This morning Yodle announced two new features that will be added to the services it provides its clients as part of their online marketing solutions package: online reviews management and photo syndication.

“Our goal is for Yodle to be the CMO for our clients,” says Court Cunningham, CEO at Yodle. “We want to automate and simplify all marketing processes into one bundle.”

The online reviews management solution enables Yodle clients to generate, promote and respond to reviews from their customers. “We have found that there is a gap between consumer importance of reviews and SMB’s perceived importance of reviews,” says Cunningham.

According to BIA/Kelsey‘s Local Commerce Monitor�, only 40.5% of SMBs consider websites with customer opinion to be very or extremely important on average. However, BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor�, shows us that ratings on sites such as Yelp or TripAdvisor were consumers’ third most trusted source when it comes to information about the products and services of local businesses. Only friends or family members and Facebook friends were rated as more trusted, according to the CCM data.

“We are hoping to educate SMBs on the importance of reviews. It is important to know that negative reviews are actually an opportunity and should not be hidden,” says Cunningham. Yodle’s new review management solution will have a specific tool to assist SMBs with responding to negative reviews.

The photo syndication feature uses automated technology to distribute photos that have been uploaded. Cunningham highlights the importance of photos being used by pointing out that “photos can be syndicated out to many directories that may not take reviews,” and so give SMBs more exposure. Not only that, but according to Cunningham “we have found that more photos and less text drives higher engagement from consumers on a site.”

These new features are currently available to Yodle’s customers. On the horizon, Yodle has additional features including offers management and email communication that will be available in early April.

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The local search market will expand from $6.0 billion to $8.6 billion during this five-year period, accelerating at a faster pace than the aggregate U.S. search market. Mobile-local search is a critical growth driver as users leverage their devices to make local decisions, and geo-targeted messages surface against these queries. Desktop search volume continues to rise as well, though, largely a product of rising tablet adoption and surging vertical search on specialized, category-specific sites (auto, jobs, etc.).

Local display, which includes social media advertising, remains smaller than search. However, the sector is growing more quickly, from $2.9 billion to $5.7 billion during the five-year curve. The primary growth drivers are social and video display, both of which are seeing expanded inventory and improving CPM rates.

BIA/Kelsey clients can log in to download the full report.

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Over the past decade, one of the leading lights in local search and leveraging local content has been Matthew Berk: first as an analyst at Jupiter anticipating key trends, then with his startup , OpenList, which was purchased by Marchex, where he later served as EVP and developed Open View, a local and vertical directory that collected and semantically sorted information for thousands of contextual categories from all over the Web.

Berk’s new project, Lucky Oyster, goes back to his roots in helping people find local information and services – this time by capturing word of mouth reviews. And keeping them top of mind. Berk notes that there has been a rise in popularity in user generated reviews and ratings on the Web. The number one source of reviews is still word of mouth – and it isn’t really supported by technology.

“People receive recommendations all the time,” he says. “But they forget them. And if they ask for recommendations in Facebook, they don’t even see the reply.” Lucky Oyster, a mobile app, has been in development for less than a year.

Based in Seattle, it has been developed to allow people to set up “pearls” of wisdom that can be categorized by apps, categories and by person. Berk notes that the system has been developed as a reminder system as much as a recommendations service – people don’t always remember what they’ve done or seen. The viral effect is already clear in some ways. Berk notes a local Yoga studio in Seattle picked up 20 new students after a strong recommendation by a new student.

Berk is appearing on the ‘New Leads’ session with AirBnB‘s Joe Zadeh and Thumbtack‘s Marco Zappacosta at Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media in San Francisco Dec. 10-12.

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BIA/Kelsey examines these differences this week in a new “Spotlight” report using data from the recently completed Wave 17 of the Local Commerce Monitor (LCM). The report is the latest in the ongoing “Spotlight” series that drills down into the LCM data to examine how SMB advertisers acquire and retain customers.

LCM is BIA/Kelsey’s long-running study of how U.S. SMB advertisers are evolving their use of media to acquire and retain customers.

Local mobile advertising is more than a blip on the radar today, and it is expected to grow substantially over the next few years. Projected mobile local advertising revenues represent a subset of total U.S. mobile ad spending, which BIA/Kelsey forecasts to grow from $3.25 billion in 2012 to $16.8 billion in 2017. This puts locally targeted mobile ads at 38% of overall U.S. mobile advertising spending in 2012, growing to 54% in 2017.

The LCM Wave 17 data shows that SMBs that participate in mobile advertising differ from those that do not use mobile advertising in several important ways:

* SMB mobile advertisers have much more aggressive plans for advertising media spending over the next 12 months compared to those who don’t. These SMBs that leverage mobile advertising spent $56,964 in their annual media spend in the last year, more than double those that do not use mobile advertising.

* In the past 12 months, SMB mobile advertisers on average spent 37% more on their budget for digital and online compared to their non-mobile counterparts (28%).

* SMB mobile advertisers advertising are highly engaged with their customers. They tend to use check-in data to understand behavior and monitor basic information related to consumers at a far higher rate than non-mobile SMBs.

* SMB mobile advertisers care very much about their online sentiment; 80% of them perform some sort of monitoring of online properties compared to only 60% of the full sample.

Interested in learning more about LCM Wave 17 or getting a custom cut for your business? Contact Celine Matthiessen at cmatthiessen@biakelsey.com.

We’ll be covering this and other themes in great depth at our upcoming Leading in Local conference, December 10-12 in San Francisco. Be there and join the conversation!

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Olander’s new company, Local Viewpoints has won seed funding from Wavetable Labs. It launched at the end of March, starting with four sales people hitting businesses up in hometown Chicago, as well as other markets.

The company basically sends out a short survey after customers shop a location, providing instant feedback to the location, analytics (time of day, products purchased) and most importantly, an online review . The surveys take about a minute to complete.

Seventy-five businesses are currently subscribing to the service, which is $299 a year. Business categories range from chiropractors to furniture stores to plumbers to high-end restaurants.

“We’re trying to bridge together all the forms of customer feedback” and measuring customer satisfaction, including online reviews and customer feedback, says Olander. The problems with other sources is that customer feedback simply isn’t being captured, he adds. Just six percent of consumers are willing to write reviews. With the world going mobile, and everyone being just seconds away from providing feedback, however, there really are no excuses.

Local Viewpoints, of course, is not the only company focused on driving up reviews via short response surveys. We’ve recently covered the efforts by SupportLocal to drive up local business recommendations via a fast-paced, 27-question local recommendations page.

Here’s an interesting InfoGraph that Local Viewpoints has put together about the Word of Mouth space.

The post Gib Olander’s Local Viewpoints Gets Business Feedback, Reviews appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Significant news in the online presence/reputation management space came across the wire at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference last week in Boston, as VendAsta announced $8.25 million in Series B funding to accelerate the company’s holistic identity/reputation/social management solution.

In just over two years, it has established a deep network of local publishers (Cox Media Group, Gannett, GateHouse Media, Hearst) and solutions providers (Web.com) that reach more than 100,000 SMBs in aggregate. VendAsta launched with a core focus on reviews/reputation monitoring, but has since expanded into social monitoring, engagement and lead generation. While maintaining a strong foothold with SMBs, it has also moved upstream into reputation management for brands.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts e-mail & reputation/presence management to grow into a $2.5 billion market in the U.S. by 2016. Enterprise will increasingly contribute to that spend as investment is made to combat digital brand fragmentation and localize advertising and marketing.

At the SMB level, with consumers flocking to new channels and operators now using 8-10 different media for advertising and promotion to reach them, a reputation solution is a central component of a digital offering for anyone in the SMB services business. With its latest round of funding backing up its recent product expansions, VendAsta is well-positioned as a critical player in the race to create the integrated dashboard.

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Yelp reviews are susceptible to a lot of noise — relatives and friends of a business, mischief makers, people without any perspective (or taste). In fact, most review sites — Trip Advisor, Zagat, etc. — are affected by these factors.

Some sites have tried to get around this problem by using proxies for reviews. A few years ago, for instance, Grayboxx used “mentions” of a location as a proxy for reviews, assuming that the majority of mentions would be positive ones. That method, however, proved to be inaccurate and especially dicey in smaller markets. Other sites are experimenting with the use of check-ins and tweets as review/rating substitutes.

Now comes Bundle, a new service with seed funding from Citibank, Microsoft and Morningstar. Bundle, which is based in New York City, has built the algorithms to clean and sort “mentions” from 20 million-plus Citibank credit cards. While other services work with credit card companies for loyalty programs and recommendations, we haven’t seen companies that can actually apply algorithms to aggregated, anonymized credit card data.

Bundle scores are based on the popularity of a restaurant (i.e., number of visits); the number of repeat visits by customers to a restaurant; and the amount people are willing to pay when they eat at the restaurant. One assumes scoring can easily be applied to other categories as well.

CEO Jaidev Shergill tells us that the company started two-and-a-half years ago as a money management site that would analyze statements for better budgeting practices, etc. But the company changed its business model to “solve problems for people using our differentiated data asset.”

“Local search and discovery have become bigger and the importance of accurate, relevant reviews is increasingly important. However, there is no way to tell whether the review is relevant to you,” says Shergill. Credit card data, coupled with aggregated demographic and behavioral data, clears the hurdle.

The service launched last December in New York and San Francisco, and nationwide on Jan. 1. “We have 2 million merchants ‘rated,’ ” said Shergill. “That’s as many as Yelp. It will get richer as the months go by.” He also notes that unlike review sites, Bundle doesn’t need to go market by market for reviews.

Shergill acknowledges some limitations to Bundle’s methodology. If there is no data, there are no ratings. So that rules out cash-only places. The data also can’t distinguish how many diners are on the check, although individual prices can be estimated based on pattern analysis. But a quick look at my ZIP code (“92009”) showed fairly robust, accurate results.

Bundle CEO Jaidev Shergill is speaking at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston along with Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim and Cartera Senior VP Jim Douglass. Register here.

Bundle CEO and Founder Jaidev Shergill

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Mentions, reviews, blog comments, tweets, posts and now check-ins. It’s enough digital noise to lead local business owners to throw their hands up in despair. As Internet fragmentation accelerates, a host of reputation management providers have carved out an important foothold in the digital landscape by aggregating merchants’ online activity through a single dashboard that subsequently allows for sentiment analysis, syndicated messaging and competitive benchmarking.

Like so many parts of the digital ecosystem, however, reputation management is quickly becoming commoditized, which can actually make the SMB’s decision process about brand marketing and protection more complicated. That result runs counter to the very problem that reputation management aspires to resolve.

In our first Social Local Media industry report, Andrew Shotland and I examine the current state of reputation management and project how the industry must evolve to create a more holistic, simplistic and measurable solution. All the leading vendors are profiled, with the report comparing and contrasting them across 10 foundational criteria and distilling their differentiating features, as well as highlighting their business model challenges. We also explore opportunities and considerations for resellers that may be thinking of branding a solution for their own clients.

As BIA/Kelsey has touted for years, there is robust opportunity in ERPM. Our forecast, in fact, pegs local spend in this segment to eclipse $5 billion by 2015. For this growth to be realized, and for these tools to truly capture the needs of the enterprises they serve, there is a pressing need for differentiation through an elegant interface that consolidates the fragmented Web into an easily managed system.

“Single click publishing,” improved social messaging, scheduling functionality, mobile features and automated loyalty tools are all essential elements of the holistic communication platform that will win the future.

Social Local Media subscribers can access the full report here.

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While much has been made of how social media is changing consumer behavior, advertisers are struggling to keep up with and make sense of this shiny new toy. Matthew Goldman is the executive director of product management for subscription ad products at ATT Interactive (parent of YellowPages.com). Goldman is ATTi’s point man on social strategies for its advertisers.

What Products Are You Responsible For?
I am responsible for Consumer & Advertiser Products including IYP products, YP 360, websites, mobile websites and social media products.

How Does ATTi Think About Social Media Regarding Its Advertisers?
Social needs to be interwoven into everything. Three years ago there was hardly any focus on social within the organization, and perhaps in the industry. Now it’s everywhere and we’ve bought into that.

We are providing the basics. For example, when we build a website for an advertiser it will have FB like button and Twitter feeds. If you add video there are video sharing tools and virtual tours. In addition you can add a Facebook Fan page to your site.

What Are You Doing for Reputation Monitoring?
In August 2010 we rolled out our Online Presence Manager, which allows a business to review its reviews from a variety of review sites. We are private labeling Marchex’s platform and integrating it with ATT’s single sign-on. Any ATT customer who buys any ad product, including a bold listing in the book, is provided with ability to sign up for a free/lite version. The lite version limits the number of trends you can track and provides a monthly email summary of activity. For businesses that don’t get a lot of reviews, this is a good way to start. The paid version is about $30/month and includes unlimited history and alerts and competitor comparison view, so you can see how the guy across the street is doing. We are seeing pretty strong take rates and now have over 10,000 customers, many of which are paid.

ATTi’s Online Presence Manager Reviews Dashboard

ATTi’s OPM Competitor Dashboard

Once Advertisers Sign Up for Reputation Monitoring, Do They Actually Use the Service?
We are seeing double-digit usage from those who sign up. There are basically two types of behaviors. The plumber who doesn’t get new reviews every day comes in and bounces out because they are not seeing any new data.

But once an advertiser is engaged in the service we are seeing them spend several minutes per visit and coming in more than one time per month. That said, the email reports allow the advertiser to engage with the data without actually using the site. When offered the email reporting, we usually get a good take rate.

One indicator of success is that our YouTube video on how to use the service has almost 10,000 views.

Does the Service Bring In a Lot of New Business?
The service is a good door opener, but for now it’s a marketing service vs. a lead generator. One of the benefits is that it unearths less visible sources of reviews. Not every review happens on Yelp after all. It’s a time-saver for businesses.

What’s the Future of Rep Monitoring Tools?
Our goal is to make it more about meaningful insight. I want them to log in and know what the best thing on their menu is or which employee needs more customer sensitivity training. When we see a change in review behavior we can ask the business if they made any changes on a certain date so they can correlate the two events.

As far as the future goes, we think about things like can we create a wizard that helps you figure out how to make a status update that’s relevant and then provide keys to “social SEO.”

When we amass this kind of data we can educate the business about how to use the data to market themselves.

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One thing I have noticed about deal hunters — they are cranky and vocal. And one thing I have noticed about the daily deals space — it has created a huge opportunity for services to help SMBs navigate these programs successfully.

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