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)

The post Useful Research for New Orleans: Recent Blog Coverage, SMB Digital Marketing Speakers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

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.

The post Just Out: Hot Agenda For LIL: SMB Digital Marketing (Sept. 22-24, New Orleans) appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Scheduling/booking is coming into its own as a key feature for SMBs, as more and more businesses tie their marketing and promotions to open slots in their schedule.

Key companies in the space include Full Slate (recently acquired by Intuit,) ReachLocal’s ReachCommerce, Groupon Scheduler, Agendize, Moon Valley Software, GenBook, Schedulicity, Maxipage and Hakema (in Europe). Another company, MyTime, was founded by RedBeacon founder Ethan Anderson and is an aggregator of scheduled appointments.

Another major player in the space is Booker, which has raised $42 Million. While focused on the beauty, health and wellness space, it also works with a wide range of national-local players.

Booker announced today a mobile app partnership with Como (formerly Conduit Mobile) to take scheduling beyond the desktop. The app takes less than 15 seconds for SMBs to create.

Mobile apps make a lot of sense in this context. A customer might make 12 appointments per year for cut and color treatments at a salon. For such a customer, a dedicated App — perhaps tied to a loyalty program — coule be especially useful. The same may not always be true for “discovery” segments such as restaurants and retail, which may be better aggregated in directories such as Yelp, Google, OpenTable or YP. Customers may also prefer booking an appointment directly with the SMB, rather than going through a directory site — or at least, this is what Booker is banking on.

Booker CEO Josh McCarter is a featured speaker at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing, which takes place Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. You may register here.

The post Booker Launches Mobile Apps for SMBs appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.