Are You The Master Of Your Own Domain?

There has been some interesting controversy in the local search space.  I have been opinionated about local search and if you are interested you can check out a couple of my posts here and here. 

Seattle-based startup, HelpHive, recently altered their service based on some strong opinions from local business owners.  The gist of the controversy was that HelpHive was building business profile pages and substituting a HelpHive run direct response number.  I personally think that is a great service for small business owners.  Like many of us, I start out most of my local service recommendations with search engines.  In the case of some paid for performance services like Service Magic (they are like the LendingTree of local services providers), you get a number of local businesses that have basically paid to get leads.  You could argue that HelpHive should be more upfront about providing lead generation services to small businesses which is what they ended up doing.  It is an interesting question as to how do you protect your local brand and what rights do you have as a local business owner.

Another approach is what Marchex recently introduced, there "Reputation Management" product.  Its akin to getting your FICA score for your business.  It aggregates all the various review sites into one place and acts as a master dashboard for your business sentiment.  Its a cool concept.  Clearly, once you have the dashboard then you can sell other services into those businesses.  Its a different approach than HelpHive. 

In the end, both services really require massive scale in order to be successful.