Social media may not be worth much as an advertising medium right now, but it has become a critical part of real estate marketing, according to speakers at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco. “It is not just FaceBook or MySpace,” noted Sami Inkinen, cofounder and COO, Trulia. “With Trulia Voices, you …

Microsoft announced today that it will integrate Live Search with the Facebook network. This will include search advertising served with results (via adCenter).
This grows out of the existing relationship that included Microsoft’s $240 million investment in Facebook and its placement of contextual ads throughout the network. At the time of that deal, it was a big …

Over the past two months, we have been talking with sales reps in a variety of local media outlets who are selling search engine marketing. While we feel like some sales organizations are making headway in selling a significant volume of SEM products to their customers, we find that the technical aspects of SEM often …

Craigslist is arguably the No. 1 real estate site with real estate-oriented page views in the “low billions per month.” So it makes sense to have founder Craig Newmark address the first day of the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco.
Newmark never reveals very much about the service, humbly referring to himself as …

 
The headlines from this week’s edition: 
GE: The Heat on Immelt  
Google: Weathering the Storm? 
The Future of Fannie and Freddie 
Anheuser-Busch’s Troubled Brew 
This wedding tradition of something old and something new is appropriate for BusinessWeek’s leading online stories this week. GE is the something old, Google is the something new … you get it. The remainder of the saying …

AT&T Advertising & Publishing saw a 3.3 percent first-half revenue decline, to US$2.82 billion. Part of the decline reflects the sale of the L.M. Berry operation to Local Insight Media, and the resulting lost revenues. That deal closed early in the second quarter. AT&T reported that its Yellowpages.com revenues grew 40.2 percent in the second quarter, …

An independent developer has created a Google Maps mashup that is basically another way to navigate Citysearch business profiles in Google Maps. The mashup has also recently been optimized for the iPhone.
This isn’t an iPhone native app that can be downloaded from the App Store, but rather a Web-based tool accessed through the device’s Safari …

Television is becoming more and more interactive, bringing us closer to a day when we’ll have pull-based content and ad delivery. IPTV promises a lot here, by virtue of its IP-based architecture. But there are lots of other factors that need to coalesce before we get there, including ad delivery, advertiser adoption and Madison Avenue …

Google has rolled out a walking directions feature in its mapping product, previously available to few users in a limited rollout (as the company often tests new products or features). This was first offered by AskCity in 2006, but then the market was once again deprived of the functionality when it killed its homegrown mapping …

In this economic downturn, I’ve heard so much talk about one medium or another making claims that it is delivering all the leads and traffic a company needs. Online selling against Yellow Pages, Yellow Pages selling against newspapers, newspapers selling against online classified sites, and the list goes on and on. The reality is no …

Having been through the post 9/11 advertising downturn with a Yellow Pages sales agency, I can attest that 2001 and 2002 saw a dramatic increase in bad debt and slow-paying customers. Some publishers in the U.S. went from 2 percent to 3 percent bad debt and slow-pay customers to 5 percent to 8 percent in …

Ad agencies look at a number of factors when they’re placing local media, such as “reach,” “targeted,” “easy,” “CPMs,” “environment,” “contextual,” “behavioral” and “geo-centric,” said Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of Centro, who was speaking at this week’s ShopLocal summit in Chicago.
Some sites consistently do better than others in different areas, noted Riegsecker. Vertical sites, for instance, …

Here are the highlights from the TKG blog over the past week, in case you missed any posts. Click below to read each post in full.
Multi-Media Drives More Conversions
In the ever increasing multi-product world of directory and local media organizations, this type of data gives even more credence to selling a set of media solutions …

Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke out once again about the company’s need to better monetize YouTube, during a call following the company’s under-performing second-quarter earnings announcement.
“I personally do not believe the perfect (YouTube) ad has been invented,” he said, in a showing of impatience for the asset’s inability to provide the expected return on its …

Watching the rankings of free applications in the iTunes store (measured by download volume) over the past week, I’ve seen lots of ups and downs.
In local apps, Yellowpages.com’s local search application went from 21 yesterday to 26 today, while WHERE went from 19 to 21, and Loopt went from 40 to 50. UrbanSpoon has meanwhile …

A recently released research paper from Integrated Media Measurement Inc., based on data from 3,000 panelists in six major markets, finds that multi-platform advertisers see increases in the number of consumers they reach while also significantly improving conversion rates. 
According to the IMMI paper:
Increasingly, major advertisers are launching multiple platform campaigns and media companies are …

OK, so it’s not really outdoor advertising, but the big six legacy airlines have begun to slap ads onto their paper tickets and boarding passes.
The new ads will include geographically relevant promotions for destination businesses like hotels, restaurants, theme parks and golf courses. They started showing up this week on Delta flights to Las Vegas, and …

It is an awkward time for a company to be holding an affiliate meeting right after it has been sold. This week, ShopLocal was put in this position for its long planned meeting with 120 retail partners in Chicago (where I was a speaker). The company has just been consolidated by Gannett, which bought off …

Now that the 3G iPhone and App Store have arrived, the iPhone is decidedly more appealing and user friendly for both mainstream users, and for companies of all sizes to create and deliver mobile apps. The previous post explored how local search on the device is shaping up to have clear social elements.
But what role …

Social features have been a core element of many of the local search applications in the iPhone’s AppStore, such as WHERE, Whrrl and Loopt (WHERE is in the top 20 downloaded free apps so far).
Each of these not only tells you where to find things locally (each features different categories to search), but also …