San Diego and the Future of Local News

Forbes alerted me to the San Diego News Network, which is rising as the San Diego Union Tribune is going down:

Here are the stats according to the Forbes article:

SDNN is running a budget of about $1 million, which allows him to employ 16 full timers (some are former Union-Tribune staffers), aided by 23 freelancers and 12 bloggers. His site draws an average 125,000 monthly visitors, according to Quantcast.

This is probably what is going to happen in many major markets as the metro print pubs falter: small online only sites that look very much like the larger news sites will arise, employing a few journalists and other freelancers. They will have to be knit into larger local ad networks and/or charge for some content to survive.

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Related: The NY Times is seeing huge usage in mobile (video), both from its iPhone app and the mobile Web more generally.

See also: MediaNews Group Starting Test of Home-Printed News

The Buzz on Bing

Over at SEL I’ve been writing posts about Bing and its traffic growth. Nielsen does an interesting analysis on Bing Buzz/sentiment (6/2):

Note that this pre-dates the actual  Bing launch. It would be interesting to see this chart today, now that Bing’s been in the market a week and see what’s changed.

On a related note: Apologies to BuzzLogic . . . I wasn’t able to post on their new Dashboard (helping analyze online conversations/buzz and place ads accordingly). It got a great deal of coverage.

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What have been your early experiences with Bing? And what about Local. Do you like it or not?

SMB Lifecycle Tools: Anyone?

Some of the comments to the Borrell-related posts yesterday made me think about the fact (as far as I know) that no one has designed an SMB marketing tool tied to company life stage. People always segment by headcount, revenues, vertical but not generally life stage. Headcount and revenues may be proxies to some degree for how young or old a company is. But companies that are established are less likely to be focused on customer acquisition (though perhaps they will be in a bad economy) than newer companies.

I’m not suggesting this is the perfect way to segment the market or “productize” marketing services. It’s just another angle to consider: what are the needs of an early stage company vs. a later stage SMB? Twitter in some cases might make more sense as a customer service tool for established companies than a new business vehicle.

What do others think about that general perspective? Nice in theory, difficult to execute?

Wanna Push Back re Local SEM Churn?

I’ve received a couple of calls and emails this morning regarding the Borrell report on Local SEM churn and piece I wrote over at Search Engine Land. If you want to respond or argue with any of the points I made or in the report, please feel free.

I’ll publish anything submitted to me verbatim (provided it’s not a profanity laced tirade). Alternatively you can just comment on any of the posts.

Will Local Market Ultimately Reject PFP/PPC?

There are two things that got me thinking this morning about . . . whether the bulk of the local market/SMBs might ultimately reject PPC or performance-based advertising in favor of a fixed-priced product: the Borrell report on Local SEM churn and a vFlyer announcement about another syndication partner, Kijiji.

For those who don’t know vFlyer, the company enables sellers in key categories to publish once to many different sites in the classifieds/vertical universe. There are free accounts and then subscription products that offer more capabilities.

While many in the SMB world clearly like pay-for-performance ad products (clicks, calls), the majority are not used to paying on a per-lead basis. They’re historically used to fixed-rate, predictably priced products.

Yet, like everything in the SMB realm, there’s no one-size-fits all offering; subscription products (like vFlyer’s model) and PPC offerings for those that are more sophsiticated and aggressive will probably live side by side. However at the low-headcount end of the spectrum a vFlyer-like product is probably a better model than paid clicks. That product ultimately includes a mix of traffic sources as well as other tools and services.

But there’s another (radical) performance scenario in the mix too: YP publishers simply selling calls derived from whatever source (print, online, mobile). This product is being tested right now in certain markets. That makes the traffic sources more of a black box and the publisher manages the delivery of leads or calls from any/all of them. It also means that under certain circumstances “organic” calls can potentially be counted as well (ethical caveats here). This has the advantage of no required education and no analytics to understand, pay attention to or optimize against.

The fixed price product I’m talking about above probably doesn’t yet exist, but GetListed provides a model for at least one component of that product. But there are a range of other components that include directories, search, (potentially) display — and social media tools of various stripes. Nobody has yet to put this package together but I’ve heard a number of things that suggest it’s emerging.

I believe that paid search will be just one component — not the killer app — of the online products that are sold to the bulk of the SMB market in the future. Third parties and intermediaries remain critical to the segment. Traditional media companies (absent the radical calls scenario) are under increasing pressure to justify some of their traditional ad fees as those products see continuing usage losses over time.

The local market is messy and remains a mess for the medium-term.

Twitter an ‘Organic’ Tool for SMBs

The learning curve with Twitter is much quicker than other online marketing methods. (Is that a mixed metaphor?) In addition marketers (especially SMB marketers) have more direct control over it than other tools (e.g., display, search marketing). Twitter reports that lots of small businesses are using it for online marketing purposes, without any direct encouragement from the company. That’s no surprise.

There have been a number of celebrated SMB marketing cases that are repeatedly discussed. For example, the Korean taco truck in LA and Naked Pizza in New Orleans. But there are many other examples. This past weekend I ran across another one (from last November): CoffeeGroundz, a local coffee house in Houston, TX:

Note: 6,082 followers. While many of those may be outside the cafe’s service area the community, brand building and customer loyalty dimensions of this cannot be denied or dismissed.

We’re also starting to see third parties (on behalf of SMBs) tap into Twitter; for example the UK’s Scoot directory.

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Here’s a related article from the NY Times about online-centric SMBs and social networking.

Borrell Documents Local SEM Churn

Borrell Associates has just put out a fascinating report (sponsored by Clickable; can be obtained from their site or Borrell directly).  The report quantifies Local SEM churn, which I’ve also been writing about on this blog for some time. It starts to get at some segmentation and best practices for sales channels that are selling search-related products to local SMBs.

As I wrote at SEL this morning:

Google just completed its now annual local reseller symposium. A terrific event last year, I was unable to attend this year but heard from one attendee that there were many fewer resellers there than a year ago. Print yellow pages, newspapers, webhosting firms, stand-alone local sales channels (e.g., ReachLocal, Yodle) and a range of others comprise the the local reseller category. They’re all selling small businesses (SMBs) into search marketing. Whether a function of the economy or for some other reason, the lowered attendance may be a metaphor for the challenges that “Local SEM” now faces.

In October, 2004 I wrote a report entitled “SEM for SMEs: The Model Has Arrived.” That document proclaimed that a then “guaranteed clicks” product provided by WebVisible to yellow pages partners would enable:

• Large numbers of small businesses to buy search marketing in a simplified way
  
• Enable yellow pages to become the gateway to online marketing (on search engines) for their advertisers
  
• Allow Google (et al.) to tap the massive SMB market through third party sales channels, avoiding the need for direct outreach to this elusive advertiser population
  

In contrast to my happy proclamation in 2004, the road for Local SEM has been rocky. On my blog Screenwerk I’ve been writing for the past couple of years about the high churn rates for these products and other challenges. Here’s a representative excerpt from September, 2008:

[W]e’re now in a kind of “purgatory,” where the “old” methods aren’t working as well (they still work in many instances however) and the “new” methods aren’t delivering as promised. It’s a problem for everyone.

Read the rest of this post on SEL.

Google just completed its now annual local reseller symposium. A terrific event last year, I was unable to attend this year but heard from one attendee that there were many fewer resellers there than a year ago. Print yellow pages, newspapers, webhosting firms, stand-alone local sales channels (e.g., ReachLocal, Yodle) and a range of others comprise the the local reseller category. They’re all selling small businesses (SMBs) into search marketing. Whether a function of the economy or for some other reason, the lowered attendance may be a metaphor for the challenges that “Local SEM” now faces.

In October, 2004 I wrote a report entitled “SEM for SMEs: The Model Has Arrived.” That document proclaimed that a then “guaranteed clicks” product provided by WebVisible to yellow pages partners would enable:

* Large numbers of small businesses to buy search marketing in a simplified way

* Enable yellow pages to become the gateway to online marketing (on search engines) for their advertisers

* Allow Google (et al.) to tap the massive SMB market through third party sales channels, avoiding the need for direct outreach to this elusive advertiser population

In contrast to my happy proclamation in 2004, the road for Local SEM has been rocky. On my blog Screenwerk I’ve been writing for the past couple of years about the high churn rates for these products and other challenges. Here’s a representative excerpt from September, 2008:

[W]e’re now in a kind of “purgatory,” where the “old” methods aren’t working as well (they still work in many instances however) and the “new” methods aren’t delivering as promised. It’s a problem for everyone.

Bing Ads: ‘Brah, I Was Stoked . . .’

Okay, since I’m posting video I can’t resist posting this Bing ad called “Hawaii.” Like some of the other ads it humorously conveys “search overload.” My favorite line is “Brah, I was stoked when I caught that tasty barrel.”

This one is also good (“cell phone“). It has a kind of “body snatchers” quality.

Circling Back to Google Squared

Riffing off my earlier post, Michael Bauer writes about the potential local dimension of Google Squared:

You have to check out searches for Sushi Denver or Plumbers Denver as below.  Damn.  ”Category” specific property/value comparison.  Where have we heard that before?  Of course, Local Matters has had comparison as an offering to its platform forever, taking advantage of the structured data of its customers.  It’s amazing how Google keeps deconstructing this space, picking apart what seem to be solid competitive differentiators.

I in fact did some local searches but the results were quite poor and didn’t write about them. But Michael’s right that a better and more refined version of Google Squared could fit nicely into local. Alternatively, as with Michael’s Local Matters example, Google could simply add a check box and then a grid view (a la shopping comparison engines) to existing local results.

Beyond what Dex was formerly doing with Local Matters, I’m sure there are other examples of what I’m talking about. However, LocalPrice comes to mind as an existing version of this:

Google doesn’t usually develop products (with the exception maybe of Maps and some stuff in mobile) that have more narrow use cases. So the company would want to see this work broadly across categories before integrating it into Google.com or Maps.

Idearc Out of the Box

When I was in Seattle for SMX Advanced I met with Idearc folks there briefly. We talked about a range of things they’re doing but not yet ready to announce. I’m here to tell you these things are pretty “out of the box” for a traditional YP publisher. Impressive stuff if they can execute well.

Stay tuned, I’ll write more when I can.

How to Handle Negative Reviews

Brownbook’s Dave Ingram pens a column at SEL on how to deal with negative reviews. Here are his top tips:

1. Use Google alerts to listen for mentions of your company or products, good or bad. You can join the conversation to magnify the good and address the bad.
2. Where you find negativity, first establish a neutral frame of mind, and don’t immediately bite. You can’t deal with the problem in knee-jerk mode.
3. If you can identify the customer, see if you can resolve the issue offline, then ask them to update their review. You’ll find when you satisfy a previously unhappy customer you’ll be creating one of your strongest advocates.
4. If the review is truly unjustified, you may wish to respond publicly to the review to provide some balance to the discussion – but use this tactic with care as it can soon turn into a fight, and nothing is less appealing than two people airing their differences in public. If you do this, I recommend starting with a phrase like “dear x, thanks for your feedback and I am sorry to hear you’re unhappy, let me see if I can help…” and then go on to unemotionally address the issue, but don’t just disagree with their view. Here’s an example of a business using this exact tactic to handle one bad review in their otherwise excellent reviews. It leads me to trust the supplier more when communication is as open as this: Aerial Tec.
5. If the review is nasty, downright personal, or in some way illegal then you might need to take action. Check the policies of the website where the review appears to find out how best to contact and notify them. Don’t just fire off an email—there may be information they need to identify the review in question and their policy will let you know the best (and quickest) way to get any issue resolved.
6. Do nothing. That’s right, you may decide to do nothing—most of us know we don’t get it right all of the time. This can be hard to do, because we feel our pride is hurt and we want to defend it, but sometimes attempts to fight back simply fuel the fire and can turn a small blip into a big problem.
7. Get some good reviews. In my opinion this is the best way to balance the picture and swing it in your favor. Ask your good customers to give you great reviews. A word of warning if you’re thinking of faking it by writing your own—don’t. Such tactics are often obvious or at least are quickly discovered.

More at SEL.

The Year the Media Died

Thanks to Bob Fichtner for pointing this out to me. It’s a take off on American Pie and it’s both funny and painful in a certain way. The guy singing even sounds like Don McLean:

Photosynth’s New Look, Google Maps’ New Tool

Microsoft has updated the look of Photosynth and added a few new tools and features, as well as improved site search:

Our green Photosynth theme has been with our team since the beginning and we didn’t want to lose it completely, but we did realize that as our pages got longer with more useful community content we needed to improve the design to help make that content easier to read.  The darker background and colors also help the great photos in your synths shine the most on the page.  Have a look around the site with the new design and let us know your thoughts.

We added the comment count and geotag icon to tradecards across the site to help you see what synths have been located on the map and what synths are being actively discussed… or where you can be the first to leave a comment.

I think Photosyth is great but still little known, although it’s accessible through (now) Bing Maps:

Google Maps has added a new feature Google is calling Smart Navigation. It’s very useful; it’s also similar to the way users navigate through and manipulate images in Photosynth (you’d have to use both to see):

Today, we are really excited to introduce a new mode of navigation which liberates you from the road arrows and gets you where you want to go in just a few clicks.  You can now use Street View’s smart navigation to travel to a new place just by double clicking on the place or object you would like to see.  We have been able to accomplish this by making a compact representation of the building facade and road geometry for all the Street View panoramas using laser point clouds and differences between consecutive pictures.

You go to StreetView and move the cursor to the location within the image you’d like to explore. You then double click and it takes you directly to the StreetView of that place/location, rather than having to use the arrows along the street:

The image below is a double click on the red awning shops at the end of the block:

It’s difficult to convey how this works with static images. So here’s a Google video of how it operates:

Google Squared: What Do You Think?

Google Squared has gone live (in Google Labs). Here’s more from Matt McGee over at SEL. Essentially it allows for a comparison of different items in a grid display, according to categories or criteria that can be customized. Here’s how Google describes it:

Google Squared is an experimental tool that takes a category (like US presidents, roller coasters, or digital cameras) and attempts to create a starter “square” of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web. You can modify your square by removing rows and columns you don’t like–or by adding new rows and columns and having Google Squared attempt to fetch the relevant facts. Verify and correct the facts in your square by exploring the original sources and investigating other possible values. If you’re happy with your square you can save it and come back to it later. Google Squared does the grunt work for you, making research fast and easy.

Play with it, it’s pretty interesting — although in most cases the results fall short right now. But I can imagine that as it gets better it could become pretty useful. Here are a few examples:

US presidents:

NFL quarterbacks:

Best rock songs of all time:

If there are no results immediately discovered, it asks you to submit the desired items. For example, “mobile ad networks“:

And viola . .  .

One can imagine many more queries where this sort of presentation would be quite useful. Hopefully the accuracy and quality of the results will get better.

Good vs. Bad Naming at Microsoft

I had an interesting conversation at the Bing launch party last night with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi about Bing the search engine and the brand. Regarding the brand I told him that I thought the name is made more successful by the fact that the underlying search engine is being largely well received. If the engine were weaker the brand would similarly be perceived as weak. So far then Bing the brand appears to be a pretty successful choice.

On the other side under the heading of poor naming choices is Microsoft’s proposed new name for netbooks: “low cost small notebook PCs.” It’s not entirely clear that consumers widely know or use the term “netbook” — it’s more an industry term. Ordinary people probably think: small computer, small laptop.

But beneath this naming discussion is subtext about Microsoft’s future role in this growing segment of the market, and whether consumers perceive these small machines as simply a way into the Internet or whether they want them to perform like larger PCs with lots of (Microsoft) software on the machine as opposed to in “The Cloud.”

Even though Microsoft has embraced The Cloud to a degree it is still very much tied to traditional software (and the corresponding revenues), which may have a greatly diminished role on these small boxes if Google has its way and can migrate more consumer activity into the browser.

Bing’s First TV Commercial

Here it is (from AdAge):

To see the commercial go to the AdAge story above or this link.

The idea is that you’re frustrated by all the links you get back on Google (though Google is never mentioned). There’s an emphasis on the human/real life. It’s a slickly produced commercial. But it reminds me of a pitch for pharma, financial services or insurance. What do you think?

TurnHere Introduces Affiliate Program

TurnHere has been providing customized video ads to small businesses through sales channel partners such as Citysearch, Yellowpages.com, Idearc/Superpages. But the company is now widely expanding who can access its service through an affiliate program, according to TurnHere COO John McWeeny. Early on, the company tried selling its video production and advertising services directly to SMBs but found it tough going. Accordingly it turned to the SMB “aggregators” to do the heavy lifting.

But now the company believes that it can have success — and there’s also third party demand — with the new affiliate program. Verticals, industry associations (and so on) simply promote TurnHere’s services on their sites; TurnHere provides all the “collateral” and back-end support, and does everything else. A would-be advertiser clicks to the sign up page from the affiliate site, buys the ad and TurnHere deploys the filmmaker, delivers the ad and plugs it in to all the distribution channels (e.g., YouTube, etc) that the company customarily uses.

Here’s an example implementation from BedandBreakfast.com:

The affiliate promotion is apparently on advertiser/member facting pages. Would be advertisers would click through to this co-branded affiliate page:

The cost is $899 to the advertiser (with a special offer for $499 until June 30). TurnHere gives a piece of that to the affiliate that drove the transaction.

While the idea is very straightforward, the right affiliate partners offer the potential to greatly expand TurnHere’s reach into the SMB market.

What’s a Facebook Fan Worth?

From the “proving social media’s value” session at SMX Advanced, Tarla Cummings of Location3 Media offered a case study featuring a hotel client that used Facebook, Twitter and mobile/SMS in its marketing. In discussing how one measures ROI of the various social media sites and tools she offered the following:

• Facebook fans were worth $6.20 each
• Twitter followers were each worth $8.49
• Mobile opt-in users were each valued at $32.05

Let me clarify that these were not abstract, absolute metrics but the calculation of what each “channel” delivered in the particular context of the campaign and related sales. I thought these data were very interesting to see.

Local Mobile Coupons and RFID

Mobile marketing and loyalty company Tetherball has announced a new and very interesting program invoving RFID tags on phones and mobile coupons. I’ve written about it on Local Mobile Search:

Essentially a customer is prompted to sign up for a mobile loyalty program (as part of that s/he affixes an RFID tag to his/her phone). She later gets an SMS message (targeted based on a range of parameters) and is given an incentive to visit a local quick service (fast food) restaurant — a coupon. The user swipes her phone with the RFID tag in front of a physical kiosk and gets a paper coupon, which is printed out, to present at the register.

Go to LMS to read the rest of this post.

Google Explains LBC Dashboard

Here’s Google’s blog post today explaining the new LBC dashboard and analytics:

So how will you use the dashboard? The first thing you’ll need to do is make sure that you’ve claimed your listing in the LBC. Even if you hadn’t claimed it until today, you’ll be able to use the dashboard, since we’re automatically populating it with data from the past month. When you log in to the LBC, you’ll notice a new “View report” link right under the statistics that we provide . . .

As we mentioned above, your dashboard will be populated with data for the previous 30 days at launch. After that, we’ll add fresh data daily, so you’ll want to be sure to check back often to see how things are going and how various strategies (like your latest offline ad campaign or the addition of a photo to your listing) affect your traffic.

Here’s the customary explanatory video:

I do think this is a significant step for Google and will evolve in directions that are even more interesting.