Matt Booth hasn’t let any grass under his feet since taking the helm at Solfo/Yellowbot last year. The company has closed a $6.35 million Series A funding round, build up its team to include more focus on marketing and business development, expanded the product portfolio and, finally, changed its name to Connectivity.

As Solfo/Yellowbot, the company was known for its reputation and presence management solutions, and was known as a strong engineering-centric company. One of Booth’s objectives has been to expand the marketing and business development focus. He has grown the team to 27 (from around 20 when he joined) and plans to expand to 65 by the end of the year, adding both engineering and marketing/business development talent.

On the product side, Booth said Connectivity plans to focus on three core products — reputation management, listings management and a new piece, which is building automated customer lists. The latter works from the premise, supported by BIA/Kelsey data, that most small-businesses don’t have a very clear idea who their customers are. Building lists from unique identifiers (most commonly through a phone contact), puts a powerful tool in the SMB’s hand that they can in turn use to do more on the retention/remarketing side of the equation.

“Most small businesses don’t spend any money on retention because they don’t know who their customers are,” Booth said. His premise is that having a better way to capture and engage with customers will spur more investment in retaining and growing existing customers.

“Products have to be great in order to be part of what a business does every day,” Booth said. The standard he cited was OpenTable. Once a restaurant installs OpenTable it is very rarely uninstalled.

Connectivity currently has 92,000 paying SaaS customers, acquired largely through self-service and resellers. Most of these are smaller merchants, but recent growth has come from from the franchise and multilocation side of the equation. Going forward, Connectivity’s efforts will focus on working with agencies and directly with brands to bring in more multilocation businesses. Booth see what everyone else sees — there is no way to scale an effort at acquiring very small businesses other than self-service or working with large resellers. Direct efforts have to focus upstream.

The recently closed Series A round will fund the company’s expansion and product development efforts. The financing was led by Greycroft Partners, with participation by Rincon Venture Partners, Daher Capital, Double M Partners, TenOneTen Ventures, Eytan Elbaz and SLP Ventures.

The post Solfo Raises Money, Becomes ‘Connectivity’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Matt Booth hasn’t let any grass under his feet since taking the helm at Solfo/Yellowbot last year. The company has closed a $6.35 million Series A funding round, build up its team to include more focus on marketing and business development, expanded the product portfolio and, finally, changed its name to Connectivity.

As Solfo/Yellowbot, the company was known for its reputation and presence management solutions, and was known as a strong engineering-centric company. One of Booth’s objectives has been to expand the marketing and business development focus. He has grown the team to 27 (from around 20 when he joined) and plans to expand to 65 by the end of the year, adding both engineering and marketing/business development talent.

On the product side, Booth said Connectivity plans to focus on three core products — reputation management, listings management and a new piece, which is building automated customer lists. The latter works from the premise, supported by BIA/Kelsey data, that most small-businesses don’t have a very clear idea who their customers are. Building lists from unique identifiers (most commonly through a phone contact), puts a powerful tool in the SMB’s hand that they can in turn use to do more on the retention/remarketing side of the equation.

“Most small businesses don’t spend any money on retention because they don’t know who their customers are,” Booth said. His premise is that having a better way to capture and engage with customers will spur more investment in retaining and growing existing customers.

“Products have to be great in order to be part of what a business does every day,” Booth said. The standard he cited was OpenTable. Once a restaurant installs OpenTable it is very rarely uninstalled.

Connectivity currently has 92,000 paying SaaS customers, acquired largely through self-service and resellers. Most of these are smaller merchants, but recent growth has come from from the franchise and multilocation side of the equation. Going forward, Connectivity’s efforts will focus on working with agencies and directly with brands to bring in more multilocation businesses. Booth see what everyone else sees — there is no way to scale an effort at acquiring very small businesses other than self-service or working with large resellers. Direct efforts have to focus upstream.

The recently closed Series A round will fund the company’s expansion and product development efforts. The financing was led by Greycroft Partners, with participation by Rincon Venture Partners, Daher Capital, Double M Partners, TenOneTen Ventures, Eytan Elbaz and SLP Ventures.

The post Solfo Raises Money, Becomes 'Connectivity' appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

A central theme emerged this morning at SMB Digital Marketing. It began in the Focus on Profits session, where former BIA/Kelsey analyst and current Yellowbot CEO Matt Booth declared, “In ten years, this conference will be all about software and services.”

Matt’s point was simple. Selling advertising to local SMBs is a tough business. Renewals are getting harder and competition is fierce. Selling cloud based services (presence management, CRM, reputation management) offers the opportunity for that coveted “lock in” that ensures a long-term high-value customer relationship because the SMB depends on your service to manage its business. Think Demand Force or Open Table.

“I couldn’t agree more with Matt that it will all be in SaaS in the future,” said ReachLocal President Nathan Hanks during his keynote presentation following the Focus on Profits panel.

Hanks took Booth’s prediction a step further by predicting the move to a SMB marketplace built around SaaS is closer to five years away. The big opportunity is in marketing automation, and ReachLocal is moving aggressively in this direction.

Part of Hanks’ thesis is that the purchasing process for local merchants is broken.

“It is not fun to do all you have to do to get and keep customers today,” he said. Sifting through the entire basket of point solutions and providers, getting leads, following up, and fulfilling orders adds up to a draining process.

Software is going to dominate local because it makes life better for the merchant. “Software is the answer for what ails us in local, and for what takes us to the next level.”

No doubt a large sales force is an asset. However, it is not a requirement for success in local, particularly as the local space moves toward more of a data- and software-driven paradigm. Hubspot, Hanks points out, uses technology to bring in leads, and sales to close the leads. “You don’t to have to have a big sales force to win in where local is going,” Hanks said.

Hanks leads a company that will drive about $500 million in revenue this year, with 2,000 employees and 23,700 active advertisers. Hanks replaced Reach’s CEO and co-founder, Zorik Gordon as keynoter. Gordon resigned last week, for reasons that were not immediately disclosed. The company did reaffirm guidance for the year, in an effort to reassure investors that Gordon’s departure wasn’t tied to the company’s performance.

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Significant news in the online presence/reputation management space came across the wire at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference last week in Boston, as VendAsta announced $8.25 million in Series B funding to accelerate the company’s holistic identity/reputation/social management solution.

In just over two years, it has established a deep network of local publishers (Cox Media Group, Gannett, GateHouse Media, Hearst) and solutions providers (Web.com) that reach more than 100,000 SMBs in aggregate. VendAsta launched with a core focus on reviews/reputation monitoring, but has since expanded into social monitoring, engagement and lead generation. While maintaining a strong foothold with SMBs, it has also moved upstream into reputation management for brands.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts e-mail & reputation/presence management to grow into a $2.5 billion market in the U.S. by 2016. Enterprise will increasingly contribute to that spend as investment is made to combat digital brand fragmentation and localize advertising and marketing.

At the SMB level, with consumers flocking to new channels and operators now using 8-10 different media for advertising and promotion to reach them, a reputation solution is a central component of a digital offering for anyone in the SMB services business. With its latest round of funding backing up its recent product expansions, VendAsta is well-positioned as a critical player in the race to create the integrated dashboard.

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Mentions, reviews, blog comments, tweets, posts and now check-ins. It’s enough digital noise to lead local business owners to throw their hands up in despair. As Internet fragmentation accelerates, a host of reputation management providers have carved out an important foothold in the digital landscape by aggregating merchants’ online activity through a single dashboard that subsequently allows for sentiment analysis, syndicated messaging and competitive benchmarking.

Like so many parts of the digital ecosystem, however, reputation management is quickly becoming commoditized, which can actually make the SMB’s decision process about brand marketing and protection more complicated. That result runs counter to the very problem that reputation management aspires to resolve.

In our first Social Local Media industry report, Andrew Shotland and I examine the current state of reputation management and project how the industry must evolve to create a more holistic, simplistic and measurable solution. All the leading vendors are profiled, with the report comparing and contrasting them across 10 foundational criteria and distilling their differentiating features, as well as highlighting their business model challenges. We also explore opportunities and considerations for resellers that may be thinking of branding a solution for their own clients.

As BIA/Kelsey has touted for years, there is robust opportunity in ERPM. Our forecast, in fact, pegs local spend in this segment to eclipse $5 billion by 2015. For this growth to be realized, and for these tools to truly capture the needs of the enterprises they serve, there is a pressing need for differentiation through an elegant interface that consolidates the fragmented Web into an easily managed system.

“Single click publishing,” improved social messaging, scheduling functionality, mobile features and automated loyalty tools are all essential elements of the holistic communication platform that will win the future.

Social Local Media subscribers can access the full report here.

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ZipLocal, the independent U.S. directory publisher with more than 300 print directories, is bolstering its digital suite through the integration of VendAsta’s StepRep reputation management tool.

VendAsta’s white-label product will be available to ZipLocal’s 110,000 advertising businesses, and soon thereafter, will be opened up across the ImmersiFind local search platform that 15 other North American directory publishers participate in.

Through StepRep, ZipLocal’s SMBs (and the sales reps handling these accounts) will be able to monitor their online visibility, track comments across social networks and reviews sites, and then engage with customers directly on these platforms. With the continual fragmentation of the Web, a reputation management tool that provides a real-time analytics dashboard encompassing these diffuse platforms is becoming an essential service to local businesses.

As such, noise in the ERPM marketplace is quickly rising. Marchex, Yext Rep, YellowBot, ReachLocal, MerchantCircle and many others offer the service as part of their suite. VendAsta recently made efforts to differentiate its product by partnering with Telmetrics to integrate call-tracking intelligence into StepRep, which begins to connect online presence with offline lead generation.

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With online search fragmentation and social media emergence driving prodigious growth forecasts for the reputation management sector (BIA/Kelsey projects $3.5 billion in ERPM revenues by 2014), agencies and publishers are both in the market for technology that adds this tool to their client offerings. Canadian agency (directory and digital) DAC Group has jumped on board, teaming with chatmeter to enable clients to manage and optimize their online presence across search engines, directories and social networks.

The partnership makes logical sense considering that many of DAC Group’s clients are national franchises that need to better monitor ERPM for local stores. This is especially so as national brands increasingly employ online advertising and social networking to drive local store traffic. The Groupon phenomenon and the recent debut of Facebook Deals are two stark examples of national-local opportunities.

Through chatmeter, DAC Group will not only provide local listings maintenance, but also analysis related to these results and a recommendation engine that will build off detailed tracking data to pinpoint campaign adjustments. Competitive benchmarking is becoming a critical component of reputation management, and chatmeter allows for businesses using its platform to size up their online performance directly against local competitors.

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If getting customers to pick up the phone is the first priority for SMBs, the second is vetting caller traffic to distill quality leads from noise … and to understand the drivers behind each activity. “Bridging the online-offline gap” is emerging as a critical component of SMB reputation management. VendAsta is now incorporating call tracking intelligence from Telmetrics into its white-label reputation management platform that publishers can offer to their local clients.

In addition to monitoring customer reviews across social networks and online review sites, VendAsta’s Step Rep will now offer a layer of speech-to-text call tracking through Telmetrics’ Voice Trends that will enable deeper understanding of  customer sentiment through keywords spoken and call duration, location, demographics and time.

VendAsta’s ultimate goal in this integration is to paint a comprehensive picture of consumer interactions with SMBs. This connects online presence to offline lead generation in a more holistic reputation management solution. It also allows businesses to build off of phone conversations to push into social media and deal-a-day offers through a deeper understanding of met and unmet customer demands.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts that local advertising spend on ERPM will reach $3.5 billion in revenues by 2014, and several major brands — Marchex, MerchantCircle, ReachLocal (through SMB Live), Yext (Yext Rep), Yellowbot and others — are lining up to compete for these SMB dollars. 

Telmetrics President Bill Dinan told BIA/Kelsey that VendAsta’s move into call tracking represents an important step in the company’s “drive to distinguish” in this crowded sector. “The wave of the future in local search is that you have to specialize in somthing.”

StepRep is one of many white-label products that VendAsta offers for publishers to rebrand for their local merchants. The Saskatchewan-based software provider offers a daily deal white label called Daily Deals 3S that has been picked up by both DirectWest in Saskatchewan (MySaskDeals) and Winnipeg publisher EX Finder (EZ Deal). Its suite also includes a social recommendation engine to validate consumer reviews through users’ personal networks.

The post Telmetrics Rings In Call Tracking for VendAsta's Rep Management appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

If getting customers to pick up the phone is the first priority for SMBs, the second is vetting caller traffic to distill quality leads from noise … and to understand the drivers behind each activity. “Bridging the online-offline gap” is emerging as a critical component of SMB reputation management. VendAsta is now incorporating call tracking intelligence from Telmetrics into its white-label reputation management platform that publishers can offer to their local clients.

In addition to monitoring customer reviews across social networks and online review sites, VendAsta’s Step Rep will now offer a layer of speech-to-text call tracking through Telmetrics’ Voice Trends that will enable deeper understanding of  customer sentiment through keywords spoken and call duration, location, demographics and time.

VendAsta’s ultimate goal in this integration is to paint a comprehensive picture of consumer interactions with SMBs. This connects online presence to offline lead generation in a more holistic reputation management solution. It also allows businesses to build off of phone conversations to push into social media and deal-a-day offers through a deeper understanding of met and unmet customer demands.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts that local advertising spend on ERPM will reach $3.5 billion in revenues by 2014, and several major brands — Marchex, MerchantCircle, ReachLocal (through SMB Live), Yext (Yext Rep), Yellowbot and others — are lining up to compete for these SMB dollars. 

Telmetrics President Bill Dinan told BIA/Kelsey that VendAsta’s move into call tracking represents an important step in the company’s “drive to distinguish” in this crowded sector. “The wave of the future in local search is that you have to specialize in somthing.”

StepRep is one of many white-label products that VendAsta offers for publishers to rebrand for their local merchants. The Saskatchewan-based software provider offers a daily deal white label called Daily Deals 3S that has been picked up by both DirectWest in Saskatchewan (MySaskDeals) and Winnipeg publisher EX Finder (EZ Deal). Its suite also includes a social recommendation engine to validate consumer reviews through users’ personal networks.

The post Telmetrics Rings In Call Tracking for VendAsta’s Rep Management appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The conference will kick off on Tuesday, Sept. 14, with a keynote address from Yext CEO Howard Lerman. Yext launched Yext Rep in May and announced a co-branded deal to offer its solution toSuperMedia advertisers in June. Lerman will likely discuss Yext Rep as well as his overall vision for how leads are driven to SMBs in the near future.

Mid-afternoon Tuesday, we’ll have a panel dedicated to the topic of reputation management with representatives from three leading reputation management players on hand: Moon Valley Software, Solfo/YellowBot.com and VendAsta. They’ll enter a discussion with BIA/Kelsey moderator Matt Booth, who will pepper them with questions about how they convince media players (i.e., directory publishers) that they need to provide their SMB advertisers with a tool to monitor, respond to and/or update their presence, reviews and performance online.

Brendan King of VendAsta will talk about its StepRep product, which has been around since 2008 and features some cool social graph tools. Emad Fanous will talk about YellowBot’s success with its Weblocal.ca rollout that occurred in March. One of the newer kids on the block is Moon Valley Software’s MyRepMan product that officially debuted in May. Pete Ryan will be on stage to talk about how MyRepMan, which MoonValley co-markets with partner Acxiom, adds functionality such as a scoring tool and syndication model (on top of basic monitoring of reviews, blogs, listings data and the like) to help track SMBs’ progress online.

These very short presentations will lead to a discussion where the tough questions about reputation management will be put to the panelists. If you’re looking for a better understanding of what rep management is, and whether it’s a genuine opportunity for companies selling marketing services to SMBs, make sure you make this 3:45 p.m. panel on Tuesday, Sept. 14.

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