It’s safe to say that Ted Leonsis is at the center of the local revolution. He’s done it all, from his early days trying to jumpstart ecommerce at RedGate, to his work building a local framework at AOL (i.e. Mapquest, Digital City, MovieFone, Studio Now); to his current role as Vice Chair, Groupon; Board Member, Amex; a Principal with the $450 Million Revolution Growth Fund; and of course, as owner of The Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards and The Verizon Center.

What is Ted’s Take on key local issues? We’re talking live with Ted Monday at 3pm pacific/12 pm eastern in conjunction with his keynote at ILM East in Boston, which takes place March 28.

Sign up for the free Webinar. Registrants also get a discount code towards the conference, which is March 26-28.

The agenda is shaping up well for the Local Search Association’s April conference, the first involving a partnership with BIA/Kelsey. The event runs April 21-24 at the Boca Resort in Boca Raton, FL.

We’ve lined up headline presentation from Ursula Worth, Google’s head of directories and web hosting partnerships, and Mary Boysman, VP of Brand Marketing and Advertising at Aspen Dental.

Worth and her Google colleagues will offer some insight on how it views the future path for local online media, while Boysman will give an advertisers perspective on building a local integrating marketing program.

Aspen Dental operates more than 300 retail dental centers in 22 states. Aspen uses the full spectrum of media choices to drive customers to Aspen locations, from print Yellow Pages to search advertising and social media. Boysman will offer a major advertiser’s perspective on how it builds its marketing program and how it evaluates and rates the performance of its media choices. Anyone interested in a cut of Aspen’s sizable annual media spend will want to hear what she has to say.

In addition to the headliners, BIA/Kelsey and the LSA have built a robust lineup of workshops that offer attendees a rich store of data and insight.

The workshops include an overview of BIA/Kelsey’s Yellow Pages and local online forecasts; a review of new BIA/Kelsey research on the pay per call market, plus a download on a series of sales rep interviews being conducted by Hawthorne Search. Additionally, the Local Search Association will provide a look at results from the latest Local Media Tracking Study, conducted by Burke Research.

Stay tuned for announcements on new speakers in the coming days. Look here for more information on the conference.

ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of doers and innovators who are transforming and redefining the local space. Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon vice chair/AmEx board member/sports team owner/AOL mastermind), along with keynotes/interviews from Jason Calacanis, Leslie Berland, Jay Herratti, Michael Zimbalist and Michael Silberman.

Other highlights of the two-day event includes a preconference rundown on local search run by Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide; a full plate of top BIA/Kelsey research and forecasts; a special venture capital panel; and innovator panels on social, mobile, deals, video and hyperlocal (the latter co-moderated by Merrill Brown).

KEYNOTES/KEYNOTE DISCUSSIONS
� Ted Leonsis: Owner, Monumental Sports (Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards); Vice Chair of Groupon; board member of AmEx, former vice chair of AOL; author, “The Business of Happiness”
� Jason Calacanis: CEO, Mahalo; investor. Calacanis’ career has been at the cutting edge of local and social media and reflects all the big trends, from his development of The Silicon Alley Reporter to Weblogs (AOL), Mahalo and the creation of TechCrunch50 and Launch.
� Leslie Berland, vice president, social strategy, American Express. Berland’s a major deal maker deeply involved in AmEx’ss mega Foursquare and Facebook deals.
� Jay Herratti, CEO, CityGrid Media. Herratti always gets top rankings at our events. He runs IAC’s super quad of the CityGrid Media Network, Citysearch, Urbanspoon and Insider Pages.
� Michael Zimbalist, VP, research operations, New York Times Co. Zimbalist leads the NYT’s 12 person-research unit. He’s deeply immersed in cutting-edge social, mobile, tablet and video efforts.
� Michael Silberman, GM, New York Magazine Silberman is the mastermind of NYMag’s development of a super set of verticals catering to the “New York state of mind.”

FEATURED SPEAKERS
� Bill Bice, CEO, SpaBoom
� Merrill Brown, Cofounder, MSNBC.com, Court TV
� Jim Douglass, EVP, Cartera Commerce
� Jere Doyle, CEO, EverSave
� Walt Doyle, CEO, Where
� Adam Japko, CEO, Digital Sherpa
� Maria Kermath, Director, New Tech & Sales Apps, AT&T Advertising Sales
� Mark Josephson, SVP, AOL Local
� Charlie Kim, CEO, Next Jump
� John McIntyre, CEO, Pixelfish
� Randa Minkarah, SVP, Revenue, Fisher Communications
� Randy Parker, President, SMB Apps
� Mark Schmulen, GM, Social Media, Constant Contact
� Andy Slater, VP, Digital Agency Sales, Katz 360
� Andrew Shotland, Publisher, Local SEO Guide
� Christopher Tippie, CEO, FindNSave
� Darren Waddell, EVP, Product and Corporate Marketing, Reply.com

Join hundreds of senior level local executives at ILM East for the local community’s best networking and insights. You can register here for earlier bird rates.

Internet Pioneer Ted Leonsis

We’ve wrapped ILM West in San Francisco this week — another terrific show. Lots of great stuff. Thanks very much to the 50+ speakers, 32 sponsors, nearly 600 local leaders and various #ILMWest Tweeters who participated.

Now our attention is focused back on our research and analysis… and to ILM East March 26-28 in Boston, featuring an initial lineup that includes the great Ted Leonsis (here’s his Wikipedia entry), Jason Calacanis (CEO, Mahalo) Michael Zimbalist (dean of NY Times research), Jay Herratti (CEO, CityGrid), Michael Silberman (GM, NYmag.com), Charlie Kim (CEO, Next Jump) and Merrill Brown (Carnegie Fellow, cofounder MSNBC, Court TV, etc.).

Our goal with all the shows, of course, is to provide “context and contacts” for executives, entrepreneurs and investors building the local space. The testimonials now pouring in make us think that we were quite successful.

Internally, insights from ILM thought leaders and the show’s in-depth research will definitely help the analysts from our six research programs shape the next waves of local innovation. Here are some of my personal takeaways:

1. No expectations of a runaway local winner. Some years, we think we’ve ID’d the next big thing. But this year, nobody really thinks that Facebook, Groupon, LivingSocial, Yelp or Foursquare is going to disrupt and run away with the entire market. This is one fragmented space. Google remains the only wildcard.

2. Time to rethink digital and traditional media separation. The New York Times, Washington Post, Morris and others have reintegrated their prints and online units. They’ve seen the light from Digital First. It gets better. The San Diego Union-Tribune just named Mike Hodges, its digital leader, as president of the entire operation. But as Clark Gilbert points out, it is still important to delineate where it makes sense to integrate, and where it makes sense to keep operations separate.

3. Hail to the phone! Or at least, to phone calls. As Marchex’s Matthew Berk brings up, the technology aids for search and discovery don’t point to replacing phone calls for leads. They point to reinforcing and supplementing phone calls. “The explosion of mobile is about being call-ready,” he noted.

4. There’s life in video and audio formats as add-on channels. We heard a lot from broadcasters at the show (i.e., Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman). What really struck us is what a great local promotional add-on they are to Internet verticals (i.e., iHeartRadio). That’s mostly what they are.

5. We’re all in the games business — at least, a little bit. Kara Swisher disagrees, but games are being deployed in many walks of local, with new demographics, added frequency and stickiness. Just looks at what GrubHub is doing. It is something that leads providers learned years ago.

6. The deal platforms appear to be interchangeable, with little changing costs. We’ve been impressed by the development of white-label deal platforms. But it was kind of shocking for us to see several major media outlets give so little credit to their platform providers.

The ability to marry store inventory with search and promotions is an intriguing one for interactive local media. But what closes the loop on this vision?

Sherry Thomas-Zon, VP, local shopping, Local Corp. — the new name for Local.com — suggested this week at ILM West in San Francisco that inventory can serve as an anchor for a 360 shopping offering. The key is to break the components of shopping into functional departments instead of making it “one size fits all.”

“The opportunity is to add value across the retail mix,” said Thomas-Zon, former president of Krillion, which was recently acquired by Local. You don’t just want to have shopping content. “You want a shopping module. It is what product search looks like on site in a mobile context.”

Speed and convenience are key parts of it. Components include grab and go shopping, need it now, where to buy, nearby stores. Thomas-Zon noted that there are different types of shopping.

For instance, there might be high consideration items, contrasting with shopping types such as low-cost replenishment, habitual purchases with limited decision making, big-box stores, off-price stores and small format products.

Google’s local efforts have grown tremendously under the direction of Marissa Mayer, and now encompass a wide range of products, including Google Maps; Google Places; Zagat; Google Offers; and Get Online, a new SMB initiative.

At ILM West this week in San Francisco, Head of Local Consumer Marketing Jeff Aguero provided a rich portrait of Google’s thinking on local. “We are 10 percent of where we are and where we need to be,” said Aguero. “There is so much that needs to be done.” He added that Google is eager to work “closely with partners to create a rich opportunity” for all.

“The local experience is mostly disconnected,” said Aguero. “It is not consistent across user experience,” whether people are engaged in researching, finding, experiencing, reviewing or sharing. Google’s goals are ultimately to “get more local searches, more customers, more reviews, better content, higher engagement and more businesses online.”

Local is obviously an important part of Google’s core search business — 20 percent of desktop search is now local-oriented. But local is “fundamentally about places. Any type of action; how does it get there; how do you share what I am doing about my experience (i.e., photos, check-in); how do I save money on a deal?”

Within Places, Place Pages is a major effort. Currently, there are 50 million dynamically generated Place Pages worldwide. Of these, 8 million have been claimed by the businesses themselves. “It is the greatest catalog of place data on the Web,” noted Aguero.

The big trend is the convergence of Place Pages and Host Pages. “They have the same type of audiences in different ways, ” he said. “The functionality of both entities are likely to converge.”

Expanding ratings and reviews is also clearly a major initiative. Google Places is now getting more than a million ratings per month.

Mobile, meanwhile, is in the middle of it all. “Fifty percent of maps usage is mobile,” Aguero pointed out. “Mobile search usage has surpasses desktop usage on holidays. “People are using mobile phones as guides to the real world on an ongoing basis. Recently, the company introduced TalkBin, which leverages mobile to provide real-time customer feedback.

Google Latitudes, a check-in product, is also is getting a lot of attention, and already has 10 million users. “It is not just how many people are enjoying and sharing products,” said Aguero, noting that Latitudes has been greatly enhanced by the introduction of Google Plus social circles.

And then there is Google’s Get Online initiative, a partnership with Intuit that lets SMBs claim a place, update information and provides a free website. Get Online started in Michigan and is now in 14 states. New tools will continue to be added, said Aguero. “We need better toolkits for businesses.” Recently, the company introduced Adwords Express, which lets businesses set up an AdWords program in 10 minutes.

Moh Ok, Chief Scientist at PayPal, and Bo Fishback, CEO and Founder of Zaarly, talked about the integration of social, local and mobile to close the loop on driving consumer purchases during a morning dedicated to SoLoMo here at ILM Asia.

Ok and moderator Mike Boland talked extensively about mobile payments, and whether the market will drive toward a common standard. Ok said PayPal and its parent eBays are currently “laser focused” on commerce. The PayPal mantra is anywhere, anytime, anyway.

Rather than talking about various forms of commerce (mobile, social, etc.), “It really should just be commerce,” Ok said. “You should be able to make it in a seamless way.”

In discussing all the different mobile payment methods out there — Google Wallet, Square and the looming NFC — Ok said the key is to be able to “pay however you want.” He describes PayPal as “Switzerland in terms of how people pay.”

Fishback followed Ok and described Zaarly, which is one of those companies that builds a compelling and original business off of an old and simple idea: putting local buyers and sellers together. “I don’t believe in companies that require behavioral change,” Fishback says.

On Zaarly, users post a need and others respond with offers to fulfill that need. Small businesses are essentially being built off of Zaarly, Fishback says. 

Zaarly has fewer than 100,000 users and has had roughly 40,000 posts in the past quarter. The company has roughly 4,000 businesses on its system. 

Fishback says it takes 300 people to create a liquid market.

Boland called it a “reverse Craigslist” and Fishback accepted that as an apt description. Peer to peer hyperlocal is another description.

“The more local you get, the less people want to rip each other off,” Fishback said. “There are no Nigerian scam artists on Zaarly.”

Advancing mobile payments is a key issue for Zaarly. Fishback says there is an imbalance in the market now. “It is easy to pay, harder to get money.” He is looking to partner with innovators in the payment space.

Google has experienced five times growth in mobile search during the past two years, according to Google Mobile’s Surojit Chatterjee, who was keynoting our SoLoMo Morning at ILM West in San Francisco.

Mobile usage generally complements the desktop, with huge spikes on the weekend and in the evening and at lunch, said Chatterjee. “When people go out for lunch, people are searching more on their mobile than on the desktop.”

Chatterjee said vertical segments have been especially high with mobile. Almost 17 percent of auto related queries are mobile, 17 percent of travel and car rental, and 32 percent of restaurants.

Mobile also is very strong for converting searchers. Seventy-seven percent of mobile searchers contacted a business; 44 percent led to a purchase and 59 percent led to a merchant.

Proximity and location, in fact, have become important criteria for Google search ranking. Make your ads location aware and help users make a decision quickly,” said Chatterjee.

SMB marketing companies have forgotten that local businesses still see calls as a key driver of new business. That’s the opinion expressed by Marchex Executive VP Matthew Berk during today’s session on “Converting Calls to Local Sales.” To succeed in the calls space, Berk emphasized the need to “go deep” and focus on quality. He defines quality calls as those that represent a proxy to conversion.

Key takeaways on emerging industry trends include:

–The explosion of mobile is about being call-ready

–Mobile search and discovery coincides with smartphone penetration, growing 5x in the past two years

–Computers are becoming more and more like telephones (i.e., Skype and Gtalk)

–Lower cost per lead + better outcomes = lower churn.

–Better outcomes means better calls

When it comes to Local Yokel Media’s business focus, it’s all about 15 miles. That’s because 80 percent of consumer spending is done within 15 miles of home. CEO and Founder Dick O’Hare shared that fact at this afternoon’s session on “Local Targeting: Getting the Bull’s Eye.” O’Hare added that geo-contextual relevance is the key to optimal ad performance. “With the right targeting on display, the traditional marketing funnel can collapse and go from awareness to purchase in one step,” O’Hare said.

Co-Panelist Jeff Minich, senior product marketing manager for Yahoo, agreed. But he also zoomed in on the importance of addressability by targeting the right users and measuring the full impact of every impression. “It’s all about finding the optimal radius around brick and mortar locations for achieving offline performance objectives.”