The scheduling space is heating up, with a number of key vendors competing for SMB business, companies such as Groupon and Merchant Circle acquiring and integrating scheduling companies into core activities, and new companies such as MyTime attempting to aggregate all the players.

Bozeman, MT-based Schedulicity is one of the key players in the space, selling scheduling and related services for a range of $19.95 to $39.95 per month, depending on the number of users. The company has attracted “tens of thousands” of SMB accounts, booking 1.25 million appointments per month. This week we talked with CEO Joshua Spitzer was promoted to CEO. We talked to Spitzer this week about his vision for appointment- driven SMB commerce (or “A-Comm”)

Spitzer’s first major development is the revamp of Schedulicity.com. In its new guise, it is not only a portal where people book local services, but one that also focuses on customer analytics and consumer discovery of new services. The discovery effort is a major initiative and was launched in late March.

“We facilitate impulse purchasing of services,” says Spitzer. He notes that every person who books a service via Schedulicity is a potential user of the new portal, and is a strong potential customer of all.

“If they used us to book a hair appointment, they may use us for their next massage or to book an appointment in another industry vertical,” says Spitzer.

Meanwhile, Schedulicity’s development continues unabated, covering 60 verticals. Spitzer says the company remains focused on landing SMBs, which he says is always the hard part. A key part of its strategy is to work with third parties such as CosmoProf, a division of Beauty Systems Group, LLC for hair stylists.

“Developing a valuable supply of appointments is difficult,” says Spitzer. “For starters, you not only have to sell to service providers, you have to change the way they do business.” But the ROI is proven – especially if they use Schedulicity as a promotional engine to help drive new customers for unfilled times.

The company, in fact, has two promotional products that are the beginning of efforts to diversify revenue streams: “Pop Up Offers” allow the company to distribute last minute deals to replace cancellations, etc.; and “Deal Manager,” a self-serve product that enables merchants to run their own daily deal type promotions. Additional functionality will be introduced “later this summer.”

BIA/Kelsey recently published the second in a series of reports based on specific cuts of data from our Local Commerce Monitor research. LCM is BIA/Kelsey’s long-running study of how U.S. small business advertisers are evolving their use of media to acquire and retain customers.

The second of these “Spotlight” reports focuses on small business advertisers that are operating customer loyalty programs. In LCM Wave 16, 40 percent of respondents reported having a customer loyalty program. (We provided respondents with this definition of a loyalty program: “[A] program in which you might offer discounts or special promotions to frequent customers.”)

The LCM data shows that SMBs with loyalty programs are distinctive from those without such programs in several important ways:

– SMBs with loyalty programs are vastly more engaged with their customers, across the board.
– Loyalty programs are just as popular with SMBs that depend on customer acquisition as on customer retention.
– SMBs with loyalty programs spend much more on advertising and web presence than those without them.
– SMBs with loyalty programs appear to be very satisfied that the programs contribute to business growth.
– SMBs with loyalty programs use more online services, and are more inclined to consider purchasing them from an advertising or marketing services provider.

Future LCM Spotlight reports will address changes in media usage (including insight into new product adoption), customer engagement, sales channels and self-serve, and mobile, among others.

BIA/Kelsey will be conducting the 17th Wave of LCM this summer, in time to inform the messaging at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing, coming up Sept. 11-13 in Austin, Texas.

Photo: CNN

Online restaurant ordering and discovery giants GrubHub and Seamless have agreed to merge their operations, creating a single company. Chicago-based GrubHub currently serves more than 20,000 food ordering establishments in 500 cities, while New York-based Seamless serves more than 12,000 food ordering establishments in 400 U.S. cities plus London.

GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney, who co-founded the company in 2004, keeps the CEO job. Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky becomes president. Zabusky recently came on to spin off the operation from Aramark, the corporate catering giant.
The two companies had been going head-to-head in a number of their markets. Both share a vision of the food ordering business being rapidly transformed via smart phone.

We had an extensive discussion with Zabusky in March. At that time, he noted that Seamless had two million regular users and grossed $85 Million in topline revenues in 2012. It projects $100 million in top line revenue in 2013, with major growth seen in coming years.

The company has had a strong foothold in the corporate market, providing food ordering and delivery to law firms, tech firms and investment houses. But its major effort has been focused on the consumer side, which has been experiencing year-over-year growth of 60 percent.

The company has 300 people in three major offices, as well as field based sales. While it is best known for its strong business in Manhattan, where it recently opened a 28,000 square foot facility,, Zabusky notes that the company has a strong presence in 13 major U.S. markets. He added that Seamless had “a major national expansion strategy,” and was well-situated to execute it with a customer care center in Salt Lake City.

The key to growth, said Zabusky, was to keep selling new products and features to its food establishment partners. “We don’t make money unless they make more money.”

Zabusky noted that Seamless has been processing electronic order forms, and providing electronic terminals. plus table side ordering apps. Generally, its focus is to move restaurants away from fax machines, and away from phone calls and paper, which he says remains the segment’s biggest competition.

With Seamless, restaurants move up to a “multi-platform portal,” where they could “view, confirm and track orders,” he said. Restaurants also leverage Seamless and its vast network for discovery and retention. For instance, it offers different deals on different days to keep customers coming back. “It is very different than the daily deals space,” he said.

The industry’s transformation via mobile, however, is expecially key. Zabusky says it represents 40 percent of the total business, up from 10 percent a year ago. But for online food ordering, mobile doesn’t just represent a phone. The company’s best customers use the PC-based Web, phones and tablets, he says. “Thirty percent of the mobile volume comes from the iPad.”

After the merger is completed, major competitors for the combined company will include Living Social, which has recently bet big on online food ordering; Delivery.com, which claims a roster of almost 10,000 restaurants in 50 cities; and Eat24.com, which covers 20,000 restaurants in 1,000 cities across the country.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Kendall Fargo, CEO and founder of Rewarder. Some of you may remember Fargo from his days leading StepUp Commerce, and early leader in what is now the growing area of real time retail inventory data (i.e. Retailigence). StepUp was acquired by Intuit in 2006.

Fargo first founded Rewarder with the idea of democratizing and flipping the common practice of employer referral bonuses. When I say flip, I mean that job candidates can set bounties for referrals to open positions. That makes a lot of sense in a buyers (employer’s) market when jobs are scarce.

“We were finding that people would put up offers that were equal to an entire paycheck,” said Fargo. This makes sense given how much job candidates will value job placement when they’re in that position. It’s their livelihood and thus something that is very price inelastic. So a marketplace was born.

Fargo and team have since expanded the model in categories and functionality. It now stands as more of an open marketplace for what I’d generally describe as assistance in finding anything. Those things could be vacation tips, collectibles, expert advice in obscure areas an anything in between.

A few examples the company gave me of real life success stories include:

– Man looking for a video of a basketball game aired on ESPN 2 over 10 years ago (he played in the game)
– Man looking for recommendations on social services to help an elderly neighbor
– Man looking for someone to proofread his manuscript
– Woman looking for a book from her childhood
– Woman providing a travel itinerary for a 3 day trip to Nashville

The way it works is like a reverse craigslist. Instead of a seller-initiated process of posting what is available. It is a buyer-initiated process of indicating demand and stating a bounty. If you think about it, that product model works better for long tail or obscure needs. And that’s one of the areas where Rewarder shines.

This has attracted lots of experts on certain topics, giving them extra income and playing into their passion to exercise that knowledge. These “solvers” can monitor queries from “seekers” and even set up push alerts for new queries.  This makes it similar to Task Rabbit and Zaarly, but less task oriented.

Rewarder works particularly well in categories for which the need is high and the solution is scarce. This causes price to be relatively inelastic for seekers, driving up rewards. The company benefits from this, as it takes a cut of the reward as a fee  for creating the marketplace and processing the payment.

The time could also be ideal for Rewarder, given the growth of the “sharing economy” and mobility. The latter creates an environment where seekers and solvers in a time sensitive mode can realize more value in the product.  This is similar to the way that eBay has found lots of success in mobile.

Rewarder is also generally interesting in that it solves some of the longstanding deficiencies of search — particularly in long-tail queries.  Rather than an algorithmic solution, it makes searching for scarce items more human-based and in that way sidesteps some of the technical challenges of natural language search.

So far there have been  $14 million in rewards offered, 500,000 registered members and a 4x increase in users over the past 6 months. Each reward currently sees an average of 7 responses. We expect this growth will continue as virality is inherent in the product. We’ll continue to keep a close eye as this plays out.

Update: Note that the registered user count has been updated from a previous typo.

We like the idea of using corporations as a distribution base for media and services. In the 1990s, The Family Education Network built a great newsletter business distributed in corporate lobbies. The concept’s been widely extended with the addition of email and the ability to more effectively target employees based on different criteria.

NextJump, for instance, has built a business providing discounts and deals sent out as part of employee communications. The deals are generally aggregated from other sources, but it can target the offers based on buying and browsing habits. It takes a commission from sales. The service is free to companies.

Now we’re also looking at San Francisco-based AnyPerk, which shifts the employer shopping model to a premium offering, charging $5 a month per employee. CEO and Founder Taro Fukuyama tells us that the 15-person company — a graduate of Y Combinator — now has 2,500 companies signed up, distributing perks from 250 different marketers. Investors include Andressen Horowitz, SV Angel and a number of individuals, as well as Japanese-based funds .

Fukuyama says that AnyPerk’s goal is to use its volume-buying capability to drive discounts of 5-50 percent. It proves its value as a consumer-centric service from the get-go, rather than serving the interests of merchants. “We do everything we can to save them more than $5 a month” he says.

Typically, customers will start with 15 percent monthly discounts on mobile phones and services and work their way up to other products, specifically monthly utility products such as gyms, video services or rent. There may be 20 things you pay for every month, he says.

Entertainment, especially, stands out. AnyPerk’s top products, in order, are fitness, entertainment, travel and cell phone. Among its perk providers are Verizon, AMC, Redbox, Regal Entertainment Group, Equinox, AT&T, Budget, Zipcar, T-Mobile and LA Fitness.

Fukuyama, a native of Japan, tells us that employer shopping services are common in his homeland, where there are four major companies. But the concept is still relatively new to the U.S.

Payment processors and related companies work with most SMBs and are increasingly seen as a potential sales channel for reaching them with additional services. This week, we talked with one processor, Boston-based Merchant Warehouse, about its efforts to leverage its base of 75,000 business customers beyond terminal sales.

CEO Henry Helgeson told us the 15 year-old, 300 employee company got its start selling terminals, but has seen strong growth in new products such as integrated coupons that anchor its “Genius” customer engagement platform. A horde of companies have introduced coupons, for instance, but many businesses have no idea how to redeem them, given the constraints of their existing POS systems, he says. The rising use of mobile phones for payments and promotions has made it an especially big issue.

The move to integrate promotions such as coupons and a wide range of payment types into payment solutions has also changed how Merchant Warehouse works with its customers, which range from alternative payment companies such as LevelUp to value added resellers. “We are moving from working with tech teams to working with marketing teams,” he says.

What has become increasingly understood is how complex it all is. Many businesses had hoped to have a single point of presence for payments, just as they similarly had hoped to have a single search engine and online point of contact in the 1997-98 time frame, he says.

And as it turned out they had to work with 50 search engines and points of contacts, they’re beginning to see they have got to plan on working with a wide range of payment solutions. “They want one closed loop wallet. But there will be many, many wallets,” says Helgeson. There are 200 entry points in the POS value chain, he notes.

Former Localeze business develoment guy Gib Olander is back in the game, this time switching his focus from local business listings innovation to maximizing effective local business reviews. Think of a variation of “Net Promoter Scores” for local business.

Olander’s new company, Local Viewpoints has won seed funding from Wavetable Labs. It launched at the end of March, starting with four sales people hitting businesses up in hometown Chicago, as well as other markets.

The company basically sends out a short survey after customers shop a location, providing instant feedback to the location, analytics (time of day, products purchased) and most importantly, an online review . The surveys take about a minute to complete.

Seventy-five businesses are currently subscribing to the service, which is $299 a year. Business categories range from chiropractors to furniture stores to plumbers to high-end restaurants.

“We’re trying to bridge together all the forms of customer feedback” and measuring customer satisfaction, including online reviews and customer feedback, says Olander. The problems with other sources is that customer feedback simply isn’t being captured, he adds. Just six percent of consumers are willing to write reviews. With the world going mobile, and everyone being just seconds away from providing feedback, however, there really are no excuses.

Local Viewpoints, of course, is not the only company focused on driving up reviews via short response surveys. We’ve recently covered the efforts by SupportLocal to drive up local business recommendations via a fast-paced, 27-question local recommendations page.

Here’s an interesting InfoGraph that Local Viewpoints has put together about the Word of Mouth space.

Increased investment, a bullseye on customer acquisition, yet unconvincing results. These are the core themes emerging from Manta’s recently-released Q1 SMB Wellness Index, a survey of small business owners focused on social media. They are the very themes called out in BIA/Kelsey’s LCM 16 SMB research. SMBs continue to pour more time and energy into social media activity; they do so to capture new business; their ROI is spotty.

A few highlights from the Wellness Index:

- Nearly 50 percent of SMBs have increased time spent in social media. Only seven percent scaled back. That said, three-quarters of SMBs dedicate fewer than five people to managing social media activities. 53 percent deploy just one.

- SMBs’  investment in social media has two clear (and related) objectives: customer acquisition (36 percent)  and lead generation (19 percent).

- Even with increased investment and clearly-stated goals (albeit perhaps not necessarily the right ones?), SMBs social ROI assessments remain murky, with 61 percent giving the thumbs-down. And Facebook is the hardest to maintain, even as the largest and most widely-used network.

The upshot? SMBs need a clearer path to understanding, engagement and success…perhaps more than ever. As they invest more while still coming up short on ROI, we’re left to ask the “social media insanity” question: are business owners doing the same things they’ve always done, perhaps in greater proportion, while expecting different results?

Something’s gotta give, and change. That’s precisely where Manta sees its role moving forward – not merely as a discovery engine or content forum for small businesses, but as CEO Pam Springer put it, a full-fledged “social hub.” This entails helping SMBs create a following by suggesting who to connect with and how to engage, syndicating content throughout Manta’s network and across the full social spectrum, and building a “feedback loop for them around all social activity” that can produce clearer ROI attribution.

Of the many possible causes of poor social media ROI, Springer spotlighted the attribution problem. No, SMBs don’t create content very easily – and that must come first – but when they do, “how does that impact a customer? Connecting the dots around lead generation is fuzzy.”

Expect Manta to take a more active role in the full spectrum of SMB social activity moving forward, including deep data mining to suggest engagement strategies, syndicated publishing and a more robust content experience within its network to foster social discovery and ROI.