The name of the game this week is gearing up for our big SMB Digital Marketing conference in New Orleans. I’ve been spending lots of time talking to speakers about what we’ll discuss on stage — which has mostly focused on the day 2 session: Brass Tacks: Where is Mobile Actually Working for SMBs.

As the title indicates, this will cut through the hype in SMB mobile marketing to see what’s really working. One little known fact is that most location based mobile marketing today is national advertisers. As an ad medium, it hasn’t really moved down market to SMBs in a scalable way (yet).

That has a lot to do with the traditional challenges of the SMB segment in its slower adaptiveness, and sales challenges. So there are a just a handful of players that are selling and fulfilling mobile tools to SMBs in a meaningful way. We’re happy to say that we have those players on our mobile session.

Those include Yelp, YP, Verve Mobile, and Paypal. Each have done lots of impactful things over the past year. We’ll mostly discuss their approach, what’s working, what’s not working, and how does that shed light on where winning strategies may lie for the coming phases of SMB mobile marketing?

So we’ll be talking to them on stage, one by one. Hope to see you there.

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GoDaddy, continuing to rev up its expanding SMB platform as its IPO nears, has launched “Get Paid”, an online and mobile payments service.

Get Paid lets Go Daddy’s base of 12 million customers – many of them SMBs – accept credit cards, debit cards, eChecks and PayPal transfers. The service has been developed in partnerships with PayPal, Dwolla and Stripe.

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GoDaddy will offer Get Paid service in three service tiers starting at $4/month and going up to $15/month depending on the configuration of features like expense tracking; connecting bank accounts; and other accounting integrations.

GoDaddy’s decision to integrate payments in their service offerings is because they did not have an existing product that allowed their customers to get paid for their products and services. In the press release, SVP of Applications Steven Aldrich said,”when we heard from customers that they want to offer their clients more ways to pay, we set out to create a best-in-class solution to ensure easy access to all the tools they need to collect payments quickly and efficiently.”

GoDaddy already offered other financial services for small businesses in the form?of accounting and billing, so the addition of payments should tie in well to the existing services. The combination of a payment tool and existing financial and business management systems can be very powerful when it comes to tracking and measuring sales for ROI purposes.

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The age-old pyramid and funnel concepts have been driven by initial awareness, browsing and then transactions. But such linear thinking doesn’t make as much sense these days. Not when you are checking prices on an item, looking up reviews and receiving coupons on your phone all at once. According to United Future, 79 percent of smart phone owners are using their phones in stores. Moreover, 28 percent have used a coupon on their phone.

“The purchase funnel is becoming the purchase pretzel,” notes Scott Hendrickson, head of advertising solutions for PayPal Media Network. “They aren’t locked in the store. You may lose them,” he said. “It is a constant tangled web.”

The new challenge is “to control the pipe, control the data, and control customer engagement.” At the same time, the new environment now gives retailers and brands an :”opportunity to do new all kinds of things” around payments, data and scale.

None of it is easy, but Hendrickson predicts it will all come together in 2014. But first, customer adoption is critical. That may be easier said then done. Several panelists were overtly dismissive of key mobile technologies, including QR codes and NFC use for payments. They also noted that ewallets really won’t hit a stride until 2018-2020. Until Grocery stores and others start accepting them, ewallets may be largely focused on narrow niches with occasional uses, such as Starbucks, Abercombe & fitch, airline tickets, movie tickets and Uber car limo rentals.

“It doesn’t matter about NFC. We have had NFC forever. And bar codes,” says Kolja Reiss, Managing Director, MoPay, Inc..”It is the service surrounding the product is what matters.”

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John Donahoe, eBay CEO and interim PayPal CEO, projected soaring numbers for new mobile payment forecasts. During his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Association, Donahoe predicted that eBay would reach $8 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume (GMV) this year, almost double its $5 billion GMV we reported from last year. Reasons for the growth include a growing acceptance of mobile commerce, a surge in iPad use for mobile payments, and new apps that blend offline and online capabilities.

PayPal’s projected numbers look even better at $7 billion, a 75 percent increase over last year. 2011 was still a good year for the online payment company as it surpassed its $3.5 billion expectations to reach $4 billion in mobile payments. Although its sales are rising twice as fast as eBay’s, PayPal Chief Scientist Moh Ok told our audience at ILM West that both companies are “laser focused” on commerce.

Donahoe also announced its new strategic partnership with eBay’s RedLaser barcode scanning app — Best Buy. Last year, the app was updated to include PayPal and Milo integration that gives users the ability to buy on the spot for either in-store pickup or at-home delivery. EBay is expected to post 57 cents a share in earnings on $3.32 billion in revenues during its Q4 earnings call next week.

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Moh Ok, Chief Scientist at PayPal, and Bo Fishback, CEO and Founder of Zaarly, talked about the integration of social, local and mobile to close the loop on driving consumer purchases during a morning dedicated to SoLoMo here at ILM Asia.

Ok and moderator Mike Boland talked extensively about mobile payments, and whether the market will drive toward a common standard. Ok said PayPal and its parent eBays are currently “laser focused” on commerce. The PayPal mantra is anywhere, anytime, anyway.

Rather than talking about various forms of commerce (mobile, social, etc.), “It really should just be commerce,” Ok said. “You should be able to make it in a seamless way.”

In discussing all the different mobile payment methods out there — Google Wallet, Square and the looming NFC — Ok said the key is to be able to “pay however you want.” He describes PayPal as “Switzerland in terms of how people pay.”

Fishback followed Ok and described Zaarly, which is one of those companies that builds a compelling and original business off of an old and simple idea: putting local buyers and sellers together. “I don’t believe in companies that require behavioral change,” Fishback says.

On Zaarly, users post a need and others respond with offers to fulfill that need. Small businesses are essentially being built off of Zaarly, Fishback says. 

Zaarly has fewer than 100,000 users and has had roughly 40,000 posts in the past quarter. The company has roughly 4,000 businesses on its system. 

Fishback says it takes 300 people to create a liquid market.

Boland called it a “reverse Craigslist” and Fishback accepted that as an apt description. Peer to peer hyperlocal is another description.

“The more local you get, the less people want to rip each other off,” Fishback said. “There are no Nigerian scam artists on Zaarly.”

Advancing mobile payments is a key issue for Zaarly. Fishback says there is an imbalance in the market now. “It is easy to pay, harder to get money.” He is looking to partner with innovators in the payment space.

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Mobile is playing an increasingly large role for deal a day, with some companies seeing it accounting for 20 percent to 25 percent of their traffic. But making transactions from mobile devices remains a work in progress. There is apparently no PayPal equivalent for mobile.

It’s an issue that Monster Offers, a publicly traded daily deal aggregator and social media company, hopes to solve via a licensing deal with New York-based Azure Media’s Zala, a person-to-person mobile sharing and payment solution. Zala allows users to instantly send or receive money on all the key mobile platforms.

The companies are promoting a prepaid credit card. The card allows users to load money, request money and send money. It is synched with user phones, ready to facilitate deal-a-day transactions and presumably other types of commerce down the road.

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