This is "Internet Week" in New York City as MediaPost hosts a series of conferences on the heels of the the second annual Digital Content Newsfronts. This is the Internet industry's answer to broadcast and cable television's "Upfronts" where the major…
The scheduling space is heating up, with a number of key vendors competing for SMB business, companies such as Groupon and Merchant Circle acquiring and integrating scheduling companies into core activities, and new companies such as MyTime attempting to aggregate…
Photo: CNN Online restaurant ordering and discovery giants GrubHub and Seamless have agreed to merge their operations, creating a single company. Chicago-based GrubHub currently serves more than 20,000 food ordering establishments in 500 cities, while New York-based Seamless serves more…
We like the idea of using corporations as a distribution base for media and services. In the 1990s, The Family Education Network built a great newsletter business distributed in corporate lobbies. The concept's been widely extended with the addition of…
Payment processors and related companies work with most SMBs and are increasingly seen as a potential sales channel for reaching them with additional services. This week, we talked with one processor, Boston-based Merchant Warehouse, about its efforts to leverage its…
Former Localeze business develoment guy Gib Olander is back in the game, this time switching his focus from local business listings innovation to maximizing effective local business reviews. Think of a variation of "Net Promoter Scores" for local business. Olander's…
Increased investment, a bullseye on customer acquisition, yet unconvincing results. These are the core themes emerging from Manta's recently-released Q1 SMB Wellness Index, a survey of small business owners focused on social media. They are the very themes called out…
Companies that are successfully transforming their sales teams to serve a fast changing local and SMB marketplace tend to follow a common set of best practices. These include a focus on customer-driven key performance indicators, a heavy reliance on data…
SuperMedia and Dex One completed their merger today, creating Dex Media, a company with annual revenues of approximately $2.6 billion (based on combined 2012 revenues), with about $500 million in digital revenue. The combined company also has 2,700 sales reps…
BIA/Kelsey recently rolled out the first in a series of reports offering very specific cuts of data from our Local Commerce Monitor research. LCM is BIA/Kelsey's long-running study of how U.S. small business advertisers are evolving their use of media…
Is appointment scheduling poised to be a new anchor for service promotions? That vision --"look for an appointment, get a deal or upsell " -- has been articulated by a number of scheduling vendors, such as Agendize, FullSlate and Schedulicity.…
Will tech companies like Google, Apple, eBay/PayPal, Amazon, Microsoft, Square and Intuit move in on the role traditionally played by banks? It is a distinct possibility in the not-too-distant future, as digitized transactions, mobile payments and offers, and digital wallets…
As promised in our LSA conference coverage last week, here is a deeper dive on Facebook's positioning and possible directions in local. I covered the topic in a bit more depth in my monthly Search Engine Watch column, including more…
Ads aren't just valued for bringing in calls and walk ins. Local businesses increasingly place value on consumers looking up maps and directions, or participating in loyalty efforts, notes SuperMedia Director of Mobile Development Chris Folmer, who was speaking on…
Seven years ago, in 2006, we began evangelizing a vision of local media driven by vertical specialties. These would drive high value leads with better, more relevant searches. In this light, Google was seen as a "perpetual vertical machine," driving…
Solocal Group CEO Jean-Pierre Remy offered directory publishers a vision for print to digital transformation built on a strong focus on building content, vertical segmentation and a relentless focus on execution. Remy was the keynote speaker at the Local Search…
The newspaper consortium-owned Wanderful Media is rolling out a retooled version of Find & Save, a shopping info site that it hopes will reinforce ties between the newspapers and the national retailers and brands that have traditionally driven their (estimated)…
Local Service Pages, a new publisher in NY who launched a Bronx book in the fall of 2012 is extending the usage of the print books with their Staten Island Book. They are the first directory publisher to have a…
Over the past few months, BIA/Kelsey has been looking at various SMB-focused sales approaches among both traditional media players and digital pure plays. Our objective was to establish a common set of best practices. We discovered early on that the…
I am personally looking forward to Solocal CEO Jean-Pierre Remy's presentation later this month at the Local Search Association's annual conference in Las Vegas. Solocal, which recently changed its name from PagesJaunes, is the leading search and directory company in…
