Yodle, the third-party SMB reseller, has now divided its business into “Yodle Sponsored” and “Yodle Organic.” The formation of the latter division, which has been live for a month with 150 clients, is a recognition that SMBs are increasingly relying on organic search as much as paid search — and they need help driving exposure to their Web sites, blogs, YouTube, and social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

For $400 a month, with six-month initial contracts, Yodle Organic is set to pump up its clients’ organic search rankings. It will provide personalized consultations, design and code Web sites to maximize search rankings; help create and syndicate video; distribute local business profiles to search sites and directories; and provide a dashboard that allows SMBs to measure goals.

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham says the timing feels right. “SEO’s price-per-lead and price-per-click is substantially lower than SEM. But it isn’t ‘either-or.’ They complement each other,” he says. “SEO takes time to build your site so it becomes visible and builds authority in the eyes of the search engines. It is about building equity in a brand that is long lasting.”

The challenge is to properly scale the effort for each client and make money — Yodle gets an average of about $1,000 per month from its 7,000 paid search clients. “No one has productized and automated and put clear accounting” around something like this, he says. But “we’ve been building Web sites for three years. We’re experts in automation.”

Still, it is an ongoing experiment as Yodle works to get clients non-paid traffic in such new areas as maps, article sharing sites and even Google’s 7 Pack. “We look at these things as organic distribution,” says Cunningham.

Content production is probably the biggest question mark for Yodle (and for any company entering this space). Out of the gate, Yodle is using a combination of external contributors, internal editors and curated content from other sources. It hopes to provide at least 10 fresh pieces of content a month to each client.

Special thanks to the 60 speakers and 515 attendees who made the ILM:09 conference such a great learning and socializing experience. Among the 85 conferences produced by John and Pam Kelsey and their team (including myself), we think it might have been one of the best.

In addition to the excellent, on-the-spot coverage of the event by the BIA/Kelsey analysts, other extensive and excellent coverage has been provided by David Mihm on his blog; Andrew Krukowski of TVNewscheck.com; Andrew Shotland at Local SEO Guide; Cory Bergman at LostRemote.com (a featured speaker vis a vis his dayjob at MSNBC.com; and Mark Briggs at Journalism 2.0.

There is also a fantastic, lengthy Twitter feed from conference attendees (and weirdly, off-site observers). Thanks especially to champion Twitterer Emerson Calegaretti, Internet Business Director at Publicar do Brasil. Emerson, we owe you some kind of prize!

Our next event is Marketplaces 2009, March 22-24 in San Diego. You’ll hear more about that after the New Year.

The Los Angeles Times today debuted “Mapping L.A.,” an online effort to map 87 distinctive neighborhoods in the sprawling Southland. For the paper, the designation of neighborhoods goes beyond civic duties. Not only does it intend to base news stories around them, but also hyperlocal marketing, advertising and blogging effortsl.

The initial cut of Mapping L.A.’s neighborhoods was based on census tracts but has been adjusted for the “geographical, historic and socioeconomic associations that define communities,” per release. One of the mapping site’s features is that it can be edited by readers on a WIKI basis — something many Angelenos will probably do as they assess the real estate impact of having their house listed in “Franklin Hills” or “Los Feliz”; and “Beverly Hills” or “Century City.”

“Dorothy Parker famously said Los Angeles was ‘72 suburbs in search of a city,’ so it’s not surprising that residents take their neighborhood names so seriously,” notes reporter Bob Pool in an article about the new mapping feature in today’s Times. “Those designations are part tradition and history but also part economic and political.”

The New York Times covers a new daily news provider called The Printed Blog that’s building a new model based on what it hopes to be the best of online and offline distribution. As its name implies, this will involve the production of daily print publications with content taken from blogs.

Many questions come to mind, such as blog content’s immediacy versus a print production/distribution cycle. The idea is first met with skepticism but some aspects of the model make sense.

• Content is free, pulling from existing blogs. This eliminates newspapers’ biggest expense: reporters (rev share of advertising is offered to bloggers).
• Papers are free to users, relying on ad revenue. This is not only the new paradigm of the Web, but free dailies are also the only form of newspaper seeing any revenue growth.
• Ad sales costs are cut by offering self-service ad management on its Web site (this could have its own set of drawbacks).
• Ads can be hyperlocally targeted based on the paper’s ability to design different layout, content and ads based on a given neighborhood. A city like Chicago will get 50 different versions of the daily paper.
• Centralized printing and distribution costs are curbed by installing printers nearer to distribution points (paper format involves three or four 11-by-17-inch sheets of white paper, laid out like a blog instead of newspaper columns).
• The central Chicago office space has been offered free to founder and recently laid off MediaNews Group staffer Joshua Karp. His staff is all volunteers.

Best of Both Worlds?

So will this work? It’s certainly different and that’s probably a good sign. Given the technology, advertising and media consumption standards of today, no one in his or her right mind would build a newspaper business from scratch the way they are currently modeled. These are operations built on the realities of a different time.

It does bring together some of the best of online distribution with the best of print. In other words, it’s lean and targeted for content production and distribution, yet it can garner print ad rates, which are much higher than those of online display advertising.

On this note, it hopes, with its hyperlocal targeting, to appeal to the types of advertisers that are increasing ad budgets, not decreasing them.

From The Times:

Advertisers will like The Printed Blog, Mr. Karp said, because it is hyper-local. “A clothing boutique or snow removal service can advertise to the 2,000 people who are most likely to buy the service, as opposed to many, many more,” he said.

About 15 advertisers have signed on for the first issue, including Flowerpetal.com, a florist in Chicago. “The great thing about it is you can change your pitch based on different neighborhoods,” said Brian Crummy, Flowerpetal.com’s founder.

Ads from local businesses are one reason that free dailies have been a rare bright spot in the newspaper industry. Unlike struggling car companies and department stores, which are mainstay advertisers of metropolitan dailies, small businesses have increased their ad spending during the recession, several publishers said.

Making It Happen

The proof will come down to Karp’s ability to navigate a few potential pitfalls. Will it be a nightmare to produce 50 different customized copies of the daily news for different neighborhoods? Will enough advertisers show up to self-service their ad campaigns (this is a big one — often underestimated)?

And most of all, will the content be relevant enough? Blog content in its timeliness, tone and quality is quite fitting (indeed, a product) of its medium. Once you take that content and put it on a printed page, it’s not quite the same (not to mention a day old).

This is exactly what I ran into when trying to do something similar with this blog. Print begs for a different tone and set of editorial standards. Once printed on paper, will it require copy editors? That’s a considerable cost not worked into the equation above. It’s always more work than you think it’s going to be. To be fair, Karp has the newspaper experience to know this.

Like many things, it sounds good on paper (bad pun intended), but will have to be proven out in practice.

Placeblogger, a 2007 recipient of $220k from the Knight News Challenge, has recently been revamped by its founders to encourage more personal interaction. Why? Location-based blogging without the context of a person is just kind of stale, says founder Lisa Williams, a longtime blogger of hometown Watertown, Massachusetts, and previously an analyst at The Yankee Group.

Williams, who partners on the site with Tish Gier, says the site has been getting more usage and frequency every month.  But the new UI lets users categorize based on “I’ve been there,” “I’m here now!” or “I want to go there.”

“It aerates the site to let people express their paths through the world,” says Williams. The site needed it to stay true to its credo, which is basically “all the places and people near you.”  “We’re not [smartphone-oriented sites like] Loopt, or Bright Kite, broadcasting specific locations,” she says. The idea is to use the Web — and placeblogging — to get to know people better.

“We’re highly personal. We’re into [things like] people’s cats,” adds Williams. However, she doesn’t see the site as a hyperlocal, block-by-block project (i.e., EveryBlock), nor does she plan to put RSS feeds on every news feed. “I’ve got an RSS feed on the wave height in Cape Ann,” she says, noting that’s a favorite kayaking location of hers. But “the scale is at the city level — 30,000 to 200,000. We’re influenced by the place blogs that have succeeded, like Baristanet” in Montclair, New Jersey.

The Yellow Pages Association has launched its own blog, apparently to add its voice to the ongoing blogosphere debate on the future of Yellow Pages.

The blog’s first post from YPA President Neg Norton explains the rationale for the blog this way, “We’re seeing so much interest in the Yellow Pages industry and where we’re headed that we thought this would be the perfect outlet for us to contribute to the discussion.”

Norton continues, “We’ll also use the blog to post interesting data, comment on small business and local search trends, highlight news from our members, and offer candid observations about discussion on our industry.”

We wish this effort well and hope to have an opportunity to contribute. There are a lot of voices weighing in on Yellow Pages on the blogosphere. Many provide cogent observations on where Yellow Pages fits into today’s media mix, while some others just do not seem to wish the industry well.

In this environment, the YPA is wise to weigh in with its own vehicle in order to add another perspective to the debate.

A new online source for local search news and viewpoints launched today. Known as Local Search News, it was started by local SEO guru Steve Espinosa.

Espinosa will supply most of the content on a daily basis and tap outside perspectives for guest columns. We supplied one for the site’s launch, as did CitySquares CEO Ben Saren — a nice piece on local search intent.

The site joins a crowded field of SEO blogs but will try to stick to a local search angle. It looks to have the makings to strike a nice balance of tactical and market-level analysis.

Buzz tracking software firm BuzzLogic released a report yesterday, administered by Jupiter Research, which affirms the role of blogs in influencing purchasing behavior. These data come at a key time for BuzzLogic’s story, when Madison Avenue remains somewhat wary about advertising on blogs.

The survey “Harnessing the Power of Blogs” (n=2000) reported an overall 300 percent growth in monthly blog readership over the past four years. Forty-nine percent read at least one blog per month, and 71 percent read more than one blog per session.

These more frequent readers reported taking action 50 percent of the time after seeing an ad on a blog, while less frequent readers did so 40 percent of the time. Of those actions, 17 percent read a product reviews; 16 percent have sought out more information about a product; and 16 percent visited a manufacturer or retailer Web site (more data here).

Who Do You Trust?

Overall, a point of comparison in the report was the level of influence, relative to social networks. Twenty-five percent of readers say they trust ads on a blog, compared with 19 percent who trust ads on social networks.

Social media is getting more attention with the tools that MySpace and Facebook have integrated for advertisers to target users. Google has taken it a step further, as we examined a few weeks ago, with technology to identify top influencers within a social graph. The idea is to basically rank individuals, and value ad inventory accordingly — kind of the same idea behind Google’s core Page Rank technology.

This is just what BuzzLogic does, except it tracks these levels of influence throughout the social graph that is the blogosphere. It tracks who is linking to whom and who has the most influence over media consumption, political views, purchase decisions, etc.?

This can be valuable information for brand advertisers to plant themselves in the right places, and for PR professionals to track buzz around a certain topic or client. BuzzLogic has also integrated its buzz tracking engine into Google AdWords so marketers can run text ad campaigns that target AdSense publishers that have the most influence in the areas where their product applies.

“Let’s say you’re Microsoft and you’re marketing the Zune [portable music player],” Rob Crumpler, BuzzLogic’s president and CEO, told me last year. “You can find out where discussions are happening about scratches on an iPod screen, and then target your advertising in those places.”

What Does It Mean for Local?

The BuzzLogic/Jupiter data suggest that the blogosphere has evolved into a sort of middle ground where well-traveled blogs are seen as both credible and trustworthy.

Blogs, in other words, now exist somewhere between mainstream online sources and the closer connections one might have on Facebook. Mainstream media might be too distant or impersonal for some readers, while close connections on Facebook aren’t necessarily experts in certain fields (product reviews, for example).

So what can local learn from this? What is the equivalent of this trusted middle ground in the unique online local media picture? User reviews in places like Yelp are one possible answer, though reviewers pop up here and there and don’t have the continuity of a blog to gain trust.

Maybe local blogs themselves are the answer, but the fragmentation of local media causes there to be a lack of a blogging “brand” that is local enough to be credible, yet on a national scale. The closest answer may be Topix, which is scaled nationally and has lots of community editors in each ZIP code who have built up a certain degree of influence.

There are also a few sites that aggregate blogs based solely on location, such as Outside.in and Placeblogger. The formula hasn’t been figured out 100 percent, but BuzzLogic’s data suggest there is a prize waiting for whoever can identify or plug influential voices into the local media picture. Weigh in if I’ve neglected any.

I like all the services using LinkedIn as their platform for social networking. The local implications haven’t really come into focus yet, but the latest publisher to put something out is BusinessWeek, with its Business Exchange.

Developed by former PowerOne Media tech guy Isaac Sacolick, Business Exchange uses LinkedIn profile information as a base, crawls the Web and leverages BusinessWeek’s audience to create, track and contribute topics and posts on any given subject — such as “Newspapers,” which is actually a pretty big subject.

Sacolick says people are always thinking they already organize their info with RSS. But the reality is that RSS is very ad hoc. “BX is organized by topics, already aggregates the top news and blog sources, and leverages the wisdom of the crowd to prioritize the most important topic,” he says. “It’s a simple way for business professionals to build up their online persona and should be really useful for business professionals, small-business owners, managers, MBA students and contractors who want to establish or promote their expertise.”

The Huffington Post has launched a beta of its first local “Internet newspaper” in Chicago, with promises to produce 10 to 20 more local efforts in the next couple of years.

The Chicago site is a mishmash of local news, mostly from local publications like Chicago Business and the Chicago Sun-Times; national headlines; local blogs and prominently featured local site partners, including Thrillist. It is a fun and interesting package, like The Huffington Post itself, and maybe provides a better glance at news and lifestyles than a metro paper like the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye provides. The site is put together by a local journalist who used to work at the Sun-Times, and all ads are sold out of New York.

Chicago Tribune columnist Philip Rosenthal quotes Arianna Huffington as observing that “people who are from Chicago have all these amazing warm feelings and memories of Chicago.” One of the first posts on the site was a sentimental tribute to the city from poet Carl Sandberg, I mean movie actor John Cusack, a Chicago native.

(Thanks to Lost Remote for steering me to this one.)