Excerpted from Feb 25, 2010 Search Engine Land article
Things in the local search space are out of the control of the typical small business owner; even if they know about the Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local Listings, or Bing Local Listing Center, they’re only covering half their bases (according to last year’s15 Miles survey.) And other portals and data companies typically don’t push updates live with the same alacrity as Google and Bing.
At our recent Local University in Spokane, Mike Blumenthalexplained to small business owners how Google and Bing assemble a Local listing. Mike explained that the major search engines pull in a number of disparate pieces of information (street address, phone number, hours of operation, etc.) about a business from just about any source they can crawl – obviously weighted more heavily towards sources they trust, including their own Local databases.
He further blew our minds with the notion that this two dimensional chart of location information not only expanded infinitely in two dimensions to cover additional local information sources, but also extended into three dimensions, with time as the additional variable. Suggesting, in other words, that recent changes to listing information that aren’t corroborated by other sources may be overwhelmed by the weight of a particular listing’s history!
This lack of transparency and understanding of how listing “clusters” are formed understandably leads to frustration on the part of the business owner, particularly when his experience to date has simply been to tell the Yellow Pages rep how he’d like his information represented year after year.
The bottom line: if you don’t claim and verify each and every listing on each and every search engine and data provider, Google and the other search engines are forced to make a “best guess,” by clustering information that seems to match up, and they don’t always guess right.
My Take
The daunting and inefficient choices for local advertising are temporary - a left-over effect of the mad rush by businesses to get found on the Web.
As Web advertising options begin to take shape, social media is achieving dominance in both traffic and advertising effectiveness. HubSpot's Mark Roberge demonstrated this in his keynote at yesterday's Hartford Business Journal eTechnology Summit. By a show of hands, he illustrated the staggering contrast between purchase decisions influenced by traditional ads vs. social/web research & recommendations.
The "Social Web" provides major advantages over the "Search Web" - higher quality interactions; less "noise"; lower cost' higher yield. Consumers and advertisers who 'get social' will realize these benefits.
The only losers will be the firms who thought short-term and provided unimaginative quick-fixes as well as old media firms that failed to adapt.
By Greg SterlingLate last week I got a tour of new site AlikeList, yet another competitor to enter the local consumer destination game. The folks behind the site, who include Jim Delli Santi (once of SBC yellow pages and later Yahoo!) and now Mark Law (most recently of MapQuest but before that Yahoo!), have built something that sits right at the nexus of “local” and “social.”
Jim Delli Santi told me that his revelation was that local was fundamentally about “people and relationships” and not technology. Nothing here exactly is new but they’ve put all the pieces together in a very compelling way — at least I think so.
Many local competitors have tried to add a “friends filter” to local sites, either on their own destination sites (e.g., GoodRec) or as an app on Facebook or by incorporating Facebook Connect (e.g.,Citysearch). But AlikeList does this in a more “organic” and elegant way.
Interestingly, AlikeList can be used as a “memory aid” or “to-do list” of sorts. The “try” list functionality is very interesting: these are businesses that I want to remember for the future, that other people have recommend.
...No feature here is unique or particularly new. But the way these guys have conceived and put the site together is very strong and the totality does amount to something new.
I would encourage others to take a close look at what they’ve done. This is a site that has a lot going on, yet consumers can “get” it quickly and there are low barriers to participation. Oh . . . and they just got $5 million from Syncom Venture Partners.
My Take
ALikeList looks great and easy to use. It also offers SMBs with an online CRM which is valuable.
But since
a). recommendations occur offline as well as online
b). they are based on trust;
c). trust is found in relationships; and
d). the social Web is all about relationships, their approach leaves me with obvious questions.
Is AlikeList built on the foundation of members’ social graphs? Or, like on other “Web 2.0″ local search sites, are relationships treated more like an “add-on” than the starting point?
Can ALikeList capture & facilitate "offline" as well as "online"? Maybe their mobile app will facilitate this.
They may be onto something big if they get it right.
- - Tim
About Greg Sterling - Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence (SMI), a consulting and research firm focused on the Internet’s influence on offline consumer purchase behavior. He also is a Senior Analyst for Internet2Go, an advisory service from Opus Research tracking the evolution of the mobile Internet.
Before SMI, Sterling ran The Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media program. Prior to The Kelsey Group, Sterling was at TechTV where he helped produce “Working the Web,” a national television show on e-business and the Internet. Before that he was a founding editor and executive producer at AllBusiness.com. And prior to joining AllBusiness, Sterling was a practicing attorney in San Francisco.
Excerpted from a Kelsey Group Blog by Michael Taylor November 27, 2007
Empowering consumers to directly ask companies for what they want and to vocalize when they see something they do not agree with has certainly become the “norm” today. Bloggers have become citizen journalists, Web sites are “community owned” and supported, and brands are allowing consumers to direct new TV ads – all indications that major companies have understood the change in the marketing rules. Time Magazine in fact named “you” as the person of the year.
According to the Time article: “It’s about the many wresting power from the few … and how that will not only change the world, but change the way the world changes. In other words, ‘you’ have the power, and brands and its institutions must get ready for the changes that ‘you’ will demand.”
The Yellow Page brand continues to remain closed to consumers, and consumers are showing their displeasure by refusing to accept or keep the print book and opting for local search options on the major search engines rather than going to publisher sites.
The Yellow Pages industry has yet to fully embrace and understand that its advertiser base and content is currently less of a strategic advantage in the age of the consumer.
Consumers are in charge and they are vocal about what they want and who they support. Yellow Pages as a group has done a mediocre job of telling consumers why the print and online directories are relevant products in their lives, how they are changing to meet new demands, and how consumers can continue to benefit from the most comprehensive database of local businesses available.
In this age of “empowered consumers,” what can publishers do to understand what consumers want and how they want to interact with the massive local database Yellow Pages offers? Does the industry really have a grasp on how the way people search for local information has changed and how can this understanding change the way the print product is formatted and produced?
The goal should be to listen and learn from consumers about what makes for a great local search experience, then delivering it in real, differentiated, meaningful features and benefits.
The empowered consumer shift is well under way and now is the time for the Yellow Pages industry to use its considerable local advantage while it can to swing the pendulum back toward viewing the directory product line as the most comprehensive source of local business information whenever and wherever people need it.
My Take
It ain't never gonna happen.
The Yellow Pages will not change - at least not until they are forced to. Nor can they - their functionally obsolete printed medium is so far out of the consciousness of 20-something's making their first major purchases - homes, appliances - that it would require past life regression therapy to resurrect.
The yellow tome will soon be amusing history. "Hey kids, when I was young the coal man delivered house-to-house in a horse-drawn wagon" will become "Hey kids, when I was young they dropped big yellow phone directories on my driveway that we used to use to find phone numbers. Isn't that unbelievable?"
"Local advertising networks will continue to lose relevance as search engines become the first stop for consumers. To date they have prospered as the “middlemen of paid search". Will savvy advertisers cut them out of the loop?"
Advertisers aren't their only threat. New media may arise that are easier to use and morebeneficial.
"Compared to the print publishers of old, these local guides offered outstanding value to advertisers. Using a performance-based model, a business paid for results in the form of a click or a call. Advertisers had the ability to better gauge spending and ad performance."
Pay for clicks. H-m-m-m-m... Is that the best that we can come up with?With AdWords, Google forever changed the nature of advertising on the internet. They applied the same performance based model to the entire web. The search behemoth now controls close to 50% of online ad dollars. Google’s ad distribution far exceeds that of its closest competitors.
My Take"The engine vs. the water wheel – gas vs. gravity"
Vrooom. VROOOMMM!!!
Engines are great. They’re sexy and provide horsepower to get you where you’re going - faster and with more stuff.
But engines need to be fueled and maintained. They also cause pollution, eventually wear out and end up scrapped.
Water wheels are quite different from engines. They expend no fuel. Rather they use gravity and the natural, non-polluting, renewable energy of flowing water that has the power to carve canyons, shape shorelines and move large vessels. Water wheels require minimal operating expense. Anyone who can get to the water’s edge can harness their power.
Let’s draw an analogy and say that engines are to water wheels as search engines are to word of mouth referrals.
Internet search engines are like their internal combustion cousins. They are great for the Internet superhighway – but get bogged down on local back roads when trying to find trustworthy products or services in your town.
Fuel for these search engines makes them an expensive advertising choice. Charges for clicks really add up considering that so many don’t convert to sales. Search engines also need periodic maintenance – optimization to keep them performing better. This gets expensive as competitors are both paying to continually optimize their search engine results, creating a costly cycle.
The pollution caused by search engines - customer dissatisfaction and advertiser disillusionment - choke their efficiency. Both customers and advertisers are in a dilemma when a search engine is replaced by a newer, more powerful model. Do I trust the new one? Should I use both? Should I pay for both? If not both, which one?
‘Word of mouth’, on the other hand, captures a natural process that occurs whenever people are together. It can be positive or negative for businesses and is highly trustworthy. ‘Word of mouth’ covers all topics from gossip to business or medical referrals.
The motivation of organic ‘word of mouth’ is communal benefit - benefiting the "refer-ee" as well as the trusted service provider. It is a very personal interchange, sharing trust and experience. Although they would love to do so, and many have tried, vendors cannot create artificial “buzz” that which generates true word of mouth referrals.
Would a consumer prefer a ‘search engine’ or a word of mouth referral when purchasing a product or service? The answer is obviously ‘word of mouth’ – their choice is less stressful and they normally receive preferential treatment during the transaction.
Which prospective customer/patient/client would a local business prefer? A word of mouth referral or a sales engine sales lead? Any local professional, merchant, contractor or business owner will tell you that their best sales result from ‘word of mouth’. More of these referrals translate into sales and they are more likely to refer more of their friends and neighbors in the future.
What if consumers could harness their local, “offline” network of trusted providers with an online network of friends and associates? What if businesses could reward their clients and the community when they provide offline referrals through such an online network?
If ‘word of mouth’ is so superior to search engines for local commerce, why not harness it using a technology and common sense?
Sunday August 26, 2007 - 11:17am (EDT)
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