A closer look at ALikeList
The buzz around the local business review market seems to be friggin out of control these days. I half expect to walk into my local grocery store tomorrow and pick up a copy of the Star with a grainy photo of a Yelper making out with Angelina Jolie on the cover!
It’s not that I don’t think local review content is important, really, it is. It’s just that this type of stuff has to have been some of the earliest content on the Internet, I am sure some of the early messages across ARPANETwere something like “took Molly to Surf Shack on Wilshire after switch testing last night, fish tacos were keen”. It just seems like sometimes it just takes FOREVER to not make much progress in Internet land.
You have to give Yelp a lot of the credit for the current surge of interest, not only is it a pretty valuable service, but the Google + Yelp deal that never happened, and now the Yelp business practices lawsuits have kept them on the front cover of the business section for a while now.
So if you wanted to reinvent this baby one more time, what might you do? Well let’s check under the hood of Alikelist.
SCVNGR: Woo hoo, now we can go buy some vowels!
Mobile location has always lent itself so well to real world real world guided tours and scavenger hunts. This summer I came across a company Plott.me which was looking to create a platform for anyone wishing to create their own guided city tour, and a few weeks back I chatted with another company Toura with a similar goal, but largely focused on creating similar experiences for museums and attractions, albeit with location as a secondary element.
But the one that seems to be getting the most attention is a Boston company called SCVNGR, thanks to a $4 million investment from Google Ventures, and word that they’re already generating over $1 million in revenue and are profitable in their first year of operation.
SCVNGR has created a platform that allows individuals or groups such as businesses and schools to create their own location based scavenger hunt games. Early customers are using the service for things like corporate team building, or on campuses for orientations and tours.
Two things that seem designed to help SCVNGR stand out are the super friendly, easy to use interface and also the broad cross section of devices supported meaning that that most anyone can set up a game and play. Although I spent 30 minutes playing around with the beta version for individuals, and had mixed feeling on it. Read more
ReserveX: Location Based Marketing and Selling More Tickets
I’ve always been interested in the theories and practices behind pricing and yield management… I am not much of a shopper, but when I do go shopping I frequently find myself wondering why things cost what they do, and the seemingly randomness to how sellers sometimes price things.
Forget about having me book an airline ticket, I’ll spend a week on Expedia with all those awesome options to work with… well what if I try these days, in to these airports within a 50 miles radius, with these times… now I wonder what will happen if I can try to arbitrage either two one ways, or throw in that trip to Denver next month trying to cross book that return with this departure using the same flight numbers… what fun!
So you can only imagine my excitement when I heard about what a company ReserveX was looking to do tying together location based marketing with yield management designed for tickets sellers. Read more
What Best Buy Could Do In Mobile and Location Marketing
I was going through my Twitter stream the other day and noticed a few tweets referencing Foursquare involving BestBuyCMO… Foursquare is undoubtedly getting a ton of press these days, and much of it for good reason… it’s new, interesting and fun, and has a lot of potential and implications for marketers… and did I mention it’s getting a lot of press these days.
As cool as FourSquare is, why stop there… Mr. Best Buy CMO, if you’re listening here is what I think would be a more comprehensive way to use mobile and location data in your business: Read more
Foursquare, Facebook, Yelp and the Battle of the Check-ins
In case you missed it a few weeks back Yelp announced that they were adding a check-in feature to their service where visitors to retail establishments can check in and let others know where they’re at, or have been. Well today on the front page of the Silicon Alley Insider is a post reporting that Facebook too is working on a similar feature.
NYC based Foursquare has undoubtedly been the leader in this area and their success seems to be attracting a lot of imitators.
Here are some thoughts on the importance of check ins and the ensuing pile on we’re about to see of folks adding on the feature. Read more
Localeze + Bing versus Google + Yelp
I noticed an article from MediaPost this morning that talks about Microsoft signing a deeper relationship with Localeze recently for use in Bing’s local efforts. This is one of those fly under the radar types of news items that garners very little attention, unlike say the big fuss made over the potential Google – Yelp acquisition. It’s just another day to day type deal, so I suppose there is no reason for it to grab headlines but in my mind this type of deal between Microsoft and Localeze is much more interesting than Google and Yelp.
I love Yelp and use it frequently, and to a degree I get the rationale on why its a potentially attractive acquisition, particularly for someone like Google that is looking so aggressively at targeting the local brick and mortar businesses, and their advertising budget. Yelp has many of the right relationships with local advertisers and at the same time has a nice content creation tool and user base who rabidly create tons of local oriented content… all a very nice fit with what Google does and where they’re looking to grow.
But the deal between Microsoft and Localeze in my mind directly tries to fix something that is currently wrong when you search for local businesses. Read more
PageRank to PlaceRank Is More Than Changing a Few Letters Around
There was a great article yesterday by Chris Silvery, who works for search engine marketing firm Key Relevance and is a regular contributor to the Local’s Only Section of Search Engine Land. The article highlights some of the ways that location oriented search within Google behaves, and frankly how it very often doesn’t behave the way it ‘should’.
Per John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local from a recent TechCrunch article : ”PlaceRank is like PageRank for places, it tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as references on the Web, reviews, photos, how many people know about it, how long its been around.”
By the way I think it’s notable that the thing being “figured out” here is “prominence”.
Now I understand that you’ve got to start somewhere, but Read more
Google and Yelp Acquisition?
There has been a lot of buzz in the past few days about Google potentially buying Yelp for $500 million or so, a lot of back and forth, will it happen or not. A lot of folks see Yelp as just another review site for big cities, so what’s the big deal? Well here are a few reasons why Google may be interested:
Awhere Inc. Turning Location into Money
So there is a lot of gee whiz stuff happening out there in the world of location these days… turn on the camera on your phone and hold it up to your surroundings and folks like Google Goggles and Layar will “magically” superimpose information related to what you’re viewing… no doubt super cool stuff for joe consumer with a knack for the new and shiny.
But a common theme these days is that shiny, new and cool is all well and good, but how do you make money from any of this stuff? Well I was given a walk through of the offerings of a company called Awhere this week and it certainly seems to fit in the category of highly valuable and actionable use of location information that is clearly designed to allow its users to get better information, and to use that information to make or save money. Read more
Placecast Teleconference, Mobile and Retailers
I listened in on the Placecast teleconference yesterday, talking about mobile technology driving retail foot traffic. There were some interesting points brought up during the discussion, a few of the most relevant:
- Consumer don’t mind giving away location as long as they get something valuable in return and they gave permission
- Texting is replacing emailing among the younger generation. Like receiving commercial email, receiving commercial texts is not seen as an intrusion as long as it was relevant and consumer gave permission
- In terms of ad delivery, location provides increased relevance… interestingly no one mentioned the consumer predisposition for acting on advertising when out and about… which I think is probably most important
- Going off and building an iPhone app is not for everyone. It’s expensive ($100k is not atypical) and overall smartphone penetration is not at scale. It makes sense for some demos more than others. Good old SMS is cheaper, easier and already at scale.
With respect to mobile meets retail specifically one of the panelists Kathryn Koegel from Primary Impact Research made mention of how consumers were often using mobile devices while IN STORE to get additional product information and reviews and to do price comparisons on the items they were shopping for. Read more
