The company has added local business video profiles and PPCall ads to the new version of YPMobile, AT&T’s iPhone app. I have a bit more over at I2Go.
The company’s mobile (and online distribution) also benefits from its relationship with Microsoft/Bing.
Pretty interesting: Monopoly City Streets . . .
On the 9th September, a world of property empire building on an unimaginable scale will be launched! A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.
Own any street in the world. Build humble houses, crazy castles and stupendous skyscrapers to collect rent. Use MONOPOLY Chance Cards to sabotage your mates by building Hazards on their streets.
. . . Online multi-player gaming with Google Maps. Just the latest, clever reinvention of Monopoly. Makes sense.
I just wrote a post at SEL about the hiring of former Yahoo! Exec. Brad Garlinghouse as head of communications platforms for AOL. As I was writing it I was trying to think about where the opportunities reside for AOL as it tries to reverse course. Local is one area and so is mobile. There are also vertical opportunities. But coupons and savings is one that came to mind as well.
One of the most interesting but little known offerings that AOL developed is Shortcuts. I’ve written about it several times in the past but haven’t heard anything lately. It links online coupons (grocery at the moment) to existing store loyalty cards:
Consumers select coupons that they add to their accounts and those discounts are automatically taken when the card is swiped at the register; nobody presents any paper. (Card numbers are added to accounts to link them.) When I originally spoke to AOL a few years ago about this there was discussion about broadening beyond grocery/CPG to other categories. I don’t know if that’s still on the roadmap.
What’s really interesting here is that you get a complete closed loop: online to offline. It also presents email and online marketing opportunities to consumers based on redemption history (maybe mobile too). There’s also huge consumer loyalty to a site like this.
AOL has an opportunity here (among other areas) to create a pretty compelling destination for consumers around deals and coupons. Yahoo! is doing something very interesting and much broader with Deals but it offer the loyalty card integration.
Yahoo! Neighbors has been expanded nationwide from its four trial markets: Bay Area, NY Metro, Dallas, Chicago.
Here’s my original post from November, 2007 when Neighbors first launched in an early trial form. Neighbors is a mix of Yahoo! Answers and Upcoming (to a lesser degree). The danger is that Neighbors becomes a repository for spam. And there will be a bit of a cat and mouse game to keep it from becoming that. Provide it doesn’t get taken over by spam this will be a valuable local resource.
Matt McGee at SEL does a nice job with a features overview. He also discusses the SEO potential of Neighbors.
This is clearly not the first integration of Q&A or “conversations” into local — most recently YPG in Canada launched an Answers product (using Praized) — but it is a relatively high-profile one. To work you’ve got to get lots of participation, which implies lots of scale. Yahoo! Local has fallen considerably from its perch as the best/most visited local site several years ago. But it remains a powerful and visible player in the local segment.
I’m unable to keep up with all the information and demands right now, which is why things have been a little light here. I’ve been blogging as normal on SEL and LocalMobileSearch but I’ll get back to my usual output here shortly.
Also I’ve not been very inspired of late.
A reader reminded me that Twitter can be used to access Aardvark as well. I had forgotten that, even after writing a lengthy article about it!
So in one view of the world Aardvark beat Superpages to local search on Twitter. But while Aardvark can be used for local search, it’s also used for a broad range of queries that have nothing to do with local. By contrast SP411 is all about local.
In answer to the question that was posed in the comment to my earlier post, I don’t know how Aardvark is doing via Twitter. Many of the responses to my SP411 post are skeptical about whether users will adopt it.
Just did a movie search “d sp411 movies + Zip”: results came back really fast but were not completely useful because I can’t click through to a theater link or other page showing locations and/or showtimes. But these kinds of things should be remedied in fairly short order.
The following are tables taken from the July RetailMeNot coupons report:
One interesting thing to compare is the online vs. printable (local) coupons and the top geographies in the third table. Might it correlate with broadband penetration? Probably not completely but it’s interesting to try and account for the variations.
Local.com is again doing its best of local contest. The principal objective of the promotion is to boost the number of consumer reviews on the site:
The Best of Local program will rank local businesses in 15 cities throughout the U.S. including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco and Washington D.C.
The 2009 Best of Local program will run from September 1, 2009 through November 24, 2009. The Best of Local weekly drawing will begin on September 1, 2009 and end September 1, 2010.
TechCrunch (now down) uses comScore data to compare growth and engagement at Yelp vs. Citysearch: “Yelp Is Growing 80 Percent A Year, While Citysearch Remains Flat.” I only saw an excerpt of the piece so I don’t know all the points/arguments made.
Here’s what Google Ad Planner has to say about both sites:
Yelp:
Citysearch:
Note the engagement metrics: time on site, page views, visits per visitor.Yelp is driving higher engagement — almost double the time on site despite having only slightly more uniques.
All this appears to validate the thrust of what TechCrunch is saying. Here’s Compete data showing he sites in a virtual dead heat, with Yelp slightly ahead:
Obviously the local space is not a “winner take all” segment; however the trend data — to the extent it’s accurate — is probably worrying to Citysearch.
Yelp’s mobile efforts (originally an afterthought) have become more and more strategic (the site just launched for BlackBerry w/Bing Maps). This has helped boost Yelp the brand and user loyalty. By contrast, Citysearch’s site relaunch and Facebook Connect integration appear not to have done much to help the site (unless it would be further behind and those changes helped retain users).
I don’t have time to do it but it would be worthwhile to take a number of sites that have integrated FB Connect and do traffic and engagement comparisons before and after. We may have an “emperor has no clothes” scenario here.
Thoughts? Opinions?
___
Update: A number of people have made the fair point that if ad dollars are considered then it’s a different picture. Citysearch is effectively a local ad network and has many more SMB dollars than Yelp at this point, although I don’t have exact numbers. Anyone care to estimate?
A version of local search has existed on Twitter for some time: asking your followers for local recommendations about places to stay, things to do and so on. One can also use Twitter search itself, though it’s very hit and miss in terms of the quality of results. And there are also the third party search engines that use the Twitter API. Yet those typically produce the same uneven results.
But in what is a first (to my knowledge) Idearc’s Superpages has brought true local search to Twitter through Twitter.com/sp411. Twitter users can now conduct searches of the Superpages database and get results as direct messages on Twitter to their local queries. (They can also retweet and share them, which makes it that much more interesting.)
The rest of this post is at Search Engine Land.
I argued early last year that if behavioral targeting and tracking became too pervasive and/or aggressive we’d see some form of regulation from Washington. It’s coming. As the NY Times reported yesterday:
10 major privacy groups plan to demand new privacy legislation from Congress regarding online behavioral tracking and ad targeting.
The roster of groups is a who’s who in consumer and privacy circles: Consumers Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Federation of America, Center for Digital Democracy, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and others.
Among the things they’re asking for: No sensitive information (like health or financial information) should be used for behavioral tracking, no one under 18 should be behaviorally tracked, Web sites and ad networks shouldn’t be able to keep behavioral data for more than a day without getting an OK from the individual they’re tracking, and behavioral data can’t be used for discriminatory purposes.
Some Congress members have indicated they will consider such legislation in the fall.
These ideas will not strike anyone in Congress as unreasonable. Just as everyone under the sun is doing retargeting, I predict that some version of the ideas expressed in the second paragraph above will be enacted into law or imposed through some existing regulatory framework.
Get ready for it. All the industry can really do is voluntarily adopt some version of these ideas to potentially pre-empt their imposition from above.
ComScore just came out with a press release that says 20% of all online display ad impressions are happening on social networks. And 80% of that is coming on MySpace and Facebook:
There’s very mixed evidence regarding the efficacy of advertising on social networks. And among the social networks there’s widely varying inventory/impression quality. Indeed, social networks have contributed to the deflation around CPM rates because their massive page views have flooded the market with impressions.
For its part Facebook is experimenting with lots of different types of ad targeting: demographic, marital status, location, even birthday.
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Related: Summarized by eMarketer here are some of the barriers to marketing on social networks (Equation Research):
TurnHere announced that it had produced its 20,000th video. In honor of that the company is running a promotion that gives away free video and other prizes to SMBs throughout September:
Enter for the chance to win a professionally produced custom video profile of your business and $1000. You could be one of 400 to receive a high-quality video that can be used on the Web. Plus four Grand Prize winners will also receive a $1000 gift card.
Every week in September 2009, one winner will be randomly selected to receive a $1000 gift card for Costco, Best Buy, Staples or FedEx Office, winner’s choice. Grand Prize winners will also receive a custom Business Profile Video valued at $599, produced by TurnHere Internet Video.
Metrics firm comScore recently reported “158 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month [of July], the largest audience ever recorded.” YouTube remains the largest video destination online.
There’s no question that video is helpful for advertisers and SMBs. Eventually it will simply be part of a list of things one must have: website, check; Facebook page, check, video, check . . . and so on.
I just had a great breakfast with Vikram Sharma, CEO of ShopLocal. He took me through a deck that reflects all the stuff that they’re doing with retailers. They’ve got their fingers in almost every area of the digital pie now: search, display, mobile, social media.
The company has largely migrated from a shopping destination that also manages retailers’ digital data to a marketing platform or vehicle for retailers and mediator between them and the rest of the digital universe. Apparently they’re doing extremely well.
We spoke about the ongoing challenge of measuring the online to offline conversion and about coupons and other tools (e.g., online tied to loyalty cards, mobile) that help bridge that gap.
We also spoke about the fact that many retailers are seeing their print ROI go down but don’t yet have coherent strategies for digital. It’s amazing that at this point in the Internet’s history there are still major retailers that haven’t fully embraced it yet.
The challenge of attribution and of tracking will remain a persistent problem in local because there’s no single analytics tool or solution that works every time on a campaign basis to reveal efficacy. Regardless, consumers are doing the “ROBO” thing and everyone understands that. Eventually marketers will be compelled to fully embrace that proposition and spend accordingly.
According to the NY Times, eBay is set to announce the sale of Skype to private investors let by former Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. Reportedly eBay wants approximately $2 billion for Skype, having written down the value of the investment. Originally the company was acquired almost four years ago this month for nearly $3 billion in cash and other consideration.
At the time of the acquisition then eBay CEO Meg Whitman said the following:
“Communications is at the heart of ecommerce and community,” said Meg Whitman, President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay. “By combining the two leading ecommerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications, we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net.”
There were all sorts of visions of PPCall for local merchants as well. In theory it was a great fit but eBay couldn’t make the marriage work. Now, at a time when Skype seems to be building momentum online and in mobile, eBay is unloading it.
Do you think it’s a good move to get rid of the company now — or a boneheaded one?
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Update: eBay signs agreement to sell Skype for $2.75 billion:
The buyer, who will control an approximately 65 percent stake, is an investor group led by Silver Lake and includes Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board. eBay is expected to receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash upon the completion of the sale and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The company will retain an approximately 35 percent equity investment in Skype. The transaction, which is not subject to a financing condition, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2009.
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