On the heels of last year’s LEADING IN LOCAL: SMB Digital Marketing show in Austin, we’ve just announced our agenda for this year’s big event in “The Big Easy”: New Orleans.

Our initial slate of Keynotes include:

Acxiom CEO Scott Howe;
ReachLocal CEO Sharon Rowlands
Google’s SMB Revenue director Steve Espinosa
Facebook’s Leader of SMB/Product Insights Joe Devoy

Additional Featured Speakers:

Sprint’s Karen Noel, GM, Small Business
Groupon’s Dan Roarty, VP of Product Marketing

Also at the event: Search marketing leader Kevin Ryan. Ryan will be debuting his new business best seller, “Taking Down Goliath: The Digital Marketing Strategy Guide for beating competitors with 100 times your spending power.”

More great speakers (We’ll end up with 40 or more):

Yelp’s Darnell Holloway, Sr. Manager, Local Business Outreach
NOLA Media Group’s Ricky Mathews, President
Morris Communications’ Steve Gray, Director of Strategy and Innovation
The Houston Chronicle’s Warren Kay, CRO
ForwardLine’s Craig Coleman, CEO
Search Influence’s Will Scott, CEO
BizHive’s Kim Feil, CEO
Wanderful Media’s Doug Kilponen, COO
Perka’s Rob Bethage, Co-Founder and VP
Booker’s Josh McCarter, CEO
Agendize’s Alf Poor, President

Will we see you down in New Orleans? Check out the full agenda here. And please register here.

The post Just Out: Hot Agenda For LIL: SMB Digital Marketing (Sept. 22-24, New Orleans) appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In a deal designed to fuel innovation at First Data, the payments powerhouse has acquired mobile marketing and loyalty start-up Perka for an undisclosed amount. First Data plans to let Perka continue to operate autonomously and service as an “agile product development company led by original management.” This year, Fast Company magazine anointed Perka as one of the “Most Innovative Companies” in local.

Founded with angel money in 2011, Perka is led by CEO Alan Chung and founding partners Robert Bethge, Rob Coury, Jay Harlow and Joe Stelmach. The company offers loyalty programs for local businesses in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Africa and Latin American. Perka has 28 employees.

Perka made a name for itself for innovative thinking around the burgeoning loyalty space. For example, last December we wrote about how Perka was tacking the issue of adapting the buy 10, get one punchcard model to highly variable purchases.

The convergence of payments, loyalty and mobility is clearly on the minds of First Data’s leadership. The company is a world leader in payment processing, handling payments daily for more than 6 million merchant locations. First Data hopes to remain a key player in payments as the space expands further into mobile and tablet based payment processing. First Data made progress in this direction with its recent launch of Clover, a cloud-based point of sale (POS) solution.

In September, First Data SVP Dom Morea spoke at length about how First Data sees the evolution of loyalty at BIA/Kelsey’s SMB Digital Marketing event in Austin. The Perka acquisition, and perhaps more critically the team that comes with it, should help First Data remain at the forefront of the rapidly changing payments space.

First Data Senior VP Dom Morea talked about the future of transaction marketing at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing event in Austin, TX.

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“Buy 10, Get 1″ loyalty programs are directly descended from paper punchcard programs and serve a general purpose. They are especially effective for transactions that are always about the same (i.e. coffee, pizza and the movies).

But how do you spur more buying and more frequent buying when transactions are highly variable? This was a question posed last year by Southwest Airlines when it shifted its loyalty program from trips to dollars spent.

Now Perka, a 28 person, national loyalty provider based in Portland, OR and New York, is adding a “Flex Card” option for its loyalty efforts as well. Perka’s Flex Card program enables local merchants to not only tally different kinds of spending, but it also enables them to set a variety of thresholds for rewards (i.e., 50 points to a shirt, 500 points to a birthday party, etc.)

Co-Founder Robert Bethge tells us the Flex card program was soft launched in October, and costs merchants $50 per month, as opposed to $35 for the standard electronic punchcard. Currently, 50 merchants are on the flex card option, while 450 take the punchcard.

Bethge adds that a key advantage of the Flex card program, he notes, is that it leverages the company’s ability to read directly off Point of Sales systems, adding many additional “closed loop” verification capabilities.

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