The Local Reviews Ecosystem
This morning at the BIA Kelsey’s 2010 Interactive Local Media conference, we’ll be introducing a new partnership between Local SEO Guide and BK – a new local social consulting practice for BK clients. I will be working with them as the Practice Director to help clients chart the social media waters (Have no fear LocalSEOGuide readers, I will still be running this little blog and my consulting practice). We’ll have more info about BK’s Local Social in the next few weeks, but in the meantime I thought I’d kick of the discussion with an overview of “The Local Reviews Ecosystem”.
Here it is in one handy infographic:
Over the past week I have informally surveyed over 20 SMB SEM consultants about their top social media priorities for clients in 2011. Customer review generation and management was the top priority by a landslide.
As you can see from the above infographic, the review ecosystem is both enormous and complex, and I am sure I have missed several large swaths of services. The definition of a review has changed dramatically since the days of filling out paper Zagat surveys. We now write lengthy novellas about customer service experiences, hover over star rating icons, thumb up and down, tweet 140 characters of restaurant reviews and hit “Like” buttons.
The complexity of The Local Review Ecosystem – from generating reviews (both legitimate and fake) to using them for SEO to interacting with customers in open forums – means those service providers that play a part in the connecting businesses and their customers via reviews have an enormous opportunity.
Should be a cool space to review 🙂
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