Yokld - New Local Business Ranking Social...

Today I am speaking with Jay Mallinckrodt from Yokld.com.

Q. What is Yokld.com? A. Yokld is a “Best Of” local business ranking social platform that is 100% compiled and commented on by users.  The idea is simple - the more times a business gets “Yokl’d” (voted for) the higher in the rankings it will be listed.

Q. How did you come up with the name? A. We were looking for a relatively short available domain name that highlighted the drilled down nature of the local directory we planned to build when we came up with Yokld.com.  Yokld is a play on the term “Local Yokel” with a couple letters removed and others mashed together.

Q. Who is behind Yokld.com? A. Yokld has been founded by myself, focused on marketing and site development, and the following partners: Joel Dow - Technical and Site Development Jim Glynn – Marketing and Sales

The three of us have been working on the Yokld concept for the last six/seven months.  We all work full time in different industries and are focusing on Yokld in our free time.

Q. How does it work? A. The Yokld user community can:

• Add their favorite local businesses to the site
• Vote through a 1-click process for preferred local businesses
• Build and maintain a portfolio of elite local businesses that can be referenced and shared with others (check out my list of local favorites)
• Post and read positive or negative comments about a business
• Rank user comments based on usefulness and accuracy

Q. What make Yokld different from the other on-line directories? A. The Yellow Pages only provides alphabetical lists or listings differentiated by the size of an advertisement. Therefore, the only way for a user to make a distinction is through the amount of money spent by a particular company. This does not assist in discriminating good experiences from bad.

Search engine results simply provide electronic Yellow Pages or paid placement ads. Again, this information doesn’t help separate the great from the mediocre.  Local search sites like CitySearch and Yelp! provide user generated content for local businesses using a controversial five-star rating system. Users debate the use of the five-star rating because people within the general population have very different tastes. This ranking system provides no way to tell if a group of people ranking a business shares the same tastes as a specific user.

We will continue tomorrow…