Big Data is becoming democratized. That was an underlying theme at our SMB Digital Marketing conference. We discussed this in an on-site analyst roundtable posted last month.

To continue that discussion, we put together a highlight reel of conference Keynoters and their biggest conference takeaways when we were able to tackle them back stage.

“Increasingly, data [for] large advertisers are available to SMBs,” said Acxiom CEO Scott Howe. “Those that embrace it are going to be running all kinds of targeted advertising with much better results.”

See the rest embedded below.

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Fifty plus industry leaders will grace the stage at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. We’re looking forward to a great show. Want to do some research before the event? Here’s some recent BIA/Kelsey blog coverage of the featured speakers (Click on the hyperlinks).

Acxiom: Scott Howe, CEO (Keynote, Day 2)

Alignable: Eric Groves, CEO (Future Stars, Day 2)

Booker: Josh McCarter, CEO (Scheduling ,Day 2)

Facebook: Joe DeVoy, Product Manager, Local Ads, Facebook (Social Media Shift, Day 2)

First Data/Perka: Mike Lazarro, Head of Planning (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

ForwardLine: Craig Coleman, CEO (Cultivating SMB Success, Day 2)

Groupon: Dan Roarty, VP, Product Development (Keynote, Day 2)

Local Media Association: Nancy Lane, President (Local Media Heavy Hitters, Day 3)

Radius: Megan Austin Karlen, VP (Smart Data, Day 2)

ReachLocal: Sharon Rowlands,CEO, (Keynote, Day 2)

SignPost: Stu Wall, CEO (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

Verve: Tom Kenney, President (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

Wanderful Media: Doug Kilponen, COO (SMB Retail, Day 2)

Yelp: Darnell Holloway, Sr. Mgr., Community Outreach (SMBs On Stage with Yelp, Day 1); Peter Curzon, Business Development ( Brass Tracks Mobile, Day 2)

YP: Jeff Federman, SVP, Digital (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

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Consumer data giant Acxiom is moving downstream with a self-serve leads products tailored to SMBs. The new SMB product, “MyAcxiomPartner,” allows SMBs to develop customer lists on a hyperlocal basis, using either addresses or polygon mapping.

The effort is part of Acxiom’s “Audience Operating System,” a consumer data campaign management tool that has been developed at a cost estimated at tens of millions of dollars. The AOS is part of a vision by CEO Scott Howe to enable Acxiom’s data to be easily and readily available to all kinds of marketers across many channels. Howe’s mantra is to use Big Data to enable more precise marketing.

Using MyAcxiomPartner, lists can also be developed based on several other criteria, including behavioral and demographic elements and over 4,000 scored models (i.e. marketing propensities such as “Mid size SUV” or “Brand Name) Apparel.”) Costs begin at $100 or $200, based on criteria involved.

In a briefing with BIA/Kelsey, VP of Global Partner Development Jeff Standridge notes that Acxiom is targeting SMB owners for MyAcxiomPartner that have annual revenues ranging anywhere from “a few hundred thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars.”

“We’re putting audience selection in the hands of SMB owners that don’t have campaign experience,” says Standridge. “We enable smart media purchases; for target audiences to be identified; and for SMBs to plan and execute media.”

A limousine company, for instance, can develop a list targeting several hundred likely customers for a self-serve mobile banner campaign. In this specific example, Acxiom has teamed up with 4Info for the mobile ad component, which also enables customers to upload their own graphics and deployments.

Acxiom CEO Scott Howe is keynoting BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing event in New Orleans Sept. 22-24. You can register here.

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On the heels of last year’s LEADING IN LOCAL: SMB Digital Marketing show in Austin, we’ve just announced our agenda for this year’s big event in “The Big Easy”: New Orleans.

Our initial slate of Keynotes include:

Acxiom CEO Scott Howe;
ReachLocal CEO Sharon Rowlands
Google’s SMB Revenue director Steve Espinosa
Facebook’s Leader of SMB/Product Insights Joe Devoy

Additional Featured Speakers:

Sprint’s Karen Noel, GM, Small Business
Groupon’s Dan Roarty, VP of Product Marketing

Also at the event: Search marketing leader Kevin Ryan. Ryan will be debuting his new business best seller, “Taking Down Goliath: The Digital Marketing Strategy Guide for beating competitors with 100 times your spending power.”

More great speakers (We’ll end up with 40 or more):

Yelp’s Darnell Holloway, Sr. Manager, Local Business Outreach
NOLA Media Group’s Ricky Mathews, President
Morris Communications’ Steve Gray, Director of Strategy and Innovation
The Houston Chronicle’s Warren Kay, CRO
ForwardLine’s Craig Coleman, CEO
Search Influence’s Will Scott, CEO
BizHive’s Kim Feil, CEO
Wanderful Media’s Doug Kilponen, COO
Perka’s Rob Bethage, Co-Founder and VP
Booker’s Josh McCarter, CEO
Agendize’s Alf Poor, President

Will we see you down in New Orleans? Check out the full agenda here. And please register here.

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The conference will kick off on Tuesday, Sept. 14, with a keynote address from Yext CEO Howard Lerman. Yext launched Yext Rep in May and announced a co-branded deal to offer its solution toSuperMedia advertisers in June. Lerman will likely discuss Yext Rep as well as his overall vision for how leads are driven to SMBs in the near future.

Mid-afternoon Tuesday, we’ll have a panel dedicated to the topic of reputation management with representatives from three leading reputation management players on hand: Moon Valley Software, Solfo/YellowBot.com and VendAsta. They’ll enter a discussion with BIA/Kelsey moderator Matt Booth, who will pepper them with questions about how they convince media players (i.e., directory publishers) that they need to provide their SMB advertisers with a tool to monitor, respond to and/or update their presence, reviews and performance online.

Brendan King of VendAsta will talk about its StepRep product, which has been around since 2008 and features some cool social graph tools. Emad Fanous will talk about YellowBot’s success with its Weblocal.ca rollout that occurred in March. One of the newer kids on the block is Moon Valley Software’s MyRepMan product that officially debuted in May. Pete Ryan will be on stage to talk about how MyRepMan, which MoonValley co-markets with partner Acxiom, adds functionality such as a scoring tool and syndication model (on top of basic monitoring of reviews, blogs, listings data and the like) to help track SMBs’ progress online.

These very short presentations will lead to a discussion where the tough questions about reputation management will be put to the panelists. If you’re looking for a better understanding of what rep management is, and whether it’s a genuine opportunity for companies selling marketing services to SMBs, make sure you make this 3:45 p.m. panel on Tuesday, Sept. 14.

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Merchant data sent in by fans of merchants and from merchants themselves is becoming increasingly important. Can it be relied on as a main source, or should it only complement listing data from the big three providers — InfoGroup, Acxiom and Localeze?

We talked to Pankaj Mathur, InfoGroup vice president of business development, about it. Not surprisingly, he has mixed feelings. It is certainly useful and cost effective, and from an SEM perspective, there is sometimes the feeling that “more [data elements] is better,” he says.

But he warns that accuracy and reliability are more important than ever before, especially with mobile phones that can send people to bad locations. Also looming is the sense that merchants are incentivized to misrepresent themselves so that they can boost their search rankings or be found under lucrative-but-wrong categories (i.e., cab companies under “airports”).

InfoGroup (and probably the other leaders in the space) instead take the “trust but verify” approach to merchant data. The company receives 10,000 to 15,000 submissions per month from multiple partners such as OnStar, Yahoo and AOL. “We find that about 50 percent of these submissions are false positive like duplicates or incorrect information, “says Mathur.

In a newly issued article, Mathur goes into more detail about the importance of the duplicates issue. In franchise corporations, for instance, there may be lists of storefronts within marketing departments, operations departments and accounting deparrtments. They don’t always overlap with LBS (location-based services) requests, he notes.

Moreover, retailers often neglect to delete or change storefront information — something that creates a special mess when companies such as Starbucks close hundreds of units throughout the country. Mathur suggests one-step updaters (such as his company’s “Express Update”) are a partial answer. In the meantime, the validated information from the leading listing providers remains in the driver’s seat.

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