Here’s how to get started:

Let’s say you want to add a list of the restaurants in Boston’s Back Bay to your website. All you’d need to do is go to that page on CitySquares and click the Get this Feed button. Once you click that you’ll be able to copy it into your clipboard and do any one of the following:

1. Use Your Blog Platform: If you use a blogging platform like Wordpress or something similar, you should be able to add a Feed Widget to your sidebar. If you can do that, just paste the feed link into that widget. Your blog’s CSS will take care of the formatting for the feed and control how it’s displayed.
2. Get a Free Widget: If you’d like to use a third party RSS widget, there’s a bunch of options out there. One in particular at SpringWidgets is pretty good and its free, but there’s others freely available. Just Google for RSS widgets and you should get plenty of options. Once you find the widget you like, enter the feed link provided to you on CitySquares.com, then grab the snippet of code provided by the widget, and drop it into your website code.
3. Build it Yourself: If you’re a developer or you know what you’re doing, you can get a lot fancier, and you can control the look and styles for the feed on your website. Just grab the RSS feed link and have at it!
4. Subscribe: If you’re not looking to do something like this on your website, but instead you want to just subscribe to one of these feeds, that’s quite simple too. All you need is an RSS reader like any of the free ones out there.

The lists of businesses in these feeds are set up to rotate quite regularly, basically whenever business content is updated on our site, it’ll update in the feeds. This way you get a fresh list of businesses on your site, as businesses are added or edited on CitySquares.com. And based on how you choose to integrate these feeds into your site, you can choose to only display a list of businesses, or a list with verbose information about them. It’s up to you! For an example, look on the right side of this page for a list of South End, Boston Restaurants, where CitySquares is headquartered.

This is just the first implementation of RSS feeds for publishers and we’re interested in your feedback before we kick it up a notch. Please feel free to report any troubles, or submit your comments, suggestions, etc., below.

Thanks and happy feeding!

It’s probably a bit overstated, but perhaps if consumers have too much power, and small businesses can’t defend themselves, than they’re in trouble. Perhaps all that would be left are huge corporate chains, with substantially more money (and hence power) than any mom-and-pop. They can afford a PR offensive, they can afford hiring dedicated twitter people, dedicated social media experts, etc. The small businesses cannot. And it’s these small businesses that are the thread in our economic quilt. They are essential, and yet they are challenged everyday by huge obstacles, nearly all having nothing to do with the Internet. You’d be surprised by what small businesses have to deal with every day, that threaten their fate. From macro economic conditions, to micro economic conditions, to neighborhood/street construction, to local zoning laws, from tax policies, to crime rates, small businesses can be crushed in ways that might seem petty and insignificant to the average consumer, or to big business. More often than not we really have no idea what small business owners have to go through to keep their doors open, to make payroll, keep their lights on, keep customers happy and returning. Too often then not we’re quick to jump to conclusions, and make assumptions. More often than not, these small businesses are greatly affected by one persons opinion.

Some people will suggest that the best way to counteract this is for the SMBs to “get on Facebook” or “get on twitter” or “hire a social media consultant.” My response? Give me a break! The small business owners response? “What is Facebook? What is twitter? What the heck is social media?”

So, we decided to take another step towards solving this problem for small business owners, and it might be interpreted as a controversial one: CitySquares now allows businesses to opt-out of reviews all together on their CitySquares.com business profile page.

Why? Well, take the local dentist for example, who no matter how hard she tries, she can’t win over all her customers. Truth be told, not everyone enjoys the dentist, right? And we have reason to believe that not all reviews left on a dentists profile are going to be glowing reviews for her root canal skills. Is it fair for this local dentist to have virtually no way to combat this? Sure, we could give her an opportunity to talk back to consumers, but what does that really do for the dentist? It’s her word against another – it’s tit-for-tat, he-said-she-said. And ultimately, that single dentist is up against a whole lot of (mostly) anonymous voices, people who are hiding behind an avatar, a username, while everyone knows who the dentist is, where she works, and have the power to nearly destroy her operation. OK – maybe a bit overstated, but nonetheless, reality!

This is just one scenario – there are lots of others that could be described. But you get the point.

So now, if you’re a small business owner you can opt-out of consumer reviews on your CitySquares business profile.

Here’s how it works:

• If you are a paying customer, you can choose between having reviews, or not having reviews. Period. End of story. There is no gray area – reviews are either enabled, or disabled, for paying customers only.
• If you are not a paying customer, we cannot disable reviews. You must be a customer. And all it takes is $5.99/month to become a customer, and that is all it costs to have reviews disabled on your profile. Not a penny more.

This new feature is not intended to be a revenue opportunity, that’s not the point. It’s not some crafty bait-and-switch, or anything like that. The point of this is to give the merchants a little more power, a little more opportunity to manage their online reputation, at least on CitySquares.com.

We’d like to do much more – and soon we will be. There’s much more in store for small merchants, but I’ll save that for a later post.

What do you think?

What I found was that the major search engines have a mobile version of their site but after that there is huge drop off in quality mobile search engines or directories. There are some out there but I had to search hard for them and I could not see many folks accessing them.  So my question is, should small business worry about mobile search?

Mobile search is growing but it’s not quite there yet. A recent press release from comScore: Mobile Internet Becoming A Daily Activity For Many showed that the daily mobile internet user population has more than doubled in one year! Accessing news and information was the top activity and then accessing social network or blogs was second.  So folks are using their mobile phones more, but the question is should you get a .mobi website?  In general I would say no. Now I will qualify my answer saying that some industries such as restaurants, hotels, movie theaters etc that really cater to those on the go should invest in mobile search.

Another great article I found recently, Getting Closer to Mobile Local Search’s Day by Mike Boland provides a nice overview of where mobile search is today and some forcasts for the future. Some points Mike makes:

• Mobile web users will grow to 95 million by 2013
• Changing device standards are bringing mobile search into the mainstream
• Smart phones are settling around $200, making the mobile Web a mass market opportunity for the first time

Again mobile search is growing but has not yet reached the level many have been expecting for some time.  With the growth of smart phones with full html browsers it does not seem necessary right now for the majority of small businesses to create a .mobi website or spend hours submitting the mobile search engines. If you optimize your website for local search and get listed in the major search engines, you should be just fine for right now in the emerging mobile search.

Thinking back to the original concept, the very first notion of CitySquares, it seemed, at the time, like such a simple idea: provide consumers with truly local results for their search queries. For example, if I’m looking for barbers in Davis Square I expect exactly that – results for barbers in Davis Square. What I do not want in the search results is Supercuts in Malden, MA. That’s not what I asked for and it’s not helping me solve my problem! This was a frequent frustration of mine, and I soon found out that I wasn’t the only one having this problem. (see here for the full story)

Well, here we are, more than three years later and CitySquares.com is now a website with a national database of local businesses, that’s mashed up with a database of deep geographic data like cities, towns, but also neighborhoods – and neighborhood data like no one else has. And let me tell you, this is not easy to accomplish. I think it’s fair to say, no wonder why it was never done before – it’s really freakin’ hard! But we’ve done it. Well, let me clarify, we’ve only begun to do it, the soil has been poured, spread, and tilled.

The ultimate goal of this expansion was simple: to lay down the same foundation across the US that we did here in metro Boston area over the past three years. We’re learned a ton of lessons in the past three years – what to do, how to do it, and what not to do. We experimented in many ways. With those lessons learned, we made our moves slowly, learning more lessons. And now, we felt the time was right to go nationwide with those lessons learned. The result is a mashup of extremely hyper-local geographic data and small business data. All this is supported by an underlying search engine optimized information architecture.

OK I know that sounds awfully technical, so here it is in plain English: We take 16 million business listings and we match up that information with corresponding state, city, town, regional, but also deep community and neighborhood information (like neighborhood names, latitudes, longitudes, centroids, and so much more). Once those two things have been combined, which in itself is a pain the butt to do, and then pour it into our website platform, which is extremely search engine friendly.  Then we get natural/organic search rankings for these businesses, in a variety of search contexts, mostly what we like to call long-tail hyper-local search. So, voila, that is what you have today on CitySquares.com. (Sorry, I couldn’t keep myself away from being technical about it!)

It’s very interesting to see the results of this too. As we’ve started growing over the last couple of months our inbound call volume has grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, it’s hard to keep up with all the emails and phone calls. This, I suppose, is a good problem to have! But what we’re starting to see are very interesting trends about the nature of the searches that result in traffic to our site, and phone calls and emails etc – and that is exactly what we expected – long-tail hyper-local search and results. Our traffic (now at > 1 million unique visitors per month, and growing extremely fast) is based on almost purely that kind of traffic.

We expect this traffic growth, which is fairly predictable, to grow very steadily over the next several months. We project approximately 10 to 12 million unique visitors/mo by the time the Red Sox are starting the postseason run. In parallel to that we are most excited about the kind of value we can provide small businesses – primarily driving traffic to small business profiles and ultimately, the real end-game, sending them business! The strategies and tactics for doing that are varied and are evolving all the time. We keep getting better at it.

So the next step for CitySquares’ website is pretty basic. We’re working on some stuff to essentially pretty ourselves up. Hey, we’re on the dance floor now, time to look the part! So we’re going to work out some bugs first, then we’re launching our partnership with Agendize, where we’ll be able to provide much more engagement types of features (you’ll see), and we’ll be upgrading business profiles, improving search, and releasing a new home page, among many other things. We’re also in talks with several different potential for content partnerships, like a national database of dining menus, events and news, reservation systems, and others. And we’ve got some other projects in the oven right now that will start to really allow people to learn more and interact with their local communities on CitySquares. Our slogan of “Your Neighborhood, Online” is a vision, one we’ve yet to realize even 30% of.

Our home market of metro Boston remains our home, and we continue to remain true and loyal to it. To all of those who’ve been with us this far, those of you in Davis Square (our official neighborhood home), Porter Square, Harvard Square, Central Square, Kendall Square, Union Square, and Inman Square, and in Brookline, Jamaica Plain, and in Boston – we thank you and we’ll continue to serve you as we always have. We’re right here in Boston’s South End! We’ll never outgrow you, we promise.

Stay tuned neighbors, the best is yet to come! And thank you for your continued support and friendship.

We’d love to field any questions you might have, so please feel free to leave your comments here!

P.S. I want to publicly congratulate our product team too (Bob, Justin, Michael, Clay) who did all this within a mere 45 days! It was no easy task, but they pulled it off and with minimal downtime or headaches. Well done guys!

It’s an exciting and busy time for the development team and we will continue to update you on what states have been launched and when. Until we are national we will do a regular update on states that go live.

To give you an idea of how we’re rolling out,  we started in the northeast, are currently knocking down the mid-Atlantic states, and making our way down the coast to Florida. We will then move west towards the great Mississippi River and then jump to the Pacific coast. We’ll be skipping over a few less populous states as we roll-out and circle back to them. Our overall roll-out plan shows us launching about 40 states in 30 days.

Please feel free to reach out with any feedback or thoughts on the expansion and wish us luck.

And last but not least, happy new year from all of us at CitySquares!

– Bob

1) the small businesses along the streets, with their storefronts, their goods and services, their owners who employ the locals and teenagers during the summer, who take good care of their customers, the local residents. Who know the children, the selectman, and who keep their sidewalks clean.

2) the artists of the community who hold high aesthetic standards, who remind us of the beauty in our world, and even the darkness. The artists who have passions for certain causes, who stick together and surprise us, who open our eyes. The musicians who sit on the park bench strumming a guitar, or the painter who stands on the shoreline painting a landscape, and who all hang out at the local coffee shop talking about politics or collaborate on some new media projects.

3) the local non-profits and pioneers whose only mission is to give something back to the community, the country, the planet, and do good things, who work tirelessly and usually for barely a livable wage to ensure everyone has access to affordable housing, to health care, or who work improve the local economy, or help clean our planet for the next generations.

These three constituents in our society are the very core of our communities. They attract a certain population, they affect the local culture, they define the community. They attract people of all walks of life, of all races, of all belief systems and politics. They are the heartbeat of our communities. Without them, our communities have no identity or character.

For the last three years CitySquares has offered non-profits and local artists free profiles on CitySquares.com. Unfortunately we’ve never really publicized this, never really marketed it. That’s always been a bit of a thorn in our side too, something we’ve always intended to do but keep getting distracted from. So I’m hoping that this blog entry can serve as our first real foray into marketing this better. Let it be known now:

CitySquares provides all non-profit organizations, and all local artists with free Deluxe Profiles on CitySquares.com. There is no catch, there is no cost, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

If you are a non-profit or a local artist, then you are welcome to sign up for a Free Deluxe Profile! Here’s just a basic example. How the profile looks and functions largely depends the content you make available on it. You can get very creative with these profiles!

What are the benefits of having a Deluxe Profile on CitySquares.com?
Like all of our profiles, they’re extremely Search Engine Optimized. So when people use the search engines to find you they’re very likely to discover your profile on CitySquares.com. Also, we have over one million people each month using CitySquares.com, and that number is growing especially as we continue to roll-out the site nationally. If you have a website, use your CitySquares profile to link to it and improve your search engine rankings. Take advantage of some of the bells and whistles on these profiles like reviews, and ratings. Embed a YouTube video if you have one, or add some images showing your art work or photography. There’s much more.

How do you get started?
Add your non-profit or your Artist profile to CitySquares.com by clicking here. Then standby for a phone call or email from us and we’ll take care of the rest. It’s pretty easy. And don’t worry about the lingo on the page, or about pricing.  Just proceed with the free options and we’ll take care of the rest.

We hope you’ll take full advantage of this opportunity which has no expiration date. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or need a hand.

Happy Holidays,

– Ben Saren

Well, it’s three years later and this past July we expanded the site to cover to all of New England and metro NY. We are one of the top 2500 sites in the nation according to Quantcast and have hundreds of paying customers. Going national seems like the next logical step doesn’t it? What are we waiting for? Grow, grow, grow! It all sounds logical and simple but in fact it’s far from it. What makes CitySquares unique is the value we provide customers. We have cultivated the site around the local communities and earnestly want to see small businesses succeed and grow. So the question wasn’t why don’t we expand, but how do we expand and preserve the essence of who we are? It’s a tough question to answer, one that we’ve been working on for some time. We don’t want to devolve into a just a national directory where the small business is buried under the national players or where the consumer’s opinion takes priority over SMBs. We care about small businesses, they’re our priority. But we also care about real-world community, offline life.

The fact is, we’ve only begun to achieve our vision. There’s so much more for us to accomplish. Our aim is to not be just a business directory or city guide, but to be the ultimate resource for local communities. Whether a county in Montana, a borough in NY, a village in Vermont, or a neighborhood in Seattle, we want to get all the information about that community, that locale, online. Get the geopolitical information online, municipal information, local government, post office, libraries, public schools, trash and recycling collection schedules, historical facts, playgrounds, parking lots, public transportation, local school lunch menus, athletic program information, July 4th fireworks locations, and so much more. CitySquares’ vision is, and has always been, to be “Your Neighborhood, Online.” Not easy, but necessary. And it will happen.

So here we are, starting our national expansion. And why? It’s simple -  there is a need. The need for the local tractor equipment company in French Lick, Indiana to be found when someone searches for local tractor equipment in French Lick, Indiana and not find John Deere in Indianapolis, Indiana. It’s about getting these small businesses online, and allowing them to be discovered by local, qualified consumers. Period. But that’s just the beginning. The rest and the best is yet to come. It may not sound or look like much right now, but as we chug along in the next couple months, the next year, and beyond, you’ll see this ultimate vision become reality.

This week CitySquares launched an additional 1.7 million businesses to fulfill the rest of New York and New Jersey as well as the entire state of Pennsylvania. We will quickly be rolling out other states to complete the national expansion. It is an exciting time for us and it’s equally exciting to see so many small businesses, mom-and-pops, across this great nation actually get online – many of them for their first time ever! This is one small step for CitySquares, one giant leap for your communities. You just wait and see.

– Co-founders, Bob Leland and Ben Saren

After dinner we ended up a wine bar in the Upper West Wide called Wine & Roses. When we walked in, we were deep in the conversation, a friendly debate. We sat down at the bar right as I was trying to explain that consumer choice, in my opinion, is about three things:

1. Convenience: That is, what is closest to me or least interruptive to my day. Whether it’s a national chain or a local boutique, just give it to me quickly.
2. Budget: That is, I know how much I’m willing to pay, and no more. Whether it’s local, at a national brand, or online, I’m willing to take the time to find the best deal possible.
3. Community: I support my local mom-and-pop businesses, I believe they are essential to my community, and I value my relationship with them. I’m also aware of the economic benefits of buying locally.

It’s possible to have a hybrid of all three, of course, and most local businesses provide exactly that – convenience, affordability, and are actively part of their community. Redbones in Somerville’s Davis Square is a great example of this. They provide a quality product, excellent service, they are extremely convenient (they deliver this quality product on Redbones branded bicycles), and they are very active in the Somerville and Davis Square communities.

As we were discussing this and sat down at the bar, it happened to be next to the owner, Jennifer. I asked for her opinion on the topic and she more or less validated those three points with one major caveat – location. If you live in Manhattan, you have choices – lots and lots of choices. (But even that is changing, in a city like NY where you can’t walk three blocks without passing a national chain. It seems like the days of the local mom-and-pop are numbered in Manhattan.)

Anyway, the owner of this wine bar, Jennifer, explained that she was leaving for Arizona to see some family outside Mesa, and suggested that she is well aware that when she gets there she won’t have the same options and will certainly end up eating and buying at national chains. Now, she didn’t suggest this was a bad thing, or a good thing, but we all agreed that there is a reality in America where in some places consumers have choices about where to spend their money (the city) yet in others (Mesa, AZ) they just don’t.

Local businesses drive our national economy, this is a fact. They’re the oil in the nation’s economic engine. Local business is the best ingredient for any community’s success.

Anyway, to tie it all back together, and where we all seemed to agree last night, is on one simple but very important point – ultimately the consumers need to decide. That is very powerful. It doesn’t matter what political party you belong to, you surely still want the same things for your community, for your children, your family, and for your neighbors – your community. At CitySquares we really believe in this. It’s the mission behind the business. It all begins with the local businesses. Supporting your local and independent businesses is critical for your community’s sustainability.

To wrap it up, here is a brief illustration of what’s known as The Multiplier Effect, which is explained nicely in this brief video clip from an independent film called Independent America.

– Ben