Don’t now how this escaped me of late, but Google also announced last month a program to promote its local business listings in storefronts around the U.S. It’s called Google Favorite Places.

Here’s the video:

Yet another piece of Google’s over-arching Local strategy.

It’s pretty awesome (in a borg-like sort of way).

glenn

Since I am fairly new to the world of blogging, I’m going to hold off on developing my own top 10 Digital Marketing Predictions or Top 10 Mobile Predictions for 2010.   There are plenty of them out there (see below for more).  I only have one prediction for 2010.  It will be better than 2009.   2009 was a tough year for everyone and hopefully one we will not forget for a long time (even though we’d like to).  For many people, 2009 could be one of the toughest ever, but it will be important to keep in mind when everything starts bubbling up again.  We live in a boom and bust society these days and, as Americans, we tend to be overly optimistic (which can be positive too).  Anyway, I am looking forward to a great 2010!

I will say that one positive thing that happened in 2009 is the year of mobile.  The iPhone became the definition of a game changer, changing the entire landscape of mobile services from handset development, data usage, application adoption, and smartphone purchases.  It’s been long overdue and I’m glad to finally see it arrive.  Look for continued growth and adoption and interesting developments from Google’s phone and the Android platform, especially its effect on the entire GPS industry.  Their free offerings could end up being a game changer in that space.

Anyway, I’d like to thank Courtney Mills, who put together a great list that I just finished reading from industry experts about there predictions for 2010.  This is a comprehensive list on a various aspects of Digital Marketing (SEO, Advertising, Social Media, Mobile, SEM, etc). Here are my thoughts on a few on them that relate to Mobile and Local.

GREG STERLING: Increased Reputation Management

In addition to greater adoption for mobile and local social, Greg touched on an intriguing area that I’ve been particularly interested in for SMBs, which is Reputation Management.  He’s predicting a rise in reputation management for small business that encompasses:

• Reputation management: adding services that help simplify and expose where SMB data and reviews exist online (see Marchex, GetListed, ClickFuel)

To an extent, this is a result of the Web 2.0 world in which content is created by someone and then picked up by crawlers and published in many other places.  The same is even true for business listings and the complexity of managing this (and even fixing it) becomes more difficult.  Small business don’t have the time or knowledge to find out where they are listed, make sure it’s correct, or even know where they should be listed and how to get there.  Furthermore, as reviews and social media continue adoption (especially while mobile in your local town), SMB owners will need tools to listen and become part of the conversation.  Kelsey has a great webinar on this space to check out as well.

SEOMOZ:   #1 – This Real-Time Search Thing is Outta Here

Real Time Search has been the buzz word for 2009 and we’ll see how it develops in 2010.  As businesses start/continue to really adopt and utilize social media, this will be an important tool to become part of the conversation.   Tools are still early in development so look for 2010 to be the year of improvements and adoption if the tools are user-friendly and effective.  Those that have already adopted Social Media will really start to try to determine the ROI and if not effective, reduce their focus in this area.

SEOMOZ:   #6 – SEO Spending Will Rise Dramatically

Many businesses are still just maturing in digital marketing, especially in the small, local business sector.   As these businesses experiment with SEM, many have found that competition has driven the cost per click beyond a reasonable ROI.  This will lead to a greater focus on SEO as an effective marketing strategy.  As marketing budgets slowly return in 2010, look for a greater percentage to move from traditional media to online as well.  Also, Local SEO will become more competitive in 2010 and an increase in optimization for Google Maps specifically.  This could lead to a much bigger level of map spam with multiple listings, increased categorization, variety of call tracking numbers, and more as businesses try to “game the system.”

MATT GRANFIELD:  Prediction #6: Companies will start exploiting GPS to a much greater extent.

Matt Granfield had some interesting thoughts (and very in your face style) for 2010.  Specifically, If 2009 was the year of mobile, then 2010 may be the year of GPS.  This may be largely due to both the iPhone and smartphone adoption and the free GPS service that Google has launched on the Droid.  If they keep a free service (very likely), then look for others in the space to follow.  Currently, most point to point applications are around $10 per month and have had limited adoption, but at a free pricepoint, adoption could go through the roof.

Forrester: 2010 – The Year Marketing Dies

Finally, Forrester had a great article on the evolution of the marketer.  I moved recently and came across my graduate school Marketing Book from just a few years ago.  While insightful back then, the marketing landscape has changed completely.  Good for a few laughs, but off to the recycle bin for that one.  Check out the article here.

Here is the full article and full list that Courtney has graciously aggregated:

SEOmoz: 8 Predictions for SEO in 2010

Top Rank Blog: 12 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2010

Clickz: Seven Ways to Get Your Marketing Back on Track in 2010

Search Engine Land: 5 Things on My B2B Wishlist for 2010

Marketing Mag: 2010 Marketing Predictions

ZDNet: 2010 Predictions: Will Social Media Reach Ubiquity?

Search Engine Guide: Will 2010 be the Year for Engagement?

Greg Stirling: Quick Thoughts about Next Year

Search Insider: Advertising 2010: Release the Hounds

Read Write Web: 2010 Predictions

Search Engine Land: 6 New Years Resolutions for In-House SEMs

Forrester: 2010: The Year Marketing Dies

Search Insider: The Shape of Marketing: 2010 & Beyond

Read Write Web: 10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2010

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

“We’ve really transformed from being a division of a telephone company… Our focus is on becoming the ad agency for small and medium businesses in America,”

via CORRECTED – Yellow – Pages Plot High Tech Road Out Of Bankruptcy – NYTimes.com.

I’ve written about the Yellowpages companies in the past and I know it pissed a few people off.  My general commentary was that their clear and present danger wasn’t secular decline, it was the enormous amount of debt that had been piled into those companies. Now that these companies are moving past those issues, I expect to see interesting things.

Start the New Year with a program to bring New Business Leads to your business.

Google and HyperLocal – Jeff Jarvis opines

In typical fashion, Jeff Jarvis has a couple of great blog posts on recent announcments by Google, and what it foreshadows for the future of Hyperlocal.

In the first of these posts – Google’s synchronicity – Jarvis describes a coherent emerging Local/Mobile strategy from Google that leverages geo-location, place profiles, real-time search, image recognition, entity-based content aggregation, social search, and recent acquisitions/interest in AdMob, Yelp, and Trulia.

In the second post – The annotated world, Jarvis further explores Google’s Hyperlocal/Mobile strategy, and embeds some videos highlighting some of these capabilities. (For additional Google-related topics/videos, see my previous blog posts here, here, here, here, and here).

Web meets World – the pace accelerates

The above initiatives by Google, while very cool, are really concrete examples of a deeper trend identified earlier this year by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle as Web Squared, or as it was originally termed “Web meets World“. Web Meets World, as I understand it, is the notion that the Web will extend its reach into the world of things (through real-time device-based sensors), will feed that data into the Cloud, whereupon intelligence derived from that data (contextual to our identity, interests, activities, location, social graph, etc.) will inform our real-time actions and decisions.

Anyway, powerful trends that in time will change the way we experience and relate to our physical and social surroundings.

glenn

Today,  I’ll share how to add your business to Merchant Circle (www.merchantcircle.com).

Merchant Circle is more expansive than many of the other options for listing your business in Local Search. Listings can include coupons, photos, videos, reviews of your business, and blog posts. If you already have a blog you could use posts in your Merchant Circle blog to drive traffic back to your own.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perks! Because Merchant Circle is such a large site, meaning it has so many members and content, the search engines are very likely to be crawling the site for content. Therefore,  Merchant Circle listings tend to show up very high in organic (FREE) search engine rankings, helping to increase your business’ exposure.

− To get started, go to http://www.merchantcircle.com and click on “Sign Up” in the upper right hand corner.

                                
− Next, click on “Get Started” and follow the prompts to enter in the information for your business.

– For more tips and tricks and ways to enhance your listing, take a look at Merchant Circle’s “How-to Guides” found at http://www.merchantcircle.com/corporate/educenter/howto/index.html.

– You can also download the Getting Started Guide here: http://www.merchantcircle.com/corporate/getting_started.pdf.

Every marketers should be familiar with the use of Google Keyword Tool. However, a big common mistake is when we search we are looking at the broad terms vs exact match. There are some differences in the number of searches.

For this exercise we’ll search for “replacement windows.”
Broad Match
Notice how the search volume displays 368,000 searches and the Match Type in the upper right corner is set to “Broad”. This will return all searches with the word “replacement” and “windows” but not together. This is the default setting and can throw you off.

Instead, use “Exact Match” as it will give you the real search numbers:

Exact Match
As you can see the search numbers drop to 40,500. That is about 1/3 of the Broad Match number – which is a huge difference.

So, when you do your keyword research ALWAYS use Exact Match so you have a more clear understanding of the estimated number of searches. This is very important to know in the competitive search phrases such as “restaurant consultants“,  and “kitchen makeover“.

Google Favorite Places is an offshoot of Google Local Business search. A Favorite Place gets a decal from Google they can stick in their store window. Each decal has a unique bar code, or “QR code,” that can be scanned by supported mobile phones.

When you scan a code, your mobile browser goes to that business’ mobile Place Page on Google. There, you can read reviews of the business by other users, grab mobile coupons if the business posted any, leave your own review, and assign a it a star to remind you to check it out later.

For the business owner, the listing is free and represents a great opportunity in hyper-local marketing – but only less than 1% of US businesses have the decal so far.

Google selected the lucky few (actually, about 100,000 businesses) based on the popularity of their Local Business Center listing; criteria included how frequently users looked for more information on and requested driving directions to the businesses, among other things. Essentially, the users “voted” and Google sent decals.

Google is planning on sending out more Favorite Places decals. If you want to be sure your business has a shot at getting one if and when the time comes, here’s what you can do.

1. Get a free Google account: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
2. Sign up with Google’s Local Business Center: http://google.com/lbc
3. Unlock your free business listing
4. Check your listing for accuracy, especially the location
5. Enhance your listing with photos that might encourage users to want to learn more about your business or get directions
6. Post any coupons you want to offer to make your business more enticing to new customers as well as repeat business

Once you’ve claimed your business, you can check on how many Google users looked for more information on you, got driving directions, and more at http://google.com/lbc.

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?

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.

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.

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”?

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.

Get Listed in Today’s Mobile ‘Yellow Pages‘

A Web presence wasn’t always one of the top priorities for hometown-grown businesses, but with mobile devices now the most popular search tool for many Web surfers, those priorities indeed have shifted.

The strategies used to optimize a Web site’s visibility five or six years ago are ineffective by today’s mobile standards, according to Dr.  Scott Testa, assistant professor of business administration at Cabrini College in Philadelphia.

“Because smartphones are location aware, the smartphone user, for all intents and purposes, is also location aware. Businesses should look at local search optimization as the ‘holy grail’ of web visibility,” Testa said.

Businesses are already starting to pay for local listings, as Google is currently test running its local services on a pay-for-play basis. In the future, most businesses will be willing to pay more for a local listing, Testa said, because they are going to see at least 20 times the return as a listing in traditional print Yellow Pages.

http://smallbusiness.m.foxbusiness.com/quickPage.html?page=20273&content=28737628&pageNum=-1

Related articles by Zemanta

• Quoted – Shop local: Think Main Street – not the mall – for holiday gifts – Enterprisenews.com (scotttesta.com)
• Quoted – Marketing to the Mommies – Demo Dirt (scotttesta.com)
• Quoted – Wall Street Journal – Borders and Retail Landscape (scotttesta.com)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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:

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?

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 . . .

While most of my clients have heard about keywords, keyword searches from their own experience of surfing the web, many do not know about categories. Local Search and Maps rely on seaches by Categories.

Categories are the terms used by Yellow Page and Local Search providers to help customers find you. Google Maps and Yahoo Local use this as their base for searching. And so do mobile phones. There are over 2000 categories to choose from. But first you want to see how your company is currently listed. For this, it is simple, type in your phone number to see what comes up and click on the first site that shows your phone number. The phone numbers basic listing information is provided by your phone service provider.

Let’s say it is www.yellowpages.com or www.superpages.com. See how they have categorized your company. If it is correct. great. If it is wrong, fix it.

If your phone number does not appear at all – you have a bigger problem. It means your local phone company might not have provided them with the correct information or no information at all. Before calling them to get this updated, call directory assistance and ask for your company name. Make sure they have it. If not or if it is wrong – call them immediately. Although you might think print yellow pages are old – people do use them and the phone company is one of the most important sources of data – your data – for online searches. If it is wrong it print, it will be wrong online. If it is wrong online – you have lot’s of work to do to fix it.

Wait, I was getting side tracked or was I. In order to be aligned with getting found in local searches on the web, you must make sure your phone service provider knows the categories you want your company to be listed under. As a rule, they will not ask you, you need to tell them. Not just for paid advertising but their database so that when they Googles and the Yahoo Locals, and the CtyPages ask for your information – you will get seen and you will get clicks and calls.

What about Vonage customers? Sales Agents using a cell phone? No directory assistance 411 support for you. Therefore, you will not be in online yellow pages or google maps. A quick fix for you is to have your local company create a business phone number for you and forward it to your vonage or cell phone account. As a rule the cost will be around $12 a month. The result is that you will be in local 411 and your data will go around the web and around the world.

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?