Yelp & Online Social Networking

I wanted to share an educational moment with some general information and advice on online social networking and promoting your business online.

You may have heard of yelp.com but some other sites you may be familiar with (or not) may include Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, yahoo groups and meetup.com. For example, in yahoo groups, I am a member of a national Keller Williams group, a member of a Keller Williams faculty group; on meetup.com, I am a member of a labrador retriever group, a kayak group and a wordpress blog group.

Did you know the average age of a user on Facebook is 35 while the average age on MySpace is 25?

Here are some tips for you to keep in mind as you explore or assess your online options:

· If you have children, you probably want to explore MySpace and Facebook on a somewhat regular basis to see what they and their friends are up to, who their friends are and what photos they are posting. Snooping? Absolutely.

· Most of these sites have industry-specific groups or interest groups or forums and there may be a few that would make sense for you to network with.

· A note on participation: most of these sites are effective if you actually participate on a regular basis. If you only set up your profile then never visit the site again, it's no use. Many of these sites "rank" their members so the more features you use (such as forums, sending emails or responding to postings) ... basically the more you engage, the higher your ranking and this is the type of activity that can actually drive people to you and your business.

· A note on self-promotion, especially with yelp.com: self-promotion is a no-no and the regulars on yelp will flag your profile if they think you are "staging" your reviews ... reviews are intended to be "organic"

· What is "organic?" It means it happens naturally and by involved members. For example, if the only reviews you have on your business yelp is from 4 customers who have never yelped on any other business, it looks bad because it looks like you have specifically driven those reviews to your page. It needs to build up naturally and it looks better if they are not all 5-star (a 4-star and a 3-star would actually give it more legitimacy)

And a few links:

· yelp business: http://www.yelp.com/business

· www.facebook.com

· www.yahoogroups.com

Enjoy and set an online goal for yourself and your business for 2009. Our plan is to increase our online leads to represent 10% of our business.