Google LSS to Be a Monster (as in Huge)?

In a column today local SEO Master Andrew Shotland analyzes and prognosticates:

At the moment Google social search does not work very well for local search. The algorithm appears to rely heavily on Gmail connections. Combine this with the fact that its hard to find enough relevant social interactions for a large amount of search queries, so Google doesn’t have much to work with for a lot of users.

But you can be sure that with the announcement of a Twitter integration deal and Facebook turning on location-based services, Google social search is going to come out like a monster and the local part of it is going to be huge.

So how can you benefit from this?

First let’s talk about some of the main types of social connections one has on the web:

• Friends
• Friends of friends
• People who are interested in the same niche
• People who are located in the same geographic area
• People who you have no connection with (let’s call them “the unfortunates”)

As I mentioned in my Twitter Chamber of Commerce post there is a large opportunity for businesses to increase awareness in their community by simply networking with other businesses via social media like Twitter. But now with the advent of Google social search, the simple act of following or being followed has a ripple effect that could yield dramatic benefits.

Read the full column at Search Engine Land.

 

The Future of Local Consumer Media?

Tomorrow at the Local Social Summit in London there’s a concluding session entitled “What does the Perfect Local Media Company Look Like in 5 Years Time”:

The final session of the day will be an interactive session where we put togther the ultimate specification for the killer local media company of the near future.

This session is being run by Praized’s Seb Provencher. I asked him at dinner last night whether this was about the business side or exclusively about the consumer experience. He said the latter (although I suspect the biz model discussion will sneak in).

I’m going to compile the excellent comments in response to OK, Let’s Talk about Local Search and present some of them for discussion during the session tomorrow. If there’s anything really interesting that emerges I’ll blog about it. As a little taste of the session, here Seb’s presentation for  tomorrow:

Separately, I've been having lots of conversations with different people on the question of whether local search is "solved," ever since these posts.

Comcast’s Yellowpages TV

AT&T has been putting Yellowpages.com listings on TV through its U-Verse cable-TV alternative for some time. Last week MediaPost wrote about a similar offering through Comcast, with click-to-call (PPCall probably in the future):

An arm of the Comcast Media Center has begun pitching a “Yellow Pages on TV” application to cable operators to offer on their local systems. The interactive-TV system allows one’s fingers to do the walking — with a remote control.

The function, among other capabilities, allows a viewer to scroll through lists of business types or search by company name — then access contact info. A viewer can also click a “call me” button initiating a call to a business, which immediately calls back.

There are several interesting dimensions to this:

• TV as another digital distribution platform for YP publishers/advertisers
• PPCall as the model
• TV as another place to showcase YP video advertising (video would be all but essential I would think)

But there are indirectly competitive dimensions too:

• Comcast sells video ads to local businesses, with a YP-like sales force of roughly 3K reps.
• Those videos cost much more than a video ad purchased through Yellowpages.com (however YP.com distribution/views are going to be less today)
• Cable cos and Telcos are competitors for ISP offerings and for TV.

Yellow pages publishers are compelled to develop new distribution for their advertising, including new digital distribution as search becomes less viable for them, with SEO’d listings falling “below the fold”: