I’ve been trying to fill the stage and audience with more SEO types in addition to our usual suspects of local media publishers (search engines, IYPs, vertical sites).

I’ve been getting Steve Espinosa, David Mihm, Andrew Shotland, and a few others involved more heavily. Let’s talk.

we can take this offline (so to speak) at some point – mbolandATkelseygroup.com

I need to get a panel going of “Average Online Advertisers”

The surveys have been a collaboration with Greg Sterling and some other Local SEOs.

I wish I was going to be at ILM. We’ll have to talk before the next event about speaking opps.

I’ll be sure to keep you up to date as we gather more data!

Will

One of the most interesting data points from our survey of Foursquare “Advertisers” was that Yelp had the greatest brand recognition of any of the alternative check-in services and led by a considerable margin among directory sites.

I think there area combination of reasons including notoriety due to the lawsuits, and SMB adoption.

At some point I’d like to do a follow up with a broader base in which we look at “Advertiser” sentiment regarding a number of rating and review sites nationwide.

In our last revision of the survey, > 90% were actively pursuing check-ins on Yelp (~65% FB Places) )and 100% had heard of Yelp (88% Citysearch, 83% Groupon).

So, I tend to agree that Yelp as an SMB check-in option is greatly underrated.

Will