Localeze Morphs into ‘Content Mgmt’ Company

As I previously said I spent a day with Localeze a few weeks ago and was impressed by the company’s vision for the future. Here’s the official announcement:

To close the gap between local search engines, businesses and ready-to-buy consumers, Localeze is redefining the foundation of local search and creating a new market — online content management. Accurate and enriched local business content coupled with broad, local search engine distribution is critical to solidifying the still-fragmented local search engine market and bringing meaningful local business results to consumers.

Localeze provides the deepest, richest and most accurate multi-sourced local business content, including content verified and enhanced by businesses themselves. This premium business content is distributed by Localeze to the largest network of local search engine partners in the U.S. (85 + sites), which captures 90 percent of U.S. consumer searches for products and services.

As Localeze’s core capabilities increase the likelihood of local businesses being found by consumers looking for specific products or services online, over 200 national brands rely on Localeze to enhance, optimize, manage and distribute their business content online. This year alone, the company saw a 95 percent increase in national brands signed.

Acxiom recently announced a deal with Moon Valley software to deepen and enhance its database. But what Localeze is doing is something of a shot across the bow of the industry. It’s no longer enough to simply provide “17 million points of interest” just as it’s no longer enough for local destination sites to simply reflect “name, address and phone number.”

Moon Valley’s Pete Ryan believes that we’re in the midst of a dramatic change in data aggregation, processing and distribution and that “user-generated content” (from consumers or businesses) is going to revolutionize the entire segment. That’s partly what Localeze is talking about and what Google’s recent “two-way” deal with TeleAtlas also represents.

‘Conversational Marketing’ for SMBs

TechCrunch has discovered some new anti-Yelp sites and calls it an indicator of Yelp’s success. To be sure.

Yelp is the poster child for the much larger phenomenon of consumer reviews of local businesses. That phenomenon is here to stay. Some businesses hate it but a majority, it turns out, embrace the phenomenon conceptually:

There are two issues: fairness and discovery for local businesses.

On the first point, Yelp, for its part, offers “Yelp for Business,” which allows communication between consumer-reviewers and local businesses through the site. But Kudzu, in my memory, was the first to allow businesses to respond to reviews publicly. (Yelp’s communication happens behind the scenes.) TripAdvisor has even started allowing hotels and B&B’s to respond to bad reviews.

The systems are maturing and, in some cases, we’re moving from pure reviews to platforms that facilitate SMB-consumer “conversations” or CRM capabilities.

But the challenge and problem of how to monitor all proliferating reviews out there is starting to be addressed too. There are at least three companies, in addition to MerchantCircle, that are building or have built the capacity to automate the collection of reviews from multiple sites. As part of that a couple of them are also trying to centralize the process of data completion/correction on multiple sites as well.

Moon Valley Software’s Pete Ryan described to me a product the company is rolling out that combines review monitoring — he likens it to a “clipping service” — with data correction for multiple sites. The proposition is this from the SMB POV: “here’s where your listings show up online and here’s what they look like.” If you correct and/or enhance your information once it will be distributed everywhere your listing appears.

Localeze has developed a version of this same value proposition for its customers.

Ryan and I discussed online reviews at some length but also the broader phenomenon of user-generated content and how it’s starting to positively impact data quality online. Managing the “local database” is becoming a “two-way” process. The recent Google-TeleAtlas deal is an example of that trend.

Getting the businesses and community engaged in correcting and completing local data — Yahoo! was really the pioneer here — is picking up steam. And UGC, in Ryan’s view, will ultimately revolutize the process of data collection and management, uncoupling it from its top-down, telco legacy.

The phenomenon of “conversational marketing” has now definitely arrived for SMBs.

Acxiom Seeks to Deepen Database

Data provider Acxiom has partnered with a company called Moon Valley to offer deeper content:

To provide more accurate, detailed information for its InfoBase-X Telephone Directories Online, Acxiom Corporation has entered into an agreement with Moon Valley Software, Inc. Moon Valley has developed proprietary software and technology that mines the Web for richer, deeper and more up-to-date business information.

This data will be incorporated into Acxiom’s existing online directory files to give local search engines the results their users want and need to make buying decisions. InfoBase-X is the largest repository of U.S. business and consumer marketing data in one source and powers Acxiom’s directory products.

The Web is going to have a lot but not all the relevant information that consumers want about businesses. Ultimately you have to go to the businesses themselves.

While this is a welcome move to improve the database, I just spent some time with Localeze and can say that Acxiom and InfoUSA will have some catching up to do.

___

See also: When Good Databases Go Bad

Google Q1 Results Challenge comScore

Publishers and site owners have long complained that third-party traffic measurement services such as Nielsen and comScore under-count their traffic and unique users. For example, Yelp sent me an email in late Feb saying that internally it shows more than 8 million monthly uniques, which was more than some of the third party services reported. See this early March comparison of Yelp, Citysearch and Local.com (per Compete):

I just a moment ago looked on Compete and, based on the earlier email, these numbers would now appear to correspond to the internal counting and trajectory of the Yelp numbers (not sure re Citysearch and Local.com).

According to the Wall Street Journal, comScore is taking some heat (and from investors) over apparent discrepancies between its metrics regarding declining paid clicks on Google and Google’s strong Q1 results. comScore itself tried to clarify there wasn’t necessarily a direct link between its data and Google’s performance. But Wall Street analysts, with some justification, continued to obsess on the paid click data.

(Google said in the earnings release, however, that paid clicks grew “approximately 4% over the fourth quarter of 2007.”)

I never directly reviewed the recent, controversial comScore reports themselves but have read the data in third party discussions. For its part comScore appears to have been incorrect on the raw numbers and was perhaps mistaken to not put enough caveats around its data. However, financial analysts were insufficiently sophisticated about the metrics and user behavior to be more “restrained” and “sober” about it in their corresponding “notes.”

There’s also a herd mentality that exists in such situations; and there’s some segment of the population that would have liked to see Google stumble and be proven an “ordinary company” not immune from the pressures facing others. That created a certain receptiveness to the declining clicks information.

However, I’ve always felt that the focus on paid clicks was misplaced as an indicator of whether Google was suffering from the larger problems of the economy. The better metrics would have been query volume and market share (comScore discusses this to some degree in the “clarify” link above). Paid clicks is a function of ad coverage and search volume. If search volumes had declined (which they haven’t) or Google had been losing market share (which it hasn’t) then these concerns would have been more justified.

Because there’s no “cost” to consumers to click on ads, clicks are not necessarily going to suffer in a recession. What will likely suffer are certain kinds of commercial queries. For example, if I put off buying the new car then I might not be doing as many searches for cars. That in turn will translate into fewer paid clicks. However, in the aggregate, query volumes were not going down (as comScore said):

The most puzzling data element is that Google’s U.S. paid clicks dropped sequentially by 7%, while, at the same time, its total number of search queries grew by 9%. At the same time, Google’s market share of all search queries grew slightly from December, and its annual query growth remains very strong. All indicators point to the company continuing to do very well as far as consumer usage and competitive position.

Some questions are approrpiate to raise about whether comScore’s methodology needs some fixing. Yet there should be no schadenfreude. Third party measurement is critical to industry credibility. Simultaneously, everybody has to take all the numbers, whatever their source, with some perspective and see them not as literal truth but rather as directional indicators.

Innovectra Loses VP, Launches Widgets

David Dague who was the VP of Marketing for local search platform and marketing services provider Innovectra has joined Localeze, which is doing some very interesting things and looks to be in transition from pure data provider to something else . . .

At Innovectra, Dague was instrumental in the developmet of the company’s local SEM product LeadStream.

For its part Innovectra, now led by Thomas Lewis, recently launched mobile/widgets and couponing as promitonal and syndication offerings that it can provide to its publisher partners.

Uppereast Responds to ‘Mapspam’ Post

I was contacted in email by the CEO of Uppereast.com Steve Georghakis who took exception to my post and characterization of his site’s appearance on Google as “spam.” I offered him the opportunity to write a post explaining the situation and offering his perspective. Instead, he gave me permission to excerpt part of his email.

Here’s the explanatory chunk of the email:

We did nothing inappropriate.  Google is the company controlling the way their data is displayed.  We have been a successful hyperlocal company for quite some time and have many revenue streams.  We do leverage affiliate relationships where is makes sense, as I believe pay-for-performance relationships are appropriate.  We run a clean, upstanding business and literally have hundreds of local advertising customers that love us.  Our site traffic from end users has increased steadily and we remain the most trusted source of hyperlocal business and local living information for the Upper East Side available anywhere.  We literally have people that walk the streets and manage the data.  This costs me money, but it’s worth it to our end users.  I had viewed Google’s Local Maps display of our information as beneficial to end users, because I know our data is more accurate than the data that is typically bought from big data service providers.  The links, where possible, brought the end user deep into a page which was presumably relevant to what they are after (e.g. hotels listings brought them right to a reservations page).  I can understand, however, that some people would rather be brought to a hotel’s URL, rather than ours.  This is not something we can control.  Google needs a process to ensure that they display the business owner’s information over a trusted source like ours (and also need to figure out how to leverage us over the business owners’ information for business closings).  It’s a complex business process, resulting in a complex technical challenge.

My characterization of the Uppereast links (all 10 results on Google.com for the query “New York Hotels”) as “mapspam” was perhaps premature and unfair. I didn’t reach out to Uppereast. However I did ask Google for a comment though I haven’t yet heard back. Yet the concentration of links from a single site certainly appeared irregular and to break with Google’s apparent policy to put “first party” content front and center in local.

As the quoted text above indicates, however, perhaps Google is relying heavily on third party content in selected situations. Here are two related posts on the subject:

• Google Using Surrogate Web Sites?
• Google Map Plus Box is All Over The Place