Everyday, the CitySquares team recognizes each local business’ and website user’s contribution to the overall CitySquares community.

We are working to create an online CitySquares Community Scrapbook where we will highlight one local business per week on our Facebook Fan Page. These are businesses that people have recently shown interest in and wrote positive reviews on the specific company’s profile.

We want to help spread the word about local businesses that are helping their neighborhoods by providing the services and products they do and creating an enjoyable experience for their customers and the people in their communities.

Included in the scrapbook is a link to the company’s profile, how the company views their impact on their community and a picture showing the products and services the business offers their neighborhood.

A big part of this scrapbook process will be fans tagging themselves in the photo your business provides to show they have visited your business before. We will also ask them to write a comment if your business’ products or services had a big impact on them or their local community.

We would love your input about this idea and suggestions of local CitySquares’ businesses that should be highlighted. If you are a local business and have a CitySquares’ profile that you would like to be featured, you should contact Marissa to receive further details.

The CitySquares’ Team is excited to see the Scrapbook grow each week and continue to show how much local businesses have become essential parts of communities across the nation.

Become a part of the CitySquares family and sign-up today!

To get started, just click on the blue Facebook Connect button that’s at the top of every page on CitySquares.com. The pages that follow are very straight-forward, and within just a minute or two you’ll be good to go.

While implementing Facebook Connect we were able to effectively re-engineer the user profiling system that’s native to the CitySquares website (built on Drupal). This is a good thing, because it will allow us to start doing much fancier things. It opens the door to a more robust Facebook integration, as well as Twitter and soon much more.

The Local Web and the Social Web are related. OK they’re not sisters, but they’re definitely cousins. The now and the future of local will see much more social features and functionalities. Some of the things we’re working on now, and plan on launching shortly, include a more robust Facebook Connect integration so that, for example, when you leave a review on CitySquares.com for a local business, your Facebook wall will be updated with something like a snippet of the review and a link to it on CitySquares.com. Same for when you give a business a star rating, or even if you contribute content in other ways, like adding news, an event, or useful information about your community and neighborhood. We’ll also allow businesses to create fan pages through their CitySquares account.

We’re also going to be rolling out a Twitter integration shortly, for both users and for businesses. There’s a whole strategy we’re going to evolve that into for community and neighborhood pages, to effectively create a waterfall of real-time locally relevant information that both pulls content in, and distributes content out. I know that sounds a little too conceptual, but hang in there – you’ll see what we mean very soon.

We hope you like what we’re doing! Stay tuned, there’s a whole bunch more coming soon. We welcome your feedback and suggestions, feel free to leave your comments below.

The quick answer is “yeah, but….”

A small business needs to be involved with social marketing. Being able to connect with customers and more importantly potential local customers is what it is all about.  Social marketing is growing at a tremendous pace right now and with anything online, if it is hot, you want to be a part of it.

I recently came across a couple of related articles that are worth reading:  How SMBs Can Optimize their Social Networking Time (2 part article) and Small Business Owners Need Twitter and LinkedIn by Carrie Hilland and Social Media Marketing for Small Business.  Both provides some good ideas on small business and social marketing

Ok, back to the “yeah , but…” Social marketing/networking biggest problem is TIME. It takes time to read blogs, write tweets, get friends, reply to emails, etc. Time is the one thing we the small business owners do not have enough of; trust me I am speaking from experience.  I find myself spending tons of time on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. trying to keeping up with things rather than getting my work done. It is addicting!

I really do not think it is realistic for the typical small business owner to be doing a lot of social online marketing. You really cannot keep up with it all. Your best bet is to hire a professional web marketer to monitor/maintain your online social network.  Now if that is now an option, I would:

• Get an account on each of the major social sites and try them out. Each one has its own unique or signature feature.
• Talk to your current customers and see what they use.
• Decide what is your reason for social marketing- plug specials, converse with customers, simply provide updates, learn more about your field, teach others about your field, etc.
• Once you find one that works for you, use and use it daily. Don’t have to spend hours on it, just set aside some time each day.

Customer are the key to any business and relating and conversing with customers is how you keep them.…Sorry I need to go…. someone just sent me a tweet, I got a new Facebook friend,  got to update my flickr page, need to stumbleUpon an article, check my rss feeds, read some emails, and I got to finish my blog post on social marketing!

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?

As CitySquares.com grows we need to make sure that the site continues to be easy to navigate and that all the people who use the site can find everything they’re looking for. One of the big additions to the site is a greatly improved navigation system that makes getting from one place to another much easier. We redesigned the header area at the top of the site so it would take up less space which in turn moves important content higher up the page. Now you can just change your location by typing in the city, town or zip code directly into the ‘change location’ text box as shown in the sample below.

Speaking of improvements, we created a cleaner and simpler home page that better articulates to our neighbors and merchant audiences just what CitySquares.com is about, and what you can do. On the new home page we added a really cool ‘What’s New’ scrolling ticker so users can see, in real time, what is happening on the site. The ticker shows the latest reviews, ratings, merchant profile edits and other activities on the site. We also added a more obvious call-to-action so small businesses can quickly jump into updating or upgrading their profile. There is also a list of top cities and a prominent location text field so users may jump to the location of their choice with ease. Visit the new home page here.

We think we’ve done a great job at providing valuable business content to users but we wanted to add more fun and engaging stuff too, so users could share their favorite businesses with friends and family as well. After figuring out what we wanted, and coincidentally meeting the folks over at AgendiZe, we entered into a partnership with them to bring you just the goods we envisioned! Agendize offers a plethora of viral tools for users such as sending a text message, add to Facebook and other bookmarks as well as instant messaging, saving to Outlook and so much more. You can see a sample of it here on this profile. Just click on on the of yellow buttons below the profile information and you will get a window of options. Every single profile on CitySquares.com has these tools so please start sharing your favorite businesses.

Lastly we added national events to the site which is just one of the early steps to truly become what we’ve long envisitione – to be your neighborhood online. The events are brought to you through our partnership with another great company called Eventful. You can find local, and hyperlocal, events all across the country on all the city, town, and neighborhood pages on CitySquares.com. Go here to see hyperlocal events in Wrigleyville Chicago!

Well, that’s quite a bit since our national roll out! And that’s not it either. Very soon we’ll be rolling out even more – including hyperlocal news, community information, classifieds, and some really fun tools to allow users to find everything they need about their location on CitySquares but more specifically, in their real world, their community.

Stay tuned for more updates and improvements to the site! We’re on a mission to provide the most hyperlocal content on the web – from business info, to real community info, events, news, classifieds, you name it. We aim to be Your Neighborhood, Online! Now the fun really starts.

If you have any questions or feedback please feel free to leave some comments here! We’re always happy to chat and hear your thoughts.

Here’s the link: CitySquares.com on Facebook

–Ben