I went to a really interesting event last night about local digital media, organised by Mashup.
It featured a panel of experts from different sites, including Qype and WeLoveLocal. It was a really good discussion - check out the Mashup site, and sign up to go to future events. It only costs £35 to attend.
Anyway... One of the best bits for me came in a discussion of why local sites are good for somethings but not others, and one of the panelist brought up 'the plumber problem'. It's easy to find good local restaurants, because thousands of people will eat in them every year, so even with low conversion rates you are likely to get a few reviews. Plumbers (& other tradesmen) will only have a couple of hundred customers a year, and so it is unlikely that they will rate them. If there are any reviews the small sample sizes mean that you can't really see if they are real or fake. So local sites will not find you a reliable local plumber.
This got me thinking. Yes, ok, it's all word of mouth and also the best tradesmen are always busy and don't actually want more business in many cases. But there must still be good plumbers just starting out, or ones who are looking to expand. & it must be possible to use social media (or digital media) to find some sort of answer.
My answer is to use Delicious. Delicious is a site that allows users to bookmark their favourite things online, and then lets other people search these. If something is popular then a lot of people will have bookmarked them. I use this when I'm travelling to get local recommendations for restaurants etc.
So here are the results for 'plumber london' in Delcious. Not perfect, by any means, and there are lots of irrelevant links, but a pretty good starting point for investigation.
For example -
4c's - bookmarked by 90 people
0800Handyman - bookmarked by 19 people
Permanex - bookmarked by 2 people
All worth investigating - and of course you can see who recommended them in each case.
Anyone else got any possible solutions to 'the plumber problem'?
Friday, January 18, 2008
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2 comments:
Great post. I'm planning a more indepth session on local services.
Would you be interested in participating?
I've started blogging Belocal here - http://blog.belocal.com/
How about using Buildersite?
I came across the same problem while I was working as a stonemason, and decided to try to solve it. It works, too: transactional feedback and competitive quotes.
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