With the current popularity of location-based social networks and customer-feedback based apps, it seems as though the whole world is getting smaller and a lot more critical (similar to my father as he ages). As pessimistic as this might sound, think about it: with the appropriate smart-phone and application, people can instantaneously broadcast where they are at any time to their whole social network. If they’re at a particular location where they’ve experienced something worth noting, chances are they’ll post about it. And from my experience, things worth noting are either really positive or really negative.

As a brand that owns multiple locations, this can become somewhat of a daunting scenario. Imagine customers visiting your location every day and expressing their strongest feelings to their entire network of followers. Also consider the fact that these followers are people who follow the commenter because they value his or her opinion.

Good or bad, a savvy business-minded individual will want to address the negative postings, commend the positive ones and find additional opportunities to use both. So how can you do this? The short answer is manually. You can dig down into all channels where your brand is being mentioned and address the issues one-by-one. This is relatively easy if you’re already actively managing these channels and if you know what you’re doing. The downside? It’s time consuming to set this up–especially if you’re reporting statistics on an ongoing basis.

A company that’s trying to facilitate this problem of scattered location-based customer sentiment is Valuevine. They’re selling a location-based analytics product that provides multi-locations with deep insight into customer experience, sentiment, trends, and the overall health of their locations.

• What does Valuevine do?
  • Valuevine provides actionable insight that’s timely and location driven from Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, Twitter, Citysearch, Merchant Circle, Gowalla and Urban Spoon.
• How does Valuevine do it?
  • Tracking and aggregating activity of all locations:
    • Checkins, fans, followers, reviews, sentiment, activity
  • Measures the Local Voice of Customer
    • Biggest critics, biggest fans, loudest voices
  • Displays Location-specific Trending:
    • Sentiment trends and activity statistics
  • Easily Invite or Share information:
    • Quickly share via email with managers and owners

WHAT I LIKED: If you’re looking to efficiently manage location-based sentiment, this is your tool. The reporting dashboard seemed impressive from what I saw (I sat through a webinar and didn’t get a chance to try it out). Valuevine’s sentiment algorithm is always evolving too, so it’s better able to discern between positive, negative and neutral comments over time.

[UPDATE - 3/29/11: After publishing this blog post, Valuevine reached out to me via Twitter with an offer for a free trial. I'll test it out and update the section(s) below accordingly]

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE: The biggie here for me was that I didn’t get to try it out. The webinar is a great way to see the features, but I would’ve liked the opportunity to start a free trial. My LIKED and DIDN’T LIKE lists would be a bit more in depth if I had actual hands on time with the tool. Currently, there is no option to sign up for a free limited trial to test drive it. I’ve contacted them, but have heard nothing back thus far.

FINAL THOUGHTS: If you need to efficiently manage multiple locations and can afford the monthly fee, ($500) I would definitely give it a go. The $299 monthly fee seems more ideal, but it only refreshes on a weekly basis, which is not ideal, considering the amount of customer traffic that occurs daily. You’re going to want to be responding to this real-time, and a week’s wait just doesn’t cut it. Also, if you have less than 25 locations, you may want to consider tracking, responding to and reporting on sentiment through traditional means.

And now, I shall end this blog post with my (Weird) Al parody tribute to Valuevine:

Ooh, I bet you’re wondering how I knew,
About your plans to make my brand so blue,
With some bad experience you had at the store,
Between the competition you know I love you more.
It took me by surprise I must say,
When I found out yesterday.
Don’t you know that…

I heard it through the Valuevine!

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