The Home Depot is set to significantly boost its home contractor leads network with today’s acquisition of Redbeacon. No price was announced for the acquisition. The deal puts Home Depot in the same boat as Sears, which has been quietly developing ServiceLive, its own contractor leads service.

Redbeacon, which takes a 10 percent commission for service jobs, was one of a number of socially driven leads companies that started in the 2008-2009 time frame. Others include Cox’s Kudzu, which has developed an intriguing partnership with Scripps’ HGTV; The Washington Post’s Service Alley; LikeList; HelpHive; and Thumbtack. The latter received $4.5 million in venture funding last week.

Last year, Redbeacon announced $7.4 million in funding from Mayfield and Venrock, but it hasn’t been easy sailing for the company. The service never landed media partnerships that it had been hoping for and replaced its founder last year with new CEO Anthony Rodio. It has, however, managed to launch services in nine markets. Under Home Depot, one assumes it will take a national approach to contractor leads.

The post Home Depot Buys Redbeacon appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Groups have been using the Web since the mid-1980s for a wide range of activities, such as scheduling, discussions, photo sharing, referrals etc. Groups have been a special strength for Yahoo.

BigTent, a group software company based in San Francisco, has recently been vying with Yahoo for the same market, focusing largely on women. It now has more than 1 million members, who reside in more than 50 percent of U.S. ZIP codes. The question for BigTent and Yahoo, in the age of Facebook and other social media, is what will keep users on a dedicated platform? And what will be their own revenue model?

BigTent CEO and Founder Donna Novitsky says the answer is easy: Facebook is great, but BigTent’s groups, which range in size from 10 to “hundreds of thousands,” tend to require a lot of customization and special features. BigTent groups now range from simple mailing lists to groups with discussions, events, memberships, payments, classifieds, reviews and more.

“Many BigTent groups are local and use the technology to schedule events every week and track participation, in addition to hosting lively discussions 24×7 online, by e-mail and on mobile devices,” says Novitsky. “As groups have grown, they need subgroups to maintain intimacy, so we provide that as well, with all the functionality of the top level groups. It’s all about continuing to scale and deliver value to more local clubs, schools, parenting groups, neighborhoods, sports teams and scout troops,” she adds.

From a business perspective, one of the core challenges for BigTent, a free service, is how to leverage its aggregated user base. The answer: advertising with national brands that want to target women, such as Clorox and Old Navy, and various marketplace opportunities.

Novitsky notes that one marketplaces effort the company is doing is a partnership with Redbeacon, which helps members find local service providers like babysitters, plumbers and painters. “Much of the discussion in our local groups is seeking referrals and recommendations from other group members so this is win-win-win for the members, partners and BigTent,” says Novitsky.

Deal referrals are another big marketplaces opportunity for Big Tent. The majority of deal-a-day subscribers, after all, are educated women. “Our audience loves deals,” confirms Novitisky. “But the deals space has gone crazy with too many different providers sending too many e-mails — it’s deal overload. So BigTent is working with several of the deals providers such as Groupon and The DealMap to bring together the best deals and sort them for our audience. This is respectful of our members’ time and attention, and delivers better results for everyone.”

The post BigTent Focuses on Leveraging Its 1 Million (Mostly Women) Users appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Redbeacon, the six-person San Francisco-based service referral company, announced today that it has raised a heady $7.4 million in Series A financing from Mayfield Fund and Venrock. CEO and Cofounder Ethan Anderson tells us that the company needed such a huge round to quickly ramp up the staff, including engineers, designers and marketing people; aggressively expand markets beyond San Francisco (although no markets have been finalized); and build a wide range of business partnerships.

Anderson notes that demographics and population size will play a large role in determining its next markets, but that business “distribution partnerships” will also play a role. For instance, Redbeacon is currently testing with BT in the U.K.

Partnerships, however, will consist of all shapes and sizes, including communities, search engines and media sites. The commission basis for job leads will “monetize better than advertising,” predicts Anderson. It will also feel like a natural, value-added feature of their sites. Partners “will drive tons and tons of traffic,” he says. “They’ll be moving to value added transactions to users.” The site currently works with BigTent, the women’s group site. It also works with several companies that remain unannounced.

Partnerships are being extended to individual SMBs, which can be partners by plugging a Redbeacon widget into their site. They can emphasize specific service categories and service providers among the leads that are carried and receive a piece of Redbeacon’s 10 percent commission for jobs. A plumber, for instance, could provide a link to dry wall repair. “It is very contextual,” says Anderson.

Anderson adds that the site’s big challenge right now is not so much online competitors such as ServiceMagic, QuinStreet and others, but “changing consumer behavior,” as people are still used to picking up the phone. The social aspects of the site should help along these lines, especially the solicitation of consumer reviews, which complement reviews imported from Yelp, Google and Yahoo. Anderson notes that 50 percent of consumers who use the service for a job are providing reviews.

As for learnings from the site’s launch in San Francisco, Anderson says it is now up to 4,000 small businesses and service pros, and “is always getting more. It is almost enough to make the service work” with price quotes on every job, he says. “People are getting price quotes from very good providers.”

The post Redbeacon Raises $7.4 Million; Interview With CEO Ethan Anderson appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

This has been the year for new sites that combine service directories and social features such as ratings and reviews.  Earlier this year, we saw sites such as RedBeacon, HelpHive and others launch. Depending on definitions, earlier entrants include Citysearch, Yelp.com, Tree.com’s Done Right, FixR , LocalPrice, Insider Pages and Center’d.

Behind their fancy Web 2.0 veneers, they are all going after an SMB leads market that has previously been defined — and is still being defined — by ServiceMagic, Angie’s List and the Yellow Pages.

Now along comes AlikeList, a new contender backed with $5 million from Syncom Venture Partners. As the name implies, the 15-person company enables people to save their local business recommendations and share them with friends via Facebook and eventually other platforms. It also plans to bring together local groups such as Home Owners Associations and PTAs. At the same time, it has an “all members” section that goes broader for Yelp-like recommendations from the general community.

This new service efficiently connects all the dots of Web 2.0 marketing. In a single dashboard, it provides reputation management services, and provides full reporting on Web site clicks. If services have 20 or more listers, they can create instant direct marketing packages, with coupons, updates, etc. On the business side, businesses will pay on a monthly basis for membership, and a per-contact basis for jobs they receive.

What we see is it all seems well executed, especially with its highly usable map features (one of its execs is a former MapQuester). But frankly, all of the new entrants look good.

Earlier Facebook-oriented services such as Loladex couldn’t get the traction they needed, and were ghettoized by relying too heavily on Facebook. But AlikeList’s timing ought to be better in terms of technology adoption, plus it has more money. In coming months, we’ll be studying this one closely to see whether it will stand out.

The post AlikeList, a New Local/Social Platform, Raises $5 Million and Launches appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.