The end of the year usually means a few things to us: the holidays; our annual predictions; and Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media, the industry’s flagship event.

This year’s event is especially hot — a 2 1/2 day extravaganza taking place Dec. 3-5 in San Francisco. More than 50 speakers have been recruited by the analyst team, and we’ve added some great extra-curricular activities, including a Tech Expo with top companies showing off their wares “Before The Bell” on Day 1; a Women’s Leading in Local networking event on day 2; and an International Roundtable.

Here’s our newest news: BIA/Kelsey Analyst Emeritus Matt Booth (currently CEO, Connectivity) is coming back to moderate one of two Executive Sessions with Google leaders. We’ll kick off with Managing Director of Global Channel Sales Todd Rowe, than go deep in conversations with Head of premier SMB partnerships Christine Merritt; Adwords Express Product Manager Francisco Uribe; Google My Business Senior Product Manager James Croom; and Global Business Leader for Google Shopping Max Frause.

We also have feature presentations set by YP CMO Allison Checchi; Deseret Digital Media CEO Clark Gilbert and President Chris Lee; Yodle CEO Court Cunningham; Pinterest Head of Partnerships Joel Meek; and Salesforce VP Randy Wootton.

We are also set with a great discussion between me and Business Book of the Year Winner Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. And then there are the feature presentations by First Data SVP Krish Mantripragada; InfoGroup CDO Matt Graves; and Go Daddy SVP Raj Mukherjee. And we’ve also got a great, seven company Superforum dedicated to local’s most important issue: “Make the Phone Ring.”

There’s so much more. Check out the Full agenda. Register here.

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SMBs are increasingly incorporating data analytics into their marketing efforts and not surprisingly, data vendors and service providers are working to entrench themselves with SMB digital marketing channels, as several industry leaders noted at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing in New Orleans Sept. 23.

For SMBs, “it is not about size, it is about sophistication,” noted InfoGroup CDO Matt Graves. “Sophistication is what matters in how SMBs target,” and may translate into such channels as multichannel buys and geo-targeting.

But SMBs are not easy to work with. “SMBs are our hardest customers,” says Graves. “They are not as forgiving as our larger customers. They want us to come up with a plan to help them be successful.”

Speaking on the same session, Radius VP Megan Austin Karlen cautioned that data cannot be treated as one homogenous category — it is a living organism with new inputs all the time. There is data at rest (volume); data in motion (velocity); data in many forms (variety); and data in doubt (veracity). You cannot settle on traditional firmographic segmentation, she noted. Data also needs to be paired with software that enables merchants to access, analyze and integrate data in a simple and effective way.”

Radius itself made news at the conference, announcing a Series C raise of $54.7 Million.

The post At Leading in Local: ‘Big Data and SMB Sophistication’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

SMBs are increasingly incorporating data analytics into their marketing efforts and not surprisingly, data vendors and service providers are working to entrench themselves with SMB digital marketing channels, as several industry leaders noted at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing in New Orleans Sept. 23.

For SMBs, “it is not about size, it is about sophistication,” noted InfoGroup CDO Matt Graves. “Sophistication is what matters in how SMBs target,” and may translate into such channels as multichannel buys and geo-targeting.

But SMBs are not easy to work with. “SMBs are our hardest customers,” says Graves. “They are not as forgiving as our larger customers. They want us to come up with a plan to help them be successful.”

Speaking on the same session, Radius VP Megan Austin Karlen cautioned that data cannot be treated as one homogenous category — it is a living organism with new inputs all the time. There is data at rest (volume); data in motion (velocity); data in many forms (variety); and data in doubt (veracity). You cannot settle on traditional firmographic segmentation, she noted. Data also needs to be paired with software that enables merchants to access, analyze and integrate data in a simple and effective way.”

Radius itself made news at the conference, announcing a Series C raise of $54.7 Million.

The post At Leading in Local: 'Big Data and SMB Sophistication' appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Infogroup, a database marketing company, has acquired GoTime, a data management platform company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The entire GoTime staff will join Infogroup and relocate to a new Manhattan office. We spoke with Chief Data Officer Christian Ward to get more insights into the Data Axle platform. In an effort to fulfill its goal of bringing real-time data to its clients, Ward said that Infogroup analyzed GoTime’s platform extensively. Ward was impressed by its modern, open-sourced platform.

“To build an app, you need quality location data,” Ward said. The Data Axle platform is designed to connect different data sets that are needed to build a custom application. The modern platform will take real-time data from the source to client. This gives clients the ability to see every change in their data through time, determine what is driving engagement and use that data to build their business. Integration of Infogroup’s business data, including local content into GoTime’s platform, is under way.

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Facebook has become an important marketing channel to SMBs, according to InfoGroup’s quarterly Small Business Marketing Outlook. Twenty percent of those surveyed said Facebook was extremely/very important, and 24 percent said it was somewhat important.

Twitter is important, too. Twenty-four percent said Twitter was either somewhat or very important. Local coupon sites were also cited by 26 percent as somewhat or very important.

In general, 31 percent expect to boost their budgets over the next 12 months. Fifty-seven percent expect their marketing budgets to remain flat. Ten percent expect a dip in their marketing budgets. Sixty percent also said that their website was the most important marketing technique, while 50 percent said email marketing was important.

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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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A couple of stories caught my attention today. First, Reach Media Group (RMG), a digital out-of-home company that we’ve previously written about, signed a deal to push New York Times content to its network of 800 coffee shops, cafes and eateries in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco.

According to the press release, RMG’s digital place-based network (formerly known as “Danoo”) has been entirely re-envisioned to emulate the familiar, trusted design of NYTimes.com. We think this move will add considerable credibility to the fledgling network. It can offer a more compelling content experience (assuming you find the NYTimes content compelling) and ultimately, a more legitimate advertising sales proposition.

For some time now, we’ve said that digital out-of-home or digital place-based advertising models will develop rapidly over the next five years. But this scenario relies on the consolidation of the market, more standardized advertising options, and more targeting and mobile content connectivity.

We think we’ll get there. The potential for consumers to view condensed content on a screen and then connect to www.NYT2day.com for the full story offers advertisers a proxy for performance, and the user a simple way to more fully engage in the content.

The second interesting story today comes from The Omaha World Herald, which reports that New York equity firm CCMP Capital Advisors has made an offer to purchase Omaha-based InfoGroup — formerly known as InfoUSA. A deal like this has been expected since late last year, when the company hired an advisor to essentially find a buyer.

According to The World Herald, the sale of InfoGroup has been supported by Vin Gupta, the company’s founder and former CEO. While Gupta is no longer an officer of the company, he still sits on the board of directors. In our view, InfoGroup’s sale makes good sense for the company and the shareholders. Taking it private will enable the company to continue its re-branding process from InfoUSA to InfoGroup.

For years we’ve been asked by companies around the globe if InfoUSA or any of its competitors offered similar business listing information. Shifting the name to InfoGroup would certainly enable the company to expand it offerings beyond its current borders.

Should this deal be finalized, it would presumably be the end of Gupta’s involvement, active or passive, in the company he founded almost 40 years ago with $100 and the vision to compile, aggregate and verify the names, addresses and telephone numbers of millions of businesses in America. Certainly, it has been a difficult job. But Gupta and his pioneering colleagues can proudly take credit for delivering hundreds of millions of qualified leads to SMBs.

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