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Digital Sharecropping

Sometime last week, I was perusing through Copyblogger when I saw an article titled, “The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Online Marketing Efforts” by Sonia Simone.

In it, Sonia opens up with an anecdote about an independent bookstore that has good coffee, readings from published authors and is an all around great place. What happens is that the landlord decides to triple their lease when it comes time for renewal, which results in the bookstore going out of business.

This is what Sonia likens to as “digital sharecropping,” a quasi-pejorative term coined by Nicholas Carr. Outside of the digital space, sharecropping was a farming system in which landowners would allow tenants to use part of their land in exchange for a portion of the harvest, putting land to use that might have not been utilized otherwise. The system was a way to pool risk and protect both parties in the event of a catastrophe or bad season. And though it may sound pretty sweet conceptually, historically speaking in the United States, it often resulted in exploitation and was little different than slavery, which had just been abolished. While there’s no shortage of information on either version of sharecropping online, in as few words as possible:

“One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative(Carr).

For you non-jargonauts, the term “Web 2.0” was coined back in 1999 to “describe websites that [would] use technology beyond static pages of earlier websites” (Wikipedia). The theory was that, eventually, the Internet would become a collaborative medium that would allow users to interact with one another through social media, user-generated content, virtual communities, etc. Think: the Cloud; YouTube; Facebook; Wikipedia; Reddit; Pinterest; Tumblr; Content Management Systems like WordPress and on and on. Nicholas went on to hypothesize that this would ultimately “provide an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of free labor” as innovation would allow companies to crowd source and profiteer from content generation done by us, the poor sharecroppers.

Sonia cautions that this is “the most dangerous threat to your online marketing efforts” for a few reasons:

“Landlords are fickle.” Because Facebook and Google are ever changing platforms, your business is susceptible to their whims, and your page can be deleted at any given moment should their terms of service change. “Sharecropped land has a tendency to become less and less fertile over time,” and “Landlords go away.”  Eventually, all of these social media mega sites tend to turn into ghost towns. Look at Xanga, Digg, Myspace, Yahoo! Buzz, Friendster and Google+ (Half-kidding about that last one).

After having read her article, I understand what’s being said. It just seems really strange in an I’m-comparing-apples-to-the-business-model-that-most-closely-represents-slavery-kind-of-way. Yes, Sonia is right when it comes to controlling and owning your assets; especially your website, and that social media works for you by driving traffic to your website where conversions are completed, not the other way around. A strong marketing and advertising campaign will integrate, manage and interchangeably use different channels that enables it to reach customers most effectively.

But in an ever-growing trend Web 2.0 is painted in broad strokes as a zero-sum game where businesses profiteer at the expense of their user base and fails to acknowledge how those very companies have provided value by making our lives better if not more convenient. A pretty obvious example is YouTube, which in 2006 changed how we use the Internet for better or worse, the latter depending on how much time you can lose to it in a single sitting. One reason YouTube grew as much as it did in its infancy was that it was easy to use. Users who weren’t particularly tech savvy could watch videos as well as upload and share their own all without having to download any software. At the end of that year, “You” were selected as Time’s Person of the Year for “seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.” In Lev Grossman’s cover story, he writes:

“It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world but also change the way the world changes.

While this excerpt may seem a tad bit cushy sans the rest of the article, social media’s impact on the world is undeniable and has given the most marginalized groups a voice. That much is evident in the Arab Spring, the series of demonstrations and protests in countries across the Middle East in which activists relied on Facebook and Twitter to spread awareness and organize protests and, ultimately, removed regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen from power.

If you find that your online marketing is at a standstill, take a step back and recalibrate your bearings because the most dangerous thing isn’t that you digitally sharecrop, and unknowingly provide value to others in doing so. That’s not a bad thing at all. The most dangerous threat is not knowing where you and your business are going, which tends to happen when values lie on the fringe and not at the core. In a world where competition can change overnight, it’s important to dust off the map every once in a while and make any necessary revisions whether that be tweaks to overall strategy or making changes to the content you curate and share. The more accurate your map, the better prepared you’ll be when it comes time to navigating obstacles and harsh terrain.

But as for digital sharecropping being “the most dangerous threat to your online marketing efforts?” It’s more like a shallow creek than it is K2.

Photo Credit: ww.utahimages.com

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Yelp and What It Can Do for Your Business

If you had the chance to read my entry, “One Year,” you’ll know that I’m, more or less, in the middle of moving from one apartment to the next. This go around, I’ve done my due diligence as best I can. I researched where I’d like to live in the city. I tore through the listings on Craigslist for longer than I’d like to admit, and I’ve visited ones that stuck out to get a feel for the property and the neighborhoods themselves. Finally, I went through the reviews on ApartmentRatings.com and Yelp to see what both former and current tenants have to make a more informed decision. It’s a funny thing to trust someone you’ve never met, and may have absolutely nothing in common with, with a personal decision. But according to a study published by Search Engine Land, approximately 72% of consumers surveyed said they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 72%.

This summer marked Yelp’s eighth birthday. And in that time, the company has gone from having a handful of employees to over 1,000 of them and has 61M users in 17 different counties. With millions of contributed reviews, it might not be too much of a stretch to say that the site has become one of the most authoritative resources for finding great local businesses, no matter what you’re searching for.

For those of you who own, operate or are running the online marketing efforts for your business, you might want to spend some amount of time getting a little more familiar with Yelp. If you haven’t unlocked your business account, you can do so here. It’s free, and it only takes a couple of minutes. Why? Because it’s free, and it only takes two minutes. Well, that and the fact that in the second quarter of this year, 78M people visited Yelp to find businesses and make purchase decisions. Without an account, you might be missing out on a ton of potential business; especially, if you’re in the food and service industry. That being said, it might be most useful for businesses that serve the general public (B2C), but it sure doesn’t hurt if you’re a B2B and have a page. Once you do set one up, you can insert your business’ information, add photos, use it to create deals for visitors who use Yelp to find you, message customers and view how your page is doing in terms of traffic. Keep in mind that Bing is now using Yelp’s application programming interface (API), most likely as a result of Google’s incorporation of Zagat into its own, and will show content including: snippets, photos, business attributes, etc. in local searches so having a presence on Yelp translates to having one anywhere else the API is used.

Additionally, you’ll be able to respond to reviews that may not be especially favorable, either publicly or privately. Inevitably, everyone eventually gets one so try not to take it too personally. This presents an opportunity to fix things with a dissatisfied customer and improve that review. I’m a stickler when it comes to customer service so seeing a company go out of their way to provide a better experience the second time around, when it’s so much easier to ignore the fact, is huge. If you find yourself getting too hung up over reviews, you may have to delegate the task to someone who can serve as the point of contact and will manage your online reputation. Do not do this. Ultimately, reviews should serve as a feedback mechanism. Positive ones will let you know what you’re doing right, and less than sparkling ones will let you know what you need to work on. If you feel like a review violates Yelp’s terms of service, you have the option of flagging it for evaluation.

You might notice that it might seem as though reviews sometimes disappear. What actually happens is that they sometimes get filtered. Yelp has an automated review filter that prevents people, or businesses, from spamming fake reviews to boost ratings and/or to undermine their competition. The ones that don’t end up making the cut and get filtered typically originate from accounts that don’t have additional reviews published. Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO of Yelp, writes, “If they [slanted reviews] were allowed to occur, they would erode trust…which would reduce the usefulness of the site for both consumers and the good businesses that rely on the positive word-of-mouth they’ve earned.” Without authentic, trustworthy reviews to depend on, Yelp is little better than the phonebook. If you’re a Yelp user who isn’t very active, give back to the community by submitting reviews when you can. That’s something on my list of things to do.

Once you have your page set up and ready to go, focus on providing great customer service. If you consistently put your best foot forward, your customers are bound to notice. And hopefully, the positive reviews you earn in the process will help you attract new customers because those who discover your business online are much more likely to share their experience with others online.