Fifty plus industry leaders will grace the stage at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. We’re looking forward to a great show. Want to do some research before the event? Here’s some recent BIA/Kelsey blog coverage of the featured speakers (Click on the hyperlinks).

Acxiom: Scott Howe, CEO (Keynote, Day 2)

Alignable: Eric Groves, CEO (Future Stars, Day 2)

Booker: Josh McCarter, CEO (Scheduling ,Day 2)

Facebook: Joe DeVoy, Product Manager, Local Ads, Facebook (Social Media Shift, Day 2)

First Data/Perka: Mike Lazarro, Head of Planning (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

ForwardLine: Craig Coleman, CEO (Cultivating SMB Success, Day 2)

Groupon: Dan Roarty, VP, Product Development (Keynote, Day 2)

Local Media Association: Nancy Lane, President (Local Media Heavy Hitters, Day 3)

Radius: Megan Austin Karlen, VP (Smart Data, Day 2)

ReachLocal: Sharon Rowlands,CEO, (Keynote, Day 2)

SignPost: Stu Wall, CEO (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

Verve: Tom Kenney, President (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

Wanderful Media: Doug Kilponen, COO (SMB Retail, Day 2)

Yelp: Darnell Holloway, Sr. Mgr., Community Outreach (SMBs On Stage with Yelp, Day 1); Peter Curzon, Business Development ( Brass Tracks Mobile, Day 2)

YP: Jeff Federman, SVP, Digital (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

The post Useful Research for New Orleans: Recent Blog Coverage, SMB Digital Marketing Speakers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The “Big Data” revolution has hit every strata of the economy, providing insights into users and customers for everything from B2B materials to entertainment and travel.

But what’s the impact of Big Data on marketing to small businesses? The use of Big Data is very important, and highly applicable to SMBs, suggests Radius VP of Marketing Darren Waddell. If properly applied, it lends itself to market segmentation and more focused leads — something that is critical for sales and marketing organizations as they contend with an unwieldy list of leads.

It is part of a move towards automation, which since the Industrial Revolution, “has been the only way that companies survive,” says Waddell, whose company is working with SMB solution leaders such as Amex, The Home Depot and Gannett. Without such segmentation, economic realities force companies to engage in untargeted “spammy” outbound marketing.

“From a lead generation point of view, this is a massive shift,” adds Waddell. “As an industry, we need to get away from lead gen data providers from the likes of Dun & Bradstreet — which are leads without intelligence — and move towards a thoughtful, differentiated approach to SMB marketing.”

Excerpted from a new Brief for BIA/Kelsey clients: “Building a Better SMB Marketing Machine: Inside the Development of Radius.” Waddell is a featured Big Data speaker at Leading in Local: The National Impact, along with VSplash advisor Neal Polachek and Dstillery VP Lauren Moores.

The post ‘The Impact of Big Data on SMB Marketing': Briefing Excerpt appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The “Big Data” revolution has hit every strata of the economy, providing insights into users and customers for everything from B2B materials to entertainment and travel.

But what’s the impact of Big Data on marketing to small businesses? The use of Big Data is very important, and highly applicable to SMBs, suggests Radius VP of Marketing Darren Waddell. If properly applied, it lends itself to market segmentation and more focused leads — something that is critical for sales and marketing organizations as they contend with an unwieldy list of leads.

It is part of a move towards automation, which since the Industrial Revolution, “has been the only way that companies survive,” says Waddell, whose company is working with SMB solution leaders such as Amex, The Home Depot and Gannett. Without such segmentation, economic realities force companies to engage in untargeted “spammy” outbound marketing.

“From a lead generation point of view, this is a massive shift,” adds Waddell. “As an industry, we need to get away from lead gen data providers from the likes of Dun & Bradstreet — which are leads without intelligence — and move towards a thoughtful, differentiated approach to SMB marketing.”

Excerpted from a new Brief for BIA/Kelsey clients: “Building a Better SMB Marketing Machine: Inside the Development of Radius.” Waddell is a featured Big Data speaker at Leading in Local: The National Impact, along with VSplash advisor Neal Polachek and Dstillery VP Lauren Moores.

The post 'The Impact of Big Data on SMB Marketing': Briefing Excerpt appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Watch out Dun & Bradstreet. Radius Intelligence is coming.

Radius, a five year old, San Francisco-based firm formerly known as FWIX, is gunning for D&B’s SMB data business by scraping the Web for insights into how users find and engage SMBs, and then providing leads for them. Today, Radius announced that it has raised $13 Million in new financing. The new amount comes on top of $15.2 Million raised in prior rounds.

The new round is led by Formation8 Partners, which has been joined in this round by prior investor Blue Run Ventures and CEO Darian Shirazi. American Express, Western Technology Investment, Stanford University and Comcast Ventures participated in earlier rounds.

Speaking at BIA/Kelsey’s Interactive Local Media event in December, Shirazi said the company is committed to “empowering people to make good decisions around big data.” Radius scrapes the Web and uses additional sources to provide a rich picture of SMB engagement with customers and comparing that data with their competitors. Social media, news, listings, neighborhood information and other sources are all indexed.

Radius says it accurately categorizes firms based on such usage, and provides leads based on the types of customers it sees by looking at SMBs and their competitors. Leads programs begin at $99 a month, and the company is already pulling in “millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue,” according to figures cited by The Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital blog. The blog quoted Shirazi as saying that Radius’ goal is to reach $10 million in annual recurring revenue this year.

At our ILM conference, Shirazi argued that his firm’s cloud-based approach has become much more relevant than the “antiquated,” “spreadsheet” approach taken by traditional data leaders, such as D&B and others. Historically, a good chunk of their business intelligence comes from SMB suppliers, said Shirazi. But SMBs have “moved from checks to credit,” making it more difficult to get an accurate snapshot about a business from its purchase data (i.e. how many cups have been ordered by a restaurant, etc.)

Radius Intelligence CEO Darian Shirazi

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