Here’s a great piece from Newsweek (Thanks Tim Cohn) about how a local business in LA used Twitter to accelerate growth and become very successful as a result.
Here’s the video.
Because Twitter is simple to use it might see more rapid and widespread adoption by local businesses as a CRM or promotional tool than other online marketing methods. It’s much easier than, for example, SEM.
In updating my Facebook status I usually just make funny statements — I think they’re funny. But I asked this morning via mobile “where is the best burger in the Bay Area?”:
In about 5 or so minutes I got four responses, all of which were pretty good. I imagine I’ll get a bunch more later today.
Using the Facebook status update as a Q&A tool just requires a bit of a “cultural shift.” But there are lots of tools in Facebook to get recommendations or answers from people.
I wonder how many people use Facebook for advice like this, whether it’s about burgers or more serious/considered matters?
Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle location enabling service has been relatively quiet since coming out of beta several months ago.
Many people didn’t initially know what it was or intended to do. Fire Eagle isn’t a destination or application in itself. It is a way to set (manually or automatically) your location so that third party sites or publishers could then tap into it and deliver more precise content. Privacy was well safeguarded by a range of tools; Google borrowed the manual location setting from Fire Eagle for its Latitude service.
When Dan Miller and I met with Yahoo!’s Marc Davis we asked about the status of Fire Eagle and he said it was alive and well. Apparently so.
Today Yahoo! announced a Fire Eagle Facebook application called “Friends on Fire” that enables location sharing with Facebook contacts:
We’ve made an application called Friends on Fire that brings together Facebook and our Fire Eagle project to help you quickly and easily share your location with your trusted friends. And you can post little messages on the map, too, to recommend bars or restaurants, or to suggest meeting up for a beer!
Yahoo! also announced a Firefox extension that allows users to update Fire Eagle from the browser. Firefox has its own location-sensing/setting tool in Geode.
These efforts are smart to raise the visibility of Fire Eagle and get developers and publishers to use it. Google’s Geolocation for Gears offers similar functionality.
These moves are part of the larger push around location online, which I’ve discussed at length before. IP targeting (or registration) used to be the only way to get a user’s location unless she entered it into a search box. Now there are an emerging array of ways, including those above.
Back to Facebook for a moment. Location is a huge opportunity for Facebook (especially in mobile) that’s currently underutilized. Of course Facebook was all about location in the early days (college and high school identities). But since it has opened up to the mainstream it has not taken full advantage of all the location information and/or the potential it offers as a local utility for both businesses and users. The Oodle powered marketplace uses location of course.
But when will Facebook proper wake up to the local opportunity?
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Related: In fact, I had forgotten, that Facebook has beefed up local ad targeting.
Danny Sullivan has written three long pieces about the rise of Twitter as a search tool. (I’ve been writing about the potential evolution of Twitter into a real-time Q&A tool both here and at LMS.) Danny also talks about the recently launched Vark (from former Googlers):
Vark is a private beta Q&A service that leverages IM and tries to organize people into networks and get them to self classify around areas of expertise. It’s a Q&A service with some thoughtful features it appears. It’s not that far removed from Mosio (w/o the mobile dimension however) or ChaCha or the new text411. Yahoo Answers is also a cousin of this service. Then there are all the so-called “social search” engines that have come and gone.
Elsewhere I’ve called this category “social directory assistance.”
Back to Twitter: there have been several attempts so far to organize Twitter’s local content. There will be many more. One of those is Twellow. I also was informed this morning of another local search tool using Twitter content called ChirpCity:
Then there are Facebook updates and discussion threads. There’s also Yahoo oneConnect (mobile), which allows one-to-many communication among contacts. The list is getting longer.
Not all these services are the same, but conceptually the idea is to leverage human beings to respond to specific questions or queries either in real time or in a near real-time way. Social search, review sites (e.g., Yelp) and Q&A (e.g., Yahoo Answers, Askville, LinkedIn Q&A) are all versions of offline word-of-mouth recommendations.
The promise of “human-powered search” has been around for several years. However none of the sites promoting that concept have really been successful. We’re just starting to see something more viable crystalize and emerge, in all these sites, which may well represent a successor to traditional search — or perhaps a companion to it.
As Danny discusses in one of his posts a key question is trust: how do I trust the answers? One approach is to stratify or classify responses by my network of contacts or those associated with my network. I’ve referred to this problem in the past as one of filtering. Mosio allows you to do this. GoodRec also does this and Vark is taking a similar approach.
All these services require some sort of “critical mass” of users in order to generate sufficient content and ability to respond in real-time or near real-time to the wide range of questions that are thrown at them. Twitter has already achieved this. The next problem, as mentioned, is filtering: both the noise (i.e., in Twitter) and better responses from poorer responses.
Where all these services really shine (potentially) is in a mobile environment, where my access to online tools and information is somewhat more constrained, notwithstanding the iPhone, etc. My patience is also less and my needs may be more immediate. But they need to straddle the PC and mobile as Twitter, Mosio and Facebook do.
I often ask people: if you had access on a mobile device to a one-to-many communication tool that enabled you to ask any question and get a near real-time answer from a trusted source or network, wouldn’t you use that more often than Google? The answer is almost always “yes.”
If an elegant version of what I just described, which is what most of these services are striving for, can be developed it will represent a successor or powerful companion to algorithmic search engines.
In the history of search first there were human-edited directories (e.g., Yahoo! Directory). Then there were simply too many sites, and search engines were used to retrieve information. Google was a better version of search and it became dominant accordingly. Now the amount of information is so overwhelming that people become relevant again. And this is especially true in mobile: I don’t want to sift through tons of information; just give me a few trusted, thoughtful responses and I’ll take it from there.
This is the next frontier for search: real-time answers in a mobile environment.
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Update: I’m informed by Jim Lanzone that Vark does have a mobile capability.
Early on I had a GrandCentral account but let it lapse. After the announcement of Google Voice yesterday I got back in. But it’s not exactly what I expected.
There are lots of nice call management features and the SMS integration is great. I had thought however that it might be a complete substitute for VoIP calling services like Skype or even Vonage. It’s not — at least right now. It’s not a telco substitute. (Perhaps if Google Talk is later integrated.)
I can turn my iPod Touch into a phone with Truphone and a WiFi connection. That’s been useful in several situations, though it sounds like my head is in a fishbowl. Google Voice offers free domestic calling and inexpensive international calls. But what it does is connect calls to an existing phone number:
One must have an operating landline or mobile phone to use the service. Google Talk or Skype or other IM clients allow you to make calls (usually with video) directly from the client. Skype and Truphone will also allow this on mobile handsets. Google Talk, however, only allows calls within the network at the moment.
If you use Google Voice with a mobile phone you’re still using minutes. Since most people have included long distance this doesn’t represent any savings. With a landline, you could in theory ditch your long distance service and make all those calls through Google Voice, connecting them to your local number (it’s similar to Jaxtr in that respect). International calling is where the value of this part of the service kicks in. Calling rates are quite inexpensive. I haven’t compared them to Skype however.
I suspect that Google Talk will become integrated into Google Voice at some point so you’ll be able to make calls directly from the service. For now, however, this doesn’t threaten any of the incumbent telco or even VoIP services.
From the company’s release:
R.H. Donnelley Corporation . . . today reported full year 2008 net revenues of $2,617 million, representing a 2 percent decline from the prior year . . . Full year advertising sales were $2,518 million, down 8 percent from pro forma advertising sales for the prior year.
In the fourth quarter of 2008, net revenue declined 7 percent from the fourth quarter of the prior year to $630 million.
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Related: The NY Times DealBook blog discusses potential bankruptcy for Idearc and similar options for RHD.
I’ve long maintained that YouTube’s early success was at least as much driven by pirated clips and professional content as the UGC material (coke + mentos, star wars kid, cats and lip sync videos). In addition, in my opinion, most of the UGC material becomes boring after awhile if it’s not leavened by the professional content. The perfect video site contains both. And recently YouTube has been trying to incorporate more professionally produced content. They know they must to remain on top long term.
Evidence of this is the rising popularity of Hulu, the NBC-News Corp joint venture that has defied early skeptics to become the number 2 video site:
Hulu has also done a better job of monetization than YouTube.
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Related: Hulu is introducing social networking (Hulu Friends). Here’s more from USA Today and the WSJ.
I’ve written about Google Voice (GrandCentral) over at SEL.
What do you think about its prospects? One way to assess this is to see whether you’re interested, after reading about them, in getting access to these services.
My answer was “yes.”
Google has said that Maps is no longer vulnerable to spam. Mike Blumenthal disagrees and offers a terrific piece at SEL about the state of Google Maps. He presents a strong critique and admonition to Google to mature quickly and bring more “responsibility” to its leadership role in local.
He also posts Google’s Carter Maslan’s response.
Barry Schwartz has a long post on SEL, to which I’ve added a privacy related addendum, about the introduction of what Google is calling “interest-based targeting.” It’s BT with an interesting twist: consumers can opt-out and/or indicate preferences that impact the ads seen.
Here’s the explanatory companion video:
There’s an apparent and potentially growing contradiction between consumer attitudes toward BT and the increasing adoption of it by online advertisers and publishers. As one example, Burst Media recently found (n=4,000 US adults):
Burst also found that “based strictly on a description – advertisements more relevant to interest – only one-in-five (23.2%) respondents would not mind if non-personally identifiable information was collected if ads were better targeted.”
Google’s “preferences” approach — allowing people to specify areas of interest — together with the ability to opt out of targeting may offer a way to bridge the privacy divide.
What do you think?
As an indication of how important and sensitive this is, see not one, not two but all three Google blog posts:
I’m a fan of Engadget and was looking at a clip of the Late Night show (now with comedian Jimmy Fallon). The clip was an interview segment about the Palm Pre. Then I noticed that all around the embedded video are ads for the Pre:
Once upon a time in traditional media this would have been verboten or at least highly suspect; however now this is a “best practice” in some respects — or an example of great ad targeting.
I’ll be speaking (moderating actually) at ThinkMobile in NYC next week (3/17-3/19). It’s a great lineup of players in the mobile world. Matthew Snyder, formerly of Nokia, has programmed the show and brought some terrific people to the event.
Keynotes will be from the 4As, NBCU and AT&T but the panels area also very strong and feature all the relevant people.
There are two basic tracks: content and marketing. My panel is:
Monetization of Location-Based Media A location-sensitive usage case
Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence
Speaker:
This won’t be the “blah, blah, blah . . . mobile is gonna be big” stuff that one often hears at these events.
There’s a ton great content and, as I said, a long list of great speakers. Readers of this blog who are interested can get 15% off the already low conference rate. Use code TMLMS at the appropriate point in the registration process.
The phrase “local search,” once helpful, has now become a problem.
The problem is it’s treated as an advertising category, which obscures what’s going on more broadly. As an advertising category it historically encompasses search, IYP, city guides and maybe a few vertical sites. But “local search” is not a category — or shouldn’t be — it’s a behavior: consumers looking for information about something that will ultimately happen offline (near home/work or during travel).
If we focus on the consumer behavior, which I’ve been trying to argue now for roughly three years, we see the impact of the Internet much more clearly: online driving offline transactions. Then marketers can focus on strategies and tactics that maximize their exposure to consumers at the right time, which implies placements on a whole range of sites and possibly a range of ad units/types.
For local businesses it’s more complicated because they’re not able to do this analysis let alone execute. They have to trust that the sales channels that reach out to them, whether newspaper, YP or agency (ReachLocal, Yodle, OrangeSoda), will perform as promised and deliver “leads” or “customers.” And whether because of SMBs’ confusion or misunderstanding or sales reps over-promising, from everything I know and see, the churn remains fairly high for SMB advertisers with the online products being sold to them.
There’s a long discussion about how large and small advertisers can manage the challenges of online marketing. But for the purposes of this post I wanted to assert that the behavior that comprises “local search” is not just about IYP sites but ultimately cuts across the Internet and is about every stage of the “purchase funnel.”
Andrew Shotland blogs about a YP usage survey that he took over the phone. As with most of Andrew’s posts it’s imbued with a hearty dose of good humor:
“If AT&T’s print yellow pages directory were a person how would you describe it?”
Here were the answers I was supposed to agree or disagree with:
There’s lots and lots of talk going on about print newspapers and what happens next. Here’s a collection of some of those pieces:
David Carr at the NY Times voices a desire for traditional publishers to come together and tell everyone that they’re now going to charge for content. This is something I discussed as an unlikely scenario in an earlier post.
Mark Josephenson (CEO of Outside.in) responds to Carr and encourages newspapers to embrace new models and not look to the past.
Bloomberg writes about what it describes as the “first post-newspaper newspaper wars” going on among online publishers in New Jersey. One of the local combatants is Patch Media.
Time Magazine (once mighty, now itself careening toward irrelevance) republishes a list of the The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. According to the list, they are:
The SF Chronicle publisher Hearst has apparently been approached by its employees’ union to potentially buy the paper.
Not newspapers but in the same general category, the local NY NBC TV affiliate is making a go of “hyperlocal news” with New York Nonstop. The video approach (vs. text) is good. But Forrester conducted a survey that argues, among other things, that most people care more about national than local news. Local or “hyperlocal” news has often been heralded as a competitive strategy for local newspapers. The Forrester data suggests this may be folly:
Source: Forrester Research (2008)
This survey operates, however, at too high a level of generality to be really persuasive to me. The best and most nuanced thinking about local issues/news and what people care about belongs to Outside.in’s founder Steven Johnson in his post The Pothole Paradox.
There’s a distinction that has to be made between “news” and other categories of local content that are very important to people such as business search, what’s on sale, entertainment and events and other local information that doesn’t qualify as “news” per se. While the question asks broadly about “what’s happening,” I would imagine it was treated and interpreted as “news” rather than local events, for example.
Qualitative interviews with people might yield some more complex answers about the relationship between “national” and “local” information and the relative value it has for their daily lives.
People care fundamendally about what’s happening around and near them. But the decline of traditional media and the rise of dozens of local sites has made the process of getting that information more challenging even as it has made more types of information available (e.g., reviews). Thus the “post-newspaper” world is more complex than the old one — for both consumers and advertisers.
Off topic: I got hit by a spam email that came from someone I know asking me to sign in to see a video on a site called FastForward. I signed in using my Google username and password. Now all my Gmail contacts are getting the spam.
I’m sorry. But I’m hearing from a lot of people I haven’t spoken to in some time 
OPA members, representing almost 30 major online publishers and 66% online reach, have joined together to combat “banner blindness” and introduce big new display ad formats. From the press release out today:
The Online Publishers Association (OPA) announced today a new initiative designed to help stimulate a renaissance of creative advertising on the Internet that meets the needs of marketers by better integrating their messages into the fabric of the Web. As part of the announcement, a broad group of its members will implement new interactive, display advertising units across their sites. Starting in July, these new units will be available only through the publishers’ direct sales teams.
The proposed new advertising units are:
These ad formats are non-standard units, outside the IAB framework. The IAB will be compelled to embrace them or lose control over formats in general. Many people have criticized standards for limiting creativity in online advertising. Accordingly, the rationale here is to boost creativity among other things:
In a “big picture” sense there’s a great deal to say about this.
In general this is probably a good move for publishers. Online advertising should move away from the “tyranny of the click,” which is actually a relatively opaque metric to a range of metrics that are tied to campaign goals. The proposed “metric that emphasizes the impact creative advertising can have on Web viewers” is an effort to get away from the click. More creative, engaging ads will also help. Improved targeting will also help (however consumers are resistant to BT and tracking).
Here’s a relevant quote from a recent Atlas (Microsoft) report on the digital purchase funnel (mentioned in my post at SEL this a.m.):
The large number of ad exposures consumed prior to purchase may come as a surprise to marketers who are used to discussions of frequency that revolve around site or campaign metrics. Measuring only the last ad in a conversion history conceals the true length of the relationship an advertiser has with each consumer. When we focus our view on individual converters’ histories and apply the funnel concept to their ad consumption, we discover that their histories are much longer and richer than typically assumed. These results confirm other research showing that advertising reaches consumers from multiple advertising campaigns and across channels.
This basically asserts that “conversions” are a result of multiple exposures to ads across the Internet and that no single place/format/publisher should get isolated credit for conversions. This is essentially an argument against Google and the so-called “last click” phenomenon. But it’s also largely accurate.
Even though they’re now in something resembling free fall, there’s also a substantial role for “offline” media to play in online campaigns. Offline “stimulus” –> Online (re)Search –> (offline) Conversion.
At the brand and at the local level we’re starting to see more sophistication about the relationship between search and display advertising (and other platforms, including mobile). Display ads, like the stock market in the US, have lost most of their pricing value this year. This OPA initiative is an attempt to restore the credibility and perceived effectiveness of display. Yet there are existing, latent effects on purchase behavior from display ad exposure regardless of whether a click happened. (See comScore’s Gian Fulgoni’s blog post as one piece of evidence.)
The online ad market isn’t entirely rational. Pricing of online display appears to be a response to a glut of supply and lots of low quality ad inventory in multiple ad networks — as well as a lack of transparency regarding the “latent” effectiveness of many display ads.
This “big ads” move isn’t going to solve display’s problems but it could help quite a bit.
Local.com put out a release last night that said the firm was acquiring 14,000 of LiveDeal’s customers. Here are the main bits from the release:
[Local.com] announced the acquisition of approximately 14,000 local business advertisers, bringing the company’s total number of small business customers to approximately 30,000.
This acquisition moves the company closer to its stated goal of 50,000 small business customers by the end of 2009, and also increases monetization of the Local.com site and network. The acquired customers will pay approximately $33 per month for a Local Promote listing on Local.com and select sites.
The company will acquire approximately 14,000 local business customers from LiveDeal, Inc. for up to $3.1 million in cash. Excluding one-time acquisition related charges, the transaction is expected to be immediately accretive. The company expects to complete the transfer of the advertiser listings during March.
When I saw this I was a bit confused; were LiveDeal’s assets being acquired? No, apparently just 14K customers (which is probably most of them). Recently LiveDeal sold the YP.com domain for $3.8 million to AT&T. Now it has sold many/most of its customers to Local.com for just over $3M.
I’m still confused. LiveDeal’s latest earnings release doesn’t suggest that it’s going out of business but that it will focus on “premium services.” Are these then the low value accounts? They represent about $5.5M in annual revenue. Local.com will have to retain them and will probably seek to upsell many of them.
It appears that as a classifieds/YP destination LiveDeal is all but done.
Here are some recent posts over at Local Mobile Search:
Twitter is the next online (and mobile) marketing frontier. Eric Schmidt called Twitter a “poor man’s email.” He’s right in the sense that Twitter can do almost everything that email can do in a marketing sense — only faster.
Chris Smith has written a great piece — in fact one that’s quite similar to something I’m working on right now for clients at LMS — on Twitter as local marketing platform.
He first discusses Twitter as consumer local search tool. It’s really not ready for prime time in that regard, although some people are trying to use it that way today. The really valuable material is about Twitter as promotions/alerts/CRM vehicle for local businesses.
In one celebrated case, Dell has already used Twitter with great success and many other companies are now experimenting with it. The movie the Watchmen has Twitter updates, etc. Very quickly we’ll see large companies adopt Twitter in almost a perfunctory way; their agencies will use it to seem “cutting edge.” But doing Twitter well, as with other social media, will require some thought. Yet using Twitter for promotions is easier than say doing the same thing on Facebook.
Regarding local businesses, we immediately bump into the self-service problem. Most will not know how to use it or how to think about Twitter as a marketing platform. But there’s a question in my mind whether large third parties like yellow pages publishers could truly manage a Twitter feed on behalf of their advertisers. Without going into specific ideas here, there are some things that local businesses could do that would be very effective — potentially as effective as anything else they’re doing online to market themselves.
Chris provides some cases of companies using it with success. It’s a must read piece.
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