One of the most promising concepts in local are “Write Once, Publish Everywhere” platforms for SMBs. With local businesses needing to communicate more and more deals, new features and special events to their customers, it makes sense to get them on a network to reach more people with one effort.

Yext and Google’s “tag” networks really got the concept going. These enabled an SMB to self-serve a promotion (“$2.00 off tonight”) throughout a network. The tech has since been applied to a wide variety of networked features, including photos, videos and menus — all wrapped in a suite of marketing services.

They’ve also been applied to mobile, which enables more “on the go” activity. Constant Contact’s $65 Million + acquisition of SinglePlatform in June was a strong validation of the space.

The services are terrific, but they haven’t been an instant hit. Pricing has been tough. Is it worth $30 a month? $100 a month? Or should it be bundled in for free? So has the challenge of getting SMBs to pay for one more “value added” service.

Last week, we talked to MeNetwork, one of the more established contenders in the emerging space. The company is based in Boulder, CO and was started in 2010 by banking, technology and ad agency vets.

MeNetwork sees itself as an SMB promotion platform that provides a comprehensive set of “write once, publish everywhere” services. One of its differentiators is that it is pushing a dedicated MeNetwork mobile app in addition to white-labeling its services with strategic partners. It’s risky, but potentially rewarding.

The company also enables easy point-of-sale redemption of offers via QR codes and Bar codes (with compatible POS devices) — something that will make increasing sense as more smart phones are plugged in, asserts COO/CTO Craig Page.

While the service helps manage and process promotions for its customers, it is also mindful that many of them already work with loyalty programs. MeNetwork seamlessly integrates with them, says Page. The aspiration is for MeNework to become the central hub for all of its customers’ promotional activities.

Pricing has been set at $500 a year (approximately $41 a month). Sales channels include self-serve, local media and vertical partners as well as convention bureaus and downtown associations.

Visitors bureaus in New Orleans, San Francisco, and Austin are already actively selling. The New Orleans center sold 200-300 SMBs off the bat, says Page. The company is also working internationally with a division of European Directories in Austria.

Working with outside sales sometimes produces higher than expected churn, and MeNetwork initially saw annual churn rates at 52 percent (actually, pretty low in this area). Churn rates have fallen to 12 percent however, as the company worked to train its reps to provide comprehensive and consistent customer care.

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Constant Contact has made a really big bet on presence management with the acquisition today of SinglePlatform, a provider of a one-stop “write once, read everywhere” presence management network that provides parsed searching capabilities and services for 600,000 SMBs, including 10,000 paying customers. The service also has valuable partnerships with a growing roster of major media players, including The New York Times, YP (formerly ATTi.com), Foursquare, Urbanspoon, Tribune, Gannett and Village Voice Media.

It has shaped up to be a big week for presence management solutions, with Yext picking up $27 million from investors to build on its base of 50,000 SMBs. The investor group includes Marker, a new fund, along with CrunchFund and existing Yext investors Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and WGI Group. The new investment gives Yext a valuation of $270 million.

Constant Contact is paying SinglePlatform $65 million in cash, $5 million in employment retention and has set aside another $30 million for earn-outs. Single Platform, which is based in New York and has about 100 employees, had raised $4.45 million from investors, including DFJ Gotham Ventures, New World Ventures, First Round Capital, RRE Ventures and Seamless Founder Jason Finger. SinglePlatform Founder and CEO Wiley Cerilli becomes GM and VP.

While the acquisition of SinglePlatform is expensive, it certainly makes a nice extension for Constant Contact, which has been evolving from a company that initially provided email newsletter management for SMBs to a broader SMB promotions platform. It now services 500,000 paying SMBs, which are being eyed by everyone from scheduling companies to Yelp, each seeing that social alerts and tagging quickly become substitutes for email. But Constant Contact has really gone on the offensive this year with a number of acquisitions and developments that have greatly diversified the company.

In a conference call this morning, Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman said to get the full revenue earn-out, the SinglePlatform team would need to bring in $74 million over the next two years.

Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman is keynoting SMB Digital Marketing in Chicago Sept. 17-19.

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One of the most common tasks users perform on AT&T Interactive’s YP.com is browsing local eateries in search of a good meal. Thanks to a new partnership with NYC start-up SinglePlatform, this task becomes easier with the addition of local restaurant menus on YP.com and its mobile/tablet apps. SinglePlatform is an online provider of restaurant menus and local business storefronts. It allows local businesses to publish information on products, services, photos and prices across search engines, mobile apps, travel guides and local review sites.

This deal allows YP.com to move up in the purchase funnel by providing more decision support information for hungry users — not just what kind of food but actual menu items and prices. To date, SinglePlatform has compiled 300,000 restaurant menus.

According to AT&T’s internal data, the addition of menus on YP smartphone apps has tripled the amount of restaurant searches per visitor. In addition, the number of phone calls and requests for maps and directions per visitor has more than doubled.

Wiley Cerilli, a former founding partner and executive vice president of food delivery site Seamless Web (now just Seamless), founded SinglePlatform in 2010. The company was named as on of “America’s Most Promising Startups” the following year by Bloomberg Businessweek.

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SinglePlatform, which places restaurant search info such as menus, specials and photos on search engines and social and mobile media, has raised $3.25 million. The new raise is led by DFJ Gotham Ventures with participation from New World Ventures, First Round Capital and RRE Venture. It is on top of $1.2 million raised in February 2010.

For a few hundred dollars per year, SinglePlatform restaurants can publish their listings across a publisher network that includes 11,000 mobile applications, 34,000 hotels, 620 universities, data providers, and travel and food specific destination sites. Mobile optimization is especially emphasized. The company’s tagline is “Get Discovered, Publish your news (or information) to millions online.”

Social media also plays a significant role. Menus can be published within websites, and users can “like” items, as well as search in real time by popularity, price and dish.

More than 100,000 restaurants are said to be using the company’s products now, and the goal is to have 250,000 restaurants. It isn’t clear how many are actually buying services, however. The company also emphasizes search by cuisine specialties (i.e., “gyros,” instead of Greek). I don’t personally shop for restaurants that way.

Currently, the company has 40 employees, including dedicated sales in “every” major market. The company’s salespeople make premise calls with iPad demos that emphasize the need to create a “full browser” self-serve experience, rather than a simple website.

The main revenue model, today, is based off the yearly subscription fee. SinglePlatform has signed up major publishers throughout the country — and will be releasing these partnerships, as well as a brand-new product, next month. Looking forward, SinglePlatform investors have said that the company will expand to other local categories beyond restaurants.

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