The inaugural Local Search Summit_took place last Thursday in San Jose and was jam packed with top notch speakers and attended by the top companies in the local search industry. With representatives from both Search Engines and the one Decision Engine The day also included a much anticipated white list program for Google Maps bulk upload which you can read about here. Here is a wrap-up of all the sessions and important notes.

Keynote with Google TV’s Steve Stukenborg

The Summit got off to a roaring start with Steve Stukenborg’s dynamic presentation about Google TV.  While not directly applicable to Local, it was an entertaining look into one of Google’s newer product offerings.

Google is essentially trying to bring a “Googly” mindset of trackability into a medium that has to-date been largely untrackable.  Through their partnership with the Dish Network and incoming data from viewers’ set-top ID boxes, they’re able to charge advertisers on an Adwords-style CPM auction model.  TV’s increasing fragmentation (compare American Idol’s 25% share today with the Cosby Show’s 49% market share in the 80’s) means that it’s harder and harder to reach large audiences, but easier and easier to target exactly the demographic you’re looking for.  Time for new ads to go live and reporting on reach and audience is typically right around 24 hours, and integration with Google’s web Analytics appeared almost automatic.

I was disappointed to learn that despite Google’s ability to use set-top ID numbers for tracking purposes, it is not possible for SMB’s (or even national franchise-model companies) to geo-target campaigns.  It would seem easy to parse out geo-targeted content to those markets in which advertisers were bidding, and back-filling “empty” markets with national content.  But I readily admit that I don’t understand the technical side of TV distribution one bit!

Local Search Ranking Factors

Localeze’s Gib Olander and I presented the key points to consider when optimizing for Local Search.  Of particular importance (at least in my opinion) is the need to shift one’s mindset from optimizing a website to optimizing a location.

Gib did a terrific job of explaining the two main modes of Local search – those of REcovery and DIScovery.  45% of all Local searches fall into the former category, where people know the business they’re looking for, and are just trying to find “NAP” (Name, Address, Phone) details.  Thus it’s absolutely critical to make sure this basic footprint is accurate across as many search engines as possible.  Tieing back into my own presentation, doing so will also ensure that these additional listings get picked up as citations by Google Maps.

These citations are one of the most important ranking factors and will help immensely with the 55% of searches involving DIScovery—where searchers are looking for a particular type of business but don’t have one particular company in mind. Properly categorizing your business and adding keywords or tags for a richer profile (pet-friendly, happy hours, wi-fi, etc.) will help your business show up for longer-tail searches around those phrases.

In the Q&A, an audience member raised a question about the use of keywords in business title, which was rated one of the most influential ranking factors by the panel of experts.  I got the chance to ensure that people understood including a descriptive keyword in your business title was a best-practice across ALL listings (including offline occurrences like dba’s), not just at the Local Business Center.  Gib correctly speculated that the reason keywords-in-business-title is such an effective ranking tactic is that the Local search engines don’t currently have enough rich information to rely on for the vast majority of listings, a situation that Localeze (and other major data providers) are trying to improve.

What Kind of Online Products Do SMB’s Need?

Unfortunately, I was answering questions related to my presentation one-on-one out in the hallway for much of this session, but I did get to witness a highly-entertaining interchange between Todd Johnson of eLocalListing and Ben Saren of Citysquares.

Moderator Greg Sterling asked these two panelists to role-play a typical sales call to an SMB.  Ben accurately portrayed some of the difficulties in reaching the SMB owner (lack of understanding of the internet, lack of time to discuss marketing, and reliance on a friend or family member for everything web-related).  Todd demonstrated eLocal’s typical strategy of a request for help with servicing search clients and repeated calls and follow-ups to try to bring the SMB up-to-speed with available internet product offerings.

All the panelists rightly asserted the typical SMB’s lack of interest in the process or even the results of optimizing (i.e. rankings or trackable emails) and pure focus on how much additional business am I getting as the only metric that truly matters.

Pay-per-call was briefly discussed with a representative from Marchex whose name I didn’t catch…my own two cents (as well as Gib’s, stated during our Q&A) is that call-tracking local phone numbers have a negative impact on the consistency of one’s listing footprint across the web.  In my personal opinion, call-tracking should be done at the offline level during or after the phone conversations themselves.

Q&A With Google Maps and Bing

Jen Chin of Google Maps and Kevin Hagwell of Bing Local were on the hotseat for this session.  Moderator Jason Calacanis did an admirable job at trying to tease out the mindsets of two of the three biggest players in Local Search.

Bing seems to see a Local profile more like a property, and will likely be taking steps to make their profiles indexable and more static than they are currently (closer to Yahoo’s model).  Google clearly sees Local profiles more as search results and as such, they have no intent to static-ize them any time soon.

With respect to mapspam, Jen reiterated Google’s abiding faith in its community members to police bad results, mark closed businesses as closed, and the like…feeling that Google users will be “highly motivated” to fix what’s wrong. It should be said that those of us in the Local Search community typically have far less faith in this strategy than Mountain View seems to.

And with respect to data feeds and trust, Kevin posed a preliminary indicator of Bing’s mindset in this session and expanded on it during the Q&A.  He feels that Local data from any source will always have flaws in certain places; even business owners mis-type their addresses or phone numbers on occasion.  There will always be a need for Local search engines to attempt to cluster and merge business data in order to present a “most likely to be accurate” result for a particular business. While Bing would like to move towards a trusted-bulk-upload feature (which Google announced later in the conference) they’re not there right now.

Using Facebook and Twitter to Drive Local Leads

Sadly, I was answering emails for much of this session and only had my ears halfway open…

Will Scott mentioned some excellent tools for finding Local followers on Twitter—a popular question in some of SES’ small business sessions on Wednesday.  WeFollow and Twellowhood were two mentioned that I’d seen before.

He also emphasized his concept of “Attention Deficit Twitter Disorder” and the need to repeat your message at various times of the day to ensure that you reach all of your followers, most of whom are probably checking-in and checking-out of Twitter frequently.  (I guess only total geeks like us are on throughout the day!)

I didn’t necessarily agree with some of Will’s recommendations for auto-tweeting and auto-following, but his full slides on Using Twitter for Local are available on his website.

As far as tracking, one of Will’s particularly interesting insights was to use Lo.ly rather than Bit.ly for tracking, due to Lo.ly’s map overlay of where people are clicking in addition to what they are clicking on.

LBS and Mobile: What to Realistically Expect

Mike Boland of The Kelsey Group led off this session with what I found a pretty surprising stat: there are 63 million mobile web users in the U.S.  That is a HUGE audience, and given the natural affinity between Mobile and Local search, we Local Search practitioners are in a great place going forward. The difficulty will lie in the fact that search volume may not be high for obscure categories or obscure locations.

Greg Sterling’s assertion that 1/3 of all Google Japan searches come from mobile devices only suggests further where we’re headed.

Sanjeev Agrawal of Aloqa added an interesting dynamic to The Summit with his conception of Local Search as not necessarily being “pull” based (i.e. it might not involve search at all).  In Aloqa’s mind, “smart” phones should actually be smart.  They should be displaying opt-in content like specials, points of interest, friends, etc. at all times.  Location, time, and social context are more important for mobile ad serving than is text or perhaps even intent-based content.

Q&A with Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman

Kudos to Jeremy Stoppelman for attending what seemed like his first search engine conference.  He shared some interesting insights into Yelp’s founding mindset and where they might be headed.

• Yelp now has over 7 million reviews and 25 million unique visitors per month.  Their traffic is a “testimonial to the model of User Generated Content.”
• They’re in 28 cities and now several countries.
• Yelp’s “secret sauce” so far has been to focus on specific communities and to build a core group of evangelists (the Yelp Elite Squad) for which they throw parties and encourage offline interaction. The highly-successful Portland Community Manager was recently shipped to London to help seed the community there.
• Stoppelman’s impetus for starting Yelp came from his difficulty in finding a reliable doctor using the extant search engines in 2004.
• Yelp does its best to keep its algorithm opaque.  The obvious factors are proximity, rating, and volume of reviews.  There’s no set number that “tips” a profile into popular status but Yelp does look at rating trends.
• Yelp isn’t really worried about Google and Yahoo stepping on its toes…Stoppelman feels that Yelp will always be able to provide a deeper level of engagement for users (echoing Google’s mindset that its own results are just that: search results, rather than deep business profiles).
• In five years, Stoppelman hopes that Yelp is “the premier brand in Local Search.”  At this point, Yelp has no plans to enter the much-hyped arena of HyperLocal News.

Q&A on Local Search: Where Are We Today?

Rather than duplicate content, I’d prefer to direct readers to the semi-live summary I wrote of this session on Thursday evening.

Kudos to Steve Espinosa & his partners for a truly phenomenal day.  The level of networking and intelligence of the panelists throughout the day was exceptional; LSS alone made the entire SES conference worth attending, in my view.

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In anticipation of the panel, we had some time to discuss the areas where mobile local marketing needs improvement, or requires different ways of thinking. These will also be key areas of discussion the Local Search Summit happening the same week as SES, as well as September’s  Directional Media Strategies conference run by my company, The Kelsey Group.

Here are a few excerpts from the interview.

MB: What are the biggest market factors that you see driving mobile search adoption on the part of both users and content owners or advertisers?

MM: Technology adoption with regard to smart phones is outstripping most previous major technology adoption rates, including touch tone phones, cassette tapes, hi-def TV and DVD video players. There’s an entire generation in high school right now who’s never known a time without cell phones. This ubiquitous adoption is already causing a measurable trend where smart phones are replacing computers, especially with regard to localized searches. People’s habits are changing - when that happens, it forces market adjustments all the way around, not only with how advertisers will get their messages in front of consumers, but also what sorts of targeting these users are willing to accept. Phone searchers love being “helped” but they hate being “tracked.”

MB: What are some of the fundamental differences of mobile marketing and SEO, compared to online marketing and SEO?

MM: I think the main difference now (which I’m single-handedly trying to rectify, heh) is that mobile marketing is a better proving ground for what I call “pervasive SEO.” You’re already dealing with limited screen space. How much more impactful do you think it is to be mentioned on the first 15 search results on several other sites when someone searches your chosen keywords, than to just be number three and show up once for your own domain name. Even if you’re number one, if you’re only there once someone else placing pervasively on ten or twelve OTHER sites will look more appealing, or more like an expert, or more prevalent. Internet users aren’t naïve anymore. They know that what’s on your web site was put there by you. If a dozen other sites are also saying good things about you, that’s much more effective in terms of earning consumer trust.

MB: What are some of the most common mistakes or misconceptions of companies entering the mobile space (media companies, app developers, web publishers, advertisers, etc.)? What about misconceptions preventing companies from playing in the mobile sandbox?

MM: I think there’s still a disconnect between the left and right brain that prevents advertisers from recognizing opportunities in the mobile space, especially for small to medium-sized business. For example, local search - which is one of my main prongs of attack with any business that has a physical location… it takes me about a dozen repetitions and even demonstrations over several weeks of the immense practicality of local business search on a phone before the little light bulb starts to glow. Ultimately, I have to sit back and wait for my clients to actually use their phone in this manner to make a decision or a purchase or answer a question, and then point out to them afterward why they ended up using the vendor they selected. “Do you remember why you ended up calling CVS Pharmacy?”  “Yeah, the first phone number I found for Foster’s Pharmacy wasn’t in service anymore.” “OK, so what happens when you change your business phone number and no one bothers to update all your local business listings that are floating all over the internet?” It’s as if small business owners think that because they have a web site with their name and address and phone number, that’s all they need. They don’t think far enough down the smart phone path to realize that their site might be all in Flash, or that the average local business search through a smart phone portal may put results from CitySearch or Superpages above your business’ own domain name… and oddly, SMBs are who absolutely need to succeed in this arena or get overrun by the big chains.

MB: Is the state of the economy currently having an effect on this adoption, any more so than other media? In other words is mobile’s “experimental” nature preventing companies from utilizing it as a content and/or ad delivery platform in uncertain economic times?

MM: I think this depends on who you’re asking. I don’t know a single consumer who’s given up their mobile phone. But I read all the time about companies abandoning or “back-burnering” their mobile marketing initiatives. It makes me want to ask marketers, “why are you doing this when that market is one of the only markets not shrinking?” Fewer and fewer people read printed newspaper, but more and more people use cell phones.

MB: Conversely, is mobile’s targeting capabilities, greater ad performance (CTRs etc.), and measurability making it resonate to a greater degree during these times when advertisers are demanding more concrete ROI?

MM: You’d think, wouldn’t you? I’m not sure about national numbers, but in the South where most of my work is done, it seems that there’s a different barrier to entry. Much like with social media, there’s a general lack of awareness (and therefore, confidence) in mobile marketing.  I’m constantly preaching a reduction in faith-based advertising models like television, radio and newspaper, and a shift to trackable advertising, whether it’s plain old PPC or mobile advertising. But there seem to be a lot of marketing execs who lack experience with the medium, making it harder to convince the rest of the C-suite to support mobile marketing initiatives. It’s like the fact that you can measure ROI at all doesn’t matter - they’re not willing to dabble in mobile unless you can prove ROI to start with. It makes no sense to me.

MB: It’s my contention that mobile and local are so closely related. Online, searches with explicit local intent are about 10% of overall searches. On mobile, it is currently about 2x-3x more than that, and growing. Do you agree?

MM: Yes, I do agree. Every statistical report I’ve seen in the last 8 months indicates that at least 25% of all searches on phones are local business searches. This is why I start my discussions by showing folks the Sprint commercial that was released in May - “Right now, 6000 people are researching restaurants in the back of a cab.” How many “right nows” are there in a typical day… times 6000.

MB: What are the capabilities of the mobile device that will force advertisers to think differently when it comes to marketing or content delivery? Too many advertisers are porting over existing strategies (i.e. display ads) to a smaller screen. Will this change and “grow into” the capabilities of the mobile device including portability, location awareness, etc..?

MM: I think what consumers react most strongly to in the mobile arena is the gradual return of instant gratification. That’s why local business search volume is soaring. What businesses are slow to realize is that searches on phones are not in any way, shape or form about your web site. They’re about your physical location. This is why porting existing ad campaigns from the web will not be sufficient. I’m waiting for someone to fully develop an app that lets you not only research the restaurant, but see a layout, pick your table, and make your reservation without making a traditional phone call or sitting on hold or even talking to another person… then tie into Match.com and hook you up with a dinner date too.

MB: Who is doing it right? Any mobile sites or apps that you admire for delivering content in a way that is fitting to the mobile device and the way people are using it?

MM: The most awesome new phone app I’ve seen was on a Nationwide Insurance commercial. You have a wreck? You click an app that’s connected to everything you need - it calls emergency services for you, it gives you a checklist for your information exchange, locates the nearest agent or office for you, takes pics of the damage for you, starts your claim process for you, and even includes a flashlight function! This is an example of the total 180 that major companies are going to have to learn to do. This app is all about the consumer. Of course, it doesn’t do you a lot of good unless you are a Nationwide customer but this app is all about helping the consumer handle a difficult situation. Companies have got to figure out that they will get a lot farther when their advertising models are more focused on the consumer, not all about the company. On another note, I’ve seen the television commercial announcing this iPhone app ONCE - it made that much of an impact that I defied all “repeat seven times” advertising advice and remembered it after one viewing… I cannot begin to count how many Allstate, Geico, Liberty Mutual and Progressive commercials I’ve seen. I have no idea of the estimated cost of all those commercials compared to the one airing of the Nationwide commercial that I saw, but I can guarantee you that when my insurance renewal rolls around, I’ll be getting a quote from Nationwide for good measure. The return on the investment in more efficiently serving the customer will most definitely pay off with a higher ROI than those 6 million untrackable television commercials for the other major carriers.

MB: Any other advice for companies entering the mobile space or online publishers trying to seek out opportunities in mobile?

MM: Be proactive. Buck the old traditions and hire some new blood (says the 40-some-odd year old). Take steps to build an online reputation before you are forced to take steps to correct it. Be an expert in your area and make sure to let people know about it. Put yourself everywhere you can afford in order to have the best chance of being found - be that online yellow pages, paid ads in a search engine, paid sponsorship of a mobile portal, name on a bus stop bench, name on the back of a little league jersey, where ever you can get publicity without offending people’s sensibilities. If you can associate that with a topic consumers are passionate about, so much the better.

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They are reaching out to local small business owners hosting an event in San Francisco city hall called “Favorite Places - Celebrating Local Businesses.”

This is the first event like this that I’ve seen from the Google Local Business Center. Given some of the trouble that small business owners have had communicating with Google about issues with their local profiles, I’m hoping this is the beginning of a broader outreach effort by Google to local business owners.

Google Favorite Places event invite

Many small business owners that have set up a nice profile in the Google Local Business Center have really come to depend on the traffic and customer inquiries generated from their local profiles and related search results in the Google 10-Pack.

But when problems happen - I know several local business owner who’s profiles were mixed up with other businesses - there is almost no way for them to get the issues corrected.

As many of my colleagues have pointed out, Google is providing a very valuable service here, but business owners need better communication and support from Google.

Let’s hope this event is the beginning of a new “proactive” outreach program by Google to small business owners!

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Join us for a conversation with Local Search experts Mike Belasco and Mary Bowling of Denver-based SEO firm seOverflow. Mike and Mary will talk about what’s hot in Local Search right now.

When: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 @ 12PM PST

Why recent changes in the Google 10 pack are so important and how you can optimize for it
What’s new and what you need to know about David Mihm’s 2009 Local Search Ranking Survey
How to pimp out Google Analytics to track local search
This event is brought to you by Corvent, a leader in webinar event services, and SEMpdx, an educational SEM resource to Portland-area businesses.

To register, please click on the following link: http://www2.eventsvc.com/corvent/register/40be3f94-5ee5-4f24-a870-969e7370d742

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Once upon a time in the world of advertising, life was simple. If you were a brand, the fastest way to reach the biggest consumer audience was through TV. That’s still true though TV is no longer as effective in getting consumers’ attention. If you were a local, small business (SMB), the parallel imperative was to buy print yellow pages. Though SMBs sometimes grumbled at pricing, the yellow pages indisputably delivered value.

Enter the New Digital Reality

Along came the Internet and broadband and the result is the messy fragmented media marketplace we have today – only getting more fragmented with mobile. It’s now very challenging to reach consumers and even harder to maintain their attention. Advertisers large and small are still trying to figure out and navigate this relatively new reality.

Traditional media still deliver value but not at the same level as before. The Internet offers theoretically precise audience targeting and broad reach, but also complexity not found in traditional media. This complexity and the related fragmentation confounds even sophisticated advertisers who, for example, have yet to master “social media” despite the enormous popularity of sites like Facebook and YouTube.

SMBs, for their part, are often confused and even terribly frustrated by the complexity of marketing in the digital era. According to an August 2008 Opus Research/AllBusiness.com small business survey, confusion, lack of budget and lack of time or personnel are among the reasons a clear majority of SMBs don’t advertise online:

Source: Opus/AllBusiness.com survey (survey base 1,000, question n=615)

SMBs have clearly been much slower than their customers to adopt online marketing. And some even maintain the fallacy that the Internet is “not relevant” to their business. Some of the answers in the graphic above reflect a lack of understanding of how the Internet is used by consumers.

The massive SMB market in the US has always been a very attractive target for online publishers and ad networks from the earliest days of the Internet. But the difficulty of reaching SMB advertisers has resulted in development of the current “local search ecosystem” – an awkward set of alliances between traditional (mostly yellow pages) publishers, local search marketing (SEM) vendors and search engines, among a few others. It all works “on paper” but in practice it may be breaking down.

BellSouth and “Local SEM”

In late 2003 or early 2004 BellSouth (now part of AT&T) introduced a product that offered to put SMBs on search engines in addition to the publisher’s own yellow pages site. It was in essence a simplified SEM offering geared specifically to SMBs who wanted to “be on Google,” but didn’t know how. That became the template going forward.

Search engines, unable to acquire large numbers of SMB advertisers directly through self service, turned to established “sales channels” such as yellow pages publishers that could use their “feet on the street” sales reps to reach local businesses. Yellow pages publishers, seeking more traffic than their sites were generating and to prevent potential advertiser defections, all developed similar products: local SEM offerings.

Rather than explaining keywords and bidding strategies, the sale to the SMB was simplified by offering “guaranteed clicks” for a fixed price. That original model has evolved in most cases. But what it permitted was an easy “close” by the sales rep. The complexity of search marketing — setting up and managing a paid-search campaign – was totally outsourced and hidden from the local business. The search engine got ad dollars it might not have otherwise and the publisher kept the advertiser. The publisher-partner/vendor got the headache of fulfillment and managing the campaign itself.

A Perfect Solution That’s Breaking Down

Though a theoretically perfect solution for all players, these local SEM offerings are starting to break down in some cases. There are lots of companies operating in the space and having varying degrees of success. Let’s be clear: what I’m saying doesn’t apply equally to all players in the segment. But in more than a few cases, Local SEM churn rates are between 50% and 100% on an annualized basis.

What that means as a practical matter is that half to all of the SMB advertisers signing up for these local SEM programs are leaving them before the year is out. In some cases, it happens after only a couple of months. In investigating what’s going on, I’ve been offered several explanations by a number of parties in the segment:

• Local advertisers are not being properly educated about SEM and expectations are not being properly set accordingly

• Not enough time is being allowed by the SMB to optimize campaigns

• Sales reps are rewarded according to sales figures only and not retention numbers

• Not enough of the advertiser spend is going directly to media (search) buying, which diminishes the performance of the campaign

Beyond this, the margins for publishers and vendors are thin and nothing like the 50%+ margins of traditional print media. Accordingly yellow pages and some online publishers such as Citysearch are forming direct alliances and trading traffic to start to minimize their direct dependence on search engines and SEM. More broadly publishers and sales channels are seeking to diversify qualified traffic sources to get more and better traffic for less money.

I see this and other related moves in the market as a partial breakdown of the local search ecosystem alliances that formed over the past few years around simple products (i.e., guaranteed clicks) as a way to bring more SMBs online and solve common problems.

The Next-Generation Products

Let’s assume for argument that many of these local SEM products now being sold are unsustainable, what will take their place? After all, the Internet isn’t going away and SMB advertisers can’t return to an all-print strategy.

The challenge for everyone focused on the local space is creating products that can scale, deliver healthy margins and, especially, provide real value to SMBs. But most of what’s in the market today fails in one or more of those areas.

More sophisticated versions of existing SEM offerings that reach broadly into more traffic sources are starting to emerge. And a growing number of SMBs may be able to manage their own marketing on places like Facebook and Twitter because of their relative simplicity. Yet the majority of SMB advertisers will still need help and want to outsource their online marketing to trusted third parties. Accordingly there’s still plenty of opportunity to get the products right and deliver better value to local advertisers.

The marketplace isn’t getting simpler; it’s only getting more complex.

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• Steve Stukenborg - Google TV
• Atif Rafiq - GM of Yahoo! Local
• Greg Sterling
• Andrew Shotland
• Steve Espinosa
• David Mihm
• and more…

The conference is set to take place at the JW Marriott in San Francisco on July 17th. Steve Stukenborg will kick off the conference with a morning Keynote talking about the importance of syngergy between online and offline media and Google’s experience in dealing with this. Stukenborg will also touch on some upcoming features of Google TV and join in an audience Q&A session.

Another key session will include Atif Rafiq, GM of Yahoo! Local and a representative from Google Maps (yet TBD) that will join in an open conversation and audience Q&A about Local Search. The session will cover everything from spam, upcoming features, and more.

Local Search News contributor and all around local guru, Greg Sterling, will be joining me in moderating the sessions throughout the day that cover everything from mobile search, ranking factors, and how to sell to local businesses. The conference will conclude with a round table discussion from leaders in the local search space including representatives from Google, Yahoo! and more.

Local Search Summit

which is taking place on July 17th has a limited amount of tickets available for $495 and will quickly sell out so register now! You can view the official press release here.

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Instead of checking in on all of these websites every day, Google Reader allows you to “subscribe” to them and automatically get the latest blog posts and updates from your favorite sites.

Google Reader Screenshot

This subscription is enabled by something called RSS feeds, and Google Reader allows you to pull together these feeds and view them all in one place.

Then you can sort and scan through the results quickly, covering much more ground than you could by visiting each of the sites by themselves.

A New Google Reader Feature - Bundles

Google just added a new feature to this tool called “bundles,” which allows you to create topical groups of these RSS feeds and share them with friends.

Just last week David Mihm released the Local Search Ranking Factors report. In this report, David surveyed 27 experts in local search and asked them to rank the factors that have the most impact on the Google and Yahoo local search results.

As I read through the report it made me think how valuable it would be to follow the blogs of the people who contributed to the report. Why not make a “bundle” that tracks the blogs of all the contributors?

Since all 27 of the contributors focus on the local search space, subscribing to this bundle would keep you current on the latest tips, tricks and trends in the local search space.

Creating a “Bundle”

So I went into Google Reader, and created a “bundle” with the RSS feeds of all the contributors. (Thanks for the nice instructions on how to create a bundle Lisa!)

Local Search Ranking Factors RSS Bundle

If you subscribe to this feed, you’ll be notified whenever one of the contributors posts something new on their blog. Click here to subscribe to the Local Search Rankings Factors Contributors bundle!

What is RSS?

If you are not familiar with RSS or what it does, this neat little video by Common Craft does a nice job of explaining RSS in plain English.

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For anyone who’s been hiding under a rock the last 6 months or so, Twitter is the preeminent micro-blogging service.  Originally designed around limitations of cell-phone carrier SMS messages to 140 characters, Twitter and its peers provide a very brief messaging platform which has grown to accommodate hundreds of other applications which use Twitter as a backbone.

• Twitpic - Link snapshots to your Twitter account.  Example: http://twitpic.com/1sw97
• Twtvite - Send invitations and track RSVPs online.  Example: http://twtvite.com/wlsvwq
• Twtqpon - Create coupons for distribution on twitter or anywhere online.  Example: http://twtqpon.com/7uz13k
• Twitterfeed - Have a blog?  Automatically tweet (send a message) each new blog post.

There has been a LOT written about Twitter in general and as a marketing and branding tool.  But as yet, there is no primer, no “Twitter for Business for Dummies.”

Even without a primer Jeff Leach, co-owner of Naked Pizza, seems to be well on the way to figuring it out.  That’s not to say that Jeff’s approach would map to the “best practices” of Public Relations (PR) and Social Media (SM) pros but it’s working for @NAKEDpizza and most importantly Jeff is tying it to metrics which matter to his business.

This issue of “metrics” and measuring return on investment (ROI) is hindering adoption of Social Media tools in larger businesses.  Quoting from Last Wednesday night’s inaugural #pr20chat on Twitter:

Social Media ROI Discussion

Social Media Return on Investment discussion on #PR20Chat.

Jeff is feeling good about his Twitter ROI and he’s got the numbers to prove it.  And, importantly for Jeff, it’s hyper-local.  NAKED Pizza is primarily using Twitter to market to an area with a 3 mile radius. Or as Jeff said when we talked about his sign, “I didn’t do it to get TechCrunch talking, I did it to reach the 35,000 people who drive by the store every day.”

Naked Pizza Twitter Sign Going up

Oh right, I may not have mentioned that: Naked Pizza is apparently the first company, period, to replace its old billboard with one calling out for Twitter followers.  And as you can imagine it’s getting a lot of attention.

Clearly a smart guy, Leach realizes there’s more gold in them thar hills, and with Naked’s aspirations toward a national franchise strategy, all PR is good PR.  But from a dollars and cents view, the @NAKEDpizza Twitter strategy is showing its potential.

With his first concerted effort at a Twitter-only promotion, Leach was able to drive 15% of daily revenues with Twitter.  And of those 15%, 90% were new customers!  Not bad for a guy who didn’t even have an account until 5 weeks ago.

And, here’s the crazy part, it’s all him.  No high-falutin’ PR firm.  No “Social Media Expert”, just a guy on a mission to change the world one pizza at a time.
Sure, Robbie Vitrano (@robbievitrano) of the Trumpet Group (a well-known branding and marketing firm) is a friend and advisor, but the Twitter strategy is all Jeff, precipitated by an offhanded remark from Mark Cuban (@mcuban) suggesting he thought there was “something to it”.

When asked, Robbie Vitrano had this to say:

What NAKEDpizza “gets” - and they get it - is that in today’s marketplace there isn’t enough money to buy attention.  But you can earn it by being purposeful, authentic, willing to make mistakes, and most importantly, by having the ability to shut up and listen.  The [Twitter] sign is an example of what the greatest natural marketers bake into their entrepreneurial vision — the courage to believe in your mission.  Twitter is a pretty jiffy tool.  But it’s just that.  First, you have to have something to say.  You’ll quickly find out “beaucoup” as we say in NOLA, if what you have to say is interesting and useful.  Check and check.

So, what are the goals for this local business on twitter?  Jeff Leach (@NAKEDpizza) says it best:

“I needed to drive down cost of marketing.  ROI of other media suck [sic].”

“The average Papa John’s does email, door hangers, hard direct mail.  [We were] looking for a way to leverage emerging social media — [there's] no TV attention, radio is too broad and our coverage area is too small.  We wanted to target the store’s delivery area, everyone around us in 3 mile radius.  ROI on direct mail is getting lower / lower.  Even Big Jimmy’s barbeque has an email newsletter.  Email open rates are dropping, too.”

Some people have taken Mark Cuban’s involvement to mean that Naked Pizza needed help. As it turns out, they were already profitable and one would guess this level of engagement will assure they continue to be.

What the Cuban investment enables - in addition to enabling Mark to develop Texas - is expansion into new markets by franchise.  And, as anyone who has been involved in franchises knows there are rules and systems.  The systems support the developer in replicating the success of the original.
With this in mind I asked Jeff “Does the facility with social media become a requirement for an area developer”?

His answer:

“We won’t sell an area developer deal to a guy who can’t identify who that general manager is going to be and that the GM owns part of the business.  An investor must manage or GM must be invested.

“GM must demonstrate facility with new media.

“As we get our social media legs we’re going to have to prepare to cross that bridge by late summer.”

So what’s next, then, for Naked Pizza and social media?  Jeff indicates to me that he’s been given access to some beta tools and is actively engaged in other top-secret discussions which will enable some pretty exhaustive customer analysis such as “Let’s say Will Scott (@w2scott) orders twice a month (it’s actually more like 4X).  Follows us on Twitter, is a fan on Facebook and is getting my newsletter.  Instead of spending money on physical contact, how do I avoid sending to those already following.”

It should be clear at this point that this is something in which Jeff is personally very invested.  Certainly he’s drawing a crowd of evangelists, but this is a lot of hard work.

Thinking of that, I asked Jeff some follow-up questions by email:

Q: “What does it look like when you reach a saturation point and have to delegate to maintain velocity”?

A: “Given the importance… having the top dogs in our company control that becomes even more important. Our brand is everything. For the next year, the most important thing we can do is have the actual owners experience and learn from this environment - then, and only then, will we truly understand its utility and limitations. Having an employee, intern, or even a marketing company handle our SM makes little sense. That strategy would not result in any real learning or enhanced experience for our customers. Anyone other than the founders and top people… do not possess the breadth of understanding of our mission and lack the context of all the moving parts as we adapt and ‘evolve forward.’ By experiencing this myself, I can apply all that is social media to what we are doing - always looking for an opportunity. Anyone other than me and my partner (Randy Crochet) might miss it.

“Is it healthy?  Is it good for the environment? Was anyone harmed in the procurement of these goods? And so on.

“Through tools such as cotweet… we can “eventually” - though not now - delegate more customer service type inquiries. Interestingly, as we open new locations throughout the country, the challenge will be how we structure our social media at these various locations. We will, of course, have corporate flow but will also require a local feel for each location. Having said that, we will probably be the first franchise company in the country that actually makes ones social media skills and capabilities one of the requirements to be awarded one of our Area Developers Agreements. In other words, money and operational skills are not enough: u must have and possess a grasp of social media and how it operates inside our Pavlov Marketing Plan in order to be our partner. In the Franchising 2.0 world, these skills and  understanding of the evolution of customers will probably be more important than the fact u ran similar businesses for 20 years etc. This means we will probably seek out (and we already have) savvy, younger, and smarter partners.”

“The world is gonna be a better place and we want to be part of it.”

Q:     ”How does your current behavior + your methods of delegation become a template for other small-biz”?

A:  “As for how this becomes a template for other small biz? Have no idea. Social Media is different things to different businesses. I think social media will make entrepreneurs and [their customers] think very hard about what they are selling and whether or not it jives with how people think and will be thinking in the future.

So, there you have it.  Jeff doesn’t have the primer.  We still need to write that “Small Business Social Media for Dummies” book.

Naked Pizza has proven, and continues to prove, that a mission, real engagement and a willingness to be who you are online will drive loyalty and evangelism.

And, 15% of daily sales isn’t enough for Jeff and the Naked Pizza team:

“@NAKEDpizza: c’mon order a few pizzas for eat like an ancestor day. shooting for twitter sales record http://bit.ly/iJYjU”.

Is it local search, or is it word of mouth?  In the final analysis we don’t know its impact on local search  (yet), but the impact on Naked Pizza’s bottom line and the Small Business Social Media psyche is undeniable.

Follow Will Scott (@w2scott) and I’ll let you know when we’ve got that Social Media Small Business primer written.

I’m hungry, it may be time to order some more Naked Pizza.

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Since then geo targeting, browser location awareness, and other tools have helped searchers receive relevant results (mostly sponsored). Google has released a search update where it prompts the user for a city or zip whenever it detects a local search, then displays local results. This has increased overall local search traffic and increased Onebox traffic.

The above mentioned feature looks like this:

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After the user enters the city or zip, instead of modifying the whole search result, Google simply adds a Onebox and keeps the natural results intact with the results from the original query.

With a good amount of research I have been able to pin point the date when this update took place and gather enough information before and after the update to see the effect of this. For those of you that would like to know, my data set before the update was 300,000 keywords referrals from Google and 550,000 after.

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So what did I find? I found that there was a rise from 2.06% to 14.78% in referrals with no apparent geo modifier from Google.  Since Google simply displays a Onebox instead of appending the geo modifier entered by the user to query we know that this traffic is purely from the Onebox.

One can only wonder based on our previous research of Onebox vs. Natural traffic that if the entire result set was changed, how much would this effect truely local traffic to websites?  As more technology becomes available, such as browser location awareness, it is only logical to think that Google (and hopefully Yahoo!) will take advantage of this and automatically display local results to users. In addition with the thought that more people probably do not

enter a geo modifier when prompted, you would imagine a local search traffic would sky rocket.

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