“Local businesses are core to our communities, but the impact of COVID-19 has been tough on business owners. Over the past few months, we’ve added tools and features to make it easier for businesses to keep customers informed, including the ability to add dining options and updated hours to Business Profiles.“
‘
Dominique McGowan
Program Manager, Local Small Business Products

Recently we’ve noted that Google is adding new local-oriented features to Business Profiles of verified brick & mortar stores (or, “physical storefront”) restaurants, and other Main Sreet small businesses. Google has also been adding tools and features to make it easier for local businesses to keep local customers informed, including the ability to add changing dining options and updated hours. 

Yesterday (May 11, 2020), Google announced it is adding “support links” to its Business Profiles. With this feature, merchants can provide their customers with donations or gift card links.

To start, Google is partnering with PayPal and GoFundMe for donations. For gift cards, merchants can link directly to the relevant page on their website or to their gift card offerings with one of Google’s eligible partners, which include Square, Toast, Clover and Vagaro.

(While Google is not charging merchants or consumers any fees, there may be partner processing fees associated with campaigns.)

According to McGowan, the feature launch will begin with a subset of businesses “to protect against misuse” with plans to expand to more countries, merchants, and partners in a safe and responsible way. The feature will first be rolled to the following countries:

• United States
• Canada
• United Kingdom
• Ireland
• Australia
• New Zealand

Business eligibility

According to Google, participation eligibility criteria includes:

• Businesses must be verified before March 1, 2020.
• Businesses must have a physical storefront.
• Owners and site managers of the Business Profile can use the posts feature to add gift-cards and donation links.
• The feature is available only in select countries.

For more information visit Google My Business help.

As we’ve shared often, millions of small businesses have adopted digital tools for all facets of their business, from logistics to marketing to managing money. Despite that, there are still millions of small businesses who seem steadfast in their belief that digital tools are irrelevant to their business. Building on research it commissioned from Deloitte last year, Google recently added more analysis to better understand the barriers small businesses face in adopting digital tools, or that are “digitally advanced,” as Deloitte describes such businesses.  Digitally advanced refers to a business’ use of certain digital tools that help companies build stronger, more profitable relationships with customers.

• A video replay of a Google live stream about the new research can be found at the bottom of this page.
• The Deloitte research report can be found here.

Deloitte’s research findings highlights

Rural-based small businesses are less likely to be using advanced digital tools than their non-rural counterparts

While they face many similar challenges to non-rural small businesses, U.S. small businesses in rural areas were twice as likely to report having an inadequate Internet connection.

Digital tools adoption growing fastest among women-owned small businesses

Deloitte’s research found that women-led businesses are more likely to be using digital tools than all small businesses. However, there is room for growth.

The smallest businesses are less likely to be using advanced digital tools

Barriers that small businesses say are preventing them from fully using digital tools

Those who don’t use digital tools gave these reasons.

“Many small business owners tell us they want to be doing more with digital, but they often don’t know where to start or have enough time to decide which tools to use,” says Google’s Soo Young Kim.  “To introduce busy small business owners to digital tools that can help them grow, we designed Google’s Get Your Business Online training program as a way to get started and better understand the value these tools can offer.”

Video provided by Google

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Ashwath Rajan and Paul McDonald have what appears to be a clever startup idea. At a glance, the concept is a mashup of the video-rental Red Box vending machines, Best Buy airport kiosks,  other airport food vending concepts and the Amazon’s Instant Pickup service we recently noted. Those and a throw-back cigarette machine.

Rajan and McDonald also have Silicon Valley financial backing and are both former Google employees. Nothing about their idea suggests the business model they’ve developed hinges on competing with Latin American family businesses. But the founders named their company Bodega, a Spanish word that New Yorkers and others use to describe neighborhood small convenience stores. The founders, again with no need to but obviously in love with the name they had decided on, also described the startup’s mission in a way that made them sound like they are out to replace one of the most beloved institutions in major cities across the U.S.: the family-owned corner market.

Both miscues set back any notion that being a former Googler makes you understand how the web works as during the past 72 hours, the two founders’ startup  idea has been described as “the startup everyone hates” on websites ranging from CityLab.com to Digg.com to Vanity Fair.

It started on Wednesday (9.13.17) when Rajan (left) and McDonald unveiled Bodega by providing a FastCompany.com writer an exclusive story. Expecting the response well-funded former Googlers typically receive when their startups are revealed, the two were surprised (shocked? dumfounded?) to discover the internet responded with a massive shove of push-back about the concept’s name, Bodega.

Even more damaging to the startup was their use of certain language which came off sounding like their goal is to crush mom-and-pop corner markets. (This is something they later-in-the day vigorously denied. However, readers of SmallBusiness.com know that it is not a good excuse when you blame others for such miscommunication, according to Osmo Wiio.)

A branding and naming trainwreck

In a nutshell, here’s what’s behind the outrage towards a simple idea.

Bodega is a term used in the Latin American community for the type of corner store the company is trying to disrupt (or seemed to be until they vigorously denied they are). When asked by the Fast Company reporter if the founders were concerned the name may be culturally insensitive, co-founder Paul McDonald’s response sounded as if he was surprised by the question:

“I’m not particularly concerned about it….We did surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said ‘no’. It’s a simple name and I think it works.”

To anyone who has been involved with any market research (other than the kind that involves talking with your friends), such a claim about the preferences of those surveyed sends up a red flag. In the history of scientific opinion research, has any tested product name ever received a 97% approval response? Especially, if the word being tested is a cross-cultural term?

Within a few hours of the Bodega announcement on Wednesday, what seemed like 3% of the entire internet began a Bodega backlash. Here’s an example:

The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development in New York addressed the matter in a statement.

“The awful irony of naming the company ‘Bodega’ after the very brick and mortar institutions they aim to displace…is offensive, utterly misguided, and frankly disrespectful to New Yorkers,” 

On the internet, the company’s name was quickly satirized with the hashtag #Brodega (neither co-founder is Latin American) and a trending #Bodega.

Then some big names started weighing in on the topic, like the creator and star of Alexander, Lin-Manuel Miranda:

*read the bodega thing a day late*
What the-
*reads the ENTIRE WORLD STANDING UP FOR BODEGAS*
Sigh. I love y’all, thanks. pic.twitter.com/thcG2WLFaP

— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) September 14, 2017

And then there’s this biting essay by Scott Simon heard nationally on NPR:

Don’t mess with the beloved bodega

Not only did the name outrage some in the Latin American community, especially in New York City where the name “bodega” is synonymous with a beloved, family-owned corner market, but the concept, itself, was labeled as another assault on urban small businesses.

If this came as a  surprise to the founders, they don’t read the New York Times (or SmallBusiness.com, for that matter) where we have covered the challenge family-owned corner markets in New York are facing. They are becoming an endangered species due to skyrocketing rent. (One of the startup’s claims is that they don’t have to pay rent.)

While McDonald later used the Bodega blog to deny their concept’s threat to small businesses, co-founder McDonald (no relation to Ronald) didn’t help his argument earlier when he told Fast Company,

“Eventually, centralized shopping locations won’t be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you.”

While that may sound to most people to be another way of saying, “our competitors are bodegas,” it didn’t to McDonald:

“Challenging the urban corner store is not and has never been our goal. Corner stores have been fixtures of their neighborhoods for generations…. We want to bring commerce to places where commerce currently doesn’t exist. Rather than take away jobs, we hope Bodega will help create them. We see a future where anyone can own and operate a Bodega — delivering relevant items and a great retail experience to places no corner store would ever open.”Bottomline

Bottomline

Competition is a good thing. Startups are a good thing. Being a former Googler can be a good thing. But remember what tu abuela taught you when she told you the old adage noted earlier: You only get one chance to make a first good impression.

As for the market research that showed 97% of the people surveyed loved the name Bodega, McDonald admitted in his blog post that “… it’s clear that we may not have been asking the right questions of the right people.”

It takes only a glance to recognize that Bodega’s vending kiosks are no bodegas. (They’re more like the tiny house of retailing) And frankly, except for the culturally misdirected name and the unnecessary implication that the startup has something to do with competing with Latin American small business owners, the idea seems clever.

But please, don’t call it a bodega.

(VIA | WPLN.org, Nashville Tenn.) In a small town or rural areas, when the economy turns down or the big manufacturing plant shuts down, most people may think the solution is recruiting another big manufacturing company,” writes Chas Sisk, a reporter with WPLN-FM, the public radio station in Nashville, Tenn. But not Perry County, Tenn. Eight years ago, unemployment peaked at a shade below 30 percent — the worst in Tennessee. Things were so bad, the state paid employers just to put people to work. It was billed as a modern twist on the New Deal. Today, the rural community of 8,000 nestled along the Tennessee and Buffalo rivers, has an unemployment of only 5 percent.

Hear the radio version of this story at WPLN.org or click the arrow below.

Linden, Tenn. County seat of Perry County

How did Perry County foster such growth?

“Small businesses,” says Will Nunley, executive director of the Perry County Chamber of Commerce. Nunley is referring to “startups, mom-and-pop shops, and even entrepreneurs – It’s those types of businesses that are interested in our community. I believe we can have just as much success incubating  small businesses that will have ten employees than to focus on trying to recruit a new, large plant).”

Perry County lessons

• Support smaller employers who have a deeper commitment to the community — or who aren’t so big that they could tear the local economy apart if things don’t work out.
• Improve the town’s infrastructure: Rather than invest in recruiting big manufacturing plants, Perry County improved the county’s broadband service and refurbished the town’s retail area.

(Continue reading at WPLN.org…)

Have you ever wondered how the time it takes for you to get to work compares with the commute of others? These two interactive visualizations from the website Overflow Data show the average commute time for every county (top) and state (bottom) in the U.S. The data is from the American Community Survey (ACS) which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.The top chart provides county-by-county data and the second one provides a state-by-state look. The data refers to mean travel time to work in minutes.

Local restaurants and shops in busy parts of town have a challenge when it comes to attracting customers to their places of business: Parking! Also, driving across town for a sales call can be especially daunting because you don’t know how much time to devote to finding something everyone needs: Parking.

To help solve the challenge, Google Maps is rolling out a new “parking difficulty icon” in “Google Maps for Android” that will give users a heads up on what kind of parking crunch to prepare for when you’re on the go. (Look for it on the iPhone app soon.)

To see how hard it might be to park where you’re headed, just get directions to your destination and look for the parking difficulty icon in the directions card at the bottom of the screen. Parking difficulties range from limited to medium to easy and are based on historical parking data.

SmallBusiness.com

Parking difficulty icons are available on the Google Maps Android app in these U.S. cities

• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Miami
• Atlanta
• Boston
• Charlotte
• Chicago
• Detroit
• Los Angeles
• Minneapolis/St. Paul
• New York City
• Orlando
• Philadelphia
• Pittsburgh
• San Diego
• St. Louis,
• Tampa
• Washington, DC
• Cleveland
• Dallas/Fort Worth
• Denver
• Houston
• Phoenix
• Portland
• Sacramento

VIA | Google.com | Used with permission

istock

Last August, we shared that Google would start penalizing mobile sites that contain certain types of interstitial messages or ads this month. So there’s no surprise that Google has now announced the”interstitial penalty” has begun.

Google’s interstitial ban is meant to improve the mobile user experience. When accessing a site the penalty targets sites that:

• Show a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.
• Displays a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
• Uses a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.

VIA | Mike Blumenthal

istock

Also on SmallBusiness.com

Google Will Start Penalizing Your Website on Mobile if You Don’t Stop Doing This | 2016

Rural and small town business trends are often very different from urban business trends. So when it comes to understanding small town and rural small business trends, we turn to our favorite expert on the topic, Becky McCray, creator of Small Biz Survival, SaveYour.Town and a regular contributor to SmallBusiness.com. (Note: The trends outlined in this article will be explored more in a SaveYour.Town online broadcast on January 18, 2017. Details at the end of this article.)

This year, rural and urban business trends continue to diverge, creating much broader megatrends; redefining the meaning of distance and geography, reshaping retail business, and rethinking what kind of lives we want to live.

1 | Redefining geographic limits

Lines on a map used to define small towns. Small towns felt isolated from the world of big cities as information, communication and technology innovations were often slow in reaching beyond city suburbs.

Lines on a map mean little today. A series of developments stretching back over a century have shortened the distance between any small town and any major city in the world.

Think about all that went into getting us to this point:

• Rural postal service
• Rural electrification
• Telephone cooperatives
• Global and overnight shipping
• Internet access
• Cell phone service and mobile devices

Looking ahead, consider the innovations that are in the process of completely reshaping the cost of moving and connection people and goods:

• Advanced automation in manufacturing, processing, and transportation
• Self-driving vehicles
• Delivery drones
• 3-D printing
• Augmented and virtual reality
• Telepresence robots

Here are ways rural businesses can capitalize on such trends

RuralSourcing | Rural people are finding work as independent professionals or contingent workers, connecting them to the larger economy, often at better pay rates than strictly local jobs.

RuralOmniLocal | More local businesses are selling online and going omnichannel using their own websites, platforms like Amazon or Etsy, social channels, apps and even monthly subscription boxes to reach customers more deeply.

Innovative Business Models | Old business structures aren’t the only way to go into business anymore. Smaller, shared, temporary, and mobile businesses are all increasing. Community and cooperative ownership structures are replacing traditional ownership in challenging business cases.

2 | Customers are changing retail

During the 1970s and 80s, when downtown Main Streets were emptying out and everyone was predicting the complete eradication of independent retail, no one predicted that eventually, Chain Store Age would admit that “Mom and Pops are Cool Again.” Now, big box retailing has triggered its own scale implosion, as chains close stores, reduce square footages and try to retool to imitate that small-town downtown feeling.

The same technologies that are reducing geographic limits apply also to retail as retail splits into two main branches: The infinite and the selective.

Infinite retailers will capture the no-thought automatic re-orders for anything that doesn’t matter

Small independent retailers will shine for carefully considered selections of things where the experience matters most.

The big boxes will be caught in between and will capture less and less.

Here are ways rural businesses can capitalize on such trends

RuralOmniLocal | Small retailers are adopting technology that lets them bring the best of online information and tools directly to the real-world of stores for a mixed real and virtual experience. Think of wish lists, related product recommendations, user reviews, and expanded product information. Tie that to a knowledgeable staff and a curated selection, and you’ve got an experience that can win.

Keep your eye on Amazon | Their retail experiments with bricks and mortar, same-day delivery and instant walk-out checkout predict technology that all retailers will be adopting later.

3 | #SmallTownCool

Society is rethinking a good life and showing a new interest in our rural lifestyles. You may have to look closer, however, as some of this interest is camouflaged in such terms as “local,” “place,” and “cozy,” among others..”

Small-town travel articles are appearing in Washingtonian Magazine, TravelSmith, and even the Weather Channel. UK travelers are heading to the Deep South even before they visit big cities. The big fad for everything “hygge” (the Danish word for “cozy” that SmallBusiness.com described recently) is another disguised interest in the rural life– with its emphasis on experiences like friends coming in from a snowy hike in the woods to enjoy a fire and hot chocolate together. The focus of such “comfort marketing” are people, places and culture, not things.

Here are ways rural businesses can capitalize on such trends

Hygge | Businesses that depend on visitors are talking up their slower pace of life, conviviality, and authentic cultural experiences. You don’t even have to call it “hygge,” as long as you connect with people’s interest in simplicity, calm, and connection.

Placemaking | Small town businesses are getting involved in their communities and improving their quality of life. Arts projects, walkability, public spaces, and grassroots actions reflect a new paradigm for community involvement.

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Deb Brown and Becky McCray will explore these trends in more depth and look to the next 30 years in a live broadcast on January 18, 2017. (The recording will be available on-demand throughout the year.) Learn more about the event at SaveYour.Town/Webinar-Trends.

If you own a business along a street or in a neighborhood that is being revitalized with buildings under renovation, roadwork or new construction, it’s often a good news-bad news situation. Good news: Individuals and municipalities  are investing in something that should add value to your business in the long term. Bad news: The chaos of roadwork or another company’s construction could cause customers to avoid your street completely.

This is your challenge: How to keep sales thriving until the end of the project.

Does your community provide construction mitigation assistance?

Most communities across the U.S., provide various types of services–even financial compensation in a few–to help mitigate the impact of street construction on the operation of a business. One of the few studies of the use of community assistance to small businesses during construction is one done in 2010 by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study was developed for Madison, Wisconsin and revealed these construction mitigation activities of 33 communities in Wisconsin

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No mitigation? Still, ask for assistance and cooperation from local agencies

If loans, compensation or another form of assistance is not available, the most valuable help a city can provide is lots of heads-up. In many instances, a city knows far in advance that construction will be taking place. Zoning and construction permits often take months. Re-paving plans are scheduled years in advance. Subscribe to email updates from any relevant city departments, like zoning or public works. Knowing far enough in advance can provide the planning period you need to plan for the disruption period.

Start an alliance with all impacted businesses

We have stressed the importance of working together with other businesses to jointly market a village or neighborhood marketplace. This is especially true when a part of, or all of the business district is facing a challenge like construction. Develop planning groups that can work on marketing and promotional activities that will turn the construction period into a branded event with special discounts and promotions.

Use social media, email and the web to communicate with customers

Use the months leading up the project to keep customers informed. This is best done cooperatively with other businesses in the community. On a special website, provide maps of temporary parking areas. Use Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to show photos of progress and to remind customers of special events, discounts and activities. Keep your customers informed on how important it is–and how much you appreciate them–for their support during the construction project.

Become friends with contractors and their crews

Despite the way you may really feel, go out of your way to welcome the workers. Helping them out will result in them seeking to work in ways that minimize the impact of their work on your operation.

Celebrate the finish with a big event

To let the greater community know that the construction is complete, throw a party or another type of event. Use it to thank customers for their support–and to remind them to let their friends know your business is back to normal (except better).

Note: Finally, we’ve found a reason to use this throw-back, early internet era, blinking caution light. Enjoy.

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Have you ever headed out for a business meeting late in the day only to discover yourself in the middle of a traffic jam caused by 15,000 people driving into downtown to attend a concert by a rock group you’ve never heard of? If not, congratulations. Having an office within a few blocks of several major performance and sports venues, this happens to me several times a year. “What’s going on?” I wonder as I u-turn and seek escape. “Oh, no. This is the day of that big concert by a rock group I’ve never heard of before.”

Here’s some good news for those whose business requires them to be in a car for a portion of each day. Waze, a favorite travel app of SmallBusiness.com users, is adding a program for the planners of major events to alert users of upcoming events and to communicate with attendees in real-time about road closures or alternative route suggestions on the day of the game, concert, festival, etc.

The feature will allow events coordinators to enter in their event, pick a date and time, then select the road closures and other things that might be impacted.

Right now, the launch partners are limited primarily to sports teams, including NFL and college football games. Soon they will include concerts by rock groups I’ve never heard of.

Also on SmallBusiness.com

SmallBusiness.com User Favorites: Business Travel Apps

VIA | Waze
HT | Lifehacker

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