What’s Next: a Wikipedia for small businesses?

August 28, 2009 | Mark Goldenson | Comments | |

gripripThree years after Alexander Graham Bell spoke the telephone’s first words in 1875 – “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” – the first phone directory was published.

The New Haven Telephone company published a white card with the names of 50 subscribers, divided into business and residential. (Only when a printer ran out of white paper and used yellow did the directory become the Yellow Pages.)

In 2007, yellow page directories were a $31 billion market, but they are being rapidly killed by the web, mobile access, 411 lines, and services vastly more convenient than thumbing through dead trees. The value of accurate business details is still higher than ever. Google’s $150 billion value stems greatly from advertising against business searches.

Yet a century after Bell’s words, business information is surprisingly sparse. Think of your favorite auto shop – can you find its hours? Its prices? The name of the mechanic on staff that you like? Because 70% of small businesses don’t have a website, there’s a good chance you can’t without calling them.

That seems crazy given how much this information can affect your buying decisions, but it makes sense considering how costly it has historically been to stay current. Yellow Pages employs hundreds of sales agents to call businesses, costing tens of millions of dollars per year.

The internet now offers a better solution: crowdsourcing. Wikipedia has destroyed the paper encyclopedia without hiring one sales agent. Alexander Bell couldn’t have foreseen that people would spend millions of hours writing 8,000 words about the Undertaker for free. While Wikipedia is great for general information, it includes almost none of the business directory information that is more valuable. Yelp, YP.com, and CitySearch offer some basic details or user editing, but either focus on reviews or don’t have deep details.

What’s needed is a Wikipedia for small businesses. Provisionally called ShopStop, it would be a public wiki that lets anyone create a website about a business and add a wealth of information:

-Contact details
-Hours of operation
-Lists of products or services
-Recommended items
-Food nutritional values
-Photos
-Prices
-Coupons and specials
-Management and staff
-Credit cards accepted
-Wheelchair accessibility
-Wireless availability
-Franchise locations
-Availability of power outlets
-Customer traffic
-Phone tree options
-Years of operation
-Public restrooms

Business owners could claim their site and add their own details, but unlike MerchantCircle, Smalltown, and other attempts at bringing small businesses online, ShopStop would not require any action from the small business. Their website can be created and useful even without their knowledge.

Like Wikipedia, ShopStop could create custom fields for each category. Editors could specify the price of oil changes across auto shops, massage styles across day spas, and flavors across ice cream parlors. Also like Wikipedia, editors could cite sources and vote on or flag inaccuracies.

This information would be quite lucrative. Search engines, shopping sites, directories, researchers, and developers would love ShopStop’s data APIs. Small businesses that become aware of their ShopStop site could pay to enhance their profile or advertise on searches or competitor pages. The more information they add, the more likely they are to bring leads.

Would enough people add this information? One might argue that people update Wikipedia and Yelp because they love the topic or vendor, but that updating wheelchair accessibility isn’t sufficiently sexy. That’s probably true, but game mechanics can create incentives. Like Yelp’s medals for writing the first review, ShopStop could award every update with points, status, and prizes, perhaps with products from the stores themselves. A ShopStop mobile app would let people update information and earn points right at the location. Some of this information will change often, but it only takes one editor in the world to add value to everyone else.

A challenge would be reaching scale before Yelp, YP.com, or CitySearch begin co-opting these features. ShopStop might defend with loyalty programs like high-end prizes that require many updates. Yelp publicly says it favors consumers before businesses, so another tactic would be to favor businesses by allowing them to control their reviews and sequester information they want private. Finding maven editors in each city won’t be easy but will be hard to duplicate. Executed well, ShopStop could kill the yellow pages for good.

What do you think?

goldenson1Mark Goldenson could probably update wireless availability in Bay Area cafes by heart. He is starting an innovative venture in health care. To submit an idea for the What’s Next series, email Mark at mjgold3@gmail.com. Selected ideas will receive attribution.

Photocredit for top image: http://www.oldtimestrongman.com/images5/dennisrogers_rip.gif

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About the Author, Mark Goldenson

  • Name
    I got a telemarketing call from the yellow pages this morning at 8:30am (despite being on the do not call list). After berating the guy and hanging up my first thought was 'why hasn't the web put them out of business yet'.

    Somebody please find a way to kill them faster and stop having those books dropped on my doorstep.
  • Thanks for that interesting look at telephone directory history. A service similar to the one you describe already exists, though. I believe it's called "Yelp".
  • M
    The reason nobody uses yelp is beacuse it is so UGLY.
  • Are these comments working, or was mine deleted?
  • On the off chance mine was deleted, let me try again, but I'll be brief.

    MyWikiBiz.com seeks to be a Wikipedia of small businesses -- with pages written by and protected for their owners.

    Check out this page, Mark:

    http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Mark_Goldenson
  • Firstly, there would need to be ratings incorporated into this model. Businesses would also have to actively encourage their customers to review products and services.

    Google are the only people who could actually do this becuase people actually know who they are. When somebody like Yelp tries to do this kind of mammoth task they are at a huge disadvantage as people have to find *them*.Google have a great brand and a huge database waiting to be utilised.

    If Google or whoever were to hand over control of company pages it should only be insofar as letting them write thier own company blurb. An 'official' section if you will. Moderation of consumer reviews apart from for removal of profanities would create a misleading environment for consumers and bring us back to square one - it'd just become yellow pages again.

    The whole point of this would be to make it collaborative and not top down. This kind of project can only be succesful through total transparency. Whoever tries it needs to be on the *consumers* side.

    I also don't like the 'competitors paying to advertise on their rivals pages' model. Maybe a recommendation engine based on who's actually best in that niche/area and not based on who's got the biggest marketing budget.

    Fine, if you want to make it profitable, try it. I'd expect though that you'd have to give your users a significant slice of the pie or they probably won't contribute as they'll feel as though theur being used. This would only really work if it was non-profit or donated a large amount of money to chairty as part of it's USP.

    I dunno, just my 2 cents.
  • howtowriteebooks
    I think Wikipedia for small business is a great concept that would prove quite valuable to the online community.
  • countrypetvet
    Have you ever seen http://www.superpages.com it has been offering this exact idea for years- Dont get caught up in the technology (ie WIKI) is just another name for some of same things that these other directories have already been doing. Now with the death of wikia idea and all its backers, I'm not sure how another wiki directory differentiates any more then the already existing offerings and even with how GOOG today allows for wiki like editing of its own results
  • Why is this different than Google Maps or Superpages?

    I think you present an interesting idea, that Yellow Pages is still huge despite Yelp, Maps and others, but I think the primary reason behind the printed Yellow Pages success, is the dwindling, yet still $30 billion, group of people who can't access or don't know how to use the web. Over time, with the existing solutions (Yelp, Maps) Yellow Pages' business will evaporate. No online service, no matter how perfect, will make the print Yellow Pages disappear, because the case remain that internet penetration in the US is not 100%.

    Who's idea is this?
  • Where did my comment go? It was there a moment ago!
  • John Wood, I too seemed to experience the "Flying Dutchman" comment feature.
  • Weird hey? It even tweeted verbatim the first part of my comment, then it was gone! It kept my single sentence comment though, so maybe it's an 'exceeded-the-maximum-no-of-characters' thing because my original comment was a bit of an essay!
  • You would still need some kind of "gate keeper" or something that would comb through all that information, like personal recommendations, because in this case you read to buy.
  • Well Brownbook.net seems to be doing just fine by crowdsourcing even that, because each listing and review includes a Report This link so the site is self-regulating. The new business-to-business endorsement feature helps in this regard too.
  • Of course flagging works. And the b2b endorsment helps. We believe in that as well.
    But what about a next level in which value is added, not taken away? And in which that is the rule, not the exception?
  • jmurfin
    Well, Mark, creating the business you propose here is exactly what we've spent the last 3 years building :-)

    We've been working with Telecoms partners for a number of years, to jointly develop the Phone Book killer, most notably doing a joint development with British Telecom in the UK to design, build and launch BT Tradespace: www.bttradespace.com - The demand is certainly out there for displacing the wasted dollars spent on Yellow Pages ads: Tradespace has attracted over 350,000 small businesses in the UK already for it's service.

    But we've spent the past six months following a very classic web start-up approach, as advocated here on VentureBeat Entrepreneur, to build and launch a truly next generation Yellow Pages killer! We call it CloudProfile (www.cloudprofile.com) and we've had some amazing feedback from our early customers, and will be at TechCrunch 50 next week to show the world.

    CloudProfile does most of what you advocate above and allows small businesses to truly 'engage' with customers (built-in engadgement 'widgets' and social syndication of content to Facebook and Twitter), and most interestingly pull in potential customers from around the web by using our rapidly evolving 'Social radar' tools.

    I'd be happy to give away some promo codes and/or engage directly with some VentureBeat readers who are interested in using our service. Fantastic to see someone seeing the same need as us. Please visit my own CloudProfile and use the Contact option to get in touch!
  • Hi Mark

    Great article, I work for Bizwiki.com and I couldn't agree with you more. The time has come for a solution to the problem that, even now in 2009, 70% of small businesses still don't have a website of their own.

    Bizwiki.com is exactly the sort of wikipedia for small business you're describing, and anyone from business owners and representatives to customers and consumers can get involved in adding, editing and improving company records of businesses.

    I love Yelp and what they do, but a review site is not the same as one focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of companies and information in the way we are. In fact what we're trying to accomplish is so similar to what you're discussing you could almost replace the word ShopStop with Bizwiki.com and you've described our site.

    We launched the alpha of the site last year and made it to beta a couple months ago. The challenge is now to scale up but so far we've been pleased with the growth in traffic with new users and editors.

    There are exciting times ahead.

    Matt
  • "What’s needed is a Wikipedia for small businesses. Provisionally called ShopStop, it would be a public wiki that lets anyone create a website about a business and add a wealth of information:"

    It's a nice idea but it's going to be abused beyond belief.

    There are already yellow pages options online already. The giant dead tree book has been duplicated online so businesses aren't missing out as much as you claim. And it's not difficult for a business to get a webpage up and running... having it rank is a different story but that is a search engine issue.