The Old Google Local is now back in a new avatar — Google Places. Here you can have a Profile page with listing in the local maps. All of us know that Google Local did give us a Profile page and a Listing in maps but what is special now…

You can answer back to the reviews that you receive. This gives you a chance to explain yourself as a business and you can “deal” with any negative feedback which you think has been wrongly put. You can Navigate to your profile page and there you can answer you reviews as the owner publicly thus having a chance to manage your negative publicity.

The more you answer your reviews, the more active your profile page is and the more social media power track you receive.

So to put it in simple terms

What Is there for me?

1. I can answer my clients
2. I can deal with the ORM Black mails
3. The Power Balance is achieved to a certain level, yup we know it was moving too much towards the consumers..
4. Get the On hand Consumer views of your business..And improve.

The only point to chew on is that will you go for each review or just choose to respond some or none. There are companies who have “learnt their lesson” from Social media as in some select cases it is the best option to ignore a “fire” and it is likely to go out by itself.

Saikat has just written a good post on Earth Day. It’s true; we often forget such days, we often forget what this Earth means to us.

There is no need to celebrate 22^nd April as Earth Day; everyday should be treated as Earth Day. But, it is not possible for everyone. So let’s celebrate this week as Earth Week.

Earth Week Memo:

• Let’s do whatever we can (physically) to make a mark – plant a tree, clean our locality or whatever you feel to go green.
• Let’s spread the word around – those who have blog, write a post on Earth Week; those who can design create something with the caption – go green and post it.

A contest:

We had a talk with our CEO in this regard and he is ready to “Go Green”. And so, here is a small little contest. The winner will be given a surprise gift from Softz Solutions.

1. Write a post or design something around the idea – Go Green / Earth Week and post it in your blog.
2. Write a comment in this post or trackback when you have published it.
3. The post with the maximum number of comments will be selected the winner.

Let’s spread the word around – it is as important as planting a tree yourself.

One rule – the post must be written between 22/04/2008 to 27/04/2008

So are you ready to take the memo?