Your Suspect

I had an appointment that got rescheduled today so I thought I’d use this time to talk about the upgrade to CitySquares.com. The best song just came on my headphones too, and it’s putting me into just the right frame of mind to type this up. The song is Underworld‘s Rez/Cowgirl Live @ Glastonbury 1999. I’d just gets me going. I’d go to extreme lengths to go back in time and be at that show.

Alright, so that being said! Here goes it…

In summary, CitySquares.com version 2.0 will include more content, more communities, a much improved user interface including some very nice new colors and styles, a greatly improved user experience, better searching, more metadata, more intuitiveness, better mapping, more robust business profiles, user profiles with a bit of “social” sprinkled in, flickr photos and API stuff, super SEO, and generally speaking lots of little bells and whistles to make the user experience more intuitive and engaging.

With this upgrade CitySquares.com will be about diving deeper into our communities and neighborhoods and extracting as much metadata as we can and presenting it online to you. The first and most basic iteration of this strategy goes live on the 15th but ultimately the metadata is going to be provided and organized by you, the hardy, tax paying people of America. How? That will be revealed later next year. Businesses will be able to provide metadata, along with people young and old, dogs, pigeons, even lawyers. More meta more meta more meta! That’s my mantra! GIMME MORE META!

The user experience is going to be dramatically improved in the usual ways that you’d expect, like a new user interface, new color palette, and navigation.

In terms of user experience and navigation, I’ll try to explain it as simply as I can without a visual aid. First, Ian Wight at Urban Mapping announced our deal and that’s a big part of what we’ll be bringing to the users (reminder to self: call them “people”). So people will be able to navigate their way around the site by zooming in and out of communities. What that means is that you’ll be able to start your experience at a Regional level (metro-Boston) and drill down to a City (Somerville) and drill down to a community (Davis Square), and all along the way the content (i.e., business listings) is being filtered according to what layer you’re at in the geographic funnel. You’ll be able to move around at that layer across the categories, which are available at all levels of the funnel. You’ll be able to go even deeper and locate, say, bars within 10 blocks of a particular restaurant. Or shoe stores within 10 blocks of your home, or 5 miles from your office. Those locations, by the way, can be part of your user (people!) profile (i.e., Home, Work, Other). One more thing – if you can’t find the right business within the parameters you set, you’ll be able to look in the next closest neighborhood(s). So if you don’t find a liquor store (I must really want a drink right now) within 10 blocks of x address, we’ll show you the next closest neighborhoods in order of any proximity you set for yourself. All this is presented very intuitively (at least we think so). Oh, one more thing – Bob showed this to me today – when you type into the location box “downt” it will automatically show you locations in our site that begin with “downt” – like, downtown Boston. This will be done for all nodes in our network. Once you’ve created an account for yourself, you’re Home, Work, or Other location will be your home page. That might be a neighborhood, a city, or a region, it’s up to you.

Is this rocket science? No, but it’s pretty effen cool! And hey we’re not a technology company and we don’t need rocket science. It’s just cool and it’s sets the stage for so much more. You can make your own assumptions and draw your own conclusions about what comes next, but there’s a lot of opportunity once this groundwork is layed down. Most of this is made possible by Urban Mapping.

Each Region, City, Community will also have it’s own home page. That home page will be auto-generated, pulling in metadata from itself, pulling in flickr photos tagged appropriately, and displaying content based on its geographic filters.

All mapping on the site will be done with Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Because we’re building this on Drupal, our options for search and indexing are pretty open. Drupal’s native search engine is quite good and there are many modules that we can use to enhance it, and build upon it. A major part of our upgrade is a metadata system. That might not be that apparent at first, but it will become increasingly necessary and critical not long after. Managing so much content can only be done in one way – tagging and metadata.

When we launch the new site we’re launching not just the same ol’ ‘hoods and businesses, but we’re launching virtually all communities within route 128. This is a big step for us. We’re going from the twenty-something neighborhoods we have today, to countless neighborhoods in metro Boston. That also includes about 45,000 businesses (provided by Localeze).

All these businesses will be given free profiles, as always. Businesses that choose to enhance their profiles can do so, and those Deluxe Profiles will include a lot more than we’re providing now. That’ll be fun. Customers will also have the chance to sign up for Constant Contact newsletters, which will be a lot of fun to sell. Constant Contact has made it very easy for us. That takes us down a very interesting road, one with great potential for pushing content (newest businesses? changes to businesses? special offers from businesses?) via email based on geographical and/or categorical parameters.

User’s will have profiles too, much like any other site out there today. So People Pages will be full of all the info you’d imagine and more specifically as it would pertain their consumer tastes. Think favorite businesses, latest reviews (“Experiences”), their friends and neighbors, pictures, etc etc.

I haven’t spoken much about SEO yet, but that’s a huge part of what we’re doing in this new release. Everything from page titles, headings, code syntax (i.e., <strong> vs <bold>), URL structure, and more, has been taken into consideration and implemented very diligently. Thank you to my friends at KoMarketing Associates for their help with this.

We’re also using OpenAds for our display ad system, and we’ve created a number of ad zones within the various Drupal templates. The power of Urban Mapping and OpenAds will allow for a richer geographic advertising experience than any IP targeting crap out there today.

[brief silence]

Well, I just had Bob read this over and apparently I’m spot-on and, as he put it, “you didn’t promise the world.” Who does he take me for anyway?

So that pretty much covers it. Looking over this post it looks like we’re doing quite a bit, and rest assured, we are.

At the risk of sounding hasty and secretive, I need to keep this brief, but I promise more info will come shortly…

CitySquares is seeking testers. We’re about 1 month from launching the new and greatly improved Citysquares.com. It’s a huge upgrade, and a vastly improved experience for people (they’re not “users”!) and for businesses. While the new site will be ready to be previewed on an invitation basis in about 2 weeks, we’re going to need some testers. This is a great opportunity for teenagers, after school, and for college students looking for an extra buck.

We’re not totally clear on how this will work, but we envision something like this:

• Testers must have their own laptops.
• Testers come to CitySquares’ office in the South End of Boston during specific hours, each day for a few days in early October.
• Citysquares will pay testers.
• Some testers may be able to work from outside the office.

Again, there’s more info to come on the new site, and also on the testing schedule and those details. But if you are interested, please email us at testing@Citysquares.com.

So today we hired our first full time engineer. (for those of you who expressed interest in the job, thank you!) And in doing so we came to a resolution about technology, and then some actually. We decided to choose Drupal as our platform of choice for the future Citysquares.com. After much deliberation, debating, discussing, and consulting with ourselves and with others, about going with an MVC framework (e.g., CakePHP, Symfony) vs. Drupal, we finally opted for Drupal. The primary reasons are as follows:

• Body of work and knowledge. There’s a huge Drupal community, and it continues to grow and grow.
• Modules, modules, modules. Holy crap there’s a lot of modules.
• My blog is built on Drupal. Ok, that had nothing to do with our decision, but I’m just a big Drupal fan from experience.
• Scalability. Time Warner’s media sites are all built on Drupal. Sony Music sites are all built on Drupal. US magazine’s site is built on Drupal. ‘Nuff said.

There are many technical reasons too, many many many. But I won’t get into that – that’s very boring and this blog isnt meant to be boring.

What’s interesting about our decision is that by choosing Drupal, and choosing to work with the Drupal community that unavoidably comes with it, we are, in essence, choosing community. We are allowing ourselves to tap into a community, while bringing communities online, and eventually enabling other communities to bring themselves online. Argh!

This is actually deep stuff, to me anyway. In a more idealogical sense, choosing to go with Drupal is an indication of who we are as people, and as a company, and not just an indication of technical choices and skill sets.

I’m really starting to get into this whole concept of open source in business practice, in management, and almost as a mantra.

I don’t know, it’s heavy stuff and I’m really wrestling with it right now. More to come on all this, as I sort it out better in my head.

[This has been appended]

I’m not typically interested in taking the time to talk about my frustrations with companies who I’d like to work with, but this is very annoying. Over the past few months Citysquares has been working on building some nice partnerships. Some are content providers offering a unique niche offering that would fit nicely into our site, and provide the users, or businesses, with some nice value-add.

One example of this is Constant Contact, the well known eNewsletter company. I’ve had the great pleasure of getting to know one of their co-founders, Randy Parker, over the past several months. Randy has actually become an adviser to Citysquares, and an immensely helpful one at that. He put me in touch with Alec Stern, their Vice President, Strategic Market Development. Immediately, I was impressed with the care and attention Alec gave to Citysquares. Are we a massive account for them? No, not yet anyway. But see, that’s not the point and Alec understands that on many levels. That’s his job. And it’s my job to make sure these kinds of deals get done, so that we continue to provide more and more value to our audiences.

That is an example of a good partnership, already. Even though I haven’t signed the docs yet, it’s just a matter of days, and Alec and I ping each other often just to keep the momentum.

Here’s a bad example:

Citysquares is about to launch some nice new features, things we’ve been talking about for a few months but have finally invested some dollars into. These aren’t world changing features, but they’re big additions for us. The work we’re doing now is going to lay the groundwork, technically speaking, for some pretty exciting features. But we need to lay the concrete first, which is what we’re doing now. So, before we can launch, eh hem, “user generated” features like events, activities, even our own twist on citizen journalism, we need to pull in some content in the meantime, RSS feeds. Standard stuff. I happened to be doing some homework this past weekend on who’s pulling events and news feeds, and from where. Upcoming is a big one, for events. Townonline.com used to provide feeds for their many papers, but they don’t seem to anymore.

Boston.com is yanking events from a site called Zvents.com. I spent some time on Zvents this weekend and was quite impressed with the content they seemed to provide – a lot of it. They’ve got some pretty nice filtering abilities too. And best of all, I can pull that query/filter from their site in a feed. Oh, well, that’s what I should be able to do. After spending about 2 hours going through the painful process of running queries, sorting them, and noting the RSS URLs, it turns out – they don’t even work.

So ok, they don’t work. Not the end of the world. They’ll fix it, right? Won’t they? 24 hours later, not fixed yet. I send them an email. No response. Still not fixed. I send them another email. No response. Still not fixed. I send them yet another email, and test again, nope – still not working. So at this point, I honestly don’t even care if they fix it. Why would I want to use them now? No thanks. Looks like Upcoming is our choice for now. Not a bad choice, especially because at least those work.

My point? Don’t offer a service that’s broken. And if it’s a technical glitch, people will understand, but at least have the sense to respond to their emails. That’s just business 101 – talk to your customers and users.

A few days ago we had a user go on Citysquares.com who added six reviews within a very short period of time. And let me say – she is not getting paid for that (at least not by us). I made sure to send her a personal thank you email, welcoming her to Citysquares.com, thanking her for using the site, and for her content. I did not hear back from her – but that’s ok. I did what I know is the proper thing to do. Recognize that a user not a “user” – they’re a person, with a pulse. And that person can very quickly impact our brand.

Anyway, enough. I think I’m a little sleep deprived. I’m getting testy. Good night.

Update on 2007-03-06: I have been exchanging numerous emails with Tyler at Zvents. It’s been a total pleasure working with him, and I can say that I am now a happy Zvents user. Although we haven’t yet launched the Zvents features on our site, I am comfortable moving ahead with them and Tyler has given me some confidence that these technical matters, as well as the communication matters, should not resurface again

I’m going way out on a limb here, and surely many of you may disagree with me, but I feel pretty strongly about this, as a serious consumer and as a serious business person running a startup that connects consumers with local merchants.

Greg Sterling posted an interesting piece on his blog today titled “Opportunity: Online Reputation Management.” I can’t debate the logic here and the basic point that it makes, but I think that the reality of user reviews and how they may or may not influence consumerism is much deeper than indicated. I also think that the user-review value proposition for small, local merchants is not a strong one.

Citysquares.com offers users with the ability to write reviews for local merchants. An interesting example of this is for a new coffee house in Central Square Cambridge, called Andala. It’s probably the best example you’ll get in any urbanized area of the typical small business just getting off the ground. They’re not a Citysquares.com customer (yet). I’ve been there, with my wife, and Chris has been there a few times. I really enjoyed my experience there, and I posted a review. Why? For two reasons: 1, because I truly enjoyed my experience so much, I found the atmosphere, the coffee (I’m a coffee fanatic), and the pastries and so forth very good and it reminded me of my visit to Beirut Lebanon a couple years ago. My wife also really enjoyed it. That experience was, on a scale of 1 to 10, a 9. That’s how strongly I felt about Andala so I posted a review, once I returned home. The second reason is because I want their business and I genuinely want to help them succeed.

Here’s the problem. I am founder and CEO of Citysquares.com, and for better or worse, I only post reviews for local businesses when I feel strongly compelled. I think I’m a typical consumer too – discerning, choosey, but reasonable. I believe that I am like the vast majority of consumers, of all ages.

Ask your friends, ask your family – how many of them add reviews for local businesses? How many of them make a choice to shop at local merchant A vs. local merchant B because of some stranger’s review? I think you’ll find the answer, as we have found, to be not too surprising – that it plays a very insignificant role in local consumerism. But let me stipulate one very significant factors: I’m speaking about local merchants – not products! I’ll get back to that in a moment.

Here’s what I’ve concluded about reviews for local merchants: For the most part, their nice to have, their moderately helpful for a small slice of the consumer market, but by and large, most consumers don’t find reviews of local businesses really all that relevant or meaningful. However, that whole reality gets flipped over on it’s head with one simple difference, and that difference is the almighty dollar. How much cheddar do I plan on spending? That’s the critical factor here.

Whether it’s for a local shoe store, pizza pie, a bar, or for the closest Bank of America, user reviews just don’t carry much weight with the typical, and more importantly, LOCAL consumer.

Now, let’s say I was going to take Ali out for a nice dinner, perhaps within a 30 minute radius of home, somewhere we’ve never been? I plan on dropping a little more loot, having a bottle of wine, in a quiet, romantic atmosphere. Suddenly what other people have to say means more to me. Even still, for me, unless the reviews are dramatically, and powerfully positive or negative, they don’t really impact my decision that much. I can’t think of any situation that user reviews would have a really big impact on my local shopping behavior. Ultimately, I’m looking for X, and I’m looking for it here.

Additionally, part of the fun I have shopping locally is having my own experience – not basing my decision on a stranger’s opinion. Ah, now that opens up a whole new topic doesn’t it – Trust. That’s where this is going? Well, not today.

Back to products. This is interesting because here’s where user reviews take front row – here’s where they take center stage. Product reviews!

Just this weekend I had to find a new boom microphone for my digital camcorder. I didn’t want the stock Canon boom mic, I wanted something else. But I read some reviews on CNET, and sure enough, I made my buying decision.

Take my BlackBerry Pearl for example – a huge jump for me. I went from being a long time and loyal Windows Mobile user to BlackBerry. Before I spent the moolah and made the jump, I wanted to know what others had to say – many many others. I wanted a big sampling of user reviews.

Take my Creative Zen, a new refigerator, humidifier, bicycle, pair of skis, golf club – you name it. I want to know what others have to say – really badly. I bought some new golf clubs this past summer – let me tell you – I probably spent 15 hours or so reading what others had to say about a wide variety of drivers and irons. I’m not exaggerating – just ask Ali, and my brother and father.

Ok, what’s the point here? The point is this: I think user reviews are important for every form of consumerism, whether products, services, local retail, you name it. But ultimately it’s all about the mighty dollar and the impact on me or others around me. How much money I’m going to spend, and how much that decision has an impact on me or others around me. High spend? High impact? Reviews matter. Low spend, low impact, reviews don’t matter.

So if I had a formula it would be:

Total Spend $
—————— = Relevance of user reviews
Total Impact
(distance, pleasure/pain)

That looks more impressive than it really is.

Amendment: Greg and I exchanged emails after he read this blog post and he reminded me of an interesting point that I forgot to address, and that is as follows: In our many many conversations with local merchants, be them in sales calls or for other reasons, local merchants are not terribly big fans of user reviews. They don’t want bad reviews written about them. Surely, they also need to understand that they have a job to do – and that’s to please every customer. Yet some customers simply can’t be pleased, and some use the Internet or a user review platform as a sort of anonymous soap box. Ultimately, user reviews will be a big part of local search and online advertising for the foreseeable future, and certainly that is true for Citysquares.com. But we respect the needs of the local merchants, and while we allow user reviews, we do need to take an editorial approach to them sometimes. Take Andala for example. The user jlobel actually used a word that we could not approve. We did not bar his review, we merely edited the word. If a local merchant believes we’re on their side, and trust us to take user reviews and that sort of content seriously, especially if they’re a paid advertiser, than everyone is happy.

Lastly, on Greg’s point about there being an opportunity for online reputation management for local merchant reviews, I totally agree. Whoever figures that out is one clever person!