Yelp me!

Please find an English interview below. If you cannot read the German part, don’t worry: Yelp is new in the German market and you won’t find anything spectacular for an international audience there 🙂

Nachdem vor einigen Wochen Pinterest im deutschen Employer Branding Markt entdeckt wurde, versuche ich mal bei der nächsten Sau, die durch’s Dorf getrieben wird, auf dem Rüssel zu sitzen: Yelp

Zugegeben, im Vergleich zu Pinterest wird Yelp erstmal eher ein Ferkel denn eine Sau sein, zum einen weil es mit Qype bereits einen ähnlichen Dienst gibt, der vor allem in Mitteleuropa erfolgreich ist – also quasi das LinkedIn vs Xing der Bewertungsportale; zum anderen, weil bisher noch keine wirklich durchschlagende Idee exisitiert, wie diese Portale effektiv fuer Employer Branding genutzt werden können.

Im Gegensatz zu kununu, dass sich mit langem Atem erfolgreich am Markt etabliert hat, liegt der Focus bei diesen Portalen nicht primär auf arbeitgeber- sondern business-relevanten Themen. Ich bin mir aber sicher (und viele Daten deuten darauf hin), dass sich diese Trennung immer weiter aufheben wird. Wer möchte schon für jede ‘Special Interest’ (inkl. Jobs) ein eigenes Portal aufrufen? Die Herausforderung des Personalmarketing liegt eher in der mobilen Nutzung dieser Dienste.

Man informiert sich in der Regel nicht im Vorbeigehen aktiv über Arbeitgeber und Jobs, so dass der mobile Aspekt hier sicher ein Stück zurücktritt, aber andererseits bietet Yelp den vollen “Genuss” nur in Kombination von Website und App an. Und wer weiss, wie sich das Nutzungsverhalten diesbezüglich in Zukunft ändert. KLM hat hier im Produktbereich ein exzellentes Beispiel kreativer Nutzung geliefert: KLM Surprise und eine Meinung dazu.

Zurück zu Yelp: Viel Wert wird auf die Community und das aktive Management der Bewertungen gelegt (daher gibt es Yelp auch nur in Ländern, in denen eine entsprechend Yelp Infrastruktur besteht). Wie bei anderen Portalen auch, kann man sich Awards verdienen, Deals finden und hier ggf. in eine “Elite” (aka Power User) aufgenommen werden. Dieser “Elite”, aber auch anderen Nutzern, werden regelmäßig Yelp-Offline-Events angeboten.

Diese Events können beispielsweise eine Möglichkeit bieten, aktiv Employer Branding zu gestalten. Und die über die Nutzung der Yelp Community als Markenbotschafter lässt sich sicher auch nachdenken.

Hübsches Feature der App: das “Monocle”, die augmented reality Version von Yelp. Wenn auch viele Businesses noch in die deutsche Yelp Datenbank integriert werden müssen…

Ich hatte die Gelegenheit mir von Yelps Münchener Community Managerin, Vee, ein paar Fragen beantworten zu lassen:

The business model behind Yelp – how are you generating revenue?

Yelp offers local advertising for the highly reviewed businesses on Yelp. Also, from time to time you’ll see ads from brand advertisers who sponsor sections of the site. We currently only offer advertising for businesses in North America and the UK. This is broken down into two kinds of advertising:

• Local advertising from local businesses that want to be featured on Yelp
• Brand advertising, i.e. display and text ads on Yelp.

What is the unique selling proposition of Yelp for users and for businesses?

The Yelp Community and our unparalleled mission to connect people with great local businesses is what sets Yelp apart. Yelp has a very engaged Community worldwide that is comprised of passionate locals that want to share their experiences and give readers the inside scoop, street-by-street, city-by-city. They are on the ground exploring and talking about their experiences at local businesses. Yelp has always made a very strong commitment to the Community, hiring a Community Manager in each Yelp market (over 90 different markets worldwide now) to nurture
and engage with local people, ultimately to deliver on Yelp’s overarching mission: to connect people with great local businesses.

I am already checking in on Facebook and foursquare, sometimes check reviews on Qype,
why should I add Yelp, or even replace these services?

There are a lot of social networks out there and we believe they all serve their particular purpose:
Facebook for example is where people go to share information about their lives and see picture of babies and puppies. People come to Yelp to help them make an informed buying decision.

The check-in feature is not only a great fun way to keep track of where you are, where you have been and with and with whom, it offers credibility to the review content already on the site. For example, if you are reading a review that give a restaurant 5 stars and you see that person has checked-in 15 times, you can be pretty sure that this person really does like the business and goes there often, giving that extra level of credibility.

This is just one of the reasons that over 71 Million unique visitors come to Yelp each month (monthly average in Q1 2012) to decide where to spend their hard-earned money and free time.
Now, as an extension of our content-rich mobile apps, our Community can check-in, but also write tips/advice, upload photos and edit/update business info without having to switch over to another service.

How can businesses most effectively use Yelp?

Businesses can most effectively use Yelp by joining the conversation and being active with their Yelp page! How do they do this? The first step is to claim their business listing page on Yelp, which will gain them access to an entire suite of absolutely free business owner tools. Among other things, this will allow them to update their listing with the correct info, photos, web address, engage via messaging (public and private) with users that write a review of their business, check page stats, post check-in offers, and much more. Yelp has built an entire section of the website dedicated to business owners: Yelp For Business Owners.

Are there already examples of businesses that already yelp for branding or recruiting purposes?

Unfortunately, this isn’t something we’ve seen in particular…but surely, Yelp is a great platform to display one’s creativity, writing skills, and commitment and passion for their city as an avid “Yelper.” It’s an added way to contribute to the community, and build one’s personal brand as a local expert, urban explorer…or just someone that really knows a lot about restaurants, bars, shopping, the best places to take kids, or who to visit when you need a mechanic!

Schauen wir also mal, wie sich Yelp im Markt platziert – und ich bin sicher, das bald jemand einen kreativen Weg finden wird, Bewertungsportale für Employer Branding zu nutzen. Das Beispiel Pinterest hat vorgemacht, wie sich aus Ratlosigkeit zumindest aktive Nutzung entwickeln kann: “Dabei sein ist alles.” 🙂

Related articles

• Yelp and Others Change the Way Small Businesses Do Business (prweb.com)
• Local Ad Growth Helps Yelp Shares Jump 25% (snspost.com)
• Yelp! (cheapmarketinghq.com)
• Yelp Beats Wall Street Expectations, Stock Jumps More Than 10% (YELP) (businessinsider.com)
• How to yelp (thenextgreatgeneration.com)

FINS Technology: Facebook To Launch Job Board

“Facebook is planning to launch its own job board later this summer, said people familiar with the matter. The job board will aggregate the job postings of third party providers, making them available for search by Facebook users.”

This does sound like just another job board without any “social” in the media.

But I would like to convey my best wishes to facebook. If anyone could finally build a successful job app/page ever on facebook, it’s them. Let’s observe the further development.

I just created my resume…

… and I didn’t say “upload”.

This morning, I was thinking about how to update my “about“-page and give it a more interesting and state-of-the art look. Get rid of boring text and upload some pictures was my first thought. But simple pictures are so Gen X… so I started looking for a tool to create infographics and came up with re.vu

re.vu  is one of many tools in the market that enables a user to pull in and edit his or her LinkedIn data to produce stylish web-based “personal” infographic(s). I choose it, because it was first to pop-up in my Google search results – and take it as an example for all the other products out there.

Actually there is a lot of thoughts on the future of candidates’ presentation in the web community. Will it be Pinterest, SocialCV, infographics or something totally different?

Speaking of infographics, back to re.vu: The infographic layout, which could be customized, focuses on basic data such as name, title and biography, social links and career timeline — it also enables a user to add more graphics, including statistics, skill advancement, proficiencies, quotes and interests over time. I like the “percentages” feature, where you can highlight figures which you think represent your career stages best.

Besides the career timeline that is generated via the LinkedIn connection, the other graphics can be tedious to create, as all the details must be entered manually. A nice feature is that you can give the page a more personal appeal by integrating pictures or moving the various design items.

In the end a partly interactive infographic resume is generated. As you can easily update your data, this page is an always accurate and recent CV.

There are strong arguments for this kind of presentation from the candidates perspective. Besides its non-static data and customizable appeal, it also re.vu also offers the possibility to integrate more detailed data,  files and hyperlinks. Though, some candidates (and some candidate advisors) tend to tailor their CV for certain employers/jobs. This might be even more work than in the “past”. Also, with these kind of tools, you still have full control over the personal data you like to share with potential employers.

But also from an employer point-of-view I could see some arguments for infographics resumes: the biggest fear of every recruiter is that they find a non-standard rather chaotic CV, have to search for data or at least do not find data at the expected place. All of this costs time… With such a tool like re.vu there will be some fresh and not-so-boring looks, but not for the price of some of those disadvantages. Data will still be structured (customization is limited, which doesn’t happen on personal homepages) and if you are interested in getting more detail to e.g. some career stages, just move your mouse over it. This makes it partially even better to read than the common pdf/word documents.

So, recruiters out there start getting used to this kind of candidate presentation.

Maybe I start trying kinzaa next, but maybe some of you already tried it and would like to share their experience?

Who’s Who in Social HR Technology – the social workplace

Useful list of services and tools @ the social workplace

… though it’s quite US centred (but let’s face it: they are the most advanced market).

20 free (?) tools to evaluate social media

“Lies, damned lies & statistics”… love this blog name. For a good start to conscious social media usage you will find a useful list at the Human Capital League:

1 – Alexa.com
Gives you stats on websites, including global rank, country rank, number of sites linking in, and good basic audience data including demographics.

2 – Amplicate
Like a lot of services, Amplicate operates a fremium model.   A quick search, which will give you a ‘hate’ vs ‘love’ snapshot for a brand is free.   Pay $19 and you get a year’s worth of data.   And for $199 you can download various industry reports.

Amplicate also has a blog with various useful bits of information (for example, apparently half of online chatter about Foursquare in 2011 was negative ).

3 – Board Reader
Board Reader will search for mentions across forums (including sites like Quora) and will also churn out a chart based on mentions over time.

4 – Blogscope
One of the giants in professional sentiment analysis alongside the likes of Radian6 and Lithium is Canadian research firm Sysomos.   Sysomos originated from University of Toronto research and in fact, some of that is still live on Blogscope.

We’ve had periodic problems connecting to the site, but when its live, it is good for a free service.  The charts it produces aren’t pretty, but they are useful.

5 – Facebook Insights
This should be standard for anyone who works in social media.   Free to access for any Page admin, this provides an in-depth picture of fans’ interactions with your page.

This allows you to post content at the most optimum time, to identify the type of content your fans engage with the most and gives a pretty accurate demographic breakdown. Knowing where your fans come from and what they do on your page when they get there allows you to tailor your strategy more effectively.

6 – Follower Wonk
Follower Wonk makes sense of yours, or someone else’s Twitter feed.  You start with 150 credits, with every search costing 30-40 credits (the idea being that after that you pay).

Follower Wonk is useful in giving you the equivalent of the Facebook ‘friends of friends’ metric, you can dissect a Twitter feed to see what type of users they reach in terms of followers and influence.

7 – Feed Compare
A lot of blogs run their RSS feeds through the Google-owned Feedburner.  If they do, you can run them through Feed Compare to look at subscriber numbers – arguably a more useful metric than visitors as this measures engaged users who subscribe to a blog via a feed.

8 – Google Insights
One that is easily overlooked is Google’s Insights tool.  This is not only useful in tracking brands, but also sector specific areas and how they work across different regions.

9 – How Sociable 
Though as with many of these services, the idea is to get you to subscribe (starting at $19 a month), a free search will give you a range of influence metrics across different social networks.   Useful if you track over time, or are doing a quick competitive search.

10 – Ice rocket trends

In addition to running a blog and news search engine, Ice Rocket has a trends tool.   This allows you to compare a number of search terms, giving you a basic graph of how they compare in share of voice.

11 – Klout / Peerindex / Kred

The three main sentiment scoring systems, Klout is trying to establish itself as the de facto industry standard, while Kred is the newest entrant and one that shows a lot of promise.

Services like Klout do have flaws (we’ve explored these more in our Rabbit Feed on influence), but both Klout and Peerindex are useful for the ability to create lists which can be public or private.   Essentially you can set up a league table of brands across a certain industry sector and track their scores over time.

12 – Mention Map 
A great visual tool, Mention Map tells you who an Twitter user speaks to the most.   Good for tracking the influencers of influencers.

13 – Social Mention
An excellent free social search engine with basic analytics including sentiment and top keywords.   Recommended.

14 – Statbrain
Very often you will want to estimate the traffic of a site where you’ve been featured.  Statbrain will give you an approximation of how many weekly visitors any site gets.

15 – Statigram

With Instagram breaking into the ranks of top tier social networks, there will be more of a need to analyse Instagram activity.   Statigram is a free service with a number of different elements.   You can view Instagram images via your browser, and set up a custom URL to direct people to.

You can manage your followers, and you can also get useful data about the type of engagement your posts are getting, your most committed followers and the times of day to post.

16- Timely 
When is the best time to tweet to hit the optimum number of followers?  Timely gives you the answer.  A more sophisticated service also looking at Facebook and giving you data on influencers is Crowd Booster http://crowdbooster.com/, which comes in at $20 a month for 10 accounts.

17 – Twitter Counter 
Another free service with premium (paid for) features, this tracks your Twitter follower count over time.   To get data on retweets and mentions, prices start at $15 a month.

18 – Tweetreach
As the name says, Tweetreach will tell you how far a tweet has gone in terms of reach (no of people who in theory saw it) and who the most influential tweeters of a certain term are.   The first 50 results are free, making it useful to get a real-time snapshot of activity.   If you want a more in-depth report, that will cost you $20

19 – Trendistic 
Trendistic tracks Twitter trends over time.   Input a search term to see how it’s performed.   You can also embed a code to have a chart change dynamically on your site.

20 – Visual.ly  
Visual.ly is a kind of DIY info graphics service.  In Visual.ly labs there is a tool meant to be fun in which you compare your Twitter profile against someone else’s, but this can just as easily be used for brands.