Not everybody can lay claim to waking up every day and making a successful living doing something they love.
If creating and sharing culinary creations is what your Carlsbad small business is all about, you already understand the tremendous value provided in nurturing and cultivating the online review.
From five-star foo foo joint to back alley eco-friendly food truck, people talk about their culinary experiences. 
This recent Wall St. move impacts Main St. small business in a big way, even if you don’t own a Carlsbad seaside nook known for awe-inspiring ambiance and unforgettably luxurious risotto.
If not immediately, then indubitably in the future…at the very least imaginably.
And maybe not so much impacts as say, influences.
Google now owns a lot of customer reviews about restaurants around the world is the basic tenet we’re looking to explore here.
Why That Matters to Carlsbad Small Businesses
Socially speaking, the days of quiet self-assured confidence and humility are gone. In business quiet and humble equates to marginally successful at best.
Now more than ever we are neck-deep in the age of self-promotion. Generally people care what we say, and we care what other people think.
Is it video games, the interweb, or is it that crazy music our kids are listening to; or is it something else?
We wouldn’t even begin to search for an answer to that most existential interpersonal communication question. But, hammer home the point of communicating with our customers where they congregate, cultivating digital word of mouth, and profiting from a genuine online small business reputation?
As consumers we crave feedback and seek peer experience.
Doesn’t matter if we’re buying a washing machine or a shrimp cocktail, whatever the exchange of information entails, the bullet points magically become ingrained in our mental rolodex of product information.
Facts get collated against cross referenced weighted variables specific to each encounter, and source.
We analyze, keep the good, dump the bad, and somehow develop an idea of how our buying experience will transpire, all before we even taste the grub, test the tool, or tune the engine.
Why?
Because someone told us so.
What’s In a Burrito?
If you think that’s a bold claim, just try this little social experiment. Try asking anyone within earshot their favorite burrito place.
Now we’re not saying information overload is not a possibility, we’re just saying people are more than willing to share their opinions.
And we listen and retain that info more than you’d think.
Try it, then later see if you can formulate any idea of who told you what, what you retained from them, and how complete the synopsis was.
Our bet is you’ll have the next 3 burrito places near you lined up for a visit.
Now take that info acquired and thought process required, then reduce the time transpired into nanoseconds. Now broadcast the results across the social stratosphere to anyone searching locally for the same type of information.
According to Gordon Gecko, information is the world’s most valuable commodity.
Court it, and enable the sharing of it amongst your customers.
Tune in next week to see Part 2 of the Google Zagat saga…we’ll at least try to back up opinion and conjecture with cold hard facts.
Comments, snide remarks, and scathing online reviews welcome…
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