Companies Put Social Media On Strategic To-Do List

Harnessing consumer conversation for corporate use is one of the newest strategic pastimes. The arena where it could matter most: local advertising. “We are seeing these referrals convert into business at a much greater rate than leads from other forms of advertising,” Andrew Shotland, vp-business development, Insider Pages, told Time Europe. Insider Pages bills itself as “the Yellow Pages written by friends.”
But it may not work as well across the board. Eddie Cheng, president of UK Yellow Pages site Yell.com, points out that 60 percent of people who record reviews have a negative opinion, ading “That’s not great from a service point of view.” Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz says the discussion changed. “It’s no longer a question of whether social networking is important, it’s a question of how do we leverage this phenomenon.”

Comments have been disabled for this post