Moderator Peter Krasilovsky led a session Monday afternoon on how several leading vertical sites are successfully leveraging social media. As sites that are focused on a specific business, profession or user need, verticals will typically contain a directory, specialized editorial content, expert Q&A, advertising, etc. Panelists were:
-Mark Britton, CEO and President, Avvo
-Pete Flint, CEO, Trulia.com
-Matt …

Avvo, the Seattle-based vertical site that launched its lawyer ratings service in 2007, has now added doctor ratings, using the proceeds, in part, from a $10 million raise it did in March. In launching a doctors site, it goes head to head against Angie’s List, Everydayhealth.com and dozens of others that view doctor ratings and …

Angie’s List, the premium ratings and review service for home and medical services, has announced that it has raised $22.5 Million from institutional investors as it prepares for an IPO within 18 months. Investors in this round include some public funds managers, including Wasatch Funds.   The company previously raised $48 million, making for a grand …

Yelp has added to its international portfolio, following up on its May launch in France with a launch in Germany. Berlin and Munich are Yelp’s first German markets. Fifteen additional German markets have been seeded with “scout” reviews, but won’t be fully turned on for a bit.
These markets include Bielefeld, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, …

For the past six months or so, Mark Canon, Yell’s head of online, has been looking to either buy or partner his company’s way into the recommendations and reviews space. As he put it, “At the center, our business is about generating and capturing content about merchants.”
Canon and Yell settled on acquiring the U.K. review …

Real estate and rental agents get into big trouble if they mouth off about a neighborhood’s quality-of-life issues. The most they can do is point to Web sites that provide some general stats (i.e., school info, crime stats and market trends).
Now Trulia is getting deeper, a la user-generated content. Three weeks ago, it launched ratings …

Redbeacon, one of the new breed of social/local leads providers for SMBs, said it is now available throughout the entire Bay Area and teaming up with BigTent, a mega-moms network in the Bay Area with more than 100 local cells. BigTent will receive a revenue share carved from Redbeacon’s 10 percent commission.
The deal between BigTent …

AT&T Interactive has put up a beta version of its new Buzz.com site dedicated to eliciting positive social recommendations and answers to questions from friends, friends of friends and throughout the Buzz site (which, unfortunately, may get confused with Google Buzz, which was developed after AT&T had announced plans for Buzz.com.)
The site’s main purpose is …

Self-serve ads will bring the SMB masses to the Web. But they haven’t made much of a dent in SMB advertising at this point. That hasn’t stopped a rush of new self-serve products coming out, several married to social media features. The latest is “minute ads” from AlikeList, one of the new crop of social/directory …

Bono and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman
As widely reported last week, Yelp has confirmed that it will receive a $25 million investment from Elevation Partners, which is widely known for the involvement of U2 frontman Bono among its seven partners.  Elevation, which manages $1.9 billion, will also seek to increase its total investment to $100 million …