IAC announced today that SeamlessWeb founder Jason Finger will take over as CEO of its CityGrid Media unit April 12. CityGrid Media includes the CityGrid ad network and Citysearch, Urbanspoon, Insider Pages and BuzzLabs.

Finger was a founder of SeamlessWeb in 1999. The company grew to 21 U.S. cities plus London during his tenure. SeamlessWeb, now known as Seamless, was acquired by food services giant Aramark in 2006, with Finger leading the business while serving on Aramark’s executive leadership council.

He’s served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Bessemer Venture Partners since 2010, focusing on SaaS, local businesses and e-commerce. Seamless currently competes for food delivery and restaurant online services with GrubHub and others.

CityGrid Media’s longtime CEO, Jay Herratti, told us he will be helping during the transition. During his eight-year tenure at the company, he proved to be a pivotal figure in the evolution of interactive local media. In addition to acquiring Urbanspoon, which should leverage Finger’s experience at Seamless, Herratti dealt head-on with building enough local user volume to attract merchants — a serious issue in the fragmented local world.

Next week, at ILM East in Boston, Herratti will provide insights into the evolution of local during his tenure at CityGrid. “Wrapping up my time at CityGrid Media with a BIA/Kelsey keynote seems like the perfect opportunity to reflect on the future of local,” he told us.

“During my session, I will share my thoughts on where local is heading,” added Herratti. “There is so much activity in our space right now; the next year should be just as interesting as the last.”

The post CityGrid Media Announces Jason Finger as New CEO appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BuzzLabs, a 16-month-old company that we first covered in February, has been charging $15 a month for the self-serve, PDF reports. The reports grade all mentions from blogs, review sites, Twitter and Foursquare Tips on a sentiment scale of one to five stars, and charts the aggregated sentiment analysis on a month-by-month basis.

In addition to the self-serve reports, BuzzLabs had been providing more customized reporting to large customers, such as restaurant chains. It is unclear whether it will continue supporting that business.

CityGrid Media CEO Jay Herratti says that the company appealed to CityGrid because it proved to be “very good at crawling both the mobile and social Web, aggregating information, and appending it to the right business. It shows how [the business] looks online.”

Herratti concedes there hasn’t been vocal demand for such information from customers — despite the initial excitement about reputation management 16 months ago or so — but he thinks it will prove to be very desirable and help CityGrid be seen as a one-stop shop. “Publishers can show this to their advertiser to prove results,” he says.

BuzzLabs, which is headed by Philip Lee, who had previously been with Microsoft Advertising, will keep its Seattle headquarters. Herratti says the company will likely add staff, and will also be integrated into CityGrid’s technology team. He anticipates it will take three to six months for CityGrid to fully integrate the company. Urbanspoon, another CityGrid property, is also based in Seattle.

The post CityGrid Media Will Provide Free Rep Management Profiles; Acquires BuzzLabs appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

CityGrid Media has released a study it conducted via research firm Harris Interactive that suggests people are more likely to “like” a local business than write a review as a way of expressing their approval of the service they received. However, good old-fashioned word of mouth (the analogue kind) still reigns supreme, with 75 percent indicating they would tell a friend as a way to support a local business.

“Surprisingly enough, Likes are trumping reviews when it comes to sharing feedback, but this does not translate to Facebook being the first and only place consumers turn when deciding to try someplace new,” says Kara Nortman, SVP Publishing at CityGrid, in the announcement of the research findings. “What this means for small-businesses on the web is that they should encourage likes, but also round our their marketing efforts to reach consumers across a variety of touchpoints.”

The study also supports the notion that consumers are consulting a growing number of sources before making a purchase decision. The CityGrid study found that 52 percent of consumers consulting more than two websites in the course of making a decision regarding a local business.

It’s really not that surprising that likes are more common than reviews. After all, reviews take work, “liking” something literally takes a second. What is interesting is the degree to which social media behaviors like “liking” have penetrating the daily habits of consumers as it relates to the small and local businesses they patronize.

The telephone survey of more than 1,000 consumers found that overall 20 percent of consumers “like” businesses to indicate support, compared with 13 percent who write reviews for the same purpose. The numbers vary considerably by age demographic, with 49 percent of those ages 18 to 24 liking businesses, compared with 40 percent of those under 35.

We were curious why CityGrid, a company with a rich database of consumer reviews, would tout data that showed the greater prevalence of “likes.” The study does make more sense in light of CityGrid’s acquisition of BuzzLabs, announced yesterday.

The post CityGrid Study Suggests Liking Trumps Reviewing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Citysearch is getting into the deals space, offering a mix of curated daily deals, coupons and other offers from providers such as Groupon, The Dealmap, Restaurant.com as well as from its own base of thousands of advertisers. CityGrid advertisers may also participate.

The service, similar to The Dealmap and 8coupons, is mobile-oriented. It is launching with iPhone and Android versions. It will also be available on the Web, leveraging Citysearch’s 15 million monthly unique visitors.

“Deals by Citysearch” de-emphasizes the Citysearch brand, which is in small type. The idea is to avoid confusion with the core brand and its city guide and review offerings, says JP Bedoya, senior director, product, Citysearch. He notes that the service has been in development for several months and is built on top of the CityGrid API, which is soon receiving a major upgrade.

Users can personalize the menu for up to 15 favorite categories, and also set deals by proximity. Deals can be printed from the website, shown to merchants on phones, or printed out from iPhones using AirPrint — something that Bedoya says is much improved in its upcoming release.

Deals and offers from other providers are initially emphasized, with Citysearch receiving a piece of a piece of any action. But Bedoya anticipates that Citysearch will do very well when it begins to add offers to its ad offerings. Homegrown advertisers can simply add the deals and offers to other advertising that they typically buy from the company on a flat fee, cost-per-click basis. “We are making it very simple, “ says Bedoya. He emphasizes that the company is putting deal quality above immediate revenue concerns.

CItysearch’s JP Bedoya is being featured on the SuperForum on Deals and Offers at ILM East, which takes place in Boston March 21-23.

The post ‘Deals by Citysearch’ Launches appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BuzzLabs, a Seattle-based rep management service initially funded by CityGrid Media, has rolled out a new self-serve tier for SMBs. CEO Phillip Lee told us that the year-old, six-person company has been mainly working with large restaurant chains. But it saw an opportunity to provide a simple off-the-shelf product for SMBs, which is being priced for $15 a month.

The service, dubbed Findmybuzz.com, provides a full PDF report and online access to a dashboard for any business that has a physical address and a ZIP code. It grades all mentions from blogs, review sites, Twitter and Foursquare; tips on a sentiment scale of one to five stars; and charts the aggregated sentiment analysis on a month-by-month basis.

The post BuzzLabs Launches Self-Serve Rep Management appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Rating and review sites for things like dining, nail salons and events (i.e., Yelp) are inevitably going to battle it out with Google. CityGrid Media’s Insider Pages wants to go in a different direction.

Since last year, the site has steered most of its energies into building up a health specialty, with deep ratings and reviews and other aggregated information. Along the way, it has learned that the value of health-related advertising (i.e., pharmaceuticals) grows astronomically as it gets more specialized and targeted. Now, the San Francisco-based site is prepared to launch up to 30 unique URLs for specialized health communities, starting in a few months.

GM Eric Peacock said it looked like a fairly dim future for review sites like his in 2009, as Google “got more and more aggressive in the local space.” Traffic was flat that year. But “we’ve been clawing back a generation of new content, more reviews” from Insider Pages, Citysearch and other sources, and a new focus on health and medical in general, he says. The emphasis on health is something that is also being pursued by Angie’s List, Avvo and others.

Early last year, Insider Pages launched Doctor Finder as a partnership with HealthGrades.com, which provides detailed provider information. The result has been growth in page views from 14 million last January to 18 million page views in December.

“We’ve scratched an itch with local search around health,” says Peacock. “It is information that is hard to find and not always available.” With virtually no marketing, Doctor Finder has especially engaged people, he says.

Instead of going to Google and leaving with a single phone number, Doctor Finder users study profiles and other information for anywhere from five to 10 doctors, averaging 12 pages per visit. “The potential is to get very, very targeted,” says Peacock. Top categories include pediatricians, OB/GYN, family practice and dentists. Meanwhile, top specialty searches include allergists and cardiologists.

For Insider Pages, the next step is to “take this and go more vertical” by zeroing in on specific medical conditions and diseases. Members of these communities will all go through the classic stages of grief, shock and acceptance. But at the same time, they won’t just be getting a doctor; they’ll be assembling a whole team of providers to help them recover and cope. Eight-five percent of the information types will work with multiple diseases, says Peacock.

The post CityGrid’s Insider Pages Refocuses on Health as a Vertical appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

CityGrid Media (formerly Citysearch) will extend its paid base of 800,000 advertisers across thousands of neighborhood news pages, courtesy of a display advertising deal with Outside.in. The two companies have been quietly conducting pilot tests of custom ads in “a couple” of markets, leading to the wider rollout.

Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson tells us that the tests have shown “strong relevancy, and high clickthrough rates and CPM rates.” Josephson says that CityGrid’s “high-quality inventory” fits perfectly with Outside.in’s efforts to populate its pages. “We’re not building a local sales force,” he emphasizes.

The CityGrid deal also complements a separate Outside.in initiative to bundle similarly themed local Web sites (i.e., foodie sites) to provide scale for national advertisers. That effort is just beginning to roll.

Josephson adds that the CityGrid deal was negotiated by Rob Delacruz, Outside.in’s new chief revenue officer. Delacruz was previously Microsoft’s head of business development for local, mobile and search.

Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson is appearing on “The New Local News” session at ILM:10 along with Warren Webster of Patch.com, Satbir Khanuja of DataSphere and Darian Shirazi of Fwix.

The post CityGrid Extends Hyperlocal Reach via Outside.in appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In its latest evolutionary step away from a destination site (Citysearch) and into a full-service advertising network, CityGrid Media is debuting its private-label reseller program to give sales teams another touch point with local businesses by allowing them to sell CityGrid’s advertising products directly.

The program gives sellers a content-centric offering — Citysearch’s business profile page template, which can be appended with rich video, maps, reviews and other amenities — to sell to local merchants that will then be distributed across CityGrid’s extensive publisher network of Web and mobile sites, now more than 250 strong.

The private label “enables publishers with entry level or no online solution to get very active in the space very quickly,” CityGrid EVP of Advertising Neil Salvage told BIA/Kelsey at DMS ’10.

User-Friendly Media is the first partner to adopt the white-label platform and is already building out advertising content for more than 1,000 campaigns. “The combination of our sales force with CityGrid’s ad products and distribution is helping us drive more high quality leads for our advertisers,” User-Friendly Media CEO Bruce Howard said in a statement.

CityGrid backs its private label with a suite of sales tools for partners to facilitate campaign enrollment and creation, as well as a branded merchant dashboard replete with analytics and display results for individual campaigns.

“The idea was born out of making it very easy for partners to have orders fulfilled,” Salvage said. “We open up the whole system, skin it with their brand, then provide the full merchant dashboard in real time skinned to that partner’s brand.”

CityGrid already counts SuperPages.com, YP.com and Dex One among the online publishers that funnel business listings and local advertisers through its ad engine for targeted placement on publisher sites across its network. Rich ad content coupled with targeted placement is an integral part of CityGrid’s goal to move fully to a pay-per-performance model. Its larger mission is to connect publishers, advertisers and consumers — all at scale.

Ideally, the reseller program enlists new merchants in the ad engine, which then replenishes the advertisers available to consumers through the publisher network. It is all part of a virtuous cycle that CityGrid hopes can achieve the reach and scale necessary to provide a legitimate, centralized alternative to Google.

The post CityGrid Serves Up Private-Label Reseller Program appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

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 will automatically get the benefits that OpenTable provides (i.e., dining credits). But they don’t have to.

The immediacy of linking Yelp’s reviews with reservations should prime the pump for OpenTable, and get more customers to ultimately register. Among OpenTable’s 11,000 restaurant customers in North America, there probably isn’t a single one without a Yelp review. OpenTable also says it won’t water down the comprehensive customer info that OpenTable has on every registered diner (i.e., missed meals, preferences, etc.). It will simply keep files on customers that come in with Yelp IDs.

OpenTable, in general, is aggressively moving to bring more diners and restaurants into its system. Another move the company recently made was the launch of OpenTable Connect, a Web-based reservation system that restaurants can use in lieu of the core OpenTable system. OpenTable Connect, which is aimed at mid-priced restaurants, such as bistros and sushi houses, costs $49 a month, and $2.50 per diner. More than 82 restaurants are currently signed on.

OpenTable’s moves come as it deals with more competition. CityGrid Media’s Urbanspoon, for instance, has launched two complementary reservation products that undermine OpenTable’s fees — and open new fronts in the battles of Yelp vs. Citysearch and now OpenTable vs. Urbanspoon/CityGrid Media.

The first of Urbanspoon’s new products is Urbanspoon Rez, an online reservations system that is now in 170 restaurants in Los Angeles and Seattle and ready for national rollout. The second is Urbanspoon RezBook, an iPad-based system that directly mirrors OpenTable’s proprietary Electronic Reservations Book computer. RezBook is now in pilot mode in five restaurants. A new report on Urbanspoon’s strategy is being released today for clients of BIA/Kelsey’s Marketplaces program.

The post Implications of Yelp's Deal With OpenTable appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

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 will automatically get the benefits that OpenTable provides (i.e., dining credits). But they don’t have to.

The immediacy of linking Yelp’s reviews with reservations should prime the pump for OpenTable, and get more customers to ultimately register. Among OpenTable’s 11,000 restaurant customers in North America, there probably isn’t a single one without a Yelp review. OpenTable also says it won’t water down the comprehensive customer info that OpenTable has on every registered diner (i.e., missed meals, preferences, etc.). It will simply keep files on customers that come in with Yelp IDs.

OpenTable, in general, is aggressively moving to bring more diners and restaurants into its system. Another move the company recently made was the launch of OpenTable Connect, a Web-based reservation system that restaurants can use in lieu of the core OpenTable system. OpenTable Connect, which is aimed at mid-priced restaurants, such as bistros and sushi houses, costs $49 a month, and $2.50 per diner. More than 82 restaurants are currently signed on.

OpenTable’s moves come as it deals with more competition. CityGrid Media’s Urbanspoon, for instance, has launched two complementary reservation products that undermine OpenTable’s fees — and open new fronts in the battles of Yelp vs. Citysearch and now OpenTable vs. Urbanspoon/CityGrid Media.

The first of Urbanspoon’s new products is Urbanspoon Rez, an online reservations system that is now in 170 restaurants in Los Angeles and Seattle and ready for national rollout. The second is Urbanspoon RezBook, an iPad-based system that directly mirrors OpenTable’s proprietary Electronic Reservations Book computer. RezBook is now in pilot mode in five restaurants. A new report on Urbanspoon’s strategy is being released today for clients of BIA/Kelsey’s Marketplaces program.

The post Implications of Yelp’s Deal With OpenTable appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.