BIA/Kelsey moderated a panel on “the Out-of-Home User Experience” (click on image for link to streaming video) at MediaPost’s Digital Out-of-Home Forum (DOOH) in New York. DOOH is the third-fastest growing ad medium after mobile and online video.

Paul Lindstrom, senior VP, Nielsen OnLocation, kicked off the panel with data showing video engagement is about 80 percent correlated to advertising recall. Andy Stankiewicz, executive VP and chief communications officer, Akoo International Inc., and David Veckerelli, co-CEO, Digital Displays Network, spoke to how their systems engaged users in unique ways to create video-based user experiences that could drive point-of-purchase sales.

In Akoo’s case, its model is to have large displays in food courts and college student unions playing music videos. Users can interact with the videos using their mobile phones (text, browsers or apps) to select content and make other choices which increases dwell time and user engagement. DDN built and operates the 7-Eleven network of video displays and uses a strategy of mapping content, dayparts and featured products to drive sales lifts.

Generally, the mood of the DOOH Forum was quite positive. The technology has matured into a more capable, cost-effective and efficient buying platform that bridges the physical (i.e., place-based) world to both traditional and digital media. Planning and buying has become easier within vendor platforms but there are still a lot of vendors. Video screens that are connected with an Internet Protocol (IP) address can be interactive, targeted and provide engaging content.

DOOH leverages social context, physical location and user passion (health clubs, bars other places where users select to be based on personal interests). The challenge now is for buyers to become educated about how to understand how their brand strategies can be served by DOOH media in combination with other media. This is a matter of multiplatform planning, buying and creative execution that leverages DOOH’s many digital and interactive capabilities to drive user engagement with compelling experiences.

Last week I attended Opus Research’s Conversational Commerce Conference (a.k.a. “C3). The focus of the discussion was mostly on social media and its impact on marketing and customer care, at both the local and national brand levels. While there is a lot of interesting activity using social media for customer acquisition, the biggest surprise for me from the conference was just how much innovation was going on around the customer-care aspect of social.

Pete Blackshaw of NM Incite started out the conference pointing out the “conversational divide” that typically exists between Marketing & Customer Care. Over the past year Marketing & PR have begun to embrace social media channels, but Operations is far behind. As a result consumers are experiencing two different brands. Blackshaw emphasized that to succeed socially the two departments must work together. Often he sees a huge gap between happy employee Twitter profiles and site feedback forms/call center processes. Increased social media activity can create service expectations that customer care is not set to deliver on yet. This challenge can be addressed by realigning incentives for both departments. Blackshaw’s parting advice was that smart players are putting feedback mechanisms everywhere to encourage customer engagement which binds them to the brand.

I was particularly impressed with Spanlink Social Watch, a hosted service that allows customer service people to monitor and respond to social media interactions about their brand. In the demo, we saw how a customer’s tweet complaining about a brand turned into an intricate series of customer-care interactions via Twitter, cellphone and e-mail. Within a minute the customer service person had identified the complaint on Twitter, routed it through to a manager who could respond to the customer via phone and solved the problem. Spanlink (and Cisco) had integrated social media into standard customer-care routines to great effect. For customers who value responsiveness and the personal touch, this blending of call center and tweet center seems like a decent answer.

On the customer acquisition side, I found Marchex’s Call Analytics solution intriguing. The service records inbound calls, transcribes speech to text and provides marketers with keyword analysis to improve conversions. The example Marchex provided was a hotel that found that when a conversation with a potential customer included the words “swimming pool,” conversions doubled. This led the hotel to use the term more in its pitches and to pay special attention to callers that called from ads that mentioned swimming pools.

A panel on the some of the big local deal services, including Yelp, Groupon, MerchantCircle and Pelago (makers of the LBS app Whrrl ), focused on how to bring “authenticity” to conversations with potential and current customers.

• According to Sumir Meghani of Groupon, the daily deals service is putting a lot more focus this year on customer retention for its advertisers. The success of Groupon promotions creates unanticipated demand (although by now they should be anticipating it, right?) and Groupon sees its role as helping advertisers manage the relationship with customers from the point of acquisition throughout their lifetime. Groupon has had great success with customer acquisition, but facilitating long-term social communication between businesses and their customers seems like an even bigger potential home run.
• Jed Nachman of Yelp discussed how businesses can effectively deal with negative feedback on public sites such as Yelp. When a complaint is emotional or experiential in nature, Yelp coaches businesses to send the individual a private message and try to handle the matter offline. When a customer is disputing a fact (e.g., the price of a margarita) that might be more appropriate to handle in a public forum.
• John Kim of Pelago talked about how to use social media in a proactive way. The goal is to keep your customers saying good things about you. He gave the example of how Marie Callender’s identified that its customers (a.k.a. moms) were challenged by how to bring their families together at mealtime. Marie Callender’s built a recommendation service that regularly provided ideas on this theme that created a large amount of social engagement, which Pelago was able to measure at the local store level via activity on the mobile check-in app.
• Doug Kilponen of MerchantCircle talked about how merchants that are taking control of local social media channels have a big leg up on their competition. Kilponen’s example of a New Jersey plumber who spends several hours/day answering questions on MC has led to huge visibility for the plumber in his market — his profile gets 20K+ page views/month. Conference host Greg Sterling dubbed the merchant “The Car Talk of Toilets.”

When the conversation turned to SMBs and social, representatives from Oodle, Closely, Vendasta and Praized Media, left us with some interesting points:

• Social is not for all SMBs. It’s for SMBs that depend on relationship marketing, such as real estate agents. If you already have to be social offline for your business, there’s a good chance that you can benefit from being social online. If your organization is feeling the need to add social media to your kit bag, you may want to consider your the inherent sociability of your target audience (e.g., SMB advertisers) and tailor your products to those niches that would be well-suited to it.
• There is a large amount of potential opportunity being lost from not utilizing social media channels. For example, each day in London there are several people who tweet that they have locked themselves out of their house. Services such as Praized Media’s Needium and other social media monitoring tools are providing ways to engage with these potential customers in non-intrusive ways.
• According to Perry Evans of Closely, social has become a key ingredient in new local businesses launching. The trend seems to be to run a daily deal to stimulate early demand and cash flow, and then utilize social channels to bring the new customers into a network that will help bring in additional customers. I found this to be one of the more interesting factoids to emerge from the discussion. The concept of on-ramping a new business via social deals seems like an entire business model unto itself and is one that is ripe for the taking.

My two big takeaways from C3:

1. Successful users of the medium will be those who figure out how to enlist their customers to do their marketing for them.
2. The advent of social signals marketing’s shift away from the concept of campaigns, which are typically event-driven, toward constant ongoing communication. A lot of the innovation in social/local will be around how organizations can build such a communication strategy in a scalable way.

For further reference you can find my unedited conference notes here:

Beware The Conversational Divide

Where Does Support End & Marketing Begin – And Vice-Versa

Cisco Previews Social Watch CRM Tool

Yelp, Groupon, MerchantCircle & Pelago

Shaping the Conversation: Search, Reputation & P2P

Social CRM for SMBs

Marchex Call Analytics

I also recommend Craig Donato’s Social Commerce & the New Rules for Local Businesses.

If your company is doing something interesting in local conversational commerce, let me know about it.

There is a lot going on in online media on the East Coast evidenced by the panel on geolocation here at the Internet Summit in Raleigh, North Carolina, sponsored by TechMedia and Southern Capital Ventures. Geolocation continues to be major news given the press coverage of Gowalla, Foursquare, Google and Facebook, which are all chasing the best solution. While an ever increasing number of players continue to move into the space, geolocation remains a growing category as business models are continuing to be developed and consumer needs are finally being recognized.

Simon Salt, CEO of IncSlingers, made the point that “geolocation needs to get beyond check-ins because they are not the end game. Check-ins are merely the portal to engagement and we need to decide what the end deliverable will be.”

Amy Dalton, senior director of marketing for Topix, said that “people are experiencing check-in fatigue where they can’t possibly check in with all the services they have signed up for.”

Salt shared one creative solution addressing check-in fatigue: “POS America is utilizing loyalty cards as a way for automatically enabling check-ins each time the loyalty card is swiped.”

When asked what it will take for geolocation to take hold, Chad Reed, director of field marketing for Whrrl, supported the idea that “marketers need to bring real value to the consumer in the form of deals, offers and meaningful promotions before geolocation will take hold and move beyond early adopters.”

What may move geolocation forward is a broader definition of location. Salt put forth the idea that “location is more than a physical location; it’s a TV show, it’s a store, it’s an event. This is how Facebook will extend how location will be defined.”

The consensus of the panel was that the combination of better smartphone handsets, a new definition of location and the addition of more tangible consumer value — be that promotions, coupons or unique events — will be the main factors going forward that will define the success of geolocation.

Content remains king on the Internet mainly because there are more ways to produce, connect and interact with content than ever before. According to Rod Smith of IBM, “there are more ways to dig into content than ever before, but it also produces more targeted ways for advertisers to interact with the audiences they are seeking.”

While content is king, the way it is presented online differs depending upon the online medium used. Joe Gregorio of Google points out that “Twitter and blogging have different voices and and different timeframes so communication has to be different. Quick updates versus longer tail content that can be searched have very different purposes.”

Now we are seeing content being merged with local commerce and the social graph in more interesting mash-ups. “Consumer commerce is moving into virtual boutiques where the average consumer can set up shop and sell merchandise and connect their social network to their store, Gregorio says. “Tying into localized information and comments are the keys to the success of this area.”

When asked where the online play will be over the next one to two years, the clear answer was the smartphone. Why? According to Bob Young of LuLu, “we have not even reached the 50 percent mark of penetration and the current demand for content and usage indicates this market will continue to rise as more smart handsets come onto the market.”

The only restriction for the smartphone growth is the data pipeline. IBM’s Smith points out: “Pipes are the issue of what will be possible versus what people want to access. This is causing poor customer experiences. Netflix, Hulu and other major content producers are pushing the networks to do a better job.”

Content will remain king as it drives searches, engagement and eyeballs, meaning content will remain the center of the Web future. Innovation continues to drive online, and the hope is that the data pipes will keep up to help fulfill the consumer promises media companies and online publishers are making.

We keep saying that media darlings like Foursquare and Gowalla will have to evolve beyond the game mechanics and check-ins that have driven their usage. Simply put, these drivers will lose novelty.

Among other things, they’ll need to develop an exchange of monetary value or utility. Foursquare knows this and has been vocal about it. Meanwhile, I’ve seen two announcements in as many days that suggest we’re moving in that direction.

The first is Foursquare’s announcement that it will partner with fitness management company RunKeeper. The deal will allow RunKeeper’s users to gain Foursquare prizes and designations (including badges) for doing things other than checking in (a first for Foursquare). Those actions all relate in some way to fitness milestones tracked on RunKeeper.

The second announcement is from GetGlue, a company that lets you check in to TV shows and other events and receive mailed prizes such as collectible decals. This week, it formed a handful of partnerships with television networks (joining its existing deal with HBO). Checking in during airings of “Mad Men,” for example, gets you these giveaways.

Beyond engaging users and getting them to watch these shows, GetGlue and the networks benefit from follow-on marketing. They’ll also get a fair amount of viewer analytics from the check-in activity. But the main point is that it’s another step toward connecting the dots between online and offline activities.

Panning back, there are lots of commercial implications to this general concept, given that most commercial activity happens offline. This is the principle behind Foursquare et al, but they have a long way to truly reach it. Expect a lot more of these features and companies to emerge.

Ad agencies have never really been a major part of the world of local online advertising. Apart from some geotargeting for their national and regional clients, they haven’t paid much attention to the many opportunities in local (geotarget banners, local search, couponing, directory and social).

Where there has been agency support, it has been largely on the certified marketing rep (CMR) side that is moving Yellow Pages/directional media dollars around to IYPs and other local “service” media. Companies like TMP’s 15miles and Wahlstrom have done well with this, as have more broadly configured third-party resellers/SMB engagers such as ReachLocal, Yodle, WebVisible, Orange Soda and Clickable.

Other groups, such as AdReady and PaperG, have acted as agencies for clients as they provide local “versioning” for them. Best Buy, for instance, creates different ads in Phoenix than in Miami. AdReady does a lot of versioning work with major clients such as Alaska Airlines. Vertical ad networks such as Adify have also gone into geo-targeting, as have media placement services companies such as Centro, which has worked with mega-advertisers such as GM on their local initiatives.

Recently, however, we’ve been seeing ambitious local initiatives at several of the large agencies. From what we can tell, the initiatives have been spurred from the client side, as national and regional clients have watched local’s momentum — or should we say “Geomentum.” Geomentum is a division of MediaBrands, which itself is owned by InterPublic Group, the third-largest advertising agency holding company. It has a nine-person leadership team, and can also draw off of MediaBrand resources.

We talked with new Geomentum President Lisa Bradner, who most recently served as a Forrester analyst. Bradner told us the problem has always been that it is so much easier to buy national. Local provides all kinds of insights and understanding about clients. But the challenge is to make it scale, she says.

Her efforts will focus on helping people understand the granular research on how/where to spend local. It is a combination of testing and measurement, she says. Whatever happens, advertisers are cutting newspaper spending, and they’re looking for new ways to reach people locally. Verticals with a strong local component such as retail, financial services and insurance will each do well out of the gate, she suggests. Consumer packaged goods and pharmaceuticals also have a local component, but “they’ll be slower to get there.”

What many advertisers want to know is how they can effectively localize their advertising from market to market — an effort that has been worked on intensively by specialists, such as Gannett’s ShopLocal. “Walgreens might lose sales in Poughkeepsie for different reasons than Santa Monica,” says Bradner.

The key is to “take it below the DMA level,” says Bradner. “You want to target the great white space between 1:1 and the DMA,” something that Bradner dubs “one to some.”

We had the opportunity to meet with Medialets CEO Eric Litman to understand its unique approach to deploying media rich mobile advertising. Medialets started out as a mobile ad network much like Feedburner but quickly realized that what mobile advertising lacked was a platform that facilitated the placement of media rich mobile ads in publisher apps and mobile sites. Medialets then developed a platform supported by creative services and a vetted publisher network to create a mobile-centric ad serving platform.

“Much like the online space, what mobile lacked was effective transparency and access to quality publishers to attract major brands,” Litman said. “Our goal was to create a platform that provided accurate near real-time data on mobile campaigns, assemble a vetted publisher group and offer a client service team to assist in the creation of campaigns, educate companies on effective mobile campaign approaches and provide additional analysis of campaign metrics.”

Medialets’ business model is different from typical mobile ad networks because it profits from serving ads on its network on a fixed-fee basis. As an ad serving platform, it enables publishers to sell directly to brands and brands to select appropriate publishers for their messages. Utilizing this model takes away the competition ad networks pose to publishers and brands. Litman pointed out that “the Medialet model allows them to sell to both sides of the equation; publishers to open up their mobile inventory and brands to sell them on the unique value mobile media provides.” When asked about the challenge of Apple’s and Google’s mobile offerings, Litman said, “having Google and Apple in the space only helps us because it brings more attention to mobile advertising. What we’ve discovered is that brands want to control where their ads appear and want more control of the publishers they want to carry their ads.”

Medialets is one of the most widely used mobile ad platforms with publisher clients including CBS, Fox, CNN, MenuPages and Cars.com. Medialets’ success has led to a recent $6 million Series B funding round from the Foundry Group with participation from DFJ Gotham, 500 Startups and Chris Saridakis bringing its total funding to $10 million.

In our discussions on the near-term future for mobile advertising, Litman said, “mobile is starting to come into its own as a medium unto itself with unique value to drive leads and action. We feel that the personal nature of the mobile phone will ultimately lead to more personalization and offer more ways to act on an ad be it e-commerce, mobile landing pages or some form of interaction with the advertiser.”

When asked if mobile will continue to be an add-on media option, Litman responded that Medialets is quickly seeing mobile campaigns from brands emerging that are taking TV advertising dollars and investing them in mobile focused campaigns as a way to better measure campaign impact and ultimately transactions.”

With Gartner and others projecting a rapid rise in mobile apps (4.5 million in 2009 and 21.6 million projected by 2013) flooding the market as smartphones continue to increase in numbers and sophistication, the number of publishers with mobile apps will only increase mobile ad inventory. To monetize this growing mobile inventory, mobile ad serving platforms like Medialets will be needed not only to serve rich media ads, but also to bring brands and publishers together to develop successful mobile campaigns.

Score one for local businesses … at least in Minnesota.

As of Aug. 1, the state began enforcement of a law that prohibits advertising “deceptive local telephone numbers and geographically deceptive business names” across the Internet, as well as in print advertisements and directories.

Legislation targets national businesses that camouflage themselves behind local names and listings, cluttering the advertising space. The landmark represents a clear win for neighborhood “mom-and-pops,” but also a victory for national chains (insurance, restaurants, other retailers) fighting for local brand relevance in an increasingly populous online space.

The Minnesota law cracks down on local-listing squatters, not companies that serve as middlemen between local merchants and customers. Often, national poachers will field a consumer’s order, skim a finder’s fee, then place the order with the actual retailer.

Writing in Ad Age, Casey Squier, managing director at hyperlocal marketing network Wahlstrom, trumpets that “all businesses with a local geographic footprint will find an easier time winning in the online and print battlefield.”

Especially so if similar legislation is adopted in other states. Georgia, for example, passed a similar statute in June that will take effect on Jan. 1, 2011, making it the 27th state to put fraudulent-listing laws on the books.

Unaddressed in the new law is the related security issue of unclaimed online listings. With search engines, social networks, Yellow Pages directories, and other formats all offering listing services, local businesses must claim their listings to prevent phony sellers from grabbing them, then optimize them with photos, video, rich media, coupons and other features. Failure to do so, and waiting for listing-service security to catch up to deceptive business practices, is an invitation to “high-jack.”

One of the recommendations we have been supporting and talking about over the past year is the need to look at the print directory differently. For the past 100-plus years, the directory has been viewed as a distribution media vehicle — “we deliver to every resident in a city.” In recent years, with distribution declining and local media fragmenting, people in our industry are still hung up on getting more books to more people rather than trying to view a directory as a series of verticals that reach different audiences, with different needs and varying levels of spending power.

Enter Larry Small, research director for the Yellow Pages Association, who supports one of our major views that demographics are an often ignored factor when considering the value of a print directory. While the industry has been concerned with the 18-25 crowd and how directories will adapt to attract and meet the needs of this group, Small points out that the real factor is not only age but disposable income.

He goes on to say: “One other metric to keep in mind is disposable income. The Yellow Pages industry has positioned itself as the best source for generating qualified leads. By definition, a qualified lead is one where people are ready to make a purchase — in other words, they have the need AND the resources to complete the sale.”

Small also shares this chart from CNNMoney.com that shows median net worth of individuals by age group:

With higher usage rates in the 35-65 age groups, the print directory has the capacity to reach more affluent spenders who have high discretionary spending in categories that are meaningful to a directory because of the life stages these age groups are in. Users in these age groups are spending on home renovation, financial services, house wares, cleaning services — all key directory headings. According to BIA/Kelsey’s research and U.S. Census data, those in the 35-65 age groups control nearly 80 percent of spending power in the US.

CRM Trends, which tracks changes in demographic trends points out: “Compared with the big-spending Baby Boom generation, these new spenders (18-30) will be less attractive as fewer will have reached their big-spending life stages. They will not only have less buying power, they will also be more fragmented into niche interest markets and will demand more personalization and be harder to reach with conventional marketing.”

Because a directory is essentially made up of a series of verticals, directory publishers would be well advised to look at these categories to determine if they have the appropriate content, editorial support and navigation for the age demographic the category attracts. Taking this approach might signal the need to redevelop different sections of the book rather than the entire directory, integrating more print to mobile or online products like SMS codes or QR Codes, rethinking distribution, or adding more unique/relevant content not generally found elsewhere or found in one location.

Freeing up the minds of print product managers to think in new ways about the directory and its varying target markets may indeed create greater innovation and product reconfigurations rather than simply offering more cosmetic changes.

Local/social leaders from Facebook, Yelp and Twitter took the stage at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, this week to discuss what IAB President Randall Rothenberg called “the mobile/social local real-time medium that does not have a name.”

Facebook’s Tim Kendall, director of monetization, said Facebook has essentially introduced “marketing on the social graph” by tracking its unique information, such as “pages,” “events,” “like,” “share” and “connect.”  “We’re getting pretty good at showing you ‘who matters to me’ on news feed and topics,” he said.

Advertising on the site is now in full play. “We have created a social marketing experience that we think it the most interesting social advertising on the Web,” he said. And Facebook’s advertising success is demonstrably strong. “Our click to conversion rate is two to three times other sites. Social wins every time.”

Kendall added that Facebook’s effective CPM ends up being “a couple of dollars,” but that advertisers also come in via the service’s self-serve advertising, which is priced on a flat rate basis.

Jed Nachman from Yelp estimated that the site’s effective CPM was $200. One example, Little Star Pizza in San Francisco, for instance, had 1,500 looks (and presumably pays $300 for the ad). Nachman also noted that on average, Yelp users look at 2-4 reviews before making any decisions.

Meanwhile, Twitter is preparing to launch its first ad product next month, according to Anamitra Banerji, who is “Product Management, Monetization.” Banerji said his prior experience at Overture told him to “innovate really, really quickly before anyone else comes up with it.”

Banerji added that people should “be focused on what you are doing and not worry about what people are doing around you.” He also noted that Twitter is a distributed product. “We don’t see ourselves as a Web site,” he said.

Weighing in on social during a separate session at IAB was MySpace Co-President Jason Hirschhorn. Hirschhorn noted that MySpace is refocused on entertainment and music. “We’re not jettisoning our roots as a social network. But our fans want to be entertained. Not everyone is a publisher.”

Hirschhorn spoke admiringly of Facebook, which has basically deposed MySpace as a leader in social media with almost four times the traffic — 128 million uniques versus 400 million uniques. “The media community itself has its social graph on Facebook,” he said. “But there is a completely different behavior and mind-set you are tapping into when you are a brand marketer.” He noted that MySpace still has information on 13 million bands, and a “16-34 type audience.”