Incredible, Evo and the iPhone

Once again I’m facing a mobile phone dilemma. Although a Sprint customer for over 10 years I’m perpetually flirting with leaving, either for the iPhone or cheaper comparable service from T-Mobile.

I bought the Pre, buying the hype, only to discover its profound limitations as an Internet device — especially compared to the iPhone. I’ve also owned or extensively tested several Android phones: the HTC Magic/MyTouch3G, the Nexus One and, now, the HTC Incredible.

Maybe it’s because I’ve already used the N1, or potentially because I now have an iPad, but I’m unimpressed by the Incredible. That’s right; I may be the only one.

I like the N1 better. It felt more substantial. I also find I’m not a fan of the HTC “Sense” interface. And it’s no longer as “fun” to browse the Internet on a smartphone after the iPad.

Android devices have gotten better and better but they still don’t trump the iPhone in my view for overall ease of use and functionality. There are a number of things that are nicer on Android than the iPhone but the “fit and finish” and certain aspects of the UI and general usability don’t measure up. As one example, the HTC Android keyboard remains weak by comparison.

What I’d really like is an iPhone on Sprint (or Verizon). But it doesn’t appear that one will be forthcoming for some time (maybe until 2012). Regardless of the existence of an exclusive deal this is a  bonehead move for Apple. Verizon is selling Droids two for one right now.

I’m now looking at the Evo (the first 4G phone) from Sprint. The additional speed would be a benefit but most actual speeds will not reach true 4G. If I’m honest I feel a sense of disappointment when I consider extending my contract for another two years for this device. But I don’t want to switch to AT&T.

No Posts Until Friday

I’ll be offline until Friday. Stress detox. Lots of green tea — that sort of thing.

No posts here or at Internet2Go until then.

Facebook Beats Yahoo in Q1 Display

A significant milestone, reported by the WSJ:

In the first quarter, Facebook pulled ahead of Yahoo for the first time and delivered more banner ads to its U.S. users than any other Web publisher, according to market-research firm comScore Inc.

Overall, Facebook.com served 176.3 billion display ads on its website over the first three months of 2010, or 16.2% of the total, said comScore. Yahoo served 131.6 billion banner ads to Yahoo users, and Microsoft served 60.2 billion, according to comScore. The data don’t include ads that Yahoo and Microsoft delivered to other Web sites through their networks, a major source of revenue for each.

By revenue, Facebook has a long way to go to catch up to its more established rivals. The social-networking site earned more than $500 million in revenue in 2009 and is forecasting revenue of more than $1 billion in 2010, according to people familiar with the matter. Yahoo earned $6.5 billion in revenue in 2009, mostly from advertising.

Obviously there’s enormous potential with SMBs on Facebook as well. It’s another possible distribution point for local ad networks too. Just take PaperG’s automated display ad creation tool for SMBs and distribute on Facebook — voila.

When location kicks in we should see some really interesting new ads/campaigns on Facebook. Along those lines . . . the company, I predict, will also become a mobile ad network (or its equivalent) in the not-too-distant future.

DexOne Boosting Video Ads

Dex One put out a release that says the company is making a bigger push with video:

Dex One recently made video a standard part of its online Enhanced Pack service – thus bringing video to Enhanced Pack clients at no additional charge. This enables these clients to have video, as well as prominent ad placement, logos and other images on DexKnows.com . . .

There are no hard numbers in the release but Dex I’m sure sees video as a potential differentiator for consumer-users of DexKnows and SMB advertisers. It may also be part of a retention strategy.

The most interesting part of the release in my view is the pricing discussion:

Dex One recently made video a standard part of its online Enhanced Pack service – thus bringing video to Enhanced Pack clients at no additional charge.

Making video a line item that has to be considered separately is probably a deterrent vs. saying “step up to the enhanced pack and you get video for free.” That makes it simpler to buy and sell.

There’s a fair amount of empirical and survey based evidence of video’s effectiveness and appeal but I’m wondering if anyone has direct experience as a SMB advertiser or on behalf of a client.

Marchex Launches PPCall ‘Exchange’

Marchex has gone public with a “Pay-for-Call Exchange,” according to a press release out this morning:

The Marchex Pay-For-Call Exchange combines a robust telephony platform with campaign creation expertise and call filtering technologies to create, manage and optimize advertiser campaigns across more than 50 publisher partners in online, offline and mobile media. Additionally, advertisers have access to rich call analytics and customer intelligence, including caller geography and call recordings.

Advertisers that have joined Marchex’s Pay-For-Call Exchange have experienced significant ROI, including an average call conversion ranging from 20 percent to 30 percent for many advertisers, with some seeing as high as 50 percent; typical consumer engagement on the phone averages more than eight minutes, with certain categories and advertisers experiencing up to 12 minutes; and typical advertiser budget increases have averaged 200 percent of their initial commitment. Additionally, companies that have joined Marchex’s Pay-For-Call Exchange have been able to monetize their inventory more effectively.

While still in its relative infancy, Marchex has built a significant, growing customer and partner base for its Pay-For-Call Exchange, including leading digital agencies such as Razorfish, one of the largest interactive marketing and technology companies in the world; ADT, the world’s largest electronic security company; PRIMEDIA, a provider of online, print and mobile platforms that provide real estate rental listings; and Jingle Networks, the nation’s leading advertiser-supported directory assistance service at 1-800-FREE-411.

According to a brief discussion I had with Marchex’s COO Pete Christothoulou:

• Marchex is acting as an agency in some respects and a network in others
• The company is buying media on behalf of advertisers offline (including DRTV), online and in mobile
• Marchex collaborates with advertisers on the creative
• The company is highly conscious of the “bad calls” problem with PPCall and does “call filtering” and ad buys that seek to maximize good calls

The program has been running in a private beta for awhile. Look again at the conversion data cited in the release:

[A]n average call conversion ranging from 20 percent to 30 percent for many advertisers, with some seeing as high as 50 percent; typical consumer engagement on the phone averages more than eight minutes, with certain categories and advertisers experiencing up to 12 minutes . . .

Impressive.

Jingle Networks, cited in the release, had made an effort to create a version of this at one point. But to my knowledge this is a unique marketplace. I asked Christothoulou about the types of advertisers utilizing the service. He said that currently it’s mostly national advertisers and large advertisers targeting specific markets.

PPCall has never lived up to the early hype (that I helped create) but a combination of factors, including more aggressive use of PPCall in traditional media and the rise of mobile, may mean that it finally gets the traction among advertisers that its value proposition has always promised.

The DealMap: ‘CityGrid for Local Deals’

The friendly folks behind unassuming local-semantic search site Center’d have just launched what is probably the definitive local deal site on the Internet, The Dealmap. I wrote about it in a preliminary way in March after a brief discussion with Center’d CEO Jennifer Dulski.

Now there’s more detail out and the site has gone live.

Here are some quick facts gleaned from the press release:

• The DealMap is available in the US and UK (the heatmap above indicates coverage areas)
• There are daily deal emails and deal alerts via Twitter in more than 20 cities (all the individual group buying sites are here, and Foursquare)
• Deals are coming from a wide range of sources: partner feeds, other coupon/deal sites, traditional media sites, directly from businesses and from users (there are game dynamics to promote the last of these)
• Dealmap will also launch an iPhone application (Android and RIM too)

There’s also an API, which means that other publishers and developers can access all this content as well. This is, essentially, CityGrid for deals.

The DealMap site is a destination but also a hub that sits in the center of a distribution network that includes a range of partners (which will undoubtedly grow quickly) and sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The DealMap aims to deliver deals content to users in whatever way or form they prefer to receive it: via search/browse functionality on the site itself, through Twitter or Facebook or via email. You can see deals on a map (hence the name) or in list form. Users can also browse by deal category (e.g., restaurants, shopping) or type (e.g., expires soon, 50% off, kid-friendly):

Beyond compiling all this content through crawling and business development, The DealMap is trying to capture “hard to find” deals — the kind that appear in a local store window but never get advertised anywhere else. They’re trying to get users and businesses to upload these directly (via mobile devices for example) and are employing “game dynamics” (like Foursquare) to create incentives to do so:

At certain point levels there will be tangible rewards for users, like a traditional loyalty program, redeemable for (what else) discount coupons and offers at restaurants and other local businesses.

Sites like Yipit are seeking to do a version of this by collecting the content of group buying sites and pushing aggregated offers via email. Search engine Ask has also tried to do something similar and comprehensive with its “Ask deals” site. However The DealMap combines both approaches and seeks to go further with the user-submitted deals information (a la the early days of RetailMeNot).

A subtle but important point is that users can search for local deals and find them. Typically there’s not enough content on any given site enable search and make it meaningful.

Users can click through to the originating site or source or see more information on a “deals profile” page on The DealMap:

The breadth of content and functionality on this site are impressive. Yet the API strategy may be what makes this site and turns The DealMap into the most valuable component of Center’d's business.

CEO Jennifer Dulski said that there were probably 100 sites that The DealMap was drawing upon, roughly 80% of which were some flavor of group buying sites. However use of The DealMap’s API could grow the number of sites (online and in mobile) that offer local deals in dramatic fashion. We’ll see how many local publishers jump on board.

The business model here is an affiliate revenue share. And coupons/deals is arguably the one area — even more than search marketing — where advertising is truly content, to use the online cliche.

Dulski and her team have created something in this site and strategy that should be enormously successful for all involved.

Two years ago I asked “Where Is the Coupon Destination?“:

From my point of view the deals/coupons segment is ripe for a next phase of development. There are numerous online competitors but, mysteriously, no one has really gotten it right. Part of the reason for that is that it’s challenging to get sufficient inventory to satisfy a broad range of consumer needs/use cases in a “search” context.

There’s also the forgetting to bring the coupons (mobile can help) and the stigma (for some) associated with using coupons.

Offline coupon clipping behavior is an interesting mix of both “search” and “discovery.” People actively look through circulars and newspaper/direct mail coupons. However they don’t necessarily know what they’ll find or what may be on sale. So there’s a bit of serendipity along with the directional behavior. I’m looking for coupons for things that I normally buy or that I need, but occasionally a coupon will prompt me to try something new or different.

I’m not sure that a pure search model or an “Oodle for coupons” is right. There’s some creative mix of community, search, discovery and content aggregation needed to make a coupon or deals destination work online. And the branding or value proposition shouldn’t be around “coupons,” which is too pedestrian.

Instead, branding should probably be around deals and discounts (for breadth). It should also start off small, like an insiders network. This is the way that Craigslist essentially began in San Francisco and built slowly over time.

With The DealMap I feel like that site has finally arrived.

Get to Know GetListed Local University

Several years ago, probably about five or six now, someone who was a “higher-up” in a branded local publisher approached me about starting a conference targeting small businesses, helping educate them about online marketing. I was at The Kelsey Group at the time and he was at his company. The inertia around what we were doing was too great to pursue this idea. But I knew it was a very good idea.

Now David Mihm and crew have essentially created that conference series with GetListed Local University. This is a road show, a one-day intensive for SMBs on . . . online marketing. Right now it’s being underwritten in part by Bing and Google. The folks that are behind it are supremely ethical and they’re not pitching anyone’s services, nor would they.

But if you’re a local publisher or interested in SMB ad dollars (and you know who you are) it might make sense for you to think about participating in these events if only indirectly.

You can reach David Mihm at davidmihm [at] gmail.com. (I get nothing for promoting this; it’s just a good idea.)

Tomorrow: Evolution of the YP Product

Why did AT&T shift away from a brand (“yellowpages.com”) that the company paid handsomely for ($100M?) several years ago? What types of “vertical” content is the company building into its consumer sites?

These and many other questions I will endeavor to explore tomorrow on a free webinar called “The Evolution of Local Discovery.”

Join me, Greg Isaacs and Todd Rose from AT&T Interactive for a discussion of the evolution of the yellow pages. I’ll be providing data and commentary on the market in general and AT&T will discuss YP.com and Buzz and some of its thinking behind where the company is going with its consumer offering. AT&T is moving with the market and trying to diversify traffic sources and consumer offerings. It’s fascinating to watch.

If you’d like to hear more and ask questions, listen in on the free session (and get my slides) — tomorrow at 1 Eastern, 10 Pacific.

kgb Launches Multi-Country Deals Site

kgb, which offers the SMS-based mobile Q&A service, has just launched a group-buying site at kgbdeals.com. I’ve discovered that there may be as many as 90 to 100 sites that are doing some version of “groupoing” now — with more to come undoubtedly.

kgb competitor ChaCha also offers couponing but only in a single market for now. By contrast, kgb has leveraged its international reach and is doing this across several non-US markets:

Undoubtedly these deals will also be pushed into mobile and via the “traditional” kgb service.

SMBs Need a Lot of Help Online

I attended The [California] Governor’s Conference on Small Business and Entrepreneurship last thursday at the Oakland Convention Center. One of the sessions I sat in on was about social media and online marketing. It was the mirror of an identical session in the morning that I was unable to attend.

The panelists included representatives from Google, Yelp, Twitter (where I got the sticker), Cafe Press and the California Restaurants Assn. Each panelist got to talk for about 5-10 minutes and then there was a Q&A session.

While there was some sophistication, the Q&A session revealed just how much help most SMBs need. Yelp’s Vince Sollitto, who was on both panels, said that the earlier session had a higher level of sophistication and greater engagement.

I took a lot of notes but I’ll summarize and provide a few observations.

More people in the room had a facebook page than were AdWords advertisers. But about 3/4 of those in the audience were on LinkedIn.

Google’s Claire Johnson spoke repeatedly about claiming listings on Places and about search marketing. It became clear however that most of these folks were very far away from search marketing.

Most of those in the audience were familiar with and used Yelp as consumers, but only a few had used the business tools. Yelp’s Sollitto said Yelp had 31 million uniques and 10 million reviews. He addressed the issue of negative reviews by saying, “negative reviews are an authenticator” and provide credibility — ironically. Not sure if those in the audience bought the argument. When he cited the URL, biz.yelp.com, however, lots of people wrote it down.

Francesca Helina of Twitter talked about tweeting “on the go” and discussed Twitter apps as the best and most convenient way to tweet. She hinted at a number of services for SMBs to come and discussed Twitter’s window sticker. She briefly mentioned Promoted Tweets, but focused on the free service. She referenced two accounts (@smallbiz and @Francesca) where marketing on Twitter and best practices would be showcased.

John Goddard of the California Restaurant Assn said that 73% of CA restaurants were independent. He talked about how many have adopted social media and Twitter in particular. “A lot of chefs are blogging” and building social media strategies around their blogs, said Goddard.

I was somewhat surprised to see how many in the audience were using Google alerts (roughly 1/3) as a basic form of reputation management and review monitoring.

Café press extolled the virtues of search marketing saying “30% of our business from Google search.”

The moderator, a woman from Palo Alto Software, threw around tips and jargon that were generally way over the heads (from my perspective) of the audience. Indeed, most of the discussion from the podium was more advanced than the people in the room — sometimes painfully so.

This is an extreme example, but one woman asked for advice on what types of content would make her website (which she hadn’t developed yet) interesting. This reflected to me the very basic level of understanding — or lack thereof — of online marketing possessed by some small businesses.

One older woman, selling Japanese medicinal herbs, talked about her frustrations with consultants who made big promises about SEO and high rankings (There’s a ton of that going on out there.)

I conduct surveys of SMBs and talk about their issues frequently in the abstract. But it’s very helpful to be in a room like this from time to time to see the challenges they confront in a very direct way. For them the world is only getting more complicated and, while there is growing awareness and sophistication in some quarters, the smallest SMBs need a lot of help — a lot.

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Related: Google offers a co-branded (with the SBA) site/tutorial on online business marketing fundamentals.

American Towns: ‘Fastest Growing’ Hyperlocal

Last week AmericanTowns.com put out a press release that asserted the company was the “fastest growing hyperlocal digital media company in America”:

• Having achieved profitability at the end of 2009, AmericanTowns reported that revenues grew an additional 35 % during Q1.
• According to Quantcast, AmericanTowns ranked in the top 800 websites in the US in Q1, and one third of its traffic was from “regular users.”
• Revenues continue to be driven by local advertisers seeking local customers, at over 75% of advertising revenues.

The release also promotes a partnership with non-profit “Meals on Wheels.” Here’s the quote:

AmericanTowns is our second largest source of web traffic, second only to Google for referral visits,” explained Michael Flynn, Director of MOWAA.

AmericanTowns is a slow and steady network that doesn’t get lots of attention but has been gaining and growing largely “under the radar.” It would make a good acquisition for a newspaper publisher or other local media player (or online player). For example if Local.com were sitting on a mountain of cash it would make sense for them to acquire the company.

Yahoo could also probably do some interesting things with the network. And AOL might be a logical acquirer. Then of course there are the yellow pages publishers . . .

Citysearch Plans Reputation Mgmt Offering

Kate Kaye of ClickZ interviews Citysearch’s Neal Salvage about CityGrid and the general SMB ad offering from Citysearch. From my point of view, here are the interesting parts of the article:

According to Neil Salvage, Citysearch’s EVP of advertising, the ultimate goal is to reduce the number or offerings and sell them on a flat-fee basis rather than a performance-basis . . .

Citysearch currently allows advertisers to update their company profiles displayed across the Web through the platform associated with its CityGrid listings distribution system. They can also respond to reviews posted about their businesses using the platform.

“In the next quarter, we will be expanding our capabilities to offer merchants even more robust reputation management capabilities such as reviewing reviews from across CityGrid, sentiment analysis and more,” explained Salvage.

The SMB online ad market is bifurcating somewhat, with a movement toward performance products in some quarters — Yelp just (re)introduced CPC — and fixed fee products otherwise (Citysearch). The group buying sites arguably represent the ultimate in performance-based marketing for SMBs.

Beyond this, some version of “reputation management” (an elastic category) is coming to most if not all SMB ad sellers/channels. It will ultimately be like SEO, just a part of the package.

Right now the most developed product is the one offered by Marchex. However AmIVisible (presence), Chatmeter and ClickFuel also have offerings with varying degrees of functionality.

If there are others out there, please let me know.

Has the iPad Already Sold 2 Million?

Chitika, which correctly estimated that 1 million iPads had been sold before Apple formally announced the milestone (earlier this month), shut off its iPad tracker several days ago at 1.95 million iPads.

If these figures are accurate it’s semi-amazing that only a couple of weeks after the one million announcement Apple would have doubled sales.

Telmetrics: Prevent PPCall Spam

Call tracking and PPCall firm Telmetrics put out a release that indicated telemarketers are calling business lines (published on the Internet) more often partly because of the consumer “do not call” registry:

Telmetrics’ call analysis showed a 61 percent increase in telemarketer activity from January-February 2009 when compared to January-February 2010.

I’m guessing that telemarketers are scraping the Web as well as probably using traditional media (phone books) to build lists that they’re now using to spam businesses with telemarketing calls. That inevitably means some numbers participating in call/leads-based ad programs (call-tracking/PPCall) are getting these calls. In fact Telmetrics says that “up to 40 percent of all call volume” could be coming from telemarketers. Yikes.

To address such “call quality” issues, Telmetrics released some best practices advice:

• Local advertisers, including national brands with a local presence, should use local phone numbers in ad campaigns rather than toll-free lines. Consumers are four times more likely to call an advertiser with a local phone number.
• Apply a quarantine period to all phone numbers published as a pay per call line, so that advertisers do not receive calls from legacy owners.
• Use an automated tool to filter and block invalid calls so that advertisers receive real and valid leads and aren’t bothered by nuisance calls. Automation is more efficient and accurate than report filtering and significantly reduces administration and customer service costs.
• Once a phone number is used in an ad campaign, continue ongoing quality assurance testing.

As an aside about the above, Telmetrics says “Consumers are four times more likely to call an advertiser with a local phone number.” I’m going out on a limb here but I would argue this data is also a proxy for the general effectiveness of local ads vs. national ads in many categories.

Back to calls. The problem that Telmetrics is raising is a fundamental one and threatens the integrity of PPCall programs. Yext uses an algorithm to only bill for calls it deems valid leads. Telmetrics has a “auto-blocking” system that it says prevents most telemarketers from getting through on these numbers.

Has anyone out there used PPCall and found that a large percentage of calls are telemarketing oriented?

Webinar Tues: ‘Evolution of Local Discovery’

Through Internet2Go, I’ll be doing a webinar with AT&T Interactive on the “Evolution of Local Discovery.” It’s an expanded yet more intimate version of the session we did at AD:TECH a few weeks ago.

I’ll be trying to put together the big picture and talking about the movement from print to online to mobile. I’ll also be discussing some of the new LBS services and the “geotagging of everything.”

The webinar is free at will take place at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific on Tuesday, May 11.

For more information or to register go here.

Foursquare Adds ‘Like’ Button to Profiles

Foursquare is the latest to integrate the Like button from Facebook:

Beyond Yelp and YPG in Canada, and now Foursquare, who else in local is using Like?

Yell Upgrades Maps, Introduces Streetcam

UK directory publisher Yell has implemented a number of changes to its site, the most significant of which include new 3D maps and street-level photography. Yell worked with companies C3 and Tridoo to generate the imagery.

Right now the coverage includes London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. Like Google Street View, you can “walk down the street.” It’s enormously useful for tourists and travelers, as well as house hunters, etc.

Here’s Google, first:

Now Yell, which offers a combination of street-level images with Bing style aerial and 3D views:

Of course Bing doesn’t offer this yet in the UK. And Big G doesn’t have the oblique and orthogonal images from above.  

These new maps really transform Yell.com and pose the first real challenge to Google Maps in the UK. Overall it appears to be a terrific user experience that adds huge value to Yell.

Separately Yell has also introduced a video channel:

The introduction of a separate Yell.com video channel that will enable businesses to showcase their business in video for inclusion in our listings. Coverage is limited at first, with the majority of videos in central London. However, we have enabled businesses to upload videos for free and we will be taking steps to further promote video as a valuable part of the marketing mix for all SMEs.

Finally, they’ve introduced what they’re calling “Shortlists” (essentially favorites) to “enable consumers to create a list of favourite businesses that can be shared by e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. In addition, it will now be possible for much wider viral sharing of any video or site page, including business listing, search results, map view.”

I have written, about AlikeList, Fablistic and CityVoter in the past, that such “top lists” and favorites are extremely useful to people and create an additional source of qualitative ranking data about businesses beyond reviews.

Yell has had many redesigns and upgrades in the past few years but this both simplifies and enriches the user experience. Overall it dramatically boosts the utility of the site.

Facebook Poised to Enter LBS Game

At the F8 Facebook developer event many people expected the company to announce its long-awaited location feature. It didn’t happen. But, according to AdAge, location is imminent for Facebook and marketers are already on board:

Facebook is preparing to launch location-based status updates for its users. But the social network is also planning to offer it to marketers, including McDonald’s.

As early as this month, the social-networking site will give users the ability to post their location within a status update. McDonald’s, through digital agency Tribal DDB, Chicago, is building an app with Facebook would allow users to check in at one of its restaurants and have a featured product appear in the post, such as an Angus Quarter Pounder, say executives close to the deal.

The launch of the feature is complicated to some degree by Facebook’s existing PR problems over privacy. However, let’s assume that those subside. Furthermore, “checking in” is entirely “affirmative” and voluntary.

Beyond the check-in capability (and potential advertising angle) it’s not clear how location will manifest on Facebook (online or in mobile). But let’s assume that it will look something like this:

The AdAge article and others wonder aloud (as is now an almost perfunctory exercise) . . . is this a Foursquare or Gowalla “killer”? I would say no.

I look at the whole thing somewhat differently. I would see this as the potential mainstreaming of check-ins.

We’ll obviously have to wait and see what shows up later this month (apparently). But Facebook will likely broaden the market and help expose more people to LBS and check-ins. And the McDonald’s angle is very interesting.

Couponing, deals and mobile loyalty is becoming a huge area of mobile marketing and Facebook may further expand it.

In February, I wondered over at Internet2Go how long it would be before Facebook became a mobile ad network (with its 100 million active mobile users). This could be the beginning — and it could become more “effective” than anything Facebook is doing with display online.

Update: AdAge is further reporting that McDonald’s “will be one of many marketers in on the ground floor and will be integrated into the platform sometime after Facebook turns on the feature for consumers.” These “ground floor” marketers apparently have been “stymied by the lack of scale with services such as Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla and MyTown” and are eager to get into the LBS game with Facebook’s greater reach and scale.

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Over the past 24 hours there have been several posts about the relative sizes of Foursquare (1 million plus), MyTown (2 million) and Google Latitude (now apparently 3 million users). Google’s Steve Lee also “hinted” to the Web 2.0 crowd apparently that check-ins were on the way for Latitude.

All of this in the aggregate makes the check-in phenomenon a more mainstream part of the local-mobile experience.

Twitter’s Got an SMB Decal Too

Following Yelp, Google and Facebook, Twitter becomes the latest company to join the SMB window sticker club. Similar to Facebook’s decal it enables businesses to build lists of followers via text message. Here’s my bad/blurry photo of it.

You write your own Twitter URL in the blank: “Follow @gsterling.”

I got this today at the [CA] Governor’s Conference on Small Business & Entrepreneurship. It was given out during a panel on social and online marketing featuring Google, Yelp, Twitter & Cafe Press.

I’ll do another post with my thoughts and observations of the panel discussion and audience reaction.

My inference from the comments and discussion is that this is the beginning of a more concerted effort by Twitter to directly address the SMB/local advertiser market. In accordance with that, Twitter has also started a new feed (Twitter.com/SmallBiz) to promote Twitter use by SMBs and disseminate information, best practices advice and case studies.

My Plan to Overthrow ‘Pizza’ with ‘Sushi’

Pizza (or plumbers) is always the local search example used in demos and discussions. My plan has been to supplant “pizza” with “sushi.” I use “sushi” in all my examples at conferences and on this blog as a “generic” local search.

If you watch this video interview with Bing’s local product head Mikko Ollila you’ll see him use the “sushi” example unselfconsciously. My (secret) scheme is working