image from Yelp.com

In a past post, we touched on the importance of being involved in review sites. We mentioned the importance of third-party validation and unbiased posts from people in your social network–or from strangers! Yelp.com is one of the most popular review sites and due to its online presence, often yields a higher search ranking than its competitors.

Now, we are seeing Yelp.com continue to leap toward integration with other social sites and increasing its push in the socialsphere. Yelp was on the forefront of adding the Facebook “like” button to all of its pages and encouraging Facebook profile integration directly after the “like” button bang. Now Yelp is expanding and adding “old school” offline marketing to its initiatives by adding community events. These events encourage businesses to get together and promote their business and encourage samples of their products to reach this audience.

This past weekend, Yelp’s Philadelphia Community Manager hosted an event at one of the cities hot spots, The Market & Shops at The Comcast Center. The Yelp Spring Festival brought together local businesses and local Yelpers and offered everything from free snow cones spiked with Vodka, to pound cake from DiBruno Brothers and cheesestakes from Mike’s Steaks. The free event brought visibility to some of the newer businesses in the space and allowed some crowd favorites to sample new products and introduce new ideas.

As I spoke with one of the business owners, they said they were hoping this event will let people know their store exists and hopefully, boost sales in the coming days. For the amount of effort the store owner put into being involved, she said it was a small investment that could really pay off in the near future.

Monica, the Yelp Community Manager, explained the event was a way for local businesses to gain some visibility. The event was open to all businesses in the area (not just Yelp paid advertisers) and it seemed they were going to achieve their goals of giving businesses visibility, getting the community involved, and providing a free and fun event!

What was odd, was that none of the businesses were leveraging their online presence except DiBruno Brothers. DiBruno Brothers had a photographer who took a few shots and handed out small business cards with their Flickr site address, which I thought was a great technique. Other business booths didn’t offer many coupons or collateral pointing attendees to their Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or Yelp accounts, which seemed to end the marketing circle and the life of the event quite abruptly.

This direction of adding an offline marketing component to an influential online marketing outlet seems to be the most effective way to get everyone involved and really show the power of a multi-channel approach. Kudos to Yelp for reaching out to local businesses and providing opportunities to expand their marketing!

Jen Cohen is a social media and marketing maven knocked down many times in 26 yrs. Something Creativehttp://somethingcreativemarketing.com

Tags: multi-channel approach, offline marketing, online marketing, review sites, Social Media, social strategy, Yelp, Yelp.com