Marketers and PR types looking to use the social web to build business relationships receive more than enough advice on using blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networks to connect. While you’re considering which software tools might work for your online marketing strategies, don’t forget these three sites, especially if you have location- or niche-based information, products, or services to promote.
Yelp – Yelp is a social site that allows users to vote and review local businesses. Most commonly used to review restaurants, Yelp also has categories for professional services, shopping, places, education, home services, real estate and more. I wouldn’t recommend “stuffing the box,” so to speak, or voting for your own product or service, but with a little creative campaigning, it’s not too difficult to get a few people to at least take a look at your product or service, and give their opinion. I’ve also found that Yelp seems to be the ONLY web presence some local businesses have. If you were looking to work with smaller businesses, you could find lots of new customers this way, too.
Upcoming.org – Upcoming is a local event guide for the web. There are a few ways to use this. For marketers, if you’re throwing events, always make sure Upcoming has a copy of your event in there. If you’re looking to meet more business prospects, tracking events in the areas where you’re going is a really great way to build some new potential business relationships. I find that when attending conferences, a quick scan of Upcoming.org for that city and those dates almost always finds me something cool to attend that no one else seems to know about.
Meetup.com- Ah, the best new tagline in the world: Use the Internet to Get Off the Internet. First, watch this nifty little video they created:
Meetup.com is often overlooked as a place to market. One way is to build a small meetup local to your organization that covers the same area your product or service is used in. For instance, if I made a software that helped small to midsized businesses collaborate better over the web, I might throw together a Small Business Meetup for the nearest decent city near the office, and then at least show up to the monthly face-to-face meetings. It’s an instant word of mouth opportunity, provided you approach the situation in a helpful way instead of just trying to foist your product on people.
There are several tools like this that you might not have considered creatively in your potential online efforts. These might have even sparked other ideas for other tools people use on the web in a slightly different way. If so, let’s talk about that in the comments, shall we?
Otherwise, what do you think? Does this make sense? Any other recommendations?
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