More on Twitter and Local Eateries

The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity. At the EconSM conference in San Francisco a couple months ago, Twitter’s Kevin Thau told the audience that the company was seeing adoption by lots of small businesses without any hand holding or education from big T itself. The significance of this SMB adoption is not lost on Twitter. Whether the company tries to make any money off of this population is another question.

Regardless Twitter is increasingly being adopted by relatively savvy SMBs as a marketing, blogging and CRM tool.

Tim Cohn pointed me to this article on Boston.com about a wide range of local restaurants using Twitter to reach potential and existing customers:

On Dec. 2, computer consultant Jen Deaderick got on the social-networking site Twitter and posted: “Tupelo02139 is preparing.’’ It was her first missive, or tweet, on behalf of the Cambridge restaurant Tupelo, where her husband is a chef. The restaurant was more than four months away from opening.

Other tweets followed, about getting inspected, planning the menu, picking the paint. By the time Tupelo opened at the end of April, word had spread among followers of the restaurant’s Twitter stream (@tupelo02139), and their followers’ followers, and so on.

“Our opening night was packed,’’ Deaderick said. “At least half were there because of Twitter.’’

Location on Firefox 3.5 Part Deux

Here’s what it looks like at the top of Firefox 3.5 when it asks for your location:

It says (site name) wants to know your location. learn more and then “tell them” or “don’t tell them” and “remember for this site.”

There’s a kind of double-opt in going on here. I enable the site or the browser to geolocate me and then I authorize the sharing of that location information with the publisher.

The actual experience on the new 3.5 version of FF is better than Geode.

Firefox 3.5 Bakes in Location

I’ve written a number of times over the past year about what’s likely to happen once location is an integral part of the browser experience: customizable sites, better ad targeting, use of demographic data based on neighborhood for online ad targeting and so on.

This week Firefox 3.5 comes out with location as an integral part of the experience. Users must opt-in and affirmatively share location, but its a huge step forward. Chrome and Opera offer something similar. And Safari includes location in its iPhone version.

Firefox is using Skyhook’s technology to ascertain user location. It had previously enabled this feature in a plug-in called “Geode.” Across the board the user experience (around location opt-in) is still a little clunky on these browsers but it’s here and will become more streamlined over time. This is a big big deal.

Online Only Newspapers Not Thriving

According to a survey done by Business Insider/SAI, online only newspapers (e.g., Seattle PI, Christian Science Monitor, Asian Week) are not doing especially well online. Some are up, but most are flat or even down. It’s too early to say that an online-only strategy for newspapers won’t work but print-online is definitely a stronger combination.

Here’s preliminary evidence that online only newspaper sites are just one more online news source for consumers — in other words the brand is weakened by loss of the printed publication.

Yet it’s now very clear that within 7-10 years print newspapers will be few and far between and most of newspaper reading will be exclusively digital (readers, PCs and mobile).

Borrell: Local Online Spending May Be Up

From a blog post by Gordon Borrell:

[W]e may have been far too conservative earlier this year when we projected that local online advertising would grow 8% in 2009. At the end of the first quarter, the increase looked closer to 11% . . .

Phenomenal as it may seem, we’re getting data indicating triple-digit growth for some companies selling interactive advertising. These are definitely the “get it” companies that have hired dedicated sales forces and are plowing ahead with the products advertisers are buying. We aren’t, however, seeing triple-digit growth from companies that continue to labor under the delusion that “convergence sales” is a viable strategy.

Right now we’re pegging local online advertising at $14.03 billion, up from our estimate of $13.3 billion issued back in January.

This may indicate something of an “inflection point” motivated by the recession in part. But it would also appear to be driven by competition among local media companies and independent sales channels. Any comments Gordon?

Another Local Biz on Twitter: Local Burger

Thanks to Will Scott and via Duct Tape Marketing . . . another local business using Twitter: Local Burger.

There’s a lot more going on here than just deals and discounts. It has posts about local farmers markets, food safety and politics. This is local eating as a political statement. Nice promotion for the place. And you know — because it’s in Kansas — that there’s going to be TV coverage of this Twitter presence, all but ensuring that the place will be packed for some time to come (assuming of course that the burgers are good).

MojoPages Goes White Label

Per TC, MojoPages has raised additional money ($5M) and is transitioning its focus to its white label business, competing chiefly with Local.com’s Local Connect white label offering (formerly PremierGuide) and to a lesser degree Localeze. There are other newspaper-focused players in the segment but MojoPages will immediately be Local.com’s biggest competitor among newspaper and TV sites looking for a “turnkey” local solution.

Here are a couple pages from MojoPages’ Chicago.com integration:

Local.com Takes $10M Line of Credit

The company’s press release says:

The facility will primarily be used for expansion of the company via potential acquisitions, and to fund strategic growth initiatives.

This made me think that there are probably some M&A opportunities in local but it seems like nothing’s going on. I’m sure there are some “fire sale” prices out there.

Scott Wolfgang of Hearst said well over a year ago (maybe a couple) that he was concerned that the natural buyers of startups in local were the YP publishers and newspapers, both of which were in financial distress and probably couldn’t make the acquisitions that they otherwise might like to.

What do you think? If you were sitting on a pile of money ($10M may not be enough), who would you buy and why in the local segment?

Merchant Cir. Goes Live with Coupons on Twitter

They’re not the first but this may prove to be a significant move for MerchantCircle: distributing local merchant coupons via Twitter. The company has now set up city-specific Twitter feeds that distribute merchant coupons. If you also search for #coupons on Twitter, you’ll find many of their new “domains”:

On one of the individual sites it looks like this: a feed of all the deals from the various local merchants.

If you click on any of the individual coupons you’re taken to the MC merchant site:

The appeal to both local businesses and consumers is obvious and it adds to the “SEO” value that MC is providing those actively using its site.

This new coupon/discounts syndication is in keeping with MC’s more recent push into consumer services; on the MC site you can following local businesses and get their deals that way as well. It also complements the deeper engagement that the MC consumer tools imply. If I as a local consumer want simply to be apprised of new coupons created by local businesses in my area I can just follow the Twitter feed.

(Valpak also has a Twitter feed but not by location like this. Discounts and deals have already proven to be a significant use case for Twitter. And there’s a potentially big local angle here too: aggregation of multiple vendors’ deals/coupons by city or zip — a RetailMeNot by location for Twitter, if you will)

Given the SEO traffic that MC gets and the new Twitter distribution it’s probably something that third party SEO/SEM firms should consider for their clients’ campaigns, although I don’t know how labor intensive that would be.

Gladwell Takes on Anderson’s Free

The irony of Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price is that the not-so-free publication that has given him the national platform and megaphone — Wired Magazine — is stumbling and may eventually fail because of the ad recession. I haven’t read Free and so I’ll refrain from saying anything about it from second hand accounts. But Malcolm Gladwell takes it on in a new New Yorker piece:

The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

Anderson dismisses Gladwell’s criticism of the book as being a simple matter of psychology:

A long review of Free by Malcolm Gladwell. Like many journalists, he finds Free unsettling

Though I haven’t read it I can say this: as with all such sweeping theories, the reality “on the ground” is more complex. But it seems particularly ill-suited to this moment or perhaps well suited to it as the case may be. Maybe if Anderson’s book had shown up a couple years ago during the boom and not during the worst recession of most people’s lives it might not be receiving the skepticism and mild backlash (read: schadenfreude) it seems to have inspired.

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Update: Anderson responds to Gladwell more substantively here on the relatively narrow question about newspapers and writing for free.

Apple Offers iPhone 3GS Inventory Tool

Apple has developed an inventory tool to allow people to check and see whether their local store has the new iPhone 3GS:

This should be something of a model for other manufacturers to follow. Where2GetIt does some analogous things like this with some of its customers. See also Krillion’s recent widget moves with Shopping.com.

(via CNET)

Vark Comes Out of Private Beta

Ever since we wrote about Mosio in October of 2007 we’ve been watching and waiting for someone to really break-through with a human-powered mobile search utility that can archive scale. ChaCha and kgb to varying degrees have done that and represent a hybrid between traditional directory assistance and Web search; one can ask any question of a quasi-professional human in the background, while some query responses are automated via a database.

Yahoo! Answers uses community to answer questions but answers don’t show up in real time; although Yahoo!’s Marc Davis has told me that increasingly there are responses in near-real time from the community.

Twitter and Facebook have the potential to evolve or develop angles that enable them to be used as Q&A services — what I’ve called in the past “social DA.” But those use cases are not fully developed on either site.

Now Aardvark, which we can call an “answer community,” is trying to bring all these things together.

The rest of this post is on LMS.

MJ Death Shows Offline Media Drive Search

I posted a stat the other week related to me by a Google exec casually in a meeting (not sure the original source): 2/3 of search was driven by traditional media and offline influences or activity. While that makes lots of sense it’s counter-intuitive for people who work in the Internet and often deny the relevance of traditional/offline media.

The query “Michael Jackson” is a great example of this interaction between events, word of mouth, news coverage and search. No doubt lots of people found out about it from online news, but most probably heard about his death from friends, TV or radio — and then went online to learn more. The news was also a big driver of mobile search volumes as well. According to the Google Blog:

Search volume began to increase around 2:00pm, skyrocketed by 3:00pm, and stabilized by about 8:00pm. As you can see in Google Hot Trends, many of the fastest rising search queries from yesterday and today have been about Michael Jackson’s passing (others pertained to the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett). People who weren’t near a computer yesterday turned to their mobile phones to check on breaking news. We saw one of the largest mobile search spikes we’ve ever seen, with 5 of the top 20 searches about the Moonwalker.

Google Mistakes Image for Video in My Post

Someone pinged me on this search result and asked if it was the result of an SEO trick that I had done:

This was a pick up of my recent BookFresh post. Google thinks the picture in the post is a video (for some reason). It’s not.

Any thoughts/explanations?

Twitter/Tweets as Analytics Tool

URL shorteners like bit.ly provide link tracking data that can be valuable to publishers and marketers. But what about Twitter itself? There’s nothing truly novel in the thought of using Twitter as a kind of tracking tool for other media but I haven’t seen much discussion of that. What prompted this is the Nielsen post about Michael Jackson’s death:

Nielsen Buzzmetrics analysis shows that more than 16% of tweets over the past 24 hours reference Michael Jackson, and less than 2 percent of Tweets mention Farrah Fawcett and Iran.

Obviously there are a range of tools that already seek to measure “buzz” and try and capture that from various sources. Even search query volumes are a measure of buzz and what’s going on elsewhere in the culture or media. But assuming Twitter continues to grow (now at 19M US uniques, 41M globally) it could easily become a free and relatively simple analytics tool that could be used by large marketers to captures (and amplify) campaigns going on elsewhere.

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Related: See my LMS post on SMS calls to action on traditional ads.

Bing Driving YP.com Visits

Gregg Sterwart writes his local column this week about Bing. But the most interesting part to me is at the end in which he discusses Bing referring more traffic to partner Yellowpages.com:

To see if this integration was actually having any effect on performance, we looked at the source traffic going to YellowPages.com as indicated by the Hitwise ClickStream tool. The last two weeks ranked Bing and Bing Local as the top 10 and 12 sites driving traffic to YellowPages.com.

The percentage of clicks coming from each for the week ending June 13 was 1.09 percent and 1.04 percent respectively. From May 16 to 23, Live Search (Microsoft’s previous search engine) was ranked 20th, responsible for only 0.45 percent of upstream traffic. It’s obvious that online users are finding this integration favorable and are making use of the information.

In other words, the traffic to Yellowpages.com coming from Microsoft’s search engine more than doubled since the Bing launch. AT&T’s Yellowpages.com is getting what might be described as a traffic “windfall” from Bing’s early success.

True Local (News Corp.) Touting OZ YP Decline

News Corp-owned True Local in Australia (not to be confused with Canada’s True Local*) has set up a site that features data showing declining YP print usage (Sensis) in Australia:

The site is called “yellow turning blue.” Others in the US have considered doing this but not set up this kind of a site (that I’m aware of).

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*I have no idea who’s running Truelocal.com now

Krillion & Shopping.com Team for Widgets

Krillion and Shopping.com (eBay) have teamed up and created an online-offline shopping widget that goes on third party sites. It shows buyers where they can get products online or locally.

From the release:

Krillion, the company that connects online shoppers with local, in-stock product, has added product availability at leading online retailers to its category-leading product locator platform. Through a partnership with Shopping.com, the new Krillion 360 Product Locator™ enables manufacturers and web publishers to connect ready-to-buy shoppers with the products they are looking for — at all the local and online retailers that carry them.

In the large majority of cases the local/offline product will win. But some consumers who are sending gifts or can wait (and get free shipping) will opt to buy online. It’s only a matter of time, however, before all the major shopping portals will need to integrate this local store inventory data to remain competitive.

Ironically, as I’ve said in the past, smartphone use in local stores could turn out to be a boon to e-commerce — as the person confirms the product she’s looking at is the desired one and then buys online from (probably) Amazon.

WSJ Publisher: Google a ‘Digital Vampire’

Vampires are all the rage these days. There’s the teen flick and book series Twilight, etc. and the HBO series True Blood. That vampire zeitgeist must partly explain the use of the blood sucking metaphor by Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton to describe Google’s relationship with newspapers.

According to Crain’s Hinton said the following:

“There is a charitable view of the history of Google,” said Mr. Hinton, who is also publisher of The Wall Street Journal. “[It] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

“Taste for blood . . ” Perhaps we should call Mr. Hinton the newspaper industry’s Van Helsing to Google’s Dracula.

One can almost hear the Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff accents coming out now . . .

Google City Tours: Start of Something Good

As many others have discussed, Google has introduced a new service in Labs called City Tours. It allows users to plan and manage itineraries on a map. Points of interest can be added and removed with ease and it also will make a bunch of suggestions (perhaps the best feature) at the outset.

Type in Paris for example and it provides a pre-populated list of attractions and places to visit:

You don’t get lists of hotels or restaurants; there seems to be an emphasis on museums. But Google’s full database is accessible to this tool. To add a site/sight or location, you simply “search” for it and it’s added:

At present an imperfect tool but still useful. It will probably get a good deal better in a short time. For example, Google has lots of video and other content about these places that don’t make their way onto this map. Also there’s no StreetView (yet) here, which would be a perfect use of the content in this travel context.

When you click on any of the pushpins, you get this kind of an info window:

Note the pull-down ratings menu. Presumably Google will use this feedback to rank and present trip suggestions in the future. In addition, it’s probably going to look at ratings and lists from other sources (e.g., TripAdvisor) to make content and ranking determinations.

There have long been rumors about Google wanting to go into travel in a more full fledged way. By comparison Bing (Farecast) and Yahoo! in particular have substantial travel properties. Google has experimented with travel on YouTube. However there’s a great opportunity here to use Maps, YouTube, Street View, Wikipedia, Panoramio and other data to create a really useful and fun travel planning tool. There’s also a really compelling mobile use case for a more robust version of City Tours, along the lines I’m describing.