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Google makes reviewing easy by adding attributes to restaurant reviews, Fake reviews are costly to SMBS but Google seems incapable of squashing them, Square’s new bank is a threat to traditional SMB banking relationships

Google makes reviewing easy by adding attributes to restaurant reviews.
Google, unlike Yelp, is making reviewing easier and quicker for users by adding quick standardized choices to restaurant reviews. Google, already having rolled out similar review attributes in the service industries, says additional industries and categories to come soon. 

Fake reviews are costly to SMBS but Google seems incapable of fixing it.
In the world of B2B sales, a great deal of money changes hands and the role of reputation is critical. All too often businesses rely on Google’s review summary to spend thousands of dollars. In this case the results were disastrous and it makes it clear that Google has not really worked hard enough in this area

Square’s new bank is a threat to traditional SMB banking relationships.
Square, being at the center of many off-line businesses POS, is now providing checking, savings and loans. Many of the services are free. The tight relationship that SMBs have with Square and SMBs dislike of banks creates an huge opportunity for Square to disrupt traditional banking. 

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands. 
NearMemo 25

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An unusually assertive Biden who noted that this 40-year “experiment” has failed. “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism,” he proclaimed at the signing of the executive order. “It’s exploitation.” It remains to be seen if real changes will occur but this is the first time in recent memory that a President has made it clear that the whole of the executive branch is responsible for increasing competitiveness.  

Craigslist has seen a decline of almost 50% over the past 3 years with much of that loss going to Facebook Marketplaces. Can Nextdoor take advantage of this?

 NYC has recently passed a law requiring that businesses post notice of any biometric tracking taking place and prevent them from selling that data. Will this increased awareness of the increasing use of Facial recognition technology change consumer behaviors or will it require additional intervention to allow them to prevent this.

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.
The NearMemo Ep 24

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Given the powerful standing of the leading apps, it is unlikely that, even if the app stores are more regulated, whether there will be a more competitive environment. And any anti-trust efforts focusing on competitive harms will go up against 40 years of jurisprudence that has only looked at consumer harms.

The Google updates favors better content for Local too!  Sterling Sky did an interesting case study in the legal space of a client that seems to have dramatically benefited from the recent algo updates. Why? Because they had spent time pruning bad content and improving the good.

 Yext Search Data Hub provides interesting GMB Insights Data across 600,000 listings
Yext has created a visual interface to 3 years of GMB Insights data that can be searched by country or vertical. With this tool you can track our nascent recovery via the recent rise in driving direction as well as see which industries are still getting more website visits or phone calls. 

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.
Ep 23 Near Memo

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Facebook’s new Bulletin product integrates tightly into Facebook groups, their newsfeed and comments. It is well a designed and a thoughtful newsletter implementation that could bring significant social benefits to newsletter publishers and new advertisers and news content to Facebook. 

From Localogy: “Shopify is planning to roll out an ad product called Shopify Audiences. The program will evidently position the company’s sizable corpus of shopping data to better inform and target advertisers’ campaigns on Facebook and Google.”

In June, the Supreme court defined terms in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. As a result, they vacated a previous 9th Court Decision allowing scraping of publicly available information. This gives Microsoft‘s LinkedIn another chance to stop HiQ’s scraping of the public data on their site. A possible outcome? Upending of the whole of the Martech world. 

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.
Near Memo Ep 22

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Why has Google, so shortly after announcing FLoC, already pulling back?Google’s delay of FLoC is signaling both the confusion and fear in the market and lack of acceptance amongst the leading platforms. 

The successes  of DuckDuckGo as the Avis of search engines indicates the customer demand for privacy
DuckDuckGo has become the number two mobile search engine in the world and is increasingly profitable. This is no small feat given the competition, what is going on?

As economy opens up, businesses need clearly communicated vaccination policy to not lose customers
With states starting to open up, how do businesses navigate the new masked, not masked reality vis a vis their employees and customers without losing customers?

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands. 
Near Memo Ep 21

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The local arc from inventory to ordering to monopoly and consolidation

 Google makes it easier to upload products & services and give Pointy away for free...Google Local announced this week the ability of merchants to more easily add products, services and appointments to the Local graph. As part of this effort, they are giving away Pointy, POS hardware that automatically creates on-line inventory. It’s part of Google’s ever increasingly more granule knowledge graph

Google Local Food Order is so easy it's magical & shows exactly where Google & Local search is going.....Google’s  web based restaurant order entry system knows so much about you, your location, credit card details,  the restaurants nearby and exactly what their menu items are, that  they can create an incredibly fluid ordering experience. They so while avoiding the need for an app, for an explicit delivery company relationship or a payment processor making the whole process totally painless. 

Anti-trust and local consolidation.....We explore the rapidly changing world that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple will be confronting and how some of the laws proposed just don’t make sense. Which takes us to the consolidation that is occurring the the local marketing stack where integrations and buyouts that got Google et. al in trouble are the order of the day

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands. 
Near Memo Ep 20

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Whenever Apple announces a new consumer focused privacy update, the pundits become Chicken Little. E-mail has long provided the best ROI of any marketing channel and while metrics might be harder to garner, that won’t stop a great email from succeeding. 

Google seems to have stopped enforcing naming abuse by businesses in Google Maps. And they have now increased the field length to 300 characters. What happens when greedy businesses meet an obtuse Google? Mayhem.

People seemed genuinely glad to be there and see one another. The content seemed entirely secondary to the networking and social events, which people enjoyed with gusto. Masks were mostly worn inside but not at all outside and not at the social events -- where people were close talking, fueled by abundant wine. It all felt disorienting and normal at the same time.

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands. 
NearMemo #19

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The Washington Post details the travails of a couple seeking treatment and the problems that befell them after they picked a provider based on what turned out to be fake reviews. The article looks at the lack of incentives to do reviews right and the lack of disincentives to not cheat. The article discussed how Section 230 creates an environment where review companies can “look the other way”.

Google’s recent announcements about advanced in AI, for understanding the written word, creating new original text and their increasing ability to understand the content of images puts line under their recent paper Rethinking Search: Making Experts out of Dilettantes where Google details new architectures to over come the limits of index driven search and the inability of the Knowledge Graph to do no more than extract small snippets. Essentially they are proposing a new model based system that could write the equivalent of a Wikipedia article in response to a query. 

Guest author Miriam Ellis details how one business person running a bookshop in Lawrence KS to not only survive but thrive in light of the Amazon onslaught. Lot of practical tips on the steps he took as well as his the epiphany of the damage that Amazon was doing to the rest of the community

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands. 
Near Memo #18

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Mike discusses his journey down the gamified rabbithole of the wildly successful Google Local Guides program, how the program promotes quantity over quality and why every business needs to not let their brand be controlled by the likes of the Local Guides.  

 SMBS have traditionally relied on best of breed SAAS point solutions to solve their pre-sale, in house and post-sale needs. Now the major SMB platforms are now converging on high quality capabilities across all three areas PLUS integrating with the likes of Google.  This allows the SMB to use one piece of software and achieve the gains of automation across the whole of their search, operations and customer experience needs. 

Google held its annual Google Marketing Live event this week. There were many ads related announcements involving automation, simplification and reach. Google's "open" commerce strategy is aimed squarely at Amazon, utilizing Google's various properties for product visibility. Throughout Google was constantly (and perhaps hypocritically) beating on the privacy drum. 

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands. 

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Hospitality Case Study of Reviews: What Happened to Yelp?

Looking at 20 years of reviews for a popular Santa Fe resort, we examine how Yelp faired against the likes of TripAdvisor, Facebook, Google and OpenTable. The analysis shows, that at least in this segment, Yelp’s problems were largely self-inflicted not caused by a Google abuse of their monopoly.

Google I/O: they flex their AI muscles and move further into local products with the Shopping Graph

Google used I/O to position themselves as the AI powerhouse, using AI for everything from engaging in human like conversations to identifying the specific model of sneaker in your photo of the band on stage. Once they have identified the sneaker, they will parse it via their newly anointed Shopping Graph and not only offer to let you buy them but tell you where they are locally available for curbside pickup. They have found their play against Amazon and its impressive.   

Google to try out retail at their NYC HQ. Can they succeed IRL? Can they actually provide support?

 After many false starts Google is finally opening a retail presence in New York at their headquarters in Chelsea. They will be selling and supporting their growing range of Google hardware from phones to the Nest. Their choice of NYC home as a site gives them an easy out if they are unable to provide real support to real customers in real life. We are skeptical they will be able succeed at scaling the project.  

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands. 

NM#16

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