But there’s still a gap: most SMBs’ email marketing tactics are fairly basic. They typically send the same promotions to everyone on their list. Or, if they segment the audience, it’s a very basic segmentation. This unrefined approach is sometimes called “batch and blast”, or “spray and pray.”

At a workshop at last week’s ad:tech San Francisco, several speakers discussed how email sophistication is evolving quickly. Although much of the discussion focused on brand advertisers, the lessons are just as useful to SMBs. This is especially true for SMBs using an agency or third party service provider.

Here are the top takeaways from the workshop:

— There’s a “unique customer journey” for each customer. Try to understand what that is: understand how each customer got to the website (or other online property). The journey will say a lot about that customer’s interests and motivations.

— The advertiser needs to speak to each customer individually, with a tailored message. This is especially true for the best customers, or power users.

— Typically, over 50 percent of the audience for a given marketing email is seeing it on a mobile device. This favors simple, bold visuals, short lead-ins, and buttons big enough for fingers (40 pixel diameter, minimum).

— Social media and email should be used together, in a complementary way. Advertisers should try to use one to leverage the other — which also means advertisers need to have the capability to associate a customer’s activity on social media with email they receive from the SMB.

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Mentions, reviews, blog comments, tweets, posts and now check-ins. It’s enough digital noise to lead local business owners to throw their hands up in despair. As Internet fragmentation accelerates, a host of reputation management providers have carved out an important foothold in the digital landscape by aggregating merchants’ online activity through a single dashboard that subsequently allows for sentiment analysis, syndicated messaging and competitive benchmarking.

Like so many parts of the digital ecosystem, however, reputation management is quickly becoming commoditized, which can actually make the SMB’s decision process about brand marketing and protection more complicated. That result runs counter to the very problem that reputation management aspires to resolve.

In our first Social Local Media industry report, Andrew Shotland and I examine the current state of reputation management and project how the industry must evolve to create a more holistic, simplistic and measurable solution. All the leading vendors are profiled, with the report comparing and contrasting them across 10 foundational criteria and distilling their differentiating features, as well as highlighting their business model challenges. We also explore opportunities and considerations for resellers that may be thinking of branding a solution for their own clients.

As BIA/Kelsey has touted for years, there is robust opportunity in ERPM. Our forecast, in fact, pegs local spend in this segment to eclipse $5 billion by 2015. For this growth to be realized, and for these tools to truly capture the needs of the enterprises they serve, there is a pressing need for differentiation through an elegant interface that consolidates the fragmented Web into an easily managed system.

“Single click publishing,” improved social messaging, scheduling functionality, mobile features and automated loyalty tools are all essential elements of the holistic communication platform that will win the future.

Social Local Media subscribers can access the full report here.

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SMBs are missing opportunities for lead generation across major search engines, national and local directories, and vertical channels.  But what if SMBs could receive “visibility reports” that show where their geographic and category gaps are?  That’s the concept behind Palore’s AmIVisible, which launched in December 2009. 

Palore CEO Hanan Lifshitz recently updated us on the growth of AmIVisible, which is currently beta testing in several geographic areas and totals more than 7 million business reports. To date, he says that more than 250,000 SMBs have interacted with their visibility report.

The user interface is straightforward. A business inserts its phone number, and AmIVisible’s algorithm produces the custom visibility report that tabulates “relevance” in three primary areas: listings (Web sites), keywords (categories) and competitor visibility. The screenshots below show this information assembled for a California chiropractor.

Lifshitz emphasizes that AmIVisible’s highest utility lies in its comparative analysis. The platform not only charts an SMB’s presence, but also spotlights its absence in direct comparison with chief competitors. It then turns SMB prospects over to SEM and SEO partners to build out online campaign strategies.

Lifshitz also says that AmIVisible is distinguished by its vigorous presence management goals. Not all e-mail reputation presence management firms are created equal or focus on the same tools. Some are reputation-centered, enabling businesses to monitor consumer sentiment and respond to queries and concerns. Others are hybrids. In the chicken-or-the-egg game of whether presence or rep management supersedes the other, his stance is clear — “you must be found first. Presence precedes reputation.” 

The Palore founder adds that AmIVisible is “looking at all pay models moving forward.” These could include more highly customized reports and further referral-driven partnerships.  

It also plans to release an updated version of the service next month that organizes listings under three distinct headings: vertical sites, geographical sites, and broader directories and engines. Right now, the listings, keywords and competitor dashboards lump all findings into aggregated lists. But first, AmIVisible hopes to achieve national service by year’s end before coming out of beta.

Is AmIVisible on to something? BIA/Kelsey forecasts that local ERPM ad spend will jump to $3.5 billion by 2014. As such, it is an increasingly competitive space, with Marchex, Yellowbot, Vendasta, Yext Rep and others offering ERPM services.

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