G5 Search Marketing is poised to further leverage its growth in several high-yield verticals after announcing a $15 million investment from Volition Capital to close out its first round of financing. CEO Dan Hobin told BIA/Kelsey that the company plans…
Twitter today made two big hires (via TechCrunch) in an effort to "ramp up the advertising platform." Dan Coughlin joins as Eastern U.S. sales director, while Amanda Levy will be his Western U.S. counterpart. Coughlin spent the past few years…
EBay is pushing to do more to integrate the flagship auction site and its Marketplaces products with ProStores, its online storefront software company. The effort to integrate ProStores is part of a broader effort to integrate its properties (i.e., eBay…
ReachLocal delivered its first quarterly report as a public company today, noting that its active advertiser count has climbed 27 percent from 13,200 to 16,700, and that its consolidated revenues grew 47 percent from $47.97 million to $70.362 million. It…
Small businesses are gaining the ability to interact with customers anytime, as e-mail marketing gives way to “the social graph,” says local marketing pioneer Perry Evans, who is introducing Closely Inc., a new firm dedicated to helping SMBs leverage the…
Small businesses are gaining the ability to interact with customers anytime, as e-mail marketing gives way to “the social graph,” says local marketing pioneer Perry Evans, who is introducing Closely Inc., a new firm dedicated to helping SMBs leverage the…
American Express Open is making a series of moves to extend its massive list of SMB credit card customers into broad marketing relationships that will fully leverage Amex’s powerful brand and relationships. The potential for Amex to be a marketing…
After a two-week beta period, MerchantCircle is out with a new mayorship title for its SMBs that are the most "networked." One mayorship is given for every city/town and is achieved by engaging in the standard b2b activities of the site (connecting with…
American Express has announced the launch of SearchManager, a unified SEM platform that will be powered by Clickable. This is essentially a white-labeled version of Clickable's existing platform that gives advertisers a one-stop-shop dashboard for managing PPC campaigns (and Facebook…
ReachLocal has continued its efforts to add sticky usage for small businesses and diversify beyond reselling Google with the launch of “Bizzy” in New York, San Francisco and Dallas. Bizzy itself, which has a 21-person team, was launched by ReachLocal…
ReachLocal has continued its efforts to add sticky usage for small businesses and diversify beyond reselling Google with the launch of “Bizzy” in New York, San Francisco and Dallas. Bizzy itself, which has a 21-person team, was launched by ReachLocal…
Thumbtack, one of the new breed of service lead companies such as Alikelist, Redbeacon and HelpHive seeking to push aside leaders like ServiceMagic and Angie’s List (and the Yellow Pages), announced today it has raised $1.2 million, and now has…
As my colleague Mike Boland has reported, OpenTable has opened its network a bit, allowing registered Yelp users to directly make reservations from Yelp -- whether they have registered with OpenTable or not. Users who have registered with both services…
As my colleague Mike Boland has reported, OpenTable has opened its network a bit, allowing registered Yelp users to directly make reservations from Yelp -- whether they have registered with OpenTable or not. Users who have registered with both services…
ReachLocal went public today, raising $54.6 million on the Nasdaq from the sale of 4.167 million shares at $13 each. The share price had been sharply cut from earlier hopes of $17 to $19 given pessimistic market conditions. But the…
MerchantCircle, which has established some expertise in launching markets on the cheap, says it is going international with new sites for Canada, the U.K. and Australia. It had previously announced that it is opening up its API to allow sites…
I recently attended a webinar hosted by SalesBlogcast that featured social media company BizBrag. My reason for attending was to learn how small and medium sized-businesses can take advantage of social media. Based on our Local Commerce Monitor research, 32…
ReachLocal says it is going ahead with its IPO. A new filing with the SEC noted that it will price 4.8 million shares between $17 and $19, allowing it to raise between $81.6 million and $91.2 million -- below the…
For the past year and a half, we have been answering questions about and consulting with our clients on sales transformation and consultative selling (see here, here and here). One of the key aspects of many of the questions we…
MerchantCircle’s Merchant Index tracks merchant confidence in the economy (low). But it also yields some unexpected “real world” insight into merchant awareness and use of their local online marketing options. The Index is based on 11,000+ e-mail respondents, so there…
