Someone searches Google for marketing in Lancaster and your company doesn’t show up. Not good. Another person searches for your fitness center, and you appear right at the top. Great! But wait, your 6 reviews have an average of two stars. “Service is terrible…” or “the place stinks.” …oops, maybe not so great after all.

A recent study from TMP Directional Marketing estimated that a whopping 70% of people turn to the internet, via computer or phone, to find a local business or service. That’s huge, and being found on local search platforms is incredibly important. But what will they find when they get there?

What do people see when they search for your business or service? The great days, or the not so great days?

There’s really no excuse for not knowing this. So go ahead, Google your business, find it in the maps listings, and see what you discover. The next thing you should do is understand a little about how the system works. Lets talk about Google…

Google crawls the internet looking for data about local businesses and organizations. When it discovers enough information about an organization, it will create a maps listing or “place page”. Your company is probably there already, even if you didn’t sign up.  Once Google creates a listing, it starts pulling all of the data it has on that organization together, and combines it. This includes address, phone numbers, website information, social media accounts, even photos.

Perhaps more importantly, it also collects reviews.

Check out this listing for a local diner. Unfortunately what Google has collected isn’t positive. (names removed)

Here’s the important bit – most of these reviews weren’t left via Google. The restaurant industry is particularly lucky (or vulnerable) in that Google pulls from a huge variety of sources. But this also happens to the rest of us, no matter what industry we’re in.

Major sources of reviews include:

• CitySearch.com
• Yelp
• Yahoo! Local
• Local.com

There are literally hundreds of others.

As long as these reviews exist on other platforms, they will keep showing up on Google – even if you could somehow delete Google’s copy.

Knowing what’s going on is the first step to addressing reputation issues, or cultivating a positive image. We’ll continue to discuss the subject here, but if you’re itching to learn more…

…please come to our class at HACC Lancaster on October 26th at 6:30pm. You can find more about it here (search for “kiwi”) and registration information is here. It’s pretty inexpensive and we know you will walk away with detailed info and tools on this important subject.

When people visit Lancaster City, however, they’re often pleasantly surprised to find a collection of excellent galleries, an up-and-coming arts scene, great coffee houses, fine dining, strong greening and sustainability initiatives, and a community committed to the continued growth of Lancaster as a thriving and vibrant city.

I’ll admit that when I first came here over 4 years ago, I had a bit of a snicker at the “I love city life” bumper stickers I saw from time the time. Coming from Christchurch, New Zealand, a city of about 350,000 people (Oh, how cosmopolitan I thought myself!), Lancaster seemed quiet. I may’ve been guilty of using the word “Dying”.

I’m the first to admit that I was incorrect in my assumptions. The community and energy that embodies downtown Lancaster is something special.

Over the past 4 years, the continued growth and development of Lancaster City has been great to watch. I’ve been particularly impressed by the work of neighborhood organizations such as the James Street Improvement District and the East King Improvement District. Likewise, the amount of green, local, and sustainable efforts in the city, such as that of the Susquehanna Sustainable Business Network (Insert shameless plug — Kiwi is currently working with SSBN on their Social Media campaign), Live Green, and Buy Fresh Buy Local.

And, because Lancaster City is relatively closely knit, word gets around pretty quickly. Which brings me to my point…

The driving forces behind Lancaster’s success -a sense of community, regular (interesting) events, sharing experiences, discussions, communication- are an essential part of what makes Social Media so popular, and so powerful. That’s why a number of Lancaster businesses, organizations, and initiatives have had such great success with services such as Twitter, or Facebook -which are the two channels that downtown Lancastrians seem to be flocking to.

Discussion within our own communities is great. It’s powerful, and it brings results. But, in my opinion, the best is yet to come. All of us have connections outside of Lancaster. Some of them reach into neighboring counties, others to larger cities on the east and west coasts. Some reach all the way around the world to Christchurch, New Zealand. (By the way, Prince Street Cafe, my family still talks about your baked oatmeal). As more and more people flock to Social Media services, these connections are going to be mirrored in our online interactions. And, with technology breaking down or eliminating distance and cost barriers, it makes sense then that any organization backed by a strong offline community can benefit immensely from a strong online one.

So, kudos to those already making their mark in Social Media and through other online methods. If this isn’t you (yet), it can be. There are lots of good examples to follow, even (and especially) here in Lancaster.

It’s called Middlespot.com and uses Yahoo! to find results. There’ve been a lot of attempts at visual search engines in the past; none of them were a huge success. Middlespot is a little different, though. Your results come up as snapshots of the actual home page of the site you’d arrive at if you clicked on a search engine result. You can scroll up and down to see the different results, and zoom in and out to get a good look at a particular page (you can actually read the page). Neat, but really nothing that hasn’t been done before. What we thought was cool about Middlespot is its “Workpad” feature. If you find a result you like, you can drag and drop the image onto your Workpad (which you can access from anywhere) or add in your own finds from other places. You could think of it as an online version of the front of your refrigerator. According to the developer, there’s unlimited space on a Workpad. We’ll just take his word for it as we didn’t test this. Some of us have enough trouble finding our keys in our house. An infinite space to fill up with pictures and clippings was a little intimidating…

Useful? A gimmick? Here’s our take. If you’re a visual person and need a way to organize the things you dig up on a particular topic, it seems that a Workpad is the idea place to store it. Couple it with the fact that Yahoo! is a pretty good search engine (It’s only beaten out by the 800 pound gorilla that is Google) and we think you’ve got a great way to conduct research or analysis projects.

Keeping tabs on your competition, pinning up their photos, writing notes about their movements…

What? Sounds a lot like stalking? No, no. In marketing, the term is “Competitive Intelligence”.