In a new Advertising Age article, Frazier Miller from the Yahoo Local team explains some similarities between their Local search and social networking.
“If you rewind the clock a few years ago, we spend all our time thinking about local merchants and users trying to find info on a local basis, like you had in the newspaper and Yellow Pages models. These were a monologue as opposed to a dialogue.”
This was before social networking really became big. A successful local listing a good couple years ago was to actually have your business information listed correctly in the respective results.
“There’s more effective ways for users and merchants to have a dialogue. For users, we’ve had things like ratings and reviews. We just hit the 2 million number in terms of ratings and reviews.”
Add the 2005 acquisition of Flickr, plus tools like receiving emails when users post a rating or review for your business, you have a local interactive experience.
I’ve mentioned this before, but Matt McGee from Small Business SEM has a couple good writeups on Flickr.
