Thanks to all who attended and participated in a successful DMS conference in sunny Denver. They keep getting better. All the coverage is below and grouped together here.

Speakers: You can also view and pull down any pics from our Flickr stream. Shout out to Kerry and Patrick for photog skills. Enjoy.

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In a panel on mobile local ad networks, Verve Wireless CMO Greg Hallinan, xAd CMO Craig Hagopian, Where VP of BD Dan Gilmartin and AT&T Interactive SVP William Hsu each offered data and context to validate mobile’s efficacy.

Hagopian: xAd’s geocoded ads earn 3 percent to 8 percent CTRs, with secondary actions on these ranging from 25percent to 50 percent. This can be explained by the mobile search user’s “intent to act on information within an hour.” The query chain, or funnel, is dramatically compressed.

Hallinan: Verve’s local display network is seeing a “significant increase in the volume of locally sold mobile ads.” And once on-board, those businesses show a high propensity to renew, and at three to five times the level of the initial spend.

Tsu: Similar to Verve, AT&T’s branded local display network is driving $3 eCPMs on average. These can escalate to as high as $10 to $15 in some cases.

While local targeting is essential to capturing mobile user intent, the panelists added that context plays an equally central role in optimizing an ad’s relevance for an individual consumer. As an example, Where recently ran a campaign for Halls that geofenced a one-mile radius around the areas of a city where the flu index spiked, driving consumers to nearby CVS, Walgreens and Walmart.

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Even though it’s a seemingly dead simple and compelling concept, Truka admitted that while most local businesses have a general awareness of what Groupon is (primarily driven by their own personal use), “they still don’t exactly know how it works for the most part.” In other words, time to take a step back.

As Groupon has exploded from its Chicago roots to a 43-country phenomenon that plans to IPO at a $25 billion valuation, it has also learned a measure of patience about what works, for whom and at what threshold. In Truka’s words, “measure twice, cut once” with merchants.

BIA/Kelsey already sees the original deal-a-day concept evolving into a broader, deeper universe of marketing, promotional and transactional products and services. Similarly, Groupon is redefining itself as a “city guide.” Its entry to mobile (Groupon Now), verticals (travel, live events), consumer-packaged goods (General Mills pilot) and loyalty (Quiznos punch card deal) suggests that redefinition is well under way.

For traditional publishers, the Groupon threat is twofold. The company is stealing share of mind and wallet from merchants. It’s also grabbing local sales resources. “We definitely hire YP reps,” Truka said. “It’s a very similar industry, and they make great reps.”

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Today as DMS ’11 wrapped up, Mike Centorani, VP of sales training at MatchCraft, and Paul Plant, founder and principal, Radicle Consulting, dissected the art of local advertiser acquisition.

Riffing on the title of the session, Plant said he prefers the title “new models for customer [advertiser] growth.” In other words it’s not just about acquiring advertisers in the traditional categories, but also broadening that base for growth in number of customers.

This includes smaller ARPAs but more of them. And they’re happening in new categories of growth, and are also a diversification play. He gives the example of home operators or online-only businesses that might only have an ad spend of $400 rather than $5,000.

“That is the growth opportunity as we move forward,” said Plant. “Chasing the broader tail and opportunities that spread us across the business spectrum — those that in the past we didn’t worry about because they were smaller.”

Centorani built on this argument with the notion that the sales process is rife with complications that lots of people don’t appreciate. And it’s getting harder as the local ad market continues to fragment and the average SMB gets called on by upwards of 40 sales reps per month.

To survive in this environment, Centorani argued that at the very least any sales rep needs to answer key questions to really know SMBs. These include what they sell who they sell to and what their customers care about.

“If your sales rep doesn’t know those things, I’d bet you have a shaky sale,” he said. “Train your sales reps to be mini ad agencies.”

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At DMS ’11, Marketplaces Program Director Peter Krasilovsky painted a sunnier picture of the robust and still-rising group buying industry. Among the notable growth signals are exceptionally big email lists with high (yet declining) open rates, a “no money down” value proposition and the equivalent of free advertising for participating merchants.

Groupon’s Chicago mailing list, in fact, more than doubles the combined lists of the market’s two daily newspapers. This opens up a universe of integrated marketing and promotional possibilities for SMBs far exceeding the deal of the day.

BIA/Kelsey’s recently updated deals forecast reflects our bullish view of the market. VP of Research Mark Fratrik sees the user base broadening. Combined with better personalization and targeting of deals (including mobile and flash deals), the result will be more relevant offers to a bigger audience. The forecast charts revenues increasing at a decreasing rate, ramping from $1.9 billion in 2011 to $4.1 billion by 2015. Mobile integration, specialized niches (B-to-B, for instance) and loyalty/retention tools can amplify the market even more.

Then there’s the evolving role of social signals in driving deal virality. While Facebook recently withdrew its Deals product and Yelp has scaled back, we still see promise in providers that are able to create powerful recommendation and referral loops that tap into social connections and affinity-based buying communities (moms, to name just one).

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What does digital transformation truly look like? And how far along the path to a new revenue model are directional publishers? Those questions were front and center at DMS ’11, as Dex One Chief Strategy Officer David Sharman, YP New Zealand CEO Scott Pomeroy and Local Search Association President Neg Norton debated “the future of Yellow Pages.”

Sharman was quick to clarify that his organization no longer views itself as a “publishing company,” instead transitioning to a broader marketing and solutions value proposition that is increasingly driven by a performance-based mobile product set. Ultimately, the core asset remains the same — not the print book, but the established brand and connected sales resources.

Pomeroy, who has aggressively accelerated digital initiatives at YP NZ since taking the reins in January, raised more radical notions of transformative change. Rather than squeezing the final revenue drops from a legacy channel and methodically marching toward digital, he volunteered that traditional media have a responsibility to at least consider running a digital-first business in which digital would be spun off as a separate entity. He reminded the audience that “the market awards value in a digitally based business that is growing.”

Naturally, that raises questions of innovation…if YPs, even with some new internal blood, are positioned culturally, operationally and financially to iterate at the speed that the digital environment requires?

Pomeroy asserted that YP NZ is not a technology company, but an “interpretive marketing services” specialist. For Sharman, it’s all about smart partnerships that fulfill client needs. Perhaps the sweet spot is thinking like a tech firm, even if it’s not a core competency.

The eternal challenge pushing back against these disruptive approaches is actual strategic implementation. As Norton summarized: “Where we’ve fallen down as a group is execution.”

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In 2004 91 percent of Golden Pages’ revenues were from print products and just 9 percent were from digital. Fast forward to 2010 and, through its vertical and digital transformation, revenues have shifted to 70 percent digital and 30 percent from print. Golden Pages identified five consumer needs — reliability, necessity, specialty, affordability and emotional involvement — and created verticals.

The transformation in strategy includes rich content built on its Internet Yellow Pages to deliver a great consumer experience. Lempert offered the example of Zap, Golden Pages’ local shopping and comparison site, which lets consumers shop and then make informed decisions based on local business information and inventory of where to buy the products. Golden Pages took the Zap model and “zapped” its Yellow Pages into verticals.

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During today’s social media forum at DMS ’11 a session on “social CRM” highlighted the products and insights of VendAsta CEO Brendan King and JoinHere CEO Justin Sanger.

The artist formerly known as reputation management is taking many forms as the social Web itself starts to blur at the edges. It’s also getting a heck of a lot more challenging in not only monitoring activity across a growing number of sites/networks, but also the varied use cases (tweets, check-ins, reviews, etc.).

“If you look back at reputation management when we started in ’08, Google didn’t display or collect reviews,” said King. “But the whole social world has changed a lot. Every consumer is a publisher and you can’t pick your message. … Now consumers say what your brand is. That brings out the need for reputation management.”

That’s 1.0, said King, the monitoring part. The next step is iterating on the information received to manage and build a reputation. Sanger doesn’t like the term social management though and has built his business on what he calls “social empowerment.”

“There is a lot of idealism with what SMBs are willing to do,” he said. “They are time starved. The plumber doesn’t have the wherewithal to go in there and engage.”

This is partly an education issue, providing intelligence on not only what to say but what not to say. A plumber, for example, might not be the best type of business to be Facebook posting or tweeting every day. The overall idea is to draw out the real life relationships that have existed for decades.

“We don’t believe Facebook owns the social network,” said Sanger. “They’ve existed for SMBs for a long time. …They’ve just been unorganized and untapped. Our job is to strengthen those relationships and give SMBs clues on how to engage them with purpose and discipline.”

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Only 1.25 percent of the 240 million websites online are mobile friendly. That statistic kicked off the DMS ’11 Mobile Tools for SMBs panel. Provided by DudaMobile, the company’s CEO and cofounder, Itai Sadan, looks at the statistic and sees a huge opportunity in building mobile websites.

In particular, he sees opportunity in converting clicks to calls. DudaMobile presented data from a survey with SMBs to understand what categories have particularly high rates of click-to-call conversions. When searched on a mobile device, SMB pizzerias experienced a 32 percent average click-to-call rate. Other top categories with high conversion rates were transportation, auto repair and home repair — all with click-to-call rates north of 20 percent.

What’s driving the call to action? Sadan believes it’s about having a call to action prominently on the top of a mobile website — making a click to call easy to find and providing a simple interface. Co-panelist Krishna Pillai, founder and COO of Convergent Mobile, agreed, but took it a step further in saying that driving a call to action is also providing a compelling offer (i.e., coupon) that entices a consumer to take action.

Annette Tonti, CEO of MoFuse, also commented on the move toward mobile websites for SMBs and said she sees three phases right now. Phase one, which she believes is coming to a close, is the thought by SMBs that they do not need a mobile website. The second phase is the understanding by SMBs that they need a mobile website, but they want it to be theirs, meaning a design that is just for them. Tonti feels like Phase 2 is just in the beginning stage, and then Phase 3, down the road, will be SMBs figuring out how to “power up” their sites to the next level.

Tonti continued that traffic is everything, it’s “the currency.” “The No. 1 reason people leave us is because they’re not sure they’re getting the traffic they need,” Tonti said.

Pillai also chimed in about overall marketing. Convergent Mobile, for instance, provides a branded decal to every customer that offers a way for them to promote their SMS short code that users can text to US411. He noted that incorporating the mobile positioning needs to be combined with other current marketing channels. In other words, just as SMBs promote their website, email and the like, they also need to be promoting their mobile presence whether that be a short code or a mobile website.

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Smack dab in the middle of today’s social media forum at DMS ’11 was a session to highlight agencies that specialize in social media marketing.

David Lifson, CEO of Postling, and Mike Nabasny, regional sales manager of Wildfire, spent the majority of the session talking about how they’re applying algorithms to bring the traditional agency model to SMBs.

The key there is becoming part reputation management play, and part toolset to empower businesses to be more effective with Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, et al. It’s the “teach a man to fish” mindset.

Another key concept is “one-stop shop,” given the growing number of online/social outlets where customer voices are being heard and SMBs’ limited time.

“These SMBs don’t have time. They need a one-stop shop,” said Lifson. “As time goes on they need more to listen and respond. We built a tool to make it easier.”

This includes Postling suggestions, a way to scale an agency approach with an automated system. It alerts businesses of top things they should know about and how to respond or redistribute. This can include things like a five-star review on Yelp or a new influential Twitter follower.

“Lots of SMBs can’t afford an agency,” said Lifson. “Can we use algorithms to get you 80 percent there?” This automated approach is an imperative to scale and needs to be engineered in a way that approximates agency service, without the agency.

“We’re a technology company,” added Nabasny. “If you’re looking for a full-service agency where someone will tweet for you, we will do that through third parties. But our core competency is engineering and we’re sticking with that.”

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