In the age of mobile & social, its more important than ever for SMBs to get their arms around all of the chatter happening about their business. We discussed the state of affairs in local reputation and “presence management” this week with Vendasta (video below).

The opportunity is being driven by things like Yelp reviews, but also newer social sharing media like Instagram. Better hardware and camera optics have fueled the social sharing movement which is increasingly happening in transactional contexts (i.e. dining out).

As one example of mobile’s influence, 40 percent of Yelp reviews happen via mobile. And according to Vendasta’s Jeff Tomlin, Facebook is trending highest as a source of local reviews on its platform. We have a white paper releasing soon on local reviews.

Meanwhile, the discussion with Vendasta happens in light of its recent platform release: Mast10x. This brings together many of the above factors and opportunities into a package for local media resellers to offer presence management to SMBs.

The company describes the platform as follows

MAST 10x is a marketing automation and sales transformation system for agencies that sell local marketing solutions to SMBs. Where most marketing automation systems rely on agencies to write generalized email campaign content, MAST 10x generates a personalized marketing assessment and emails that follow up with information about the businesses digital footprint and marketing efforts. As businesses engage and show interest, they are flagged in a sales reporting system so that sales teams can focus efforts on interested targets.

Jeff Tomlin and I unpack the opportunity in the video below.