Announcing - Support Your Favorite Not-for-Profit

YouGottaCall now supports Members' ability to donate their rewards and rebates to their designated charitable organization.

Our vision is to connect consumers with their trusted local service providers.
Businesses can pay rewards to their network for referrals that result in new sales.
Members can choose to
keep these rewards or
donate them to the non-profit agencies that they support.

In 4 easy steps , current Members may log-on and designate a non-for-profit organization to receive their rewards. (click picture for larger view)

This is an exciting step for our vision to benefit the entire community of trusted businesses and deserving 501(c)3's. Please keep your feedback and ideas coming!

WOM Connection Engine For Local Businesses

How YouGottaCall.com helps local contractors, professionals and merchants...

Local businesses can develop a free, self-sustaining source of word-of-mouth referrals.

WOM Connection Engine For Local Businesses

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: yougottacall wordofmouth)

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OK - So They're "Best" - But how can they get BETTER? Your feedback, please...

Article: YellowPages.com Ranked #1 Local Search Platform


My Take

A few questions for you, Mr./Ms. Local Business Owner:

1. How can local search be improved to better meet YOUR needs?

2. Most online Yellow Page advertisers omit their e-mail addresses. Yet the people finding them online are already at their computer keyboards and are therefore able to instantly communicate with them
- Are you hesitant to permit prospective customers to contact you via e-mail?
- Why? To prevent spam? Because it would be too difficult to monitor?

3. What if you were able to generate qualified word-of-mouth referrals from the people who know you best - your customers, neighbors and friends? For free? And what if you could measure these results? And what if you were allowed to reward your referrers? And benefit your community to build self-sustaining referrals in the future?

You're the experts. Please let us know how local advertising can be improved for YOU.

From DMS '08: Future Search: Local Search In Five Years?

The Yellow Pages comprise a $14B industry in the States.
As such they have analysts, experts and conferences.

If you are a local business owner who buys Yellow Page ads, you might find some of these thoughts interesting.


My Take

Yellow Page customers (local business owners) might ask "Do these experts realize that Facebook, with its hundreds of millions of users, was not here 5 years ago?"

YouGottaCall

WOM Connection Engine For Consumers 01

From: timtracey, 1 week ago

WOM Connection Engine For Consumers 01

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: wordofmouth yougottacall)

Consumers benefit from local, social search by finding and trusted local service providers through their network of friends, neighbors and co-workers


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Add Word-of-Mouth to Your Advertising

Advertising is a necessity for gaining new clients and growing revenues. But you might think twice before buying Yellow Page or local newspaper ads.

Are your target clients using these traditional media as much as they used to? Or at all?

Studies show that consumers:
trust the opinions of their friends and neighbors much more than ads; each participate in over 10 word-of-mouth referrals every day; and are connecting with each other more and more on Web-based social networks.

So why spend money on advertising that doesn't influence your customer's purchasing decision? Or even get read?

Businesses are saving ad money and increasing sales by harnessing WOM. These recent articles show how you can, too.

Guerrillas Use Word-of-Mouth Marketing - It comes in many forms, but all of them are essential to your business.

WoM: Viral Psychology 101 (Slide show) 12 Secrets Of Successful Word-Of-Mouth Programs

Word of Mouth (Slide show) Joining the Movement to Measurably Improve Your Business

YouGottaCall.com is your free, ready-made network with all the tools you need to
1. connect with your WOM referrers,
2. leverage the good will you worked so hard to build,
3. measure WOM results,
4. be found by your extended network and
5. reward your best referrers.

Study: Behavior of Online Reviewers Affects Their Credibility

Excerpted 9/5/2008 from PhysOrg article

(PhysOrg.com) -- Consumers increasingly rely on recommendations in online forums, such as Amazon.com and Angieslist.com, when deciding which products and services to buy. But, in most cases, they've never met the posters of these reviews.

Without traditional cues to assess the credibility of reviewers, people evaluate not only the content of opinions, but also the online behavior of posters, according to a recent article in the Journal of Marketing Research titled “Listening to Strangers.”

The study was conducted by Nicholas Lurie, assistant professor of marketing at Georgia Tech College of Management, and Allen Weiss and Deborah MacInnis, marketing professors at the University of Southern California.

"Imagine that you send an e-mail to members of your neighborhood association asking for recommendations for painters. How do you decide whose recommendation to trust?,” Lurie asks. “Our study suggests that you are likely to give greater weight to those who respond quickly, write a lengthy response, and engage you in a back-and-forth discussion.”

My Take

Imagine being able to search your friends' and neighbors' rolodexes of their trusted vendors! Wouldn't that be a powerful tool for selecting trusted local service providers!

How word of mouth really works

Word-of-mouth. It is a natural, unstoppable phenomenon.

Many talk about creating it and improving it. Maybe they'll succeed and all the best to them!

But how about facilitating it and getting out of the way? Better yet, a way to give back to the community by harnessing its incredible power.

That's what YouGottaCall.com is all about.

We'd love your suggestions for continuing to make it better. And we look forward to your involvement as it becomes available in your locale.

- - Tim