Lee Watters.com

This coming Nov. 27, American Express OPEN and almost 20 organizations, both public and private, declared the said date as Small Business Saturday. This special day recognizes and supports local, independent small businesses that are in fact (unrecognized) but nevertheless critical to our nation’s economy as it creates jobs and builds communities in the local arena.

Some of the organizations supporting Small Business Saturday are Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau, The 3/50 Project, Destination DC, NYC and Co., LA Inc., Yelp, eWomenNetwork, Facebook, Count Me In, Business Matchmaking, The City of Santa Clarita and a lot more. Every business owner are called upon and encouraged to join the movement. You can participate by downloading social media tools and other helpful materials at www.smallbusinesssaturday.com. These materials, which allow you to create personalized and geo-targeted advertisements, are very useful in promoting your businesses.  Plus, American Express will be giving away $100 Facebook advertising credits to the first 10,000 small business owners to sign up.  In order to help gain retail traffic, American Express cardholders can avail of as much as $25 statement credit when they make a single purchase of at least $25 using American Express credit cards at any of the participating locally owned businesses. To be eligible, cardholders must be one of the first 100,000 to register their American Express card at www.smallbusinesssaturday.com from November 08 to November 27, 2010. Moreover, the single purchase of $25 covers only those made at the participating merchant stores, not online or at a government agency.

For more details on the terms of this promotion, please check out www.smallbusinesssaturday.com or facebook.com/smallbusinesssaturday.

Foursquare: A Total Success Says McDonald’s

Taking advantage of the Foursquare Day, McDonald’s Rick Wion, head of social media, shared that the company was able to successfully increase traffic by 33%! This was announced by Wion during the recently held Mobile Social Communications conference. The fast food giant spent a minimal amount of $1,000 for the campaign which was used to give out giftcards as enticement to potential customers. What is $1,000 anyway, considering that a multi-million company like McDonald’s spends millions as well for their annual advertising campaigns. 100 randomly given $10 and $5 giftcards which serve as checkin lures to diners, likewise attracted the media’s attention. Thus, a total of 50 articles about McDonald’s successful Foursquare campaign were published.

Of course the 33% increase success was measured by the number of checkins, not sales. Checkins are the same as persons entering McDonald’s. Nevertheless, McDonald’s was happy with the increased foot traffic to their stores, not to mention the number of denizens who followed and became fans of McDonald’s in the social media sites. One can conclude that McDonald’s definitely considers Foursquare to be a successful platform to increase profit.

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Google has been testing a new page format for local search results. This new design removes the Lucky 7-pack that has been showing up at the top left of local Google search results. In the new design, local listings will be showing up on the left and a smaller map will be showing up on the right.

The new page layout looks more like a business directory of listings, something Google has been trying to accomplish for some time. Wanting to deliver more precise search results for local queries, Google has made it known they are in a never ending change to provide more relevant search results. The one thing Google has made clear; they will no longer include other Web directories in their local search results.

What does this mean? Other Web directories might include online yellow page directory sites, local directory sites, and other forms of service online directories. Google does not want the user to be presented with two levels of search results. Online yellow page directories have normally been part of local search results, displaying another set of results tied to the keyword used. But with the new layout from Google these sites will no longer appear in the top rankings for local searches.

How does this affect your business? Well, if your business has relied on online yellow page directories or service a directory for leads the sites will stop working for you. Since Google has redesigned their local search results and released “Google places” as their new local business directory. Google has tweaked their algorithms making it harder to appear in these results. Now, more than ever it’s imperative that your web site be optimized to show up in these search results.

If your small business is not investing in some form of SEO (search engine optimization) you stand the risk of disappearing from Google altogether. When Google rolls these changes out nationwide your business could see some drastic changes in the amount of traffic and leads it receives from local search.

What can you do? The first thing I would do is have your web site evaluated for SEO, second I would check to make sure your business is correctly indexed in Google places. It’s becoming clearer, something I’ve been talking about for a long time. Every business owner needs to become a participant in their marketing. You can’t just turn it over to some advertising executive at your local newspaper, magazines, radio or your local cable company. The Internet is playing a major role in how your local businesses found, and how your brand is perceived.

One thing you can count on in this ever-changing world of marketing, things will keep changing. If you have any comments please leave them below I would love to hear your thoughts.

If you have any questions concerning the changes going on with Google, give me a call I’m more than happy to talk with you.

It seems yelp may be dealing from the bottom of the deck. As more reports surface about the business practices of the popular customer review web site yelp.com about altering, and even deleting reviews.  All I can say about this is a number of my clients have been experiencing odd changes with their yelp reviews.

I guess we’ll just have to see how this all works out, if any of the allegations are true, yelp will lose all of its credibility.  You can read more on the story by following the link below.

New York Time Business