s a super fast and easy process – just click to edit your page and you’ll see a link for “Deals” all the way at the bottom of your left-hand menu.  Just be aware: once you start your Deal and it gets approved, you can’t change it any way, or add a second one to run at the same time.  Although, you can stop the deal from running at any time.

To learn more, visit the facebook deals home page.  Yes, yes, it says it’s only available in Hotlanta, Austin, Big D, San Diego and San Fran, but that’s just old.  Why update the main home page where people can learn more when you’re promoting it to facebook owners?  That would just be silly.  Actually, just skip that link above and visit a subpage where it doesn’t have misinformation.

If you like whitepapers, here’s their pdf.  Or if you like short videos, try this (puff), this (for iphone – describes different types), and this (walks you through adding them).

Happy Dealing!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?