Google Hotspot Launch

In Today’s Dallas Local Marketing News…

Google launches their new product for local business reviews Google Hotspot,

They really make it easy for you to look for local businesses and offer suggestions based on your location and even your friends recommendations.

By offering this  “recommendation engine” they jump in front of the pack (facebook, 4square) which makes Hotspot very fun for me.

You can add friends if you are signed in to your gmail account and be able to see what your friends have reviewed.

They make the entire review process painless and easy.

I noticed that they are pulling information from various other review sites to populate this.

Possible implications for this could be that this also shows up in the Google Search results when a person types in a local business.

At the moment Google is pulling in reviews from established review sites as well as their own Google Places. However, by adding this service in a very clean and friendly layout they encourage people to drop a few reviews.

I DID! I reviewed 2 while I was playing with it and found it fun.

Reviews have their obvious benefits (as long as they are good) to the business. There has been a big belief in the local marketing space that the more reviews you have the better it is for your business as far as rankings are concerned.

The truth is that I have seen businesses in certain industries with ZERO reviews take the top position in the Google Places results.

However this may add a wrinkle to the entire algorithm. I mean, why create this product if you there is no way to make it more of a ranking factor. And now I believe reviews will be a much bigger factor than it TRULY has been before.

I am curious to see how they will roll this into the entire Google Places master plan. Stay tuned.