Summit Panelist Yelp: New York Times Reviews Impact

New Media Tastemakers Summit Panelist – Yelp: New York Times Reviews Their Impact on Small Local Businesses

The New York Times talks about the impact of user review sites like Yelp on businesses. As we know, they’re huge, since every restaurant in town is now scared that they may offend too many customers with poor service or mediocre food. But if this is a consumer driven society, then in many ways firms like Yelp are turning every individual into a powerful new media tastemaker:

THE Rooz Cafe, a restaurant and coffee shop in Oakland, Calif., signals its distaste for patrons who post reviews on Yelp.com with a small sign: No Yelpers.

The sign is routinely ignored by devotees of Yelp, a San Francisco Internet company that enables average folks to write reviews of everything from restaurants to plumbers to parks.

“If you want good coffee and a comfy place to work, I’d recommend this place,” wrote Stephanie S., who gave Rooz four stars. “And the No Yelpers sticker made me laugh.”

Rooz’s owner, Steve Ranjbin, said he put the sticker up as a joke, but added that he had a complaint about Yelp.

“Yelp does not respect us as business owners,” Mr. Ranjbin said. “They don’t listen to business owners unless you’re an advertiser paying Yelp.”

Mr. Ranjbin, who said that amateur reviews can hurt his business, said some had misquoted him or called his employees names, but that Yelp had refused to take these comments down. Yelp rarely removes reviews, even when advertisers complain, preferring to let the crowd have its say.

The proliferating reviews of Mr. Ranjbin’s establishment offer a good illustration of people’s newfound love of comparing notes via reviews online.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 2.5 percent of all Internet users in March went to Yelp.com, and traffic there quadrupled over the last year. Yelp tracks its users through Google Analytics, and the company, which is almost four years old, said it had 9.5 million unique visitors in April, nearly double the 5 million it reported last October. There are more than 2.6 million reviews on the site.

“This site is having an impact on business,” said Greg Sterling, founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting firm that focuses on the Internet’s effect on local consumer and advertiser behavior. Mr. Sterling said that Yelp had become an early leader in that field, which also includes Judy’s Book and Insider Pages.

But don’t forget, when stores and restaurants get good reviews, they are more than happy to put the YELP sticker on their windows.

Los Angeles Luxury Chocolate Salon – Oct. 5

The 2nd Annual Los Angeles Luxury Chocolate Salon will take place on Oct. 5, 2008, at the Pasadena Conference Center.

Featured 2008 Los Angeles Luxury CHOCOLATE SALON chocolatiers and confectioners include Mignon Chocolate, Chocolate All the Time, Sacred Chocolate, Ojai Chocolat, Arlene’s Gourmet Toffee, Valerie Confections, Jade Chocolates, Malibu Toffee, Guittard Chocolate Company, Marti Chocolatt, The Chocolate Traveler, Poco Dolce, San Francisco Toffee Company, Silver Stone Wines, Vermeer Dutch Chocolate Cream Liqueur, and more.

TasteTV Events include:

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TasteTV and TasteTV.com Chocolate News Updates

Speaker Bio: E.C. Morgan, Soma Managment

E.C. Morgan, Soma Managment

E.C. Morgan graduated with honors in Business from the University of San Diego in 1987 then joined WIG Securities as an analyst before starting his own investment company, Morgan Capital Management in 1991. His fund, MCM Partners, was featured in Barron?s Financial News for Top Performance. He invested in digital media and emerging technology and founded Soma Management in 2001 as he saw the digital convergence taking place.

Soma Management produces, aggregates, and syndicates original lifestyle content for broadband, mobile, IPTV, VOD, and virtual worlds. Its focus is Beauty, Fashion, Health, Travel, Celebrity and other lifestyle content.

Speaker Bio: Jeanniey Mullen, Zinio

Jeanniey Mullen, Zinio

Jeanniey Mullen provides more than two decades of accomplishment-laden experience in the email, interactive and digital marketing realm. She is considered by many a force of unending energy, focused on driving revenue, improving brand impact and increasing customer relationships; all by harnessing the power of a digital dialogue and integrating it in to every possible touchpoint in the on and offline worlds.

Jeanniey Mullen is the Global Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Zinio Systems and VIV Magazine. In her role at Zinio and VIV, Jeanniey is charged with reinventing the publishing industry as a digital cornerstone of the consumers lifestyle.

She is also the founder and Executive Chair of the Email Experience Council (recently purchased by the DMA).

Prior to her role at Zinio and VIV, Jeanniey was the Senior Partner, and Global Executive Director of the Email Marketing and Digital Dialogue Practice at OgilvyOne Worldwide. In her role at Ogilvy, Jeanniey was responsible for leading the worldwide efforts that use digital dialogues and email to create powerful, meaningful and profitable customer communication strategies for Ogilvy clients, including IBM, American Express and Yahoo!

Jeanniey’s experience spans across B2C and B2B initiatives and many verticals including publishing, entertainment and events.

Prior to joining OgilvyOne, Jeanniey founded and ran her own interactive agency, The Lift Network. Before that, she served as the CMO and EVP at Avalon Digital Marketing Systems, where she helped launch one of the first B2B email platforms that incorporated on-demand video into the email message. Prior to Avalon, Jeanniey was the Global GM and VP of the email marketing department. Before entering the advertising agency world, Jeanniey was the Director of Customer Relations and Marketing Experience for JCPenney’s five key businesses, Store, Catalog, Direct, CreditCard and Insurance, Jeanniey is recognized in the industry as pioneering the first global email marketing practice, and was named one of the top 25 media people to watch while at Grey Direct.

Jeanniey’s expertise in the discipline spans both the B2B and B2C industries. In addition to her board position at the eec, Jeanniey is a columnist for ClickZ, has published numerous white papers and best practice guides, has been appeared in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. She is a frequent keynote speaker on the topics of email and digital marketing for organizations like Media Post, ClickZ, DMA, Shop.org and many others.

Newspaper Goes Online-Only

It’s not completely true that what happens in Wisconsin happens everywhere, but is a completely online edition the best or worst scenario for small local newspapers for survival?

Just An Online Minute… Wisconsin Newspaper Goes Online-Only

The Capital Times, an afternoon daily in Madison, Wis., this weekend folded its print edition and became an online-only newspaper.

“Today marks our last edition as a traditional daily newspaper of the sort Americans knew in the 19th and 20th centuries,” the paper announced Saturday in an editorial. “Starting tomorrow, The Capital Times will be a daily newspaper of the sort Americans will know in the 21st century.

Given today’s challenging market for newspapers, it’s not surprising that an afternoon paper like The Capital Times would fold in print. Afternoon dailies have been fading away for decades, victims of evening TV news broadcasts and cable TV long before the Internet struck a death blow.

In fact, in some ways, The Capital Times’ shift to the Internet is good news. Before the advent of the Web, evening papers simply closed and didn’t resurface in other forms. And even the Madison newspaper isn’t completely abandoning print; it will still publish a free print newsweekly and a free weekly entertainment guide.

Still, it appears inevitable that more and more newspapers will shift resources to the Web. Consider, figures released today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show that most top dailies have lost ground recently. For the six months ending March 30, circulation at The New York Times fell to around 1.08 million, marking a 3.9% drop. At the Los Angeles Times, circulation fell 5.1% to around 774,000, and the Dallas Morning News saw a 10.6% drop to approximately 368,000.

Of the 20 largest newspapers in the country, only two saw gains — The Wall Street Journal (up 0.4% to around 2.07 million) and USA Today (up 0.3% to around 2,28 million). Some other, smaller newspapers to show gains include the San Jose Mercury News, which grew 1.69% to around 231,000 and The Cincinnati Enquirer, which was up 2.93% to around 206,000.

How’s the online Feature section making out? Based on the number of Art & Food articles, they seem to be getting a good amount of space.

Why being like YouTube but for Food is not a Business Model

Only YouTube can be YouTube, that’s the common wisdom. And by most accounts YouTube does YouTube very well, which is why other business models that are based on the refrain “we’re going to be like YouTube, but for food (or fashion, or sports, or whatever)” aren’t very original, or likely to succeed in the long term because anyone can come up with the same idea.

Plus, now the basic layout is no longer difficult to reproduce. White-label tech outfits are even providing the basics for free. As reported in TechCrunch:

Create Your Own YouTube, Pray You Can Make Money

“YouTube sold for $1.6 billion. How much will you sell yours for?”

That’s the over-optimistic hook being used by StartYourTube to entice people into setting up branded video sharing sites on its white label platform.

StartYourTube does exactly what the name implies. You can go onto the site, create your own “tube”, customize it with colors and graphics, mask it to your own domain, invite friends, and start loading content. The tubes not only host videos but have sections for pictures, audio files, and blogs as well.

They also look and feel much like YouTube, with most recent, most viewed and most viewed lists. Users can vote and comment on videos; however, there’s no related videos list for each video.

This is entirely a free service with, puzzlingly, no perceivable revenue source for the owners. (Update: As has been noticed by commenters, it’ll actually cost you to raise the limits on how much content can be added to your tube and how many views you can receive). Publishers get to keep 100% 60% of ad revenues and the site is even running a $500 promotional giveaway campaign for the “top tubes”.

So far over 11,000 tubes have been created, including ones for snowboarding and anime. It was perhaps inevitable that a straightforward, white label video sharing platform would arise, especially given the success of other consumer social media platforms like Ning.

But it’s not the first company to give users and businesses more power to curate online videos. Magnify was built around the idea of creating specialized channels around videos hosted elsewhere. Reality Digital, KickApps, and VSocial all provide video hosting services that integrate with existing websites. And now with YouTube’s APIs, the online video gorilla itself is giving developers more control over how videos are managed on the web.