Multiplied Media in Deal with T-Info

Multiplied Media has announced a deal with Deutsche Telekom (DeTeMedien) in Germany to distribute local search content there on its Poynt IM and mobile platform. This is the company’s first EU deal and similar to deals in the US (e.g., with Idearc/Superpages). It’s a new distribution channel (IM) for the content on T-Info’s local search site: Suchen.de.

I love the slogan: Die Lokale Suchmaschine fur Duestchland (the local search engine for Germany).

Urban Mapping Expands Databases

Over the past couple of days Urban Mapping has put out press releases saying that it now has neighborhood maps/boundaries for “40,000 neighborhoods in 2,000 U.S. cities and towns. This is in addition to 10,000 neighborhoods in Canada and Europe.” It also has detailed data for 53 transit systems across the US. (Here’s more discussion/explanation on the Urban Mapping blog.)

This is tons and tons of data. Google Transit covers a somewhat smaller area of the US but has more international coverage.

Urban Mapping CEO Ian White articulated “the keyword conspiracy” in his remarks on the monetization panel at Where 2.0.

___

Disclosure: I am an advisor to the company.

CityVoter Pitching Brands on Local

CityVoter, which has been a co-branded, city guide and content/community partner for local media affiliates, and more recently a direct destination, is doing something very interesting as it evolves. Consistent with my earlier posts about local and demographic targeting, the site is pitching national brands and other entities on local targeting (contests, local promotions) but with a twist.

The voting on CityVoter offers high levels of engagement with local (and vertical) audiences. In addition, CityVoter’s registration data offers demographic profiles of users. Hence advertisers get access to specific, engaged users (voters) in local markets. People complain about how social networking isn’t working for advertisers. But this appears to be a different case.

The proof of concept was its relationship with Exercise TV for the lauch of that cable channel:

Between January 28 and March 23, ExerciseTV and CityVoter invite fitness professionals and their clients or friends to nominate themselves or their favorite trainer at www.exercisetv.tv/toptrainer.

And here were the results:

Between January 28 and March 23, nearly 10,000 people voted for their favorite Boot camp gym, cardio instructor, dance instructor, general fitness trainer, kickboxing instructor, personal trainer, pilates instructor or yoga instructor. Eight trainers were awarded the title of Top Trainer, one in each of the listed categories. The contest drew almost 100,000 unique visitors to the ExerciseTV site.

The company is now working with other brands in similar ways. In addition to national promotions, the site continues to work with local media partners to capture SMB ad dollars.

The voting concept is a very smart one. Even though other sites offer “best of” lists and voting, this is core to the CityVoter concept and helps drive participation by a broader number of users.

What Is Local: Part CXXII

I was talking just a moment ago to Marketing Sherpa’s Stefan Tornquist, who was asking me about inserting a question re local into an online survey they are doing. We digressed into an interesting discussion of what local is really about. Back to the Local Paradox post below . . .

Direct mail is worth more than $50 billion annually in the US. This is all about demographic and local targeting. When you enable more precise targeting online than IP/DMA/Metro area then you get into buying neighborhoods that represent certain populations brands are interested in reaching: Hispanics, families with kids, people with incomes over $100K and so on. (Trulia just did a version of this with its new ad network; YouTube is adding demographics to its “insights” reporting.)

Imagine a car OEM that wants to target all its would-be buyers in the US online. They fit a certain profile and may be concetrated in certain metro areas. How would it do this? Local targeting of course (once the sub-DMA level capabilities kick in). Advertisers aren’t there yet, however, and they don’t fully understand this opportunity.

The search engines don’t fully understand the opportunity either or they’d be working to build out the capability and educating their advertisers accordingly. By adding Skyhook Wireless’ technology to a toolbar (think Yahoo, Google, MSFT, ASK) this could be done today. Also registration addresses and default location settings allow this today. Think of all the branding dollars that suddenly might look at SEM quite differently if these capabilities were in place.

That’s one side of local. The other side is the point of sale.

Leading people to where they can buy something and/or recognizing that most purchase behavior is offline is the other half of the true local opportunity. That involves the question of tracking and inventory feeds. Those challenges are being addressed in various ways. The inventory data is being syndicated and that will only grow over time. However, the tracking question remains one that can’t be perfectly answered and will require a patchwork of solutions: directions lookups, phone tracking, coupons, mobile response and so on.

What I’m trying to get across here is that local sould be seen as the biggest and most important opportunity online — once the advertisers clue in and the technologies develop to the point where targeting can be more precise.

Google Maps Expanding Content, Options

At the Where 2.0 show Google’s John Hanke in his keynote discussed Google Maps’ evolution from a yellow pages like database of service business listings, plotted on a map, to something much broader. Indeed, Google seems to be rapidly building out Maps will all kinds of additional information. And the community/My Maps feature is a key element of all of it.

The company is also experimenting with how best to surface this information:

Recently it added images from Panaramio (theoretically Flickr should show up too at some point). In addition, there are some other features I just noticed last night:

The ‘Local Paradox’ and IYP Affiliate Network

I moderated a panel the other day at the Where 2.0 show on maps and monetization. We discussed online and mobile. The panel tried (in 30 minutes) to explore all the business models and revenue sources that publishers and developers could use to monetize their creations. (Perry Evans has captured some of the dicussion here.)

The “elephant in the room” was: when is Google going to turn on “AdSense for Maps?” One audience member strenuously objected to that proposition and the general small publisher dependence on Google for monetization. That was a moment that drew a strong reaction from the crowd but the more interesting part of the panel and one that Perry goes into is what I called “The Local Paradox.”

You’ve got a situation where there’s clear consumer demand, most transactions happening locally and increasing technological sophistication re local targeting. But you don’t have the ad inventory to match the demand and/or technological capabilities emerging. The inefficiencies of the local market online mean that “hyper-local” queries aren’t matched with hyper-local ads. There are many potential explanations for this, including the relative lack of sophistication among the advertisers. But there’s also a potential bias among the engines themselves.

Ian White of Urban Mapping (also on the panel) called this “The Keyword Conspiracy.” What he means is: search engines don’t want people to bid on neighborhood queries because they are low traffic terms that may convert at high rates but don’t attract lots of competition. In other words, an engine isn’t going to make money on terms that fall below the city or metro level. Thus there’s limited interest in publicizing these terms and, viola, the chicken and egg problem reappears: hyper-local ads don’t show up so advertisers don’t know they can bid on these terms.

A potential solution is behind-the-scenes location awareness (triangulation, GPS, default location, etc.) that serves ads on a hyper-local basis but that are equally targeted to the metro area. The machine determines where the user is and serves the ad at the hyper-local level (or at the DMA level). Not a great solution but one that potentially resolves the dilemma.

Skyhook’s Jed Rice (on the panel) made the point that local ads perform much better than generally targeted ads (he cited CTRs) but also said that the inventory was hard to find to match the ads with the consumer queries (the point above). He made the analogy to offline direct mail/demographic targeting several times. I’ve also made this argument to several folks and told them the way that online publishers/advertisers will “get” local is if it’s “repackaged” as demographic targeting.

After the session I had a quick chat with Danny Moon of UpNext. We discussed the challenges of monetizing that sites like his. (He’s using Lat49.) But he and I discussed the idea of an IYP affliate local network — essentially a competitor to AdSense for local sites. This is the flip side of my argument about an IYP ad network — or an extension of it.

Yell offers an affiliate network in the UK. The YP publishers (and/or others) would benefit themselves and the ecosystem to pool their advertisers and offer a similar capability in the US. Together they would have well over a million advertisers that they could deliver to local sites. These publishers would also likely welcome the option to participate in such a program. Two caveats: it would take a sophisticated platform to slice and dice and serve the ads and it would take cooperation among the publishers.

Skyhook Promotes Partners Using API

Skyhook Wireless has made several announcements recently and is today promoting the fact that a wide range of companies are using its API to provide improved location awareness and targeting. Its technology should be added by G, Y!, M and others to their toolbars to automatically detect location (to complement and improve upon IP targeting alone).

Here’s the list of desktop and mobile partners currently using it: Whrrl, Geocaching.com, Krillion, Yahoo! Fire Eagle, UpNext and CitySquares.

Once location is “baked into the browser,” a wide range of interesting new ad and content targeting capabilities become possible.

EveryScape Expands Community Strategy

I just wrote about Smalltown turning its Webcards into website substitutes. Mapping site and virtual world EveryScape is seeking, in a way, to do the same thing with its local business profiles. CEO Jim Schoonmaker told me that is how its profiles can be used and are being used by some small businesses. These are visually rich, potential alternatives to conventional websites:

Alternatively, the company’s technology can be embedded or incorporated into existing websites (e.g., hotels). Competing with the more well-heeled, Google and Microsoft, EveryScape is trying, in its own words, to be “the real world, online.” And today it’s announcing a range of upgrades and new capabilities:

The key new features include:

• Scape Memo. A new community feature called “Scape Memo” lets people create a private link on EveryScape.com with up to 200 “memos” that identify their favorite locations to share with friends. For example, you could create a link pinpointing your 30 favorite restaurants nationwide, or you could send your friend a link with a memo identifying a new dinner location. Scape Memos are private and are shared via email. In addition, users can embed any memo within their favorite social network such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
• One-click Meta Search. EveryScape.com brings together all of the information from across the Web about a particular destination. With one click, you experience what it’s like to be there, read reviews from Yelp, see photos from Flickr, watch videos from YouTube and search the Web with Yahoo!.
• Better Local Search. EveryScape.com also features an improved navigation bar with more categories and subcategories designed to simplify local search. A new “What’s Nearby?” feature gives visitors one-click access to other businesses close to their chosen destination.
• World Tags. EveryScape also lets businesses upload photos, videos, links and more. For example, a restaurant could upload a video interview with its chef, or a women’s boutique might want to upload photos of its latest line.

The company is also announcing what it’s calling EveryScape Ambassadors. This is part of its attempt to leverage the community to grow the site, its content and ad revenues. Ambassadors replace the former “scape artists.” There are two types of “ambassadors”:

• Destination Ambassadors are EveryScape’s contracted representatives for specific destinations. They are responsible for capturing all of the public content for a given territory. Depending on the breadth of the destination, this represents a sizable yet flexible time commitment. Destination Ambassadors are required to attend a training and certification program through EveryScape.
• Local Business Ambassadors are “assignment photographers” who help us capture interior images of local businesses that are looking to build their presence on EveryScape.com. This opportunity is ideal for amateur and professional photographers. It requires minimal training, which can be done online.

The company makes money by selling interior photography, which is what the Local Business Ambassadors shoot (there are formal territories). One of the things that I’ve wondered is how much success the company is having with that program. Schoonmaker said that EveryScape is concentrating on building out neighborhoods and is having success because of the visual nature of the product and the profiles. “Like everything, the first one is the hardest,” Schoonmaker explained. “But it gets easier with each business because when they see other businesses around them there, they want to be there.”

The Ambassadors program is critical to EveryScape’s success in gaining content and sales. But EveryScape, like Google Earth/Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth, is also becoming a platform that others can develop on top of. Schoonmaker and I discussed several “mashups” that might result. There are some very interesting possbilities indeed.\

___

Update: I spoke at Where 2.0 to Schoonmaker, who demo’d some of the new, aggregated content that EveryScape is incorporating. He also showed me the ability to annotate EveryScape profiles (and keep them private or make them public) — Scape Memos– so it becomes a UGC platform in its own right.

Schoonmaker also told me that the Ambassadors program doesn’t replace “scape artists,” as I previously thought. Scape artists still exist but the Ambassadors get paid and are a quasi-professional group.

Smalltown Takes ‘Webcards’ on the Road

In my periodic discussion of local search successes and survivors, I often neglect to mention Smalltown. The site has plugged along since its debut in 2006 and has pursued a “hyper-local” strategy in the SF Bay Area. It was one of the first local sites (if not the first) to add video. Faced with the challenge of where to go next it decided to do something very interesting.

I met several weeks ago with founder Hal Rucker who showed me a demo of what the company is launching today: Webcards as a stand alone product. Flash-based Webcards, which are a core component of the Smalltown destination experience, now become a platform for small business websites and their syndication (see ad at right on Trulia). Indeed, the ad units themselves are amazingly versatile and in some ways more impressive in syndication than they are in the context of the Smalltown site.

Webcards can substitute for a conventional website:

They cost $9.50 per month and are apparently SEO friendly. However they can also be embedded in other directory sites:

In addition or alternatively, they can act as interactive, geo-targeted banners on non-directory sites:

Rucker also told me that any changes made to Webcards would go live wherever they appeared on the Internet. Another interesting angle here is Rucker’s use of Webcards.com as a prospecting tool for new Smalltown sites. He intends to watch and see if there are particular markets where Webcards are adopted. Those markets could become the next locations for Smalltown sites, he told me.

Superpages Widgetizes

Superpages adds an iGoogle Gadget and a Yahoo! Widget to expand reach:

There are a range of iGoogle yellow pages Gadgets, including one from Yell. However, none of the other US YP publishers appear to have made one. On Yahoo! Widgets it says there are 229 results for “yellow pages,” including a widget for the Idearc-owned Switchboard.

Widgets, which extends to Facebook applications, are an important incremental source of traffic and so it’s worthwhile to make these tools available. In particular, iGoogle is a fast-growing product that potentially puts yellow pages search on the user’s home page. Yell in the UK has built an affiliate program and a contextual ad network. In the US, these types of widgets could equally be the basis of an affiliate network.

As long as they’re at it, Idearc should probably also think about a Google Mapplet, although I don’t know how much usage these are getting.

‘Bits’ Praises Yelp

The typically skeptical and cynical journalist-cum-analyst Saul Hansell at the NY Times praises and expounds on the virtues of Yelp:

One reason for Yelp’s success is that it focused on San Francisco in its first year. The new generation of Web workers took Yelp to be their entertainment bible, and that helped generate enough critical mass that others joined in. Now the Bay Area represents only 30 percent of Yelp activity, Mr. Stoppelman said. Los Angeles is second, followed by Chicago and New York.

The site is also popular, Mr. Stoppelman said, because Yelp has been slow to add advertising, and there still isn’t that much of it. There are no banner ads. Instead, Yelp uses some relatively subtle advertising formats: Businesses can pay to have their companies listed first on search pages (identified as a sponsored listing). And they can pay to add photos and a little other information to the page about their business. But revenue from these sources isn’t enough to make Yelp profitable, Mr. Stoppelman said.

Responding to criticism from business owners that some user reviews are unfair, Yelp also recently introduced a way for the business owner to send a message back to a reviewer. If the reviewer doesn’t choose to write back, the business owner can’t send a second message.

But Mr. Stoppelman said that the site deliberately tilts its rules to support the reviewers. “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third,” he said.

A Coming Meta-Engine for Local?

I ran across this review of Loladex the other day and it made me think. Also, all the data portability stuff going on with MySpace, Facbook and Google’s new FriendConnect also got me thinking about some uber/meta-engine for recommendations that would mine all the discussions and referrals all over the Web and consolidate them. (Challenge: building trust/brand. Arguably Grayboxx was a version of this and fell prey to insufficient time to build user trust.)

We’ve had myriad local destination sites, which often syndicate their content to third parties. We’re also seeing sites like Loladex and others try and build on existing connections and communities — call it a local “layer” on the social graph (hate the term).

But soon, we may see engines that try and tap all the local recommendations out there and organize that content in some structured coherent way. Content/review aggregators such as OpenList, Google Maps or BooRah do a version of this today. But there may be a new group of sites (e.g., Mechanical Zoo) that try and do a “next generation” version of recommendations aggregation.

Eye-Fi Uses Skyhook for Auto Photo Geotagging

Eye-Fi, which makes memory cards for digital cameras, has introduced new cards that allow wireless uploading of photos and automatic geotagging, using Skyhook Wireless’ WiFi triangulation technology. The premium card includes WiFi hotspot access for a year.

From the press release:

Eye-Fi Explore allows users to automatically send photos directly from their camera to their PC or Mac, and to one of 25 online photo sharing, printing, social networking, or blogging sites using their home wireless network. Eye-Fi partnered with Skyhook Wireless to provide geotagging capabilities and Wayport to enable hotspot connectivity for the Eye-Fi Explore.

Through a partnership with Skyhook Wireless, the Eye-Fi Explore will allow users to map where their photos were captured with automatic geotagging. The card uses built-in wireless technology to locate nearby Wi-Fi access points when pictures are captured within the Skyhook coverage area. The Eye-Fi service uses this information to encode each photo with geographic locations, and the images arrive on the user’s computer and online sharing account automatically tagged.

The Eye-Fi Explore wireless memory card will also give users the freedom to upload photos while away from home at one of Wayport’s 10,000+ hotspot locations. By simply turning on the camera in a Wayport location, the card will automatically connect to the Wi-Fi network and begin uploading photos to the Web and the user’s PC or Mac.

Flickr, Panaramio and other services that overlay images on maps will immediately benefit from this kind of capability. Indeed, cameras so equipped could be used to automatically create databases of place specific images, local business storefronts and so on with comparative ease. Most digital cameras will have WiFi in the next year or two.

Trulia Launches Real Estate Ad Network

Trulia has launched what it calls the Trulia Ad Network. The company is already syndicating its listings and functionality to third party sites through the Trulia Publisher Platform. In many ways this new initiative is a logical extension of that effort.

Ad network partner-publishers announced with the launch include Oodle, Homes & Land and The Savvy Source.

Targeting is both demographic and geographic. Users can buy city, zip or neighborhood-level ad placements. Advertisers could buy all zip codes in a given state where the median income exceeds $100K, for example.

This is consistent with my argument that one flavor of local targeting ultimately turns into demographic targeting. And ad networks help address the persistent “fragmentation problem” of local (and vertical) markets.

Moms: A Force in Local

On this Mother’s Day it’s worth noting that women and moms in particular are the most important constituency for the local Internet.

Women are slightly more numerous online, more connected and more trusted than men. They also engage in more social behavior online and off.

For local sites (other than sites focused on restaurants, bars, etc.) they represent a more important group of users and evangelists than men.

Order (Pizza) Online, Deliver Locally

CNN profiles the online ordering efforts of the nation’s largest pizza chains:

In the past seven years, Louisville-based Papa John’s International Inc. has made a lot of dough from online ordering — more than $1 billion to be exact.

The nation’s third-largest pizza delivery chain trumpeted the $1 billion milestone Wednesday, noting that its U.S. online sales have been growing at an average clip of more than 50 percent per year. In 2001, the chain’s online sales totaled $20.4 million. Last year, its online sales approached $400 million.

I write about it because “pizza” is the archetypal local search subject. But I also bring it up because this is very much like Circuit City or Wal-Mart’s “buy online, pick up in store” feature. It’s also like online booking for local businesses (e.g., HourTown, ZocDoc, GenBook, Booking Angel). So is this “e-commerce” or local commerce?

It’s a hybrid model that reflects the integration of the Internet with the “real world” and points the way to much more of this sort of thing in the future: online order taking with offline fulfillment.

The Need for an IYP Network

The yellow pages publishers are all competing with one another online and to varying degrees offline. But what they need to do is sit down in a room and start working together. They’ve done it with “frenemies” Google and Yahoo!; so why can’t they do it with one another?

First, they need to support coordinated marketing for the industry that reflects a new multi-platform strategy: print, online and mobile. They’re all doing this to some degree independently with the net result being less visible and/or powerful than a joint effort. That consumer marketing will also get the message across to advertisers as well so it’s valuable for that reason too. (The conundrum here is that AT&T paid $100 million for the “brand” Yellowpages.com and probably doesn’t want to share any of that equity with anyone else.)

Then they all need to build a joint online ad network (as the newspapers are doing with Yahoo! and quadrantOne). They may even want to use a third party platform such as Adify or RightMedia to expand beyond IYP sites. The chief problem for any individual IYP is volume. Marketers like the conversion rates on IYP sites but almost uniformly want more volume. (That is not true for true SMB advertisers however.)

If the publishers could get together and pool their traffic they would go a long way toward accomplishing that. IYP publishers are using Google and Yahoo! as part of their extended “networks” but there is a difference there.

There are various local ad networks today:

• MediaSpan
• WorldNow
• Internet Broadcasting
• Quigo (now part of AOL)
• NNN
• quadrantOne
• Marchex
• Centro (not a network per se, but functions like one in some respects)
• Traditional ad networks offer geotargeting but are typically “blind” save AdBrite

Those criticisms may be less true for YP publishers and IYP sites but forming some sort of larger network would benefit them with certain groups and categories of advertisers – especially national advertisers or brands that have local outlets or franchises.

Once upon a time the YP industry was poised to come together in a portal strategy to compete with Google and Yahoo! in search. That never actually happened but now might be a good time to revisit an updated version of this idea.

Palore Crawling Producing Interesting Data

Palore, which I’ve advised, some time ago changed its model from consumer plug in to data aggregator for third party destination sites. The company had been aggegating data from a range of sources, largely about restaurants. But it came to the conclusion that fighting the battle on the consumer front was too challenging. So the model was changed and the company is collecting data and licensing that to third party sites.

In the process of doing that they’re finding some interesting things. For example, the company recently was able to show the relative percentages of restaurants in US cities with websites:

An earlier post showed the relative depth of content for NYC restaurants among several competing consumer destinations:

The company is moving beyond restaurants into other local categories as well.

Marchex Gains, Beats Estimates; Market Slow to Understand Local Opportunity

Marchex reported Q1 revenues and gained on advertiser growth:

Revenue was $37.0 million for the first quarter of 2008, compared to $34.2 million for the same period of 2007.

The company has also recently announced a series of deals with partners seeking to gain additional, qualified local traffic from its network.

The “market” still doesn’t really understand local and Marchex is struggling to educate the market and tell a coherent story about what it’s doing.

Once again, let’s be clear on what local is about: It’s NOT about yellow pages advertisers and SMBs, though that’s an important part of the story. It’s also NOT about “the long tail,” though that’s there too.

Local is first and foremost about transactions and the point of sale; it’s about where the money changes hands. E-commerce is a bit player in retail and the Shopatrons, Where2GetIts, Krillions, NearbyNows, ShopLocals, Channel Intelligences of the world threaten to marginalize it and further flatten its growth.

The Internet, fundamentally, is a “consideration” medium that helps consumers make buying decisions that are consummated offline (read: Local). Part of that is finding SMBs but it’s also about products and brands — in a big way. (See alternative segmentation of SMB market discussion.)

The future of advertising is about the smart integration of media — online and off — and better visibility and tracking of performance. Mobile integration with traditional media, inventory feeds and more complete end-to-end tracking will help make all this more transparent for folks eventually.

Ever since I left the Kelsey Group I’ve tried to re-frame the definition of local to more clearly expose what’s really going on with the Internet and consumers. Neither the advertisers, nor most of the ad networks, nor the publishers are yet advanced enough to fully respond to this reality — and opportunity.

But it’s coming.

Yellowbook Launches New Ad Campaign

Yellowbook announced yesterday that it had launched a new, multimedia ad campaign, part of “a full branding makeover.” The site has tweaked its design somewhat and there’s a new logo (pictured above). Traffic measurement service comScore previously said the site was one of the top 5 gaining properties in 2007.

The site though much improved than in the past still needs to add more content to help users make buying decisions (decision support) among a range of competing providers. Like its rivals, Yellowbook also has video.

___

Related: AT&T’s Yellowpages.com touts its success, including in mobile.