Groupon has moved closer to CEO Andrew Mason’s vision of being a “city guide” via “GrouponLive,” a new events source featuring various Live Nation events. “The Live Email,” featuring last minute discounts, is being sent out to Ticketmaster’s regular opt-in list. It is also available to users who go to the site. Live Nation says GrouponLive will be a “local resource for Live Nation events, ranging from concerts, sports, theater, arts and other live events.”

Synergies between city guides and events companies have been tried before. Citysearch and TicketMaster had been tied together several years ago under IAC, which had merged the two companies. TicketMaster sought to send event goers to nearby restaurants, bars, etc.

The new GrouponLive partnership could generate more traffic, building a better advertising base — Ticketmaster’s own email already sells advertising. It could also take advantage of Groupon’s transactional capabilities, moving Groupon more squarely against social event transactions companies such as Eventbrite.

Looking further out, it could also move Groupon into more of an events-listing direction, competing against companies such as Eventful, Zvents and others. For now, however, it only promises to showcase Live Nation events.

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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.

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National retailers are increasingly looking to get their local stores into local Web sites, directories and social and mobile sites. But they are confronting issues such as bad local store listing data, and the challenge of competing with locally owned stores for social and mobile media awareness, according to a morning panel hosted by Red Door Interactive at its San Diego headquarters.

Members of the panel included ESET VP Dan Clark; Universal Business Listings CEO Doyal Bryant; Citysearch National Sales Manager Michael Todd; and Placecast Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Montgomery.

For national retailers, “the biggest competitor is a locally owned shop,” notes Placecast’s Montgomery. “Digital Physical” efforts attached to consumer wallets are the way to go.

Because of that, the natural goal for chains like Target is to zero in on what makes the local Target outlet “My Target. Relevancy is tied to where you are,” says Montgomery. In fact, it is “not just where you are, but the time of day. It means something if it is 8:30 on a Saturday night.”

Montgomery suggests that retailers begin to go beyond “no brainer” Web site features such as store locators and product info and start digging in with video, mobile and SMS. “Mobile Web sites are obviously something you need to do in the future,” he says. But in conversations with more than 160 agencies and brands, Placecast has learned that the bug question is: “What do I do in mobile?”

“The objective is to learn as quickly as possible,” says Montgomery. “Don’t just look at clicks. They don’t capture a user’s emotional connections.”

Montgomery suggests that retailers start with short codes and keywords, which have a similar impact as more sophisticated bar codes and scanable coupons, even if they don’t  exactly provide “the same rich experience.” What retailers will find is that SMS is “incredibly affordable. You can build that asset right out of the gate,” he says. They’ll also see very high open rates in e-mail from smartphone users. The mobile open rate is 82 percent, and 69 percent open immediately.

The Panel at Red Door Interactive

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Citysearch has debuted “cityseries,” a new digital “best of” magazine for the iPad that allows users in key cities to quickly find “best” bars, shopping, spas, breakfast and other top categories.

The attractive online magazine, which will be promoted on other iPad sites, relies on Citysearch’s editorial staff and combines reviews with business profile information. Initial monthly editions have been launched in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

What’s especially unique is that Citysearch combs its coupons database and presents “popover” coupons that appear when the iPad is held horizontally, below the text. Users can either save the coupons to their photo albums or fling away the coupons with their fingers — iPad/iPhone/iPod touch style — before continuing. Currently, there are five on a page. There are no additional charges to advertisers for inclusion.

It isn’t really clear what users will do if they save the coupons. Show it to the merchant? Confirm discounts via word of mouth? E-mail it to themselves and print it out? But they do represent a unique touch screen advertising option we hadn’t seen before.

Note: This post has been updated to reflect Citysearch’s fix of the coupons.

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Citysearch announced today that it has shifted its ad model for small businesses, moving from the cost-per-click model that it pioneered several years ago to a new model that will drive consumers directly to their own Web sites. The new model provides advertisers with a complete range of SEO and marketing services across the CityGrid network of 100 Web and mobile partners.

The new services are being offered as “CityGrid Complete,” and will use Orange Soda as a partner. As part of the announcement, Citysearch also announced an investment in Orange Soda, which competes with the likes of ReachLocal, Yodle, WebVisible, Marchex and MatchCraft to resell search engine advertising and optimize content. Orange Soda currently works as a reseller for media companies such as Gannett and Freedom Interactive, and also works with franchise operations such as Remax and Jiffy Lube.

Neil Salvage, Citysearch executive vice president of sales and service, said the announcement is consistent with the enlargement of his own job description, which now includes product development on the merchant side. Salvage acknowledged that Citysearch has had a “not robust” search engine marketing platform, and has been searching for a better solution for 18 months.

“We talked with everybody,” Salvage said, and came to the conclusion that Orange Soda is a superior solution with a “robust back end oriented system.” Its SEO solutions “fit somewhere between ReachLocal and Yodle,” he added.

To Salvage, what’s really important about the announcement is that Citysearch is moving away from its complex cost-per-click sales model and toward a fixed-fee model that will boast a wide bundle of services. The move should allow Citysearch to increase its monthly yield from$600 to $800 per advertiser to more than $1,000, said Salvage. “That’s where we need to be.”

Cost-per-click overemphasizes the reseller factor and has become “old school,” added Salvage. “It was built to go after Yellow Pages, but wasn’t really appropriate because the Citysearch product set did not really support that. It was an entertainment site. Now we want to focus our time and energy on platforms and the process,” he says. “We are focused on signing up more publishers, not on owning the [SMB] relationship. ”

Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti is a keynote speaker at Marketplaces 2010, which is taking place March 22-24 in San Diego.

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Zvents, the events lister, is reporting 35 percent year over year growth with over eight million unique visitors, largely due to its powering events for 285 local media brands, including  major newspapers and the NBC owned-and-operated TV stations.

CEO Ethan Stock cites Quantcast data showing Zvents Media Network as the 250^th most used net on the Web, ahead of Citysearch (#267) and Local.com (#291). “We’re a very large local property by any measure,” he says.

The company, which has raised $32 million over its five year history, also claims it has been averaging 12,000 monthly event listers. These use the site to promote a wide range of local events and activities, including live music, performing arts, sporting events and community activities.

Of those listers, roughly 1200, or 10 percent, are now boosting their presence by taking out ads via self–serve – a percentage that Stock thinks will climb to 20 percent in 2010. The company also sells regional and national accounts via telemarketing and national sales, with top categories including major concert promoters, sports teams, casinos and  home and garden events.

High end shopping, with its sales-oriented events, such as Williams Sonoma cooking demonstrations, are also becoming more important to Zvents bottom line.  “There is a significant segment of consumers who perceive shopping as entertainment,” says Stock.

The key to the company’s future in local, however, is to stay away from the trap of focusing on directory-type advertising. Instead, Zvents will stay focused on events and shopping, he says, which have the most highly motivated advertisers. “They are also relatively concentrated in terms of the volume of advertising.”

Indeed, the company’s focus on events and advertising puts it most in competition with social sites such as Facebook and Google, rather than local sites such as Citysearch and Yelp, who may be more directory oriented, says Stock. Other events oriented companies include Eventful, and “new city guide” players such as Center’d and American Towns.

In hindsight, the company’s initial focus on teaming with newspapers “look like a very smart choice,” adds Stock. While newspapers are commonly disparaged in today’s climate for their declining circulation and advertising, “they have high repeat traffic. Much more than national partners.” Top Zvents newspaper partners include SFGate, the Denver Post, Seattle PI, Boston.com, the Dallas Morning News, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Daily News, and the Orange County Register.

Stock also sees a major boost coming from renewed efforts in local from national partners such as AT&T’s Yellowpages.com, which has been an investor in the company ; and from MSN, where Zvents listings will be showing up in Bing, and trigger Instant Answers via Silverlight search.

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Citysearch officially rolled out its CityGrid publisher network this week. The network moves Citysearch away from an exclusive focus on its individual sites (“Citysearch.com,” “Insiderpages.com,” “Urbanspoon”). Instead, it works on a distributed basis with partners (i.e., “SuperPages”) to marry local content and advertising.

In the short term, CityGrid represents the new face of Citysearch and the next evolution in the local market. It allows the company to leverage its existing infrastructure and content, and reach down into the distribution channel with a more automated and cost-effective option versus a focused business development effort. For its publisher network, and its 500,000 local advertisers — projected to jump to 750,000 by year-end — it also represents a real alternative to Google.

Overall, our enthusiasm for the product is as high as it was when we were first walked through it some 14 months ago. Here’s why we like it. The local market fundamentally suffers from two broad problems. First, it’s hard to make money without a substantial investment in sales. Even then, success is not assured. Second, content is expensive to create. Yes, user reviews can be acquired, but there are still large swaths of categories that still lack deep engaging content.

In theory, CityGrid addresses both problems. It gives small and large developers local content and local monetization together in package. The power of this cannot really be underestimated since both of these are hard to come by, not to mention expensive. Urbanspoon used this to great success and eventually was acquired by IAC (Citysearch’s parent). Nearly every review and ad on Urbanspoon was from Citysearch.

We have seen some reports that this product is a reaction to other companies in the field entering the space. It’s not. If anything, it simply takes the winning strategy of opening up an API to developers and letting them build products on robust infrastructure. Think Google Maps, for example.

To our knowledge, there is no one else doing this model with the same scale and focus. Indeed, 100 developers signed up to work with the API within the first two days of its release. We expect, however, that more people will enter this market quickly. But not before Citysearch gets a major head start, if Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti gets his way.

“My vision is [that it will become] the leading content and ad network for local,” he told us, adding that it is no longer just about Citysearch.com as a destination site. “This is Citysearch,” he says. “It isn’t distributed in one place. It is part of many places, all around the Web.”

The result also provides an alternative to Google. “We look at what Google is doing with local as a major competitive threat,” says Herratti. “It controls access to the Internet.

“Last year, we were building and rebuilding,” Herratti notes. “This year, we are very, very focused on execution.” Still, the current product is relatively primitive and will be rapidly evolving. “Right now, we are talking about version 1.0” he says. “Twelve months from now, there will be new geotargeting solutions, new ways of creating content. We’re taking all of these pieces and putting them together. The next thing is to optimize, and optimize.”

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