Google just launched an interesting update to its Google Local Business Center that makes Place Pages more interesting and interactive. After claiming their business through the Google Local Business Center, business owners can now easily post short updates about their companies on their respective Place Page. In addition, businesses that have been claimed by their owners will now feature a badge that highlights the fact that the actual owner of this business has claimed and improved the page.

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With Place Pages, Google aims to offer "a webpage for every place in the world." Most users access these pages through searches on Google Maps.

As Google points out in today's announcement, business owners can use the new "post to your place page" feature to post updates about their businesses directly from their dashboards. This gives local businesses the ability to send out updates about new products or - in the case of local restaurants - to highlight daily specials and new menu items.

It's also good to see that Google is now givin/> [...]

Thu Jan 14, 2010 13:40 pm

Five reporters from radio stations in in Canada, France, Belgium, and Switzerland are going to spend five days locked in a French farmhouse with only Twitter and Facebook to get their news. It's not a lame reality show, but an experiment looking at the quality of news from social media.

This experiment may be flawed from the start. One can almost imagine that people will purposely put out false information via Twitter and Facebook just to mess with these people (they can be followed on Twitter [updates in French]). Reporting on this story, AFP's Marie-Dominique Follain asks if social media is really a serious threat to established media.

Is this a worthwhile experiment? Tell us what you think.

It appears that the credibility of social media as a way to get news is what is coming into question (not that this is the first time that has happened). "People tweet about fake events. Social media is rife with hoaxes," people will say. Yes, that's true.

People do put out false information, but what seems to be overlooked is that Facebook and Twitter are just the platforms for people posting their updates. They often are accompanied by links to blogs and traditional news sources. While the group have agreed to only connect to the outside world through Facebook and Twitter, and no web surfing, they are reportedly still allowed to follow links to outside sites from these social networks. With the 140-character limit of Twitter in particular, linking out is often very necessary in getting the whole story across, or at least gaining access to that story from the reader's perspective.

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Fri Jan 22, 2010 09:20 am

This is Part Two of Two in a series exploring the promise and potential of Social CRM and SRM. In Part One, we reviewed the importance of sCRM as well as introduced the concepts of Social Relationships Management (SRM) to look beyond customers in Social Media. Originally intended for inclusion in Engage!, Paul Greenberg contributed his view of sCRM and SRM to continue the discussion…

There is little doubt that customers are ruling the roost right now — to a point that should be of concern to business — and a reason to rejoice. On the one hand, because we are human, we love to complain and thus the virally negative press and publicity that a bad customer service problem can lead to grabs much of the headlines. But there is a converse side to the seemingly scary reality that says, “OMG; the customer can talk about my business outside of my control.” It also can mean that the customers, who are not only newly empowered but increasingly pro-active in managing their own experiences and interactions, can become advocates who support you, endorse you and engage others in providing benefits (and sales) to your business.

What makes the changes in the world interesting is that even customer engagement strategies, a radical idea not more than one or two years ago, now need to be nuanced to recognize far more than just customer lifetime value (CLV) which measures how much revenue and profit a customer will bring to you over his or her lifetime with a company. The gradations of traditional CLV analysis incorporated the impact that your business decisions would have on the pu/> [...]

Fri Jun 04, 2010 05:15 am

One of the more interesting discussions I had with attendees at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit a few weeks ago was about the future of location-based mobile advertising and why it has so far failed to take off. The speed-bumps we uncovered during that session included the burden of building an ad network and finding unique ways of engaging users, but one other key hurdle that stands in the way is the physical interaction at the point-of-sale.

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Nic Brisbourne, an investor at DFJ Esprit, hit the nail on the head this morning with his blog post, "Point of sale redemption is key to mobile vouchers/codes." As he points out, mobile coupons have been a common idea for startups over the last decade, but it hasn't been until now with current smart-phone technology that the idea has seemed relatively viable. The other factor that he says is pushing the mobile voucher market is support from major vendors.

"US retailers Kroger and Target have begun issuing money off 'digital coupons' that can be downloaded to mobile phones and scanned agai/> [...]

Tue May 18, 2010 12:40 pm