Google TV, YouTube and Geo

This is a collection of tidbits from Steve Stukenborg’s Local Search Summit keynote. He’s Google TV Product Manager

Various sources on the data:

• TV ads platform now in use for YouTube as well
• 40% surfing Web while watching TV. TV top offline influence on search behavior.
• TV getting very fragmented, like Web: 120 channels on average. Google like fragmentation because it can target and aggregate audiences
• Millions of set-top boxes via partnership with Dish Network. There are partnerships with other national networks (though not other cable cos beyond local provider Astound). Ads can appear on TV next day
• Google pushing for model that charges advertisers based on how many actually watched the commercial, rather than audience for the show itself
• 1988 DVR penetration was 0% today its 22%
• Google TV seeking to build “network” from “long tail” of smaller networks and audiences
• National brands using Google TV to drive people to local stores/local providers
• He discusses the various ways that small advertisers can get ads made: marketplace, SpotMixer
• Does audience targeting via data from Equifax and Nielsen. That data is matched to set-top box IDs, though not personally identifiable information.
• Nice discussion of analytics and how TV analytics can be overlaid on Web analytics to show whether TV is driving search volume and traffic to site.

Case study (ooVoo)

How did TV ads campaign affect site traffic and search volumes? TV ads drove 500% increase in traffic and searches increased by 269% during campaign.

Stukenborg says there was a “residual effect” — continuing traffic and brand lift after conclusion of campaign

Case study (ShoppersChoice)

People coming in through TV URL were “twice as likely to convert.”

Case Study (Realty Executives)

“Traffic to their site increased exponentially.” Their objective was to build awareness/traffic for local affiliates.

Stukenborg acknowledged that traditional SMBs aren’t using the program and most of the advertising is national right now.  I asked him whether any of the YP publishers or third parties developing video on behalf of of SMBs were using TV ads to gain TV and/or YouTube distribution. He said there has been internal discussion about that but “no.”

More to discuss here, but I’m in the middle of another conference session.

New Yelp iPhone Update Adds Features

I’ve written about the new update for the Yelp iPhone app over at LMS. More of Yelp is coming over from the PC side, including sales and deals. The following video explains and demonstrates the new features. The app isn’t yet available.

Tech Companies Among Inc’s 500/5000

Inc Magazine has done its annual ranking of the fastest-growing small companies. There are many tech companies on the list but three that proactively reached out to me were G5 Search Marketing, ReachLocal and Angie’s List. I don’t have the time to comb through the entire list (which is not that user friendly) to pull out everyone interesting.

Here’s how companies make the list (and presumably the revenue numbers are real):

The Inc. 500|5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2005 through 2008. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by the first week of 2005, and therefore able to show four full calendar years of sales. Additionally, they have to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent — not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies — as of December 31, 2008 (a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired since that date). Revenue in 2005 must have been at least $200,000, and revenue in 2008 must have been at least $2 million.

Andrew Shotland’s Top IYP SEO Rankings

SEO Maven Andrew Shotland conducted a test to see which of the major IYP (and related) sites were doing the best on Google in terms of organic search appearances.

Here’s his list of the top 10:

1. Superpages
2. Citysearch
3. Yelp
4. Yahoo Local
5. InsiderPages (also IAC/Citysearch)
6. YellowPages.com
7. BizJournals
8. AreaConnect
9. MagicYellow
10. Switchboard (Idearc/Superpages)

You can see the rest of his list here. He goes into his queries and methodology in the article. He also provides more color around these results.

Basically, the top sites on Andrew’s list represent where people need to have their businesses listed.

Google LBC Dashboard ‘Is Borderline Useless’

So says Matt McGee who uses his wife’s real estate practice as a real world example:

Google shows impressions (how many times your listing appeared in Google or Google Maps search results) and actions (how many times they clicked for more info or clicked to your web site). Those are all fine and good, but they offer no context without strong keyword data — they offer nothing by themselves that you can act on. But Google is falling down on the keyword data, so it all becomes data for data’s sake. What good is marketing data if you can’t act on it? . . .

[N]ot only do I not know what cityname is being searched with “real estate” when Cari’s listing shows, but I’m also seeing all citynames combined into one line on the chart. So, that #5 result above, “real estate” is combination of “Kennewick real estate” and “Pasco real estate” and “Richland real estate” and any other possible combination?

Again, I ask: How is this useful?

Read his full post here.  How do others that are actually using it feel?

NearbyNow Rolls Out New iPhone Apps

On the success of its Lucky Magazine app, NearbyNow has built iPhone apps for Seventeen Magazine and Runners World (with others to come) that allow users to review apparel and purchase locally, using NearbyNow’s inventory monitoring and verification. According to the press release:

Seventeen Fashion Finder will feature a variety of fashion and accessories that are teens’ fall must-haves. The application allows teen girls to search by product: jeans, tops, bags and shoes; by trend: rocker, bo-ho, classic and girly or by price point. The application then checks availability and reserves any of the products in stores nearby. Seventeen Fashion Finder is the first mobile application targeted at the teen market that allows users to locate and reserve products in their local area.

The rest of this post is at LMS.

Spot Runner Chooses Yodle to Service SMBs

The press release just came out this morning:

Spot Runner . . . and Yodle Inc. . . . announced a strategic partnership that makes Yodle the local online advertising partner for Spot Runner. As part of the partnership, Yodle will assume responsibility for providing local online advertising services for Spot Runner’s local online clients, including several noteworthy franchise accounts, and collaborate with Spot Runner on future opportunities . . .

Spot Runner conducted a pilot program to evaluate Yodle’s online lead generation services and based on the positive results, it selected Yodle as its local online advertising partner.

This is a nice affirmation for Yodle and obviously the end of a disastrous chapter for Spot Runner, which bought Weblistic only to shutter it after many false starts, mishaps and miscues around strategic direction.

In an email exchange with Yodle CEO Court Cunningham this morning he said:

I think this portends future consolidation.  The two drivers will be 1) need for companies to focus where they can be great and partner in areas where they cannot  (this case) 2) bandwidth at the SMB.  The small business owner is being bombarded by solicitations and trusted brands need to emerge to simplify the buying process for them.

I certainly agree with his second point. There’s still way to much confusion and “noise” in the market.

Source: Opus Research (8/08) n=615 US small businesses

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Related: Here’s a bit more color from ClickZ.

Yahoo!: Coupons Are Cool

Thanks to ValPak’s Todd Leiser for pointing me to Yahoo! research on consumer interest in coupons. It’s consistent with everything else we’ve seen in the market showing coupon use is up and consumers are less inhibited about using them.

Here’s the Yahoo! press release and the numbers:

• 43% of [survey] participants said they are using coupons more since last year. Easier access to coupons would motivate them to use coupons more often, a sentiment stated by 76% of women.
• The majority feel that there are not currently enough coupons for things they want to buy and nearly half actually think coupon hunting is a chore. Less than a fifth of consumers have a “go-to” online site and almost 80% think the process of finding coupons is difficult.
• 59% stated that “they feel great when buying things with coupons.” Bargain hunting can also become a badge of honor with 29% wanting to be known as the coupon king or queen.
• The survey results confirm that men are more inhibited about using coupons.

Yahoo! also says:

Web searches for “printable coupons” on Yahoo! are up 50 percent in 2009, compared to the same time in 2008, and up 135 percent compared to 2007. Furthermore, the most popular coupon-related Web searches in the past month have been for pizza restaurants, major retailers and grocery coupons.

The popularity of coupons, etc. is not news. But the key finding in these results is: “Less than a fifth of consumers have a ‘go-to’ online site . . .”

This confirms what I’ve said in the past:

• Consumers want a coupon destination
• There must be sufficient inventory to make that destination meaningful
• There’s no “brand” in the space and it’s still up for grabs.

Beyond traditional stalwarts like ValPak, destination sites ReaitMeNot and Savings.com are coming on strong.

Yellix Turns Facebook into Caller ID

MobilePeople Alum Claudia Poepperl, has started a new company called adaffix. The company’s first product is Yellix. It essentially turns Facebook into “caller ID 2.0″ for smartphones (except the iPhone). Here’s how Yellix describes what it does:

YELLIX is a free application for your mobile phone. Once installed, it will automatically display a pop-up showing you the up-to-date status, photo and other relevant content of your Facebook friends when they call you on your mobile.

Friends must install the Yellix Facebook app and then the Yellix app on their phones:

It works on phones that run the following OSs: Android, RIM BlackBerry, Symbian S60 or Windows Mobile. The website says the following about the iPhone:

We would love to provide YELLIX for iPhone. Unfortunately Apple does not support our advanced technology.

What this means is that Yellix requires apps running in the background. There are apparently also some challenges with BlackBerry, but there’s a workaround:

BlackBerry does not fully support YELLIX Caller ID. This is due to the fact that BlackBerry does not support pop-ups while the phone is ringing and also due to the fact that most BlackBerrys (expept for e.g. Bold) do not support 3G. Despite these limitations you can still use YELLIX:  When you receive a call let the phone ring approx. 3 times. After pressing the answer button take a quick look at the screen and you will see information about the caller.

Without having installed and used it, I can imagine that this will become quite popular because it’s a unique product and can be quickly understood. Here’s an explanatory video:

So, how are they going to make any money with this you ask?

There’s apparently a local directory partnership distribution model tied to some related features of Yellix. In other words, Yellix will help distribute listings from existing (yellow pages) publishers through some alternative features on the app. According to an email exchange I had with Poepperl that is now operating in Austria.

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Update: Here’s more on Yellix’s directory monetization strategy, now live in Austria. According to Poepperl:

“If the call is not successful we do a reverse search on the called number. if it is a business we identify 3 alternatives of the same category in the same area.”

Those listings come from directory partners and presumably one or all of them is a local advertiser.

UBL and GetListed Develop Data Monitoring Tool

The folks behind UniversalBusinessListing and GetListed have gotten together and developed a tool that “will check the presence of business listings as they are seen on major search engines and online Yellow Page directories, then highlight variances and corrections that are required,” according to the press release.

The tool is in an invitation-only private beta but it sounds like an enhancement of what GetListed has already been doing.

I spoke to UBL’s Doyal Bryant at the YPA event earlier this year about the announcement but haven’t since.

This will be most valuable for third parties working in the SMB segment and on behalf of SMB advertisers.

There isn’t an exhaustive list of sites that will be included but probably the three major search engines, IYP sites and a few others such as Yelp.

ShopLocal’s Data, Ads Showcased

ShopLocal has been busy with its dynamic search marketing product, pushing its data out to third parties and with new presentations of its circulars.

Here’s an example of “Circular Central” on the Gannet-owned IndyStar site (Gannett owns ShopLocal as well). While it’s been up for the past several months, I recently rediscovered it.

Yahoo! features the same thing (see also coupons from ValPak).

The Circular Central site allows users to page through the circulars in the same way they would in the Sunday newspaper, complete with page turning simulation. It also provides a range of browse and search functions too. According to ShopLocal, users looking at multiple pages average 55 pages in their visits. The company also said that 14% of users look at 100 pages or more in these visits.

Finally ShopLocal is one of the data providers in the novel but ultimately not-very-useful MasterCard-sponsored Priceless Picks iPhone app:

Seb’s Interview with RHDi’s Sean Greene

Sorry . . . it’s not my interview. It’s Sebastien Provencher’s. He talked to Sean Greene, recently named head of RHD Interactive. Here are some interesting bits:

SG: Interestingly enough, I’m viewed as the Internet guy within RHD but I’m viewed as the print guy in Santa Monica. This gives me a unique understanding of print & online but also a strong knowledge of Yellow Pages sales. This allows me to put in perspective the need of both consumers and advertisers.

He says RHD has 500K advertisers.

He adds that he wants to do a better job with social media:

SP: what do you think of social media as an opportunity?

SG: We’ve been looking at it but I’m disappointed we’re not further along. For example, Work.com is all about consumer generated content and could be a great entry into social media. Next phase: how do we integrate social media in our big opportunities.

He also says that he’s (now) bullish on mobile.

Me: RHD has some great URLs and properties in Business.com and Work.com. It needs to do more experimentation on the consumer side (that’s a cultural challenge in RHD overall). My guess is that on that front (experimentation) it lags AT&T and Idearc. Justin Sanger (formerly of LocalLaunch) might disagree.

Much of what Greene seems to be talking about in the interview, if one reads between the lines, is cultural: educating people and enabling them to see the other’s perspective.

I keep hearing that the YP industry is going to verticalize increasingly. RHD has spoken in the past about this too. We’ll see how/whether this happens. It’s also the case that some natural acquisitions that should be happening in the local space aren’t because of the financial condition of the YP and newspaper industries right now.

CityVoter Debuts iPhone App (v. 1)

City guide and local search utility CityVoter has launched an iPhone app. I spoke briefly to CityVoter CEO Josh Walker about the app and provided some feedback. During the call, he acknowledged that it was imperfect but that the company was testing it and would develop version 2.0 after gaining customer and market feedback. He characterized it as a first effort. And with that caveat, it is a good one.

The rest of this post is at LMS.

Is a Newspaper Turnaround Afoot?

There were a number of separate items about newspapers from the past few days. First, on the bad news front, comes a kind of early eulogy for print newspapers in Philadelphia, the first “big city” in the US that may not have a daily (stay tuned).

On a more upbeat note, the Seattle Times is back in the black and apparently growing after the demise of the print edition of the Seattle PI, although that website appears to be holding its own as well. According to the NY Times:

But less than five months later, a nearly forgotten word has crept back into Times executives’ vocabulary: profit. “On a month-to-month basis, we are starting to operate in the black,” Mr. Blethen, who is also chief executive of The Seattle Times Company, said in an interview last week.

How much black ink and by what measure, the privately held company will not say, and amid a sharp advertising downturn, no one denies that its situation remains precarious. But The Times has improved its prospects by picking up most P-I subscribers and managing to keep them so far. It says its daily circulation rose more than 30 percent, to more than 260,000 in June, from about 200,000.

Oddly enough, what remains of The P-I is also faring better than expected. The Hearst Corporation kept the paper’s Web site alive as a news operation with a small staff, heavily reliant on more than 200 unpaid bloggers who write on things as diverse as their neighborhoods, cooking and marathon running.

Last week News Corp. announced a $203 million loss and a move toward requiring users to pay for all content online, the Financial Times is toying with several pay models but the centerpiece appears to be a pay per article system:

FT.com currently offers three tiers of access to its digital content. For users who register an amount of personal information, such as their email address, 10 articles a month are accessible free of charge. There are about 1.4 million registered users of FT.com for this limited access.

An online subscription costs £150 a year, or £199 for a premium-level service that includes added content such as the Lex column . . .

“We are looking at pay per view and we do want to offer users the broadest range of options for accessing FT content on the website,” said the FT.com managing director, Rob Grimshaw. “We will progress with pay-per-view sometime over the next 12 months” . . .

However, speaking to the Guardian yesterday, Grimshaw said that it was of paramount importance to have a simple, easy payment system as had been successfully introduced by Amazon, with its “one-click” service, and iTunes.

In addition, last week, Borrell Associates said that it foresaw a modest recovery in newspaper ad revenues:

Despite their loss of favor among techies, newspapers remain a highly trusted advertising medium among most consumers (per Nielsen, 4/09)

Finally, here are some new metrics from the NAA (based on data collected by MORI research and Nielsen):

• Newspaper Readers Seek Out Advertising Content: Nearly six in 10 adults (59 percent) identify newspapers as the medium they use to help plan shopping or make purchase decisions.
• Newspaper Readers are Involved: 41 percent of U.S. adults say newspapers are the medium used most to check out ads – more than radio TV, Internet, magazines and catalogs combined.
• Newspaper Readers Take Action: 82 percent of U.S. adults took some action as a result of a print newspaper ad in the past 30 days: 61 percent clipped a coupon, 50 percent bought something advertised and 52 percent visited a store.
• Newspaper Readers Value Insert Advertising: 73 percent of adults regularly or occasionally read newspaper inserts, and 82 percent have been spurred to action by a newspaper insert in the past month.

MapQuest Integrates Census Data into Maps

MapQuest has integrated premium datasets into its enterprise product. The data include:

• US boundaries (including neighborhoods)
• US Census Data (2000):-Broken down by Block, Group, Tract, ZCTA, City, County and State
• Premium Business Listings:-13+ mil US and 2+ mil Canada Business Listings
• US Public School Locations: -Includes over 102,000 public schools.
• US Traffic: Incident and Flow data

As I’ve said before, as this “offline” demographic data makes its way online, tied to more precise location awareness, location-targeting becomes audience targeting.

AmericanTowns Offers Improved Design

Often in my writing about local I neglect to discuss American Towns. The site has been around for a long long time and keeps growing under the radar. It’s presented as a kind of local portal with a broad range of content and listings. 

Over the past two years American Towns has become a syndication partner for others in the local space  (e.g., Trulia, Oodle and others). They also syndicate their event lists to third party sites. The site has gotten better and better but has been somewhat clunky to use until now. 

I ran into Ted Buerger, Chairman of AmericanTowns at the Inman conference last week. He told me about the redesign, which dramatically improves the user experience I think.  

With a cleaner and better “UX” I suspect we’ll see a bump in growth. I think the site is also now a takeover target.

GM-eBay: Buy Online, Pick Up at Dealer

eBay Motors is expanding to include new cars from GM in a trial to start in California tomorrow:

The trial is part of Detroit-based GM’s turnaround plan, making more official a practice some of its dealers had already participated in on their own. It expands an existing partnership covering GM certified used vehicles sold through eBay . . .

Starting Tuesday, eBay visitors will be able to visit Web pages like gm.ebay.com and chevy.ebay.com, where they can browse new 2008 and 2009 vehicles, ask dealers questions and figure out financing . . .

Car buyers will be able to choose between the two standard options currently offered on eBay Motors: Negotiating a price with a dealer through the site or purchasing right then at a fixed price. Cars will be picked up at the dealerships.

This will likely work because cars are a commodity (literally) with only a few variables to select (sunroof, trim, etc). A test drive will probably still be required, but a buyer can do that anywhere and then buy the car online.

This scenario creates an interesting categorization challenge: Is this e-commerce or still a local purchase?

MerchantCircle Adds Content from DemandMedia

This morning MerchantCircle is announcing a deal that will add more content to unclaimed merchant pages and add services for MerchantCircle customers. According to the release:

MerchantCircle, the nation’s largest social network of local business owners, today announced a comprehensive relationship with Demand Media, the leader in distributed social media, to deliver professional, industry-specific content and domain name services to 800,000 MerchantCircle customers. Demand Media’s proprietary content, creation, and social syndication platform and its leading domain name registrar will complement MerchantCircle’s rich, merchant-created content to enhance the consumer experience.

In case you had difficulty penetrating that passage, the deal includes three components:

1. Content from DemandMedia’s syndication partners will appear on unclaimed merchant pages:

These article links appear below the fold. Users can click through to pages that look like this and contain ads:

2. The second part involves offering these articles to MerchantCircle customers who want to add content to their pages but don’t have the time to blog or otherwise do it themselves. That will be a subscription model for the merchant.

3. The third part involves eNom (a unit of DemandMedia) powering MerchantCircle’s “instant websites” offering (domains + email).

The deal provides huge distribution for DemandMedia and more monetization opportunities accordingly. It also makes the unclaimed pages (the bulk on MerchantCircle) richer and more SEO worthy. The company says officially it has 800K customers and 20 million monthly unique visitors in the aggregate (almost all SEO). I’ve been told the merchant number will cross 1 million this year.

News: Geomentum, News Corp, Ad Dollar Shifting

I’m once again squeezed for time — going to be at Inman Real Estate Connect in SF today speaking about mobile —  but here are some interesting things going on:

News Corp. says, after yesterday’s big $203 million loss, that by “next summer” all Murdoch’s newspaper sites will be charging for access. With the exception of the Wall Street Journal perhaps, News Corp. will also see traffic and ad revenue losses accordingly. The question is: will subscription revenues offset ad losses?

Big news: Interpublic targets “hyper- local” with new unit called Geomentum that will be working cross-platform geo-marketing (including planning and measurement) to include traditional, online and mobile. The NY Times explains:

Mediabrands, an ad-buying and planning division of the Interpublic Group, plans to introduce a unit on Thursday, Geomentum, that will focus on this problem. Geomentum will be large, handling about $2 billion a year in local advertising for companies like Coldwell Banker and Nestlé Waters. It will figure out how to divide ad dollars among the almost 40,000 ZIP codes in the United States, sometimes zeroing in on even smaller areas, like a city block . . .

In a simple example, a company selling drugstore makeup for Asian women ought to advertise in neighborhoods where lots of Asian women live, and not bother pitching its products in neighborhoods heavy on white men. Once Geomentum narrowed down where Asian women lived, it would then analyze how a billboard in the neighborhood performed, versus a newspaper ad, versus a dollar-off coupon, by writing a long equation that linked store traffic and local product sales with all those variables.

DoubleClick/Google exec Dave Fall joins SMB/Local SEM marketing platform Clickable.

SMB-centric video platform and ad network Jivox launches a suite of new “video marketing” capabilities and tools:

[L] businesses can now take advantage of Jivox’s ad creation and distribution services to create and post compelling video content on their websites, in email and other marketing campaigns, on directory service sites, and on YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

Up and coming deals/coupons destination Savings.com adds Internet provocateur Jason Calacanis to its board.

As Nielsen potentially moves from “people meters” to set-top box measurement of ratings (inevitable) it will wreck havoc on networks, producers and shows. According to an article today in MediaPost:

If the TV industry were to convert to digital set-top data as the basis of advertising deals, it theoretically would shift billions of dollars in TV advertising revenues among top shows, networks and distribution platforms, according to an analysis being published today by a top Nielsen executive.

“This is not merely an academic discussion. These decisions would have major financial implications for ad buyers and sellers,” Manish Bhatia, the Nielsen executive in charge with developing the research firm’s digital set-top initiatives . . . the shifts would generate $3.1 billion in incremental advertising revenues for cable TV networks, but would cost the broadcast networks an estimated $1.1 billion.

Movement to this type of ratings system is also part of a broader move toward “addressable TV.”

Finally, Google is again the top global brand, according to Millward Brown.

TheShack: Email->Video->FB Fan

Indeed, RadioShack is becoming “The Shack,” though perhaps it would’ve been better to use the French “Le Shack” instead. No matter.

I received this email today. It prompts you to watch allegedly hip/cool/humorous commercials hosted on Facebook. And while you’re there, why not become a FB Fan:

On the one hand this sort of hand off from email to Facebook represents a strong approach to social media and customer acquisition. However, I’m already on the email list so in one sense it’s a wash. I’m more receptive to commercial messages in email than I am on Facebook — but that’s just me

Perhaps it’s a hedge against declining email open rates.