Yext Rep – Real Time SMB Reputation Management
UPDATE 11.25.12:
Since I wrote this two years ago, a lot has changed. Yext has pivoted its business away from pay-per-call to business listings management to help you manage your yellow pages listings from a single dashboard. The service is called Yext PowerListings.
Yext Powerlistings can automatically update your business’ information across 50+ of the top local search sites out there including Yelp, Yahoo Local, SuperPages and more. They also now do review monitoring. It’s not free, but the amount of time it can save you is huge. Check it out here.
Here’s their fancy graphic showing where they send their data:
Full Disclosure: I get paid every time someone buys a Powerlisting via the above link. It’s not much, but it helps keep the lights on at the blog – and I do think it’s a great service. Ok, end of shill…
Howard Lerman of Yext pinged me today to discuss the launch of Yext Rep, their new reputation management platform for SMBs. I thought it was pretty cool.
The service allows businesses to get “a real-time feed that shows the constant flow of reviews, tweets, Facebook wall posts, alerts and other information, allowing business owners to monitor and manage how their reputation is being affected in real-time.” So businesses can see what people are saying about them on Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. all in one dashboard as it happens. Here’s a screenshot:
Yext will also be flowing Yext Calls events into the dashboard as well. Currently the platform will check your presence on the top local sites, but it doesn’t appear to report anything more than the fact that you either have or don’t have a profile on each service, as opposed to services like GetListed that make sure your data is accurate.
For the average SMB I am curious how much real time action there will actually be. Seems like a lot of users could sign in and see nothing happening. The less it changes, the less you log in. I suppose flowing Yext Calls data through the system should help keep the feed fresh as they are likely generating several calls/day for a biz.
Perhaps the most interesting things Howard told me were the following:
- Yext Rep will be an open platform. So you can write your own apps for it and market them to the userbase. If Yext can get all of its advertisers using Yext Rep on a regular basis this could be a great opportunity to get the attention of thousands of SMBs.
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Yext Rep wants to be the dashboard to purchase and monitor all of your online marketing. Nothing like a modest ambition. I guess Howard has been reading the blog 🙂
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To that end, according to Howard, he checks my post, Yext – Are Half Your Phone Leads Junk post at least 4 times/week to see what his customers are saying about their service. So if you’re a Yext customer and have some feedback feel free to pop a comment up there.
Greg Sterling has a nice overview with some images and here’s Venturebeat’s summary of the product.