Reputation Tracking Is Newest Online Metric

“Reputation management” is emerging as a crucial piece of online marketing, analyst Greg Sterling told the Borrell Associations Local Online Ad Conference in New York Monday. It's particularly crucial for local businesses struggling to keep up with burgeoning social media.

Word of mouth about a business' reputation has traditionally been the biggest source of leads for small- and medium businesses -- at least 50%, he said. Now, research from a Nielsen survey shows online ratings and reviews are the digital version of word-of-mouth. Reviews from acquaintances are the No.1 most trusted source of consumer information about a business, and reviews by strangers are No. 2.

Sterling introduced Matthew Berk of Marchex to talk about a reputation management service that Marchex is testing to help SMBs with the explosion of  ratings, reviews and other online content. Marchex manages online advertising for about 70,000 customers, serving more than 1 billion ads a day.

“We realized that just supplying leads is not enough. To truly serve the SMB, you have to go deeper,” said Berk, Marchex's EVP of product engineering. “We asked SMBs: How do you stay on top of what people are saying about you online? They don't, or they struggle. It's almost impossible to stay on top of Yelp, Twitter and blog posts. It is a real problem that needs to be solved.”

“They want to run their business, they don't want to monitor what people are saying about them.

So Marchex has developed a service to make it easy for small businesses to find out what the Internet is saying about them. The service starts by crawling the Internet for everything it can find about businesses.

“We think we have the largest collection of local data outside of Google with 10 million consumer reviews. We take it down to the store level.” There are three kinds of data mined:

• Reviews, with summaries of keywords (words like best crabcake, great place to take a date) and positive or negative sentiment.

• Mentions are summarized from blogs, stories and Twitter.

• Listings about the business, where Berk said there's often a lot of incorrect information.

The summaries of this detailed and constantly changing customer feedback offer insight into how people feel about a business. It can tell an SMB not only how to market, but also how to improve their business, Berk said. Companies can also size up what's being said about their competitors.

Marchex is testing the platform with 300 beta customers and expects to launch soon.

Berk expects a one-price-per-seat subscription, with some variation possible for multiple location businesses.

One TV station in the audience asked how a local site might use this reputation management service. “Online advertising has incredible low engagement,” said Berk. “This has high engagement. This could be part of the mix for a larger bundle sold by a local publisher.”