Google has launched a program called Local Guides in a concerted effort to increase the quality and quantity of local reviews on its platform.
The program is a replacement for its City Guides, which never really took off as far as creating useful content for users.
The company pitches Local Guides as such:
With Local Guides, you join a global community of explorers who write local reviews on Google. As you write more reviews, you access more levels of benefits available only to Local Guides.
Millions of people rely on reviews like yours to decide where to go and what to do, so you help others by writing local reviews on Google.
Some of the key points:
- "High quality content" is defined as "3 to 4 sentences long and contains specific, helpful and balanced information about a particular business."
- Reviews are to be closely integrated with Google Maps so they populate according to specific user searches.
- Benefits will also be tied to frequency of reviews: "For some benefits, we give priority to Local Guides who are consistently contributing reviews each month."
- Community managers are being assigned to specific markets. This is in direct competition with Yelp, and demonstrates how important Google feels these local review communities are.
- Google explicitly states that users are not to be paid in goods or services for reviews. Of course, there's no one policing this or any way to monitor that.
- Business owners are to be banned for soliciting reviews with freebies: "Soliciting reviews for a particular business or self-promotion (through discounts, collateral, etc.) to Local Guides in any capacity is prohibited, including but not limited to online and offline Local Guides community activities, events, and forums. Individuals found to be violating this prohibition may be expelled from Local Guides."
- Unofficial meetups will also be thrown in different cities and Google will lean heavily on the Local Guides community to make those happen.
As users are accepted into the program, they are incentivized to write more reviews with different benefit levels for higher contributions. This is in some way similar to Yelp's Elite program which has local businesses offer complimentary events for top users to attempt to curry favor.
The four levels break out like this:
Clearly, local reviews are becoming more important for travel brands. Startups such as Localeur have been proffering local content targeted to the millennial traveler for a couple of years now, while other companies such as Gogobot and Foursquare have pivoted more squarely into the user review and recommendation column. There's also renewed competition in North America on the review front with Zomato buying Urbanspoon in a direct confrontation with Yelp.
It should also be noted that Google signed a content partnership deal with Localeur back in 2013, and then launched its own City Expert program. So the larger players are definitely paying attention to the up-and-comers as far as approach, content and style.
The competition for dominance on local is heating up alongside the wholesale shift of consumer behavior to mobile. There are some serious investments being made here, and there's bound to be some shakeouts as the competition intensifies.
Signup for Local Guides here, and browse the FAQ here.