Yelp Files for IPO to Raise $100M
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They day we’ve been telling you about just became reality. Doctor review site Yelp has officially filed to go public with their IPO. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those of you reading the DoctorBlog this past year, as we’ve mentioned the likelihood of Yelp going public sometime in 2012. Now, with the class-action lawsuits behind them, they’ve stated they plan to use the IPO to raise over $100M…but, in all likelihood, may end up raising even more.
Yelpsuit Dismissed For Good…or Bad?
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It’s officially over. The class action lawsuits against Yelp claiming extortionist practices were dismissed with prejudice this week by US District Court Judge Edward Chen. These lawsuits had been dismissed before, but still allowed for the plaintiffs to refile the lawsuit. The refiling of these lawsuits is what brought the case back in front of the court in a hearing earlier this week. And, that’s what makes the ‘with prejudice’ part of the court’s ruling important – it means the lawsuit cannot be refiled and that the case against Yelp is officially over.
Harvard’s Stars-to-Dollars Study
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The really smart people over at the Harvard Business School recently released a study on the real effect of star ratings on actual revenue. We shared with you earlier this year that having stars showing up in your search results increases visitors by around 29%. Professor Michael Luca at HBS took it a step further by correlating the rise in rating by a single star on review site Yelp to a 9% increase in revenue. He did this by comparing the change in star ratings by thousands of restaurants in the Seattle area to the actual revenue reported to the Washington State Department of Revenue over a 6+ year period. (For more information, including a bunch of greek equations to explain things like “Regression Discontinuity,” you can download Luca’s working paper.)
The Evolution of Online Referrals
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It wasn’t too long ago that the phone book was the place to go to find a doctor or a dentist. It was pretty much the only game in town when it came to listing yourself in a local directory where prospective patients could easily find you to book an appointment. Then, those savvy marketing minds at the Yellow Pages figured out that they could make money selling full-page advertisements to doctors in order to attract more patients. Thus, the doctor with the largest marketing budget was now perceived as the doctor in town.
Then along came the Internet.
All of a sudden, there are online directory services that make your information to more people for less than what you had been paying the Yellow Pages. Before long, there were hundreds of sites where you could include your practice in their directory to expand the number of patients that could find you. Now, with a computer nearby, the best use for the Yellow Pages was a bit of avant-garde redecorating…
Then along came Google.
Eventually, the even savvier marketing minds at Google realized that they can provide these basic listing services for free – by charging for the info to be included in search results. This created listings on demand – where the doctor’s name is presented at the exact time someone is searching for a “one day crowns” in “Sunnyvale.” Instead of relying on patients to pick the doctor off a list in a book, the doctor is dynamically presented to the patient depending on when, where, and what procedure the patient is looking for.
Then along came Facebook.
While having your information actively presented to prospective patients that are currently looking for your services is great, wouldn’t it be better if your information was actively presented to even more potential patients than only the ones looking for you? And, wouldn’t it be even better yet if your information was actively presented to these prospective patients by their own trusted friends, and not some faceless search engine?
This is exactly what Facebook provides – word-of-mouth marketing online. Now, instead of Internet users getting your name from an advertisement in a search listing, they can get your information directly from a trusted source – your own patient. It’s genuine word-of-mouth marketing, scaled across the Internet.
Would you like to learn more about how Facebook works, and what effect it will have on your practice? We’re holding an educational webinar and Q&A session on this topic to explain how Facebook works in a bit more detail. No Ads. No Sales Pitch.
Join us this Thursday, April 15th at 12pm PST by RSVPing here:
http://www.DoctorBase.com/webinar
Dentists Being Searched On The Web: Why Review Sites Are Booming
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Web marketing for private practices is becoming more and more competitive. Try paying for Google advertising on a term like “San Francisco Dentist” or any city plus the term “dentist” and you will see a very pricey cost per click. It is a good strategy as people now spend over 5 hours per day on average on the web.
The web has replaced such mainstays as the yellow pages and even a friends opinion as our go to information source.
But people are not looking to be “sold” when searching a dentist or other important decisions. They are looking for information. They are doing due diligence.
Below is the Google trend for the term “dentist Reviews”.
This is why review sites are enjoying growth and why it is a concern for the private practice as these are uncontrolled sites that can dramatically affect the perception of a dentist or his practice. A review site may work for a restaurant but the same model does not work for many other private businesses. This, of course, has lead to much upset over review sites holding small businesses and private practices hostage over brutal negative reviews.
Please contact the author if you have any questions or this concerns you since something can be done about it if review sites affect you negatively.
Online Reputation Management: Doctors and Dentists Guide to Fixing Bad Reviews.
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by Ihab Hanna, DDS in San Francisco, CA
The number of reviews for health care providers online is growing exponentially and at an accelerating pace. Betting against this trend is foolish, yet managing your reputation online can be a time-consuming task. And once effective cease & desist letters to remove misleading or false reviews can receive large amounts of negative publicity from online newspapers and avid defenders of CDA 230 of the Communications Decency Act – which holds harmless those companies hosting such
user generated content.
If you search Google for your name you will see the following:
- Your own website (hopefully).
- Various review sites such as Insider Pages, Dr. Oogle, Yelp and others.
- Search directories happily capturing traffic on searches for your name.
Review sites and search directories are trying to sell advertisements based upon people searching for objective reviews on your practice and others offering the same service. That means your current patients looking up your phone number or address in Google are blasted with ads for potentially negative reviews and ads from competing practices in your immediate neighborhood (Google is getting very good at Geo-Targeting down to the zip code).
A more alarming situation is if a review site has one or more bad reviews visible associated with your practice.
Many private practitioners are under the assumption that the web traffic they get is from searches for keywords such as “Dentist San Francisco, Ca” (Broad Keywords) by examination you will you’re your name (Brand Keywords) being actively and regularly searched by your current patients base and potential patients.
If you have patients, chances they ARE or will be talking about you on the Web.
You cannot really 100% stop bad reviews on review sites but you can execute a strategy to defend yourself and voice your own perspectives as balance, hopefully a dominant perspective that is the primary “voice” of your name & brand online. The irony is that private practices have been toiling for years (some decades) to care for their patients, having collected numerous Thank You letters and cards.
So, What Can You Do?
Ideally, this is handled by having hundreds of pages that you control that Google can find under a search for your name.
Do this by creating a Blog. Blogs are cheap to build and easy to maintain. Search Engines also love the dynamic nature of a Blog – when’s the last time you added new content to your website as is required now of competitive keyword markets on Google? Chances are, a low-cost Blog will eventually out-rank your static website (and many others) over time. Best of all, you’ll show your community and your patients (as well as future patients) that you care enough to have a voice online and adopt new technologies.
A blog offers a great avenue to pass on details about your practice such as new equipment you spent so much to get or new skills you or your staff have attained.
Transcribe your patients’ testimonials online and on your Blog. And add functionality on your Blog where your patients – if they have a gripe – can come to you first. Because if they have no alternative but to go onto another site – that negative review (even if the patient was having a very bad day) can be permanent!
Every page on a blog can be set up to be visible to the various searches on your name to where it can in time produce hundreds of potential pages that can be found under a search for your name.
3 Ways to Protect Your Reputation Online
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by John Sung Kim, Partner or DoctorBase.org
1.) Many free tools exist to alert you whenever someone posts up your name on the Web.
They are not 100% accurate nor are they in real-time, but they are far more efficient than humans at crawling the Internet for this information. What they are not good at is discerning whether such reviews and posts are negative or positive, as that still requires the thought process of actual people who read each posting.
2.) When such alerts come to your office about potentially negative or positive reviews, have your office (or your marketing vendor) be proactive by replying to lukewarm reviews.
More importantly, have your office or vendor post your positive testimonials from patients onto the Web, that way the public has a more fair and balanced view of what most of your patients are saying about your practice – not a disgruntled few. This method also allows for a doctor to have a decent number of positive reviews quickly.
3.) Get outside help.
While healthcare providers are exceptionally intelligent & highly educated people, as marketers they have little desire nor inclination (not to mention time) to delve into the guts of search engine optimization, managing paid ads online, and reading/responding to every review. Save time (which for many doctors also means a great deal of money) by outsourcing this function to an agency that has the technology and healthcare experience to manage the day to day functions of name brand reputation management. It costs about the price of a nice dinner for two in the city each month, and you’ll probably enjoy that dinner more knowing that you have someone(s) guarding your name online.
Get a Free Trial of the DoctorBase service
(it does all 3 for $300 per month)
