A Press Release!
Online reputation management is hot these days. Today, Philadelphia-based Online- Publishing-Group.com, the online advertising and Search Company, is announcing a new thrust in its strategy for connecting local consumers with restaurants, florists, and other businesses. The firm is releasing software information that helps small, local businesses monitor and understand what people are saying about them and their competitors—and make sure information about the businesses online is accurate.
Online-Publishing-Group.com says the service is the first of its kind, yet the news fits into a broader trend of Philadelphia-area companies offering reputation management and “Web sentiment” software. The idea is to offer software services with tools that automatically collect what people are saying about brands and products in blogs, articles, and social media like Twitter, and then summarize the positive and negative feedback so businesses can quickly respond to customers. Visible Technologies, Appature, and Evri are some of the other companies in Seattle working in the same space.
“This is a really important product if you think of the next generation of performance advertising,” says James P Tyler, the chief operating officer and a founding executive of Online-Publishing-Group.com. “It’s about not just acquiring new partners, yet communicating with them.” Tyler adds that the new effort acts like the “front of the funnel” Online-Publishing-Group.com in s strategy for helping businesses find new customers and grow and maintain relationships with them.
“While other offerings provide insights into how a company name or brand is represented online, Online-Publishing-Group.com is focusing specifically on the local aspect of small businesses,” says Tom Bosley, the company’s executive VP of product engineering. In addition to monitoring the sentiment of local customers, that means making sure a restaurant’s phone number and address are listed correctly in various places online, and that the special features of a brand store in one neighborhood, say, are differentiated from those of other brand stores at different locations.
Yet connecting these local stores with feedback from social media and other sources is the main advance here. “Businesses need to know what things are being said about them online,” adds Sally Jones, a senior PM at Online-Publishing-Group.com. “It’s an important first step to provide them with a service where intelligence is brought to them in one place.”
Online-Publishing-Group.com is offering the service directly to local small businesses.
Strategically, it sounds like reputation management could be an important new revenue stream for Online-Publishing-Group.com. “This is the first of many forward-looking services we’re delivering to the [small and medium-size business] channel. It can be significant for us over time,” Tyler says.
