HNY: ¡Felíz Año Novo! Bonne Année!

Hey everyone . . . Happy New Year!

I hope that 2010 is healthy and successful (however you define success) for each and everyone one of you.

I haven’t been writing anything here but I’ve been posting at SEL and Internet2Go:

• As Verizon Implements Bing Default Search Deal Company Sees User Backlash
• Now That Everything Is Known, Will The Google Nexus One Phone Launch Generate A Collective Yawn?
• Year In Review: Search Goes Mobile
• Nuance Buys SpinVox for $66 million in Cash (Plus Stock)
• AdMob Also Sees iPod Touch Growth
• Vlingo Top Search Terms/Categories of 2009
• Pricing & Plan Details for Nexus One
• Wither Kindle: Thinking about Tablet 2.0
• Tracking App Store Growth, Downloads
• Confirmation of Nexus One from T-Mobile

Happy Holidays to Everyone!

Have a great holiday everyone . . . And thank you to all the readers of this blog. I’m grateful to you all.

Location Will Be Everywhere

Without diving into the technical side of things (which I would bungle anyway), what’s becoming clear is that everything will be geo-tagged or otherwise capable of being tied to place in one way or another: products, services, businesses, comments/reviews and, of course, people.

So will ads and offers . . .

Yahoo was an early pioneer with Fire Eagle (followed by Google with Gears with geolocation) but others have moved in including the company Twitter just bought MixerLabs. There’s SimpleGeo and others (maybe Facebook) that will provide location or geocoding to content.

The geotagging of all this content and the ability to associate people on mobile devices with places, other people and content will be radical in terms of how we use and consume Internet content and (potentially) interact with others. Most of this will, not surprisingly, play out in a mobile context.

It really feels to me — beyond the fact that everything is accelerating — that we’re entering a new period of Internet development and evolution, coinciding with the cloud and the rise of smartphones (maybe connected tablets too).

As Google’s Vic Gundotra said the other day, “We’re at the beginning of the beginning” of a new era of computing.

It’s really pretty clear that mobile devices, ubiquitous connectivity (which is coming) and data in the cloud are going to make computing and mobile Internet-based computing look very different in a few years than they do today. And location will be a big part of everything — finally.

Twitter Buys TownMe Owner

Twitter is really serious about this local thing. It just announced acquisition of the creator of GeoAPI, Mixer Labs.

From the Twitter blog post:

The Mixer Labs crew has been working on harnessing the power of local information for a couple years and just recently launched GeoAPI, a comprehensive service for helping developers build geolocation-aware applications. As of today, they’re part of Twitter and will be working to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets. We want to know What’s happening?, and more precisely, Where is it happening? As a dramatic example, twittering “Earthquake!” alone is not as informative as “Earthquake!” coupled with your current location.

We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and other powerful new possibilities.

What’s also interesting is that as a byproduct of that acquisition Twitter now owns TownMe, a local destination site created by Mixer Labs (as their main offering).

From my earlier post about TownMe:

A mix of data crawled from the Internet and user-generated content, Elad characterized TownMe as a kind of “next generation” wiki for local. The site describes its mission as follows: “TownMe’s mission is to bring all the world’s communities and local information online” . . .

Pigeonholing TownMe is not easy. It’s not exactly a local search engine, nor is it really a directory site. Nor is it a local news and events site. It’s not American Towns or Topix, Zvents, Everyblock, Yelp or Yellowpages.com. Rather its an amalgam, in a way, of elements of all of them.

What will Twitter do with TownMe? It now owns a local destination site.

Your thoughts?

Local Publishers What If . . . ?

If you’re a publisher with a local sales channel or an independent local sales channel, you need to have an answer to the following scenario. (Let me start by saying this is just my speculation informed by no specific conversations with anyone.)

Here goes . . . Yelp had 200 mostly telephone sales people. Google tried to buy the company. It appears not to have worked.

Google now steps back and says . . . “Hey, we’re Google; we’ve got a pretty strong brand and we think this local thing is pretty important. What if we hired our own telephone sales force and tried to sell our local listing ads that way? And what if we combined it with a traditional media campaign to broadly expose the SMBs of the world to the existence of these ads?”

Yodle and before them Leads.com told me that local advertisers can be sold over the phone. Others have shown this too.

In my view Google could become very very effective in acquiring SMB advertisers with the approach I’ve described . . . and you get 30 days free to try it out.

If you’re a local publisher or sales channel how do you compete with this? Again this is pure conjecture on my part (no wink, wink; I’ve heard nothing).

Here’s how you’d have to compete if this were to happen:

• More and better customer service/true consultative selling
• “We don’t just give you placement in Google results, we put you on Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook . . . ” (as well as traditional media)
• Cultivate real trust with the local advertiser

From what I know this approach would represent a cultural shift for many YP publishers, even though they’re saying things like this publicly.

In another way, this is the same question as: “how does the local retailer or SMB product seller compete with the big box?” In most cases the answer is: they can’t. But those that do successfully compete do so with great service.

Quick Thoughts about Next Year

This certainly won’t sound original but 2010 is going to be all about leveraging social media in the local space (or leveraging local if you’re a social media site). And mobile. Mobile. Mobile. Mobile.

If you’re a traditional media publisher:

• Distribution: gaining exposure for yourself and your and advertisers via Facebook, Twitter and otherwise through social media “extenders” and tools (e.g., AgendiZe)
• Using social media APIs, Facebook Connect, etc. to bring social media functionality to destination sites
• Reputation management: adding services that help simplify and expose where SMB data and reviews exist online (see Marchex, GetListed, ClickFuel)

See the related article: The New Local Product Suite Now in Focus.

Mobile obviously becomes a huge theme and issue for local publishers and entrepreneurs in 2010. Did I mention mobile?

I believe 2009 was the “year of mobile” — at least from a validation standpoint. Mobile is the “bridge” between online and offline. The perfect metaphor for that is the barcode scanner in the store for reviews and price information online.

But mobile is paradoxical: barriers to entry are low and it enables small companies to emerge with popular (esp. niche) LBS apps but it’s hard for most traditional publishers to do well in the segment because they’re not creative enough in most cases. And then there are the really big players.

For example, Google has moved very effectively to gain and consolidate a leadership position in “mobile search” (the definition of search is expanding in mobile; see Google Goggles). Google may own much more local traffic on the handset than it already does on the PC. How do you compete? You thoughtfully throw lots of stuff against the refrigerator: apps + mobile Web, diversified mobile strategy, risk taking and experimentation with brand and non-branded sites/content.

I know I said this last year, but online I think we’ll see more location precision and sophistication around local ad targeting. Local stops having to sell itself and everybody’s doing it at the national and regional level at least as part of the campaign; mobile has made clear the value of location to most of these folks. Yet everyone’s doing geotargeting in the context of a more complicated market: more platforms (e.g., search, display, social media, traditional, mobile).

In addition: M&A. Yelp may have been the first taste of a much more M&A-friendly 2010, with IPOs for some.

On the advertiser side there are still the same old, same old bottlenecks (confusion, fragmentation, lots of people coming at SMBs) but the dollars are much more willing to move now. Holding on to the traditional media spend may prove quite a bit more difficult in 2010.

I also predict we’re going to seem some very competitive stuff coming out of Facebook and the Twitter API in local. That’s easier for me to see from third party apps built on Twitter data. But Facebook has some tricks up its sleeve (including on the advertiser side).

There’s more to talk about regarding other media, specifically around TV and cable companies getting squeezed over time as consumers need them less and less because they can get Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and the Internet more generally in the living room.

This is all I can manage to get out right now.

Are Reviews Becoming a ‘Commodity’?

When I was speaking to IAC’s Dinesh Moorjani about the Citysearch Android app late last week, we discussed the idea that reviews were moving toward “commodity” status. While this clearly isn’t true across the board it’s already be true in the restaurants and hotels categories, for example. Take this restaurant review on Yelp (click to enlarge graphic):

There are 187 reviews of this (very good restaurant) in San Francisco. In other than “high consideration” scenarios, I’m only interested in the reviews summary (or maybe the two most recent reviews). Thus Yelp’s trends/summary tools become my focus rather than the reviews themselves.

We can discuss and debate when you might look more closely at reviews (dentist, roofer, etc.); however the paradox is: the more reviews there are the less they matter in a way. 

It used to be very difficult to get reviews — and still is for many sites — this is what helped build Yelp and its brand: breadth and density of reviews. However when there are 100, 300 even 500 reviews people don’t have time to go through them and they (individually) have less value. Citysearch argues that editorial content and enabling the SMBs to “have a voice” on the site become differentiators in this new environment. (Yelp allows businesses to respond to reviews; it’s a bit different from what Citysearch is doing.) 

While Yelp has a strong, engaged community it becomes relatively easy in selected categories for Google, for example, to duplicate this summary/sentiment analysis function: 

So as we get more reviews for more businesses over time, from a consumer perspective, other things start to factor in: my network’s opinion or accessing word of mouth for very specific recommendations.

To varying degrees Facebook, GoodRec, Aardvark, Twitter (to some degree) and the new AlikeList contemplate this less anonymous, more “trusted recommendations” scenario. Yelp too has been connecting people on its site. And Citysearch integrated Facebook Connect some time ago, so that I could see who among my friends was on the site. 

The reason that Yelp didn’t show me my “friend’s reviews” or allow “sort by friends” is because there weren’t enough reviews to make that functionality meaningful. Here’s my paraphrase of Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman’s previous explanation of why they didn’t initially pursue this approach:

He reminded me that very few people actually create content, despite the popularity of reviews, which typically means that your friends won’t have written anything about most of the businesses you’re interested in. He also said that services that ping your network when you have a request are also going to be challenging because some people aren’t going to want to receive emails all the time (see Facebook fatigue). 

AlikeList is betting that it has removed the barriers to content creation and will be able to build enough usage and community to make this “trusted recommendations” functionality meaningful. 

We may not be there but we eventually will be entering a period where reviews about everything are everywhere and people look to “secondary” tools (top lists) or analysis (ratings summaries) to make decisions. Comparable to Yelp’s ratings summary feature, I always point to Amazon’s “most helpful/most critical” review capsule in this discussion:

This is the future to some degree. Reviews will always be important (even essential) but they become less of a differentiator over time. Here’s where Grayboxx’s methodology might be relevant; however the execution was very awkward and the site was probably too early. 

Some quick final thoughts:

• More reviews across categories means Google can crawl, capture and present these summaries (bad news for competitors)
• Lists and tools that get me to the “best,” “most popular,” “most recommended” become essential as a first step; then I drill down into reviews if I need more detail and information
• Q&A tools and connecting actual people or being able to query the community become more important as well (Yelp, Yahoo Local and Yellow Pages Group do have this today; working to varying degrees)
• Other site content and functionality become important to complement reviews
• Brand and trust matter (getting reviews from Yelp might be preferable to getting them from a less well-known site that offers reviews and shows up in Google results for the same query)

What do you think about all this and the basic question of whether reviews are moving toward “commodity status”?

No Surprise: ReachLocal Seeking IPO in 2010

This has been hinted at or said all-but-explicitly many times in the past. According to Dow Jones Newswires:

ReachLocal Inc . . . plans to sell up to an estimated $100 million of stock in an initial public offering  . . .

The company said it would use a small amount of the proceeds for a deferred payment on its purchase of the stake in its Australian operations it didn’t already own. The rest will go to general corporate purposes and working capital.

ReachLocal, founded in 2003, saw revenue more than doubled last year. In the first nine months of 2009, it was up 38% to $143.3 million while it swung to an $11.7 million profit.

(Here’s the SEC filing, with lots of info about the company, its finances, executive compensation and its revenues.)

According to the company’s Inc 500 profile:

The nearly $147 million in 2008 revenue put ReachLocal’s growth from 2005 at 3,217 percent. Of the companies on Inc. 500 that were founded in 2004, ReachLocal had the third highest revenue. ReachLocal has experienced over 146,000 percent revenue growth since its 2004 founding year.

A little over a year ago when the company opened its UK office it said it “serves 12,000 local businesses in over 30 markets around the world, including the UK, US, Canada and Australia.”

Reach has consistently said to me that its churn is “much lower” than the 65%+ annualized churn experienced by most of the local SEM channels selling online marketing to SMBs. If we assume that there are 15,000 advertisers/accounts that Reach is managing (my guess), that would mean the annual value of each, on average, is just under $10K.

Anyone want to add anything to this or express their opinion about the prospects for a public ReachLocal?

___

From the press release about the forthcoming IPO:

ReachLocal, Inc., a local online marketing company, announced today that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) relating to a proposed initial public offering of shares of its common stock. The shares of common stock to be sold in this offering are proposed to be sold by ReachLocal and certain stockholders. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined.

J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. and BofA Merrill Lynch are acting as joint book-running managers. Citi is acting as lead manager, and Piper Jaffray & Co., Needham & Company, LLC and Broadpoint.Gleacher are acting as co-managers.

NYT: Google May Have Walked

An alternative version of the Yelp-Google story is explained by Miguel Helft at the NY Times. He writes that various sources (including “Google executives”) contend that Google, rather than Yelp, declined to pursue the sale because of a lack of “transparency” in the negotiations:

[A]nother person who was briefed on the negotiations said that it was Google that walked away. The person said that Google executives believed that their counterparts at Yelp weren’t being “transparent.” The executives also didn’t want to let the negotiations be driven by leaks to the press . . . implying that it was Yelp that had first leaked word of the talks . . .

It seems apparent, based on conversations with multiple sources, that after the two sides tentatively agreed on a deal, Yelp came back to Google saying it had received a higher offer from another party. Why Yelp didn’t take that offer, which the sources said was in the vicinity of $750 million, is a bit of a mystery. The people who said Yelp walked away from the deal implied that there wasn’t a good fit with the other company. However, as Anthony Alfonso, president of Trenwith Valuation, told Claire Cain Miller, some of Yelp’s actions may have been an exercise in brinkmanship.

Fascinating.

My original suspicion was that one of Yelp’s investors leaked the negotiation story to TechCrunch in an effort to bring out other bidders and ratchet up the price being discussed.

Another theory floated is that the $500 million number came out to establish a valuation for a big investment round to be announced.

Somewhere on the Yelp side it would appear somebody’s being a bit greedy.

MapQuest Adds Content via Citysearch

I noticed Citysearch content on MapQuest before but now the MapQuest blog formally announces a deal:

Now you’ll find more than 700,000 new and informative business listings nationwide in popular search categories such as restaurants, hotels, shopping, spas, bars, clubs and more through our partnership with Citysearch. In addition to more listings, you’ll also find greater editorial content for each business including restaurant menus, coupons and special offers, business hours, and customer ratings and reviews, so you can search, research, and of course, get a map or directions to get there.

Recently MapQuest added street-level photography with “360 View.” The company has also added food-bank icons to the map for the holidays.

IPOs a Comin in 2010?

In the post “Yelp turned down Google” chatter the word is the company is headed for IPO city. Here’s Business Insider:

Why would Yelp’s investors allow Jeremy to turn down a $550 million deal when the company’s revenues are only in the tens of millions of dollars?

But our source tells us investors are the ones most opposed to selling.

They speculate that Microsoft inquired but also was rebuffed and that a deal with Google could still happen.

I could be way off, but I think running Yelp as a public company would be tough. But as a public company Yelp would change out of necessity I suppose.

The board would probably want a more Wall-Street-Friendly CEO and the company would need to find a strategy to grow revenues substantially and keep them growing; it would need to turn into a version of ReachLocal in essence.

The Yelp brand is very strong and they’ve built a terrific entity. But I probably would have taken the money.

Opt-In WPs Will Lead to Same for YP

From this weekend’s NY Times:

Leland Yee, a California state senator representing San Francisco, has promised to introduce a bill to the Legislature in January that would prohibit telephone companies from delivering white pages unless customers specifically ask to receive them.

Here’s what Yee’s site says:

According to the Product Stewardship Institute, telephone books represent significant tonnage in the waste stream (660,000 tons per year).  Local governments currently bear costs to recycle and/or dispose of phone books, and some areas experience limited or absent opportunities to recycle.  According to a report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, not publishing a phone book reduces greenhouse gases by about three times as much as recycling (relative to land filling).

The AT&T spokesperson quoted in the article approves of opt-in white pages but references usage in defense of mandatory distribution of YP: 

As for the Yellow Pages, their fate is more secure because they are still seen as important for generating business.

“People reference the yellow pages 3.3 billion times a year,” [AT&T spokesman Fletcher] Cook said. “There’s still a high volume of usage.”

If Opt-in WP (a non-revenue-generating product in the US) legislation passes, it will set up a precedent for a future opt-in treatment of yellow pages.

The future argument will be: those that truly want it can get it and those that don’t won’t have to. The logic of that will be hard for the industry to combat given the opt-in precedent that will have been set by WP. Consumers and politicians won’t care about the revenue side of things. 

YP will have to do lots of aggressive PR about how it helps SMBs and the local community to combat the environmental/waste arguments.

Who disagrees with me?

Citysearch Launches on Android

Already on the iPhone, BlackBerry and the Pre, Citysearch has launched an Anroid app today. The app has much the same functionality as on the other platforms: users can write reviews and share information. They can also search and filter by various criteria, as well as find nearby places using built-in location awareness.

However the iPhone and Android apps are somewhat different.

(I downloaded the Android app, but am having some difficulty getting it to work this morning. See update below; working now.)

The thing that’s important is that Citysearch is present on Android, which is rapidly becoming a major mobile platform. There may be as many as 50 Android devices in the market globally by the end of 2010 according to financial analyst projections.

Over time the “mobile Web” will get richer and minimize the need for many publishers to build native apps for all the smartphone platforms. But for now the functionality available via apps is still much richer than what you can do on the mobile Web.

Local and mobile are joined at the hip and every local publisher needs some sort of mobile presence; the scope of that and particular mobile strategy depends on the particular site/publisher, their audience and their objectives.

Citysearch told me that the company is seeing increasing usage volume coming from mobile devices, although wouldn’t give me specific figures.

The site, which lost ground to Yelp over the past few years, is now pushing in several directions to regain the initiative. Mobile is an area where it can reinvigorate its brand and reintroduce itself to consumers. Citysearch is also doing interesting things on the merchant side.

Most recently the company integrated the Twitter sign-up API and effectively became a “Twitter client.“

One interesting question, which I discussed with Citysearch, is whether user reviews are now becoming “commoditized.” Accordingly, Citysearch believes that its editorial content is a differentiator vs. pure user review sites (read: Yelp). I would agree that editorial “round-ups” and features add considerable value when people are looking for ideas and inspiration.

Do you believe that Citysearch’s across the board push into mobile will help it gain new users and reassert itself in the local space?

____

Update: App is working now; nice  interface with Twitter integration very prominent on the profile page:

Google-Yelp Deal Now Off

180 degrees . . . apparently Google is not buying Yelp. Something changed over the weekend and Yelp rejected Google’s $500+ million offer.

As I wrote last week: When Money’s on the Table, Take It. While many Yelpers — and the rest of the local ecosystem — many not have liked the idea of a Google-Yelp combination, you don’t say “no” to this kind of money without a very concrete alternative plan. Everyone from the VC-investors to the company executives want an exit.

We haven’t heard the full story yet, but there’s a great deal more here going on than simply “walking away.” We’re probably talking about one of two alternative scenarios:

• Another buyer or major investor will be announced
• Yelp has decided to pursue an IPO (perhaps with a major investor to provide additional cash to get it to $100 million in revenues)

What do you think happened?

Next Up for Google: Trulia?

Let the rumor-machine keep a rollin’ . . .

The latest is that Google is “eyeing” Trulia. From AllThingsD via CNET . . . Another local content site in the important vertical of real estate.

We’ll see . . . More later.

Off now to a winter solstice party; drinking, human sacrifices, that sort of thing . . .

Why Isn’t AT&T the Buyer of Yelp?

Again, nothing has been confirmed yet but let’s assume that Google acquires Yelp. I’ve been talking to people all day about this question and the implications for both companies.

A more interesting question to consider may be: Why didn’t AT&T (owner of YellowPages.com) buy Yelp? AT&T, with its large sales force could have provided Yelp with ad sales and Yelp could have broadened the reach of AT&T online and in mobile to audiences that aren’t using yellow pages. 

Here’s what I wrote previously in my post “If I Were a Yellow Pages Publisher . . .”

So if I were AT&T I’d be buying Yelp. The sales force could sell the ads and the brand would be an enormous addition to AT&T interactive  . . . Notwithstanding the chart at the very bottom, Yelp’s traffic is already bigger than the IYPs . . .

So what kept AT&T from trying to buy Yelp? Was it:

• Lack of vision
• Lack of an entrepreneurial culture
• Too many layers of approval
• Inability to act quickly

Or have they tried and Yelp investors wanted more than they were willing to pay? What do you think?

Local in a ‘Post-Yelp’ World

It’s still a rumor so take everything I’m about to say in that context. (Though it’s being confirmed by Claire Miller at NYT; “more than $500M”.) However if Google does succeed in acquiring Yelp, it will be a huge deal for everyone the local space. Earthquake was the metaphor I used in my post at Search Engine Land last night.

In many of its markets Yelp is the strongest online local brand next to Craigslist. And among younger users it’s a far stronger brand than yellow pages or newspapers. Yelp also operates a telephone sales force. This would give Google the basis of an active outreach effort to the local market.

This is a cultural shift for Google and a major competitive change potentially in the local segment.

If Google does buy Yelp it will have much less “need” for its current roster of reseller partners, with limited exceptions perhaps. The combined consumer pull of Google + Yelp in the local space would present an almost insurmountable challenge to many local publishers. Their “feet on the street” advantage would also be diminished.

But my sense is that a Yelp acquisition would also open up opportunities for others. This is not to say that Yelp would lose vitality or momentum (although it could). It could be come the “YouTube of local.” But my intuition tells me that it would create an opening for others with interesting new approaches to the market.

Twitter and its open API and developer community represents a challenge to Yelp, as does Facebook (which I believe will acquire FourSquare). FourSquare may be a threat to Yelp in a very limited way but it is not a mainstream service — absent some dramatic changes and shifts.

Forced by the rise of Facebook in mobile, Loopt is trying to become a version of Yelp now. And AlikeList, which just launched, has great potential.

Yelpers will initially be quite upset about their site and community being absorbed by Google; however they’ll get over it just like YouTube users did. But in the process the Yelp brand identity will lose some of its edge, which is what will partly create the opening for others.

Mobile, where Yelp is also strong, is of course creating opportunity for companies in the local space that aren’t incumbents on the PC.

It’s premature to congratulate anyone at Yelp unless or until this rumor is confirmed. But if so, it caps a great success story: part luck, part experimentation, part great execution. I’ve watched it from the very beginning (when I was skeptical).

At one point a few years ago CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me that Yelp was working to figure out “the formula” around entering new cities. When he used that phrase (assuming my memory is correct) I thought to myself: “formula, what formula could there be?”

But their execution has proven that there was one and that it has been working very well. Stay tuned.

___

Update: David Mihm reports that a stat mentioned last week by Yelp COO Geoff Donaker is that Yelp has 200 salespeople. Google will likely boost that and use it to sell Local Listing Ads as well as Yelp. It could also use the team (over time) to expose Google Apps and other services (e.g., Voice) to SMBs. It’s not just about ads for Google.

Even if people defect and leave Yelp, I believe Google will be using telephone sales going forward. Reach, Yodle and other independing local sales channels will need to broaden and reposition if what I’m saying comes true.

Is Google Making a Play for Yelp?

TechCrunch is reporting that Google is “advanced acquisition negotiations” to buy Yelp for $500 million or more. TechCrunch has been generally correct recently about many of the rumors it has reported recently (i.e., Google Phone) so we should take this seriously.

Yelp has raised a little over $30 million over several funding rounds. Revenues are heading toward $50 million according to several sources. If the price suggested by TechCrunch is correct, it would be about 10X estimated revenues.

There has been an imbalance between Yelp’s success as a consumer brand and destination and its ability to “monetize” among small business advertisers. However that $50 million in revenues, if correct, would be very respectable.

Buying Yelp would be a different sort of acquisition for Google — a major one — because it’s not really a technology platform so much as a local brand, community and sales channel. If Google does buy Yelp, what exactly does it get?

It gets a local-social network with roughly 26 million users across the US, Canada and the UK. Yelp reportedly has 8.5 million reviews. This is a huge amount of content that Google can’t generate itself and which it is already leaning on pretty heavily on its Place Pages as part of its increasing focus on local. But Google is also doing things on Place Pages that potentially threaten sites like Yelp longer term (e.g., sentiment analysis).

The rest of this post is at SEL.

_____

Ideally the buyer should be AT&T or another YP publisher rather than Google. Indeed, Yahoo! would also be in some ways a better cultural fit for Yelp (or the old Yahoo! at least). But Google seems to have beaten the others to the punch. And hypothetically IAC could combine Citysearch, Urbanspoon and Yelp into a local empire of sorts; however Barry Diller doesn’t have quite enough cash to pick up Yelp it would appear.

Even eBay should have taken a run at Yelp, but it probably lacked the vision to do so.

No Surprise: Reviews Influence Consumer Buying

Why do consulting or analyst firms announce results of consumer surveys that show “reviews influence consumer shopping” as though this is either a) a revelation or b) new information. Deloitte is the latest to point out this near-self evident piece of information:

Over half of all U.S. consumers and 69 percent of Millennials believe that online customer reviews and ratings influence their buying decisions more than any other type of online advertising, and 51 percent have purchased products based on an online recommendation. In fact, 24 percent of U.S. consumers would like to have an online service that recommends a product based on other consumers’ preferences.

According to the survey, one-quarter of U.S. consumers are socializing online almost every day and nearly 60 percent currently maintain a social networking site, up from 48 percent last year. The connections maintained over social networks provide powerful sources for trusted recommendations.

Reviews are like word of mouth. Consumers see it as unbiased, whereas advertising is viewed with suspicion.

In fairness to Deloitte, they were comparing the influence of different “mediums” in a kind of hierarchy.

Here’s a great deal more on ad types/media and consumer trust from a massive Nielsen survey:

WhitePages Bringing Social Media into Results

WhitePages.com announced that it would be integrating publicly available social media profiles into people search results:

[T]oday WhitePages (www.whitepages.com) announced that it will incorporate public social media profiles from Facebook and Twitter into its people search service.  Now, in addition to traditional contact information like phone numbers and addresses, a people search on WhitePages will also provide consumers with direct links to select matching Facebook and Twitter user pages . . .

Today’s announcement is a preview of how social networking data will eventually be incorporated throughout the entire WhitePages site.  By the middle of next year, WhitePages expects to significantly expand the number of social listings, and add social networking account information to existing work and residential listings where relevant.  Consumers can also add links to their social media profiles on their own by taking advantage of WhitePages’ recently launched editing capability.

Here’s my Twitter profile on WhitePages:

Arguably WhitePages.com has been in this realm forever but is moving aggressively to make itself more relevant to the Facebook era. Success is not guaranteed by any means. The company will need comprehensive data but also to create an improved user experience vs. what exists today. Among others, 123People will try and give WhitePages.com a run for its money.