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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

City Waboo Links Business Sites to Social Networks

An advertising budget of $39 won’t go far for any business. It won’t get many fliers, and certainly cannot rent a billboard or buy time on television or radio. But City Waboo has a deal for you. For that $39, Eduard Arakelyan and partner Armen Akopyan will post a company profile on their website complete with product or service descriptions, photos, contact information and a customer comment section. Other websites can make similar claims – City Search, for example – but what makes City Waboo different is the capability to link the profile through social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook to get a company’s name out to hundreds, if not thousands, more customers. “Were taking word of mouth and putting technology behind it,” Arakelyan said. Arakelyan and Akopyan found their initial success through a website promoting businesses in Burbank and Glendale. Not wanting to limit themselves to two cities, they expanded their concept nationally through City Waboo. They beta-tested the site last spring and officially launched it just before Christmas. City Waboo has listings in every zip code in the nation with a concentration on 15 major cities with the highest populations. The name, by the way, came in a moment Arakelyan described as an epiphany and was tested with focus groups, friends and family. Traditional forms of advertising won’t cut it anymore as newspaper circulation drops and devices such as TiVo allow viewers to skip television commercials. Customers find no relevance in just picking a business out of the phone book or as more likely happens these days, from a search engine. While online advertising accounts for less than 10 percent of all ad spending, it still brought in $21.1 billion in 2007, according to preliminary figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. That is a 25 percent increase over the $16.9 billion earned in 2006. When looking for a new restaurant, a reliable mechanic or a dentist, people generally rely on their family and friends for recommendations. Those personal recommendations were what Arakelyan and Akopyan went after with the social networking capabilities at the site. “When we first came out in beta last May and June, a lot of people who approached us said it was great but if they were going out to a restaurant or needed a lawyer or something they were going to ask their inner circle,” Arakelyan said. The pair comes from an advertising background having operated Trimark Advertising for more than 10 years. Their fondness for assisting small businesses comes from having parents who are business owners Arakelyan’s operate a flower shop and Akopyan’s a restaurant. Even small business owners find going online is necessary for marketing and advertising purposes. Finding someone you can trust is harder. “If you do not have a reliable vendor you can depend on that can effect the growth of your business,” said Ray Shahin, owner of Le Soleil Day Spa and Salon in Glendale who has a profile on City Waboo. After starting the business two years ago, Shahin fired the companies he worked with to create a website. Then he found Trimark, which helped not only with the website but also business cards and other media buys. “The business took off pretty quick from the way they built my website,” Shahin said. In creating a profile for the site, Arakelyan stresses how the business itself gets involved, working with a marketing department that helps them refine their keywords to optimize searches and how to best describe their product or service. “As the website grows and more and more people see their listing, more and more buzz gets generated,” Arakelyan said.

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