Businesses in the smallest of small towns are being reviewed online right now. Do you know what is being said about you? Here are two sites you need to take a look at.
Yelp – offers reviews of all kinds of local businesses. It also gives you the business owner some tools to maintain your listings.
TripAdvisor – focuses on tourism businesses, like motels and restaurants. The management response tool is pretty limited.
Found anything negative? Do two things:
1. Fix problems. It’s just possible you could stand to improve.
2. Encourage your loyal customer fans to respond on your behalf. They carry more credibility than you do, in this case.
What other review sites have you found relevant for your small town business?
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
Ari Herzog has written an excellent expansion on this idea, How Yelp and TripAdvisor Help Business Thrive. He offers much more info on this concept.
Those are great site, but they’re missing something. They don’t allow the business owner to join the conversation. Imagine when a customer had a bad experience at a restaurant. He or she could write a bad post on those review sites and point figures at how horrible the restaurant staff treated them, or that customer could leave a problem and have that owner reply to resolve that issue.
We currently developing a solution that will allow the customer to leave a feedback and the business owner can reply back on the same thread.
We allow both sides tell their story.
Nick, I’m looking forward to seeing Feedback Jar. Your idea sounds interesting. Small business owners will have to walk a very fine line to add the right kind of reply, without appearing defensive or negative!