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Want to be transparent and do it in a high-tech way? Google is trying to help you for free. Google’s Favorite Places is a business-to-consumer program where participating local businesses will have a window decal from Google that can be scanned by a person’s iPhone to extract instant data.

That means, your furniture store or restaurant will yield a query on Google along with starred reviews and your website so people can browse on-the-street and on-the-web. Fact is, the marriage is increasingly part of the retail landscape: browsing on the street, inquiring by the web.

The Power of Customer Reviews

And negative or positive, people really like customer reviews (and they tend to trust them). For example, according to Internet hosting site 1&1, four in 10 UK shoppers rely on independent online reviews or recommendations before buying items. One in four consumers look for customer service commitments on the store’s web sites.

Today’s shopping behavior has changed radically, and local businesses can quickly embrace this trend by enrolling in Google’s program or by even posting both positive and negative reviews on their website or in-store.

Our Pizza Sucks

To think of it another way, Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco handed out staff T-shirts to their employees, donning reviews from Yelp with quotes like “this place sucks” and the pizza was soooo greasy.” It is a way to embrace the negative and turn it into something positive by acknowledge their short-comings. Obviously no business is perfect and by putting that truth in front of others (via T-shirts) we see how there’s opportunity in customer reviews that may have not existed several years ago.

It’s a way to show that a business may have nothing to hide, and realistically, you can’t please everyone so why fight it? Embrace it. The pizza joint, which blasts punk rock music with staff donning throwback sneakers, is the perfect outlet for such playfulness.

But this may not pertain to your particular business, maybe you can’ t hand out edgy T-shirts  with the word “sucks” on them. As one T-Shirt says “We celebrate the good, but not as much as we focus on the bad…It’s a public flogging.”

Make Lemonade out of Lemons

Yet, social networks like Yelp do give business owners a new way to dialogue with their customers—even if it’s negative. Businesses can respond directly to customer reviews on yelp and they also have a forum on Twitter.

It’s obvious that  the business landscape has changed, and while customers are as empowered as they’ve ever been,  and maybe so has small business. And as with Google’s new service, we see that our online reputation is becoming as important as our offline one–and the two will be difficult to differentiate in the coming years.

A Guest Post by Michael Mitchell:

As an senior consumer trends analyst and consultant, Mike Mitchell has profiled and reported on emerging consumer trends throughout the globe. From people raising urban chickens for eggs to bolster the local food movement to the emergence of colored beers like electric green and fluorescent blue, he has continually unlocked some of the deepest and most fascinating forms of modern consumer behavior.  His interests lie primarily in crowd behavior and crowd intelligence, as well as consumer sentiment, sector blending,  the irrationality of buying and Gen Y trends.

Prior to working in new media consulting and consumer trends, Mike was a reporter for the Naperville Sun. There he wrote for the features, sports and city government departments but also contributed to Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Southtown, Naperville Sun, Indiana Post-Tribune, and Aurora Beacon. He has contributed to the Chicago Tribune, WGN TV, CLTV in Chicago as well as numerous blogs.
As a reporter, Mike covered the political scene (interviewing personalities such as Barack Obama, Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert and Jenna Bush), and essayed product and behavioral trends.

Mike has a Masters in Science from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, becoming among one of its youngest graduate degree holders at the age of 23, as well as a B.A. in Journalism and minor in Business Administration from Lewis University.