@YogurtimeUpland - I am eating my words

At one point I held over a dozen mayorships in Foursquare, but as the service has become more popular, I have lost every one of my mayorships except for one - the mayorship for Yogurtime, a frozen yogurt place at 110 South Mountain in Upland, California.

I've only written about Yogurtime once in my Empoprise-IE Inland Empire blog - in a December 2009 post that looked at the brouhaha between certain customers of Yogurtime and the Upland High Gay-Straight Alliance.

But I did write about Yogurtime at length in my Empoprise-BI business blog - in a post (also from December 2009) that noted that Yogurtime didn't really control the online marketing of their business. Search results for Yogurtime were dominated by results from Yelp and other sources - and by a Yogurtime Twitter page. Just one problem:

Yogurtime's Twitter account ranks very highly in Google search results. Only problem is that this @yogurtime Twitter account is for a Yogurtime in Hong Kong.

So, because I know how to spell SEO, I made a humble suggestion:

So all the folks in Upland need to do is to establish a @yogurtimeupland Twitter account, and hopefully all the third-party content on Yogurtime will be pushed down the search queue....

I'd email Yogurtime with these suggestions...but their email is not listed. Perhaps they'll find this post and at least set up a Twitter account to communicate with their customers online.

And maybe they'll implement privileges for FourSquare mayors. :) One can only hope...

Well, it's now several months later, and I spent a little bit of time on Sunday afternoon in Yogurtime (maintaining my mayorship, of course). While there, I noticed that Yogurtime HAS set up a @YogurtimeUpland Twitter account. While I seriously doubt that my post prompted them to do this - I don't even know if they ever saw my post - I'm glad to see that Yogurtime has joined its Hong Kong brethren in the Twitter world.

The first @YogurtimeUpland tweet was on April 10, and by April 20 they were already offering online specials:

Today only: whisper 3Free to the cashier to receive 3 ounces of yogurt for free!

Unfortunately, not many people know about the Twitter account yet. When I began following the account this afternoon, there were only two other followers. But even though there are only three followers, the Twitter presence is already yielding positive results. While a Google search of "Yogurtime" still results in the Yelp listing being the first entry, the @YogurtimeUpland Twitter account has climbed up to third (after the Foursquare entry). My December 2009 Empoprise-BI blog post has fallen to 19th.

Imagine what will happen when more people find out about the Twitter account. Yogurtime will have more control over their online presence and reputation. And that can be a good thing.