Our audience might be upset that Jed’s Burgers, a fictitious business set up for the Yext PowerListings demo isn’t real. What may be more upsetting is the fact that 20 percent of local searches will return the wrong information. Lerman is passionate about preventing this problem and his enthusiasm for Yext’s new PowerListings was clear at the final afternoon session, “Yext: PowerListings Across Platforms.”

So what’s the best way to get accurate and timely SMB info out there for end users? Go to the business itself. That’s the central idea behind PowerListings, which enables businesses to update their info against 24 partner sites.

“This system is about speed and control,” Lerman said.

TargusInfo, a major direct marketing tools provider and the parent company of Localeze, a “Big 3″ provider of business listings, will be acquired by NeuStar for $650 million in cash. The deal enhances NeuStar’s positioning as a leader in authentication services across the Internet and voice networks, whether fixed-line, cable or mobile. Authentication is expected to dramatically grow with the boom in digital services such as movie downloads. Both companies are based in Northern Virginia.

Localeze’s listings business is not the biggest factor in the acquisition, but the division’s focus on enhanced SMB and franchise profiles will likely fit into the mix. TargusInfo is perhaps best known in the direct marketing world for its lead gen scoring techniques, which evaluate the likelihood that a lead will turn into a sale. TargusInfo is also well known for its Caller ID verification service, among other real time, on demand information and analytics services. It helps process more than 100 billion annual transactions around the world.

TargusInfo posted $149 million in revenues for the year ended Sept. 30. Combined, the two companies earned $732 million.

“The people who know both of us understand that billions of times every day Neustar and TARGUSinfo flawlessly help people find each other, connect to one another and share.,” notes Neustar CEO Lisa Hook in a blog post. “By combining TARGUSinfo’s leadership in Caller ID and online information services, such as lead verification and scoring, with Neustar’s strengths in network information services, including address inventory management, network security, and marketing analytics, we will be able to greatly extend Neustar’s ability to provide its customers services based on unique, non-replicable datasets.”

Localeze President Jeff Beard told us that “at the end of the day, it is all about providing real-time intelligence about identity. The vast majority of that is consumer identity,” he says. Beard adds that Neustar’s interest in TargusInfo is on several levels, including local search. Major tech companies such as IBM, Intel and others are all getting more involved in local search as part of their broader activity, he notes.

“Write once, read everywhere” concepts are popular ones with so many platforms to serve. Agendize is probably the king of these for listings and appointments, serving more than 66 unique platforms. Localeze and Universal Business Listings are other key players that come to mind for managing name, address and phone (NAP) information.

Other companies are specializing in other write once, read everywhere applications for such areas as classifieds (i.e., Travidia’s Bamboo Net). Now, for restaurant information, including social and mobile media, we have “SinglePlatform.”

The New York-based company was started over a year ago by entrepreneur Wiley Cerilli, with a first round raise of $1.2 million. Eleven years ago, Cerilli was one of several people developing Seamless Web, an online food ordering service that was sold in July 2006 to Aramark, the food services giant.

Cerilli saw a need for SinglePlatform because restaurants increasingly needed to post information such as specials, events and menus on a broad range of media — social media, mobile, directories, city guides, even games — and acquire new customers. Single Platform’s salespeople make premise calls with iPad demos that emphasize the need to create a “full browser” self-serve experience, rather than a simple Web site.

One revenue model that is being pursued is based on pay-per-call leads. Calls to merchants on the company’s dedicated number cost $1. The company shares a portion of the revenues with publishers that work with it. Cerilli says the company has already signed up companies such as Localeze, FoodSpotting, Menuism and Blackbook Magazine.

In his keynote address at DMS ’10, Yext CEO Howard Lerman pointed to the imminent release of a tags product in response to Google Tags and emphasized that tags could grow into the standard local advertising unit. Sure enough, the company will officially unveil Yext Tags in January across more than a dozen locally oriented partner sites, including AOL’s MapQuest and Patch, Citysearch, SuperPages, Yahoo and Yellowbook. And no, Google is not taking part.

Many will assume that Yext Tags is launching to combat Google’s continued migration into local advertising. Some have even termed this an “anti-Google alliance.” For the non-conspiracy theorist, perhaps it is about integrating online advertising for merchants into a single buy and a central distribution engine. Whatever the case, the key to breaking through with SMBs that have found search engine marketing to be a confusing experience will be simplicity, which is at the core of the new platform.

Pricing is flat rate for advertisers ($99 per month), to be split evenly between Yext and the partner sites where the tags appear. From Yext’s dashboard, businesses can create, distribute and modify tags across a local network that reaches more than 100 million UVs each month. No keyword bidding — these are natural search results, not sponsored ones.

For Lerman’s New York-based start-up, tags broaden the overall value proposition that Yext can offer the 30,000 businesses that are currently using some combination of its pay-per-call and reputation management tools. Initially, Yext will market the product, but will soon allow partners to resell it. Another “next step” will be enabling clients to update their listings and tags from partner sites (not just on them).

While Tags can be messaged any number of ways, many merchants will seize on it to promote deals and offers. This could appeal to national retailers seeking to drive local store traffic in particular areas (a theme that sprouted in 2010 and will only gain stream in 2011). Gold’s Gym, for instance, has been experimenting with localizing offers across the partner network as part of a Tags beta test.

Google first pushed out its Tags offering in June at a flat rate of $25 (seemingly its new magic number, with Google Boost also being peddled at this rate). The search giant recently enlisted at least 100 telesales reps to market Tags and Boost to businesses that have claimed their Places page. Now it is offering $100 million in AdWords credits to SMBs that enroll in Places. Funneled together, these initiatives have many online search and Yellow Pages companies wondering if Google is trying to take their turf.

This isn’t the first coordinated effort to push back against Google. IAC’s CityGrid Media developed over the past year to connect sellers and publishers through a targeted ad engine that optimizes placement for businesses across the network. At BIA/Kelsey’s Marketplaces conference this past March, CityGrid CEO Jay Herratti described the network as an alternative “scale player” to Google.

Sample Yext Tags Listing

Yext Tags Dashboard (courtesy: TechCrunch)

Last month I had lunch with Infogroup’s Pankaj Mathur to discuss a range of topics in mobile and local media. One thing we discussed was a new Twitter partnership that was then under wraps. Today the wrapping was taken off.

The deal essentially lets Twitter users and businesses link tweets to Infogroup’s business listing and POI (point of interest) data. From the press release:

Under the new agreement, Infogroup’s search, navigation, and other partners can use Infogroup’s persistent ID numbers to post and receive tweets driven by Twitter Places, Twitter’s geolocation feature. In addition, local businesses will be able to add their Twitter Handles and other social media user names directly to the Infogroup business database via Infogroup’s innovative ExpressUpdate technology which empowers businesses to search, edit, verify, add or enhance their Infogroup business records online. The agreement will give product developers and Infogroup’s broad network of local search, navigation and value-added resellers the ability to leverage Infogroup’s highly accurate data in combination with Twitter’s communication platform to provide more value to their customers.

For Twitter, this is a step toward being more of a location enabled resource for users and local advertisers (see our past analysis). Its moves in this arena have been notable but slower than others going after local/location such as Facebook and Google.

This should also be valuable for businesses that use Twitter as a marketing vehicle — a growing base according to our data. For Infogroup, the deal further applies and differentiates its local data at a time when differentiation is required to stave off commoditization.

There are increasingly more robust and sometimes free geo/places databases and APIs entering the market. But Infogroup continues to innovate in new ways such as deeper data sets for business info. Social tools like this represent another direction.

In the meantime, it boasts better accuracy and updated info than the free databases. It currently powers the top five search engines, 90 percent of North American in-car navigation systems and sales software of 85 percent of Fortune 100 companies.

With online search fragmentation and social media emergence driving prodigious growth forecasts for the reputation management sector (BIA/Kelsey projects $3.5 billion in ERPM revenues by 2014), agencies and publishers are both in the market for technology that adds this tool to their client offerings. Canadian agency (directory and digital) DAC Group has jumped on board, teaming with chatmeter to enable clients to manage and optimize their online presence across search engines, directories and social networks.

The partnership makes logical sense considering that many of DAC Group’s clients are national franchises that need to better monitor ERPM for local stores. This is especially so as national brands increasingly employ online advertising and social networking to drive local store traffic. The Groupon phenomenon and the recent debut of Facebook Deals are two stark examples of national-local opportunities.

Through chatmeter, DAC Group will not only provide local listings maintenance, but also analysis related to these results and a recommendation engine that will build off detailed tracking data to pinpoint campaign adjustments. Competitive benchmarking is becoming a critical component of reputation management, and chatmeter allows for businesses using its platform to size up their online performance directly against local competitors.

For iPromote CEO Michael Barr, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Now he’s trying to convince third-party publishers, and the local clients they represent, that it’s a no-brainer to serve keyword and location-based display ads alongside the text-based search ads they are already running. This is expressly what iPromote does with its LocalSearch offering.

Barr believes the answer is automated ease-of-use — that simplicity creates scalability. Only then will large-scale sellers add display to their toolkit and SMBs embrace it. The LocalSearch solution is built around the core idea of taking the work out of display while still producing fast, targeted ads to fulfill inventory needs and satisfy ROI demands.

A local merchant’s Web site or business listing URL is inserted, iPromote uses a combination of the client’s information and its own database content to create a display ad, and the publisher or business then pinpoints where and when the ad will run and the campaign budget.

The geotargeting built into the interface means that when a user queries a particular term and location, a locally and contextually relevant display ad will serve. Location-aware features enable “locally relevant display ads,” which, according to Barr, convert at a 2-5 times higher rate that generic display.

Image Credit: iPromote

The ads can be branded with either the publisher’s or the advertiser’s name. A dashboard allows for real-time campaign management and ready-made changes to ad content (drag and drop new photos, revise the business description, etc.). Ads are also optimized for mobile platforms.

IPromote is already in motion with several partners, and Barr has set a high-priority goal of attracting major IYPs and local search directories to the service … those that serve thousands of SMBs. These publishers would reserve display real estate on their search results pages and subsequently be able to bundle display offerings with existing search campaigns to drive down the cost of lead generation.

Once publishers place the ads on their own sites, they can then select other locations to distribute the ads. They can also blast them out across the iPromote Ad Network, which includes Yahoo, Bing, CitySearch, Local.com and many more publishers.

Barr and his team are banking on resurgent growth in the display market, and recent data show he’s on to something. This week, IAB reported that display-related advertising revenues for the first half of 2010 rose almost 16 percent year over year.

As local businesses increasingly transition their advertising dollars online, they expect agencies and publishers to furnish them with simple, consolidated solutions supported by tangible, trackable ROI. MerchEngines built its white-label “relationship generation” system to enable online marketing providers to do just that for their SMB clients.

In a crowded online marketplace, where bigger firms such as ReachLocal, Yodle and WebVisible also compete to service SMB agents, MerchEngines’ value proposition is the comprehensiveness of the toolkit that publishers can implement and local merchants can benefit from.

There are eight key features in the suite, including a “SocialStream” layer that tracks activity across four prominent social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz).

PPC search campaign management is fundamental to online search offerings, and MerchEngines is no different, supplying a single interface to customize, amend and track campaigns across multiple search engines. Tied to both SEM and social is CallAnalytics, the branded service that allows SMBs to establish call-tracking numbers and monitor traffic from both search and social.

Also of note is OneList, which disseminates a local merchant’s listing across more than 40 business directories (Yelp, Superpages.com and many more). The eight-tool portfolio is encompassed in a single online dashboard that agencies and publishers can conveniently access to monitor and change campaigns.

MerchEngines was founded in 2005 by longtime Internet executive Andy Steuer. In 2009 it sold to Hostopia, the Web site hosting unit of Deluxe Corp.

As “the media capital of the world,” New York is rife with daily newspapers, high-culture magazines and lifestyle publications, yet Trevor Sumner says he had “no idea what was going on in my neighborhood. I couldn’t even keep up with restaurants in the East Village.” That lack of district-level information inspired NearSay, a start-up site whose stated goal is to create a “custom neighborhood paper” for readers.

NearSay, cofounded by Sumner and David Pachter eight months ago, is both local and vertical, an important first step in addressing the definitional concerns that bug many hyperlocals. Geographical lines are drawn by district (Downtown Manhattan, Chelsea), with tabbed content categories for each of the coverage areas (local news, restaurants, nightlife, family and more). Readers can opt in to specific content interests for their neighborhood.

The lean, seven-person staff includes no full-time writers. Instead, NearSay relies on an extensive network of bloggers and community activists (city council and community board members, for example) to do its heavy lifting. Bloggers are rewarded with promotion from the anchor site that not only points to their originating work, but also posts full writer profiles and incorporates a “most influential” ranking model to further incentivize. It’s part of NearSay’s mission to build a site “where you find people and content,” Sumner told BIA/Kelsey.

He stressed that a blogger advertising network, in the image of the TBD’s model in Washington, D.C., will eventually sprout, though it has yet to take shape. First business priorities are to build out premium listings through a self-service business directory and to capitalize on the booming online coupons trend through targeted neighborhood offers. This encourages greater personalization of deals and discounts (Tribeca families, for instance) and opens up additional inventory. Sponsorship of particular content and section features is another monetizable opportunity to be considered.

Then there is the challenge of a start-up site being discovered in New York. Just this month, The New York Times launched The Local East Village in conjunction with NYU, and as BIA/Kelsey’s Peter Krasilovsky detailed, Capital New York (currently online in beta) wants to make its mark with a hyperlocal site devoted to highbrow New York culture. Factor in the dailies, tabloids, NY Observer, New York Magazine, Time Out New York and others, and it’s a cluttered marketplace to be noticed in.

Sumner thinks that could actually play to NearSay’s advantage. “The issues is that it’s too cluttered. There is so much noise in New York. It’s a fundamentally different problem that we’re solving.” He hopes that a high recommendation score from early adopters, coupled with the reach of the blogger network, can spread the word about the site, which will expand to all of Manhattan later this fall and into surrounding burrows early next year.

SMBs are looking for their phones to ring and their doors to open, pure and simple. These cash register-related activities largely sway their perceptions of online marketing campaign effectiveness. Kenshoo Local, a division of SEM provider Kenshoo, aims to specifically meet these needs via an integration with Mongoose Metrics call-tracking platform. Using the platform, agencies and IYPs will be able to connect online clicks to offline call conversions for their local clients. 

Todd Herrold, Kenshoo’s director of product marketing, told BIA/Kelsey that this partnership differs from normal call tracking mechanisms. It focuses on ID’ing the most effective keywords that convert into calls, not simply amassing a high volume of clicks in hopes that the phone will ring. Marketing campaigns can then be adjusted to pinpoint an “optimal bid” by distilling those keywords that are delivering calls from those that aren’t.

Here’s how it works: Mongoose Metrics offers a “session-based DNR,” or Dynamic Number Replacement, that assigns each Web site user a distinct call-tracking number after he or she clicks through on a search ad. They are also served a “keyword identifier” by Kenshoo Local. After the business is called by the user, keywords and search queries are matched to the number and identifier. The matching is based on an algorithm that probes call duration to determine call value, then circles back to the keywords that drove the calls. Keyword choices can be modified based on results.

An open API allows Kenshoo Local to connect directly with Mongoose Metrics to utilize the call-tracking solution. Its partners can then view their clients’ call-tracking reports within Kenshoo’s interface. 

The partnership marks Kenshoo’s latest penetration into the local advertising market. The SEM company, which launched in 2006, moved up market from smaller agencies to global firms and international brands (Wal-Mart, Sears, Travelocity). It introduced Kenshoo Local at ILM:09 last December to scale its SEM technology platform to IYPs that need efficient, cost-effective tools to manage droves of SMB campaigns.

Kenshoo Local General Manager Sivan Metzger noted that Kenshoo is a “technology-only play” that doesn’t do “fulfillment for SMBs.” The company focuses on building out its platform for partners to bring added value and accountability to their clients, not managing SEM programs for SMBs directly. 

Next steps for Kenshoo include building comprehensive quality-of-call data that identify the value of sales, as well as adding voice recognition software that mines calls for keywords that activate higher-quality calls. Metzger is speaking at DMS ’10 in Dallas next week, where Kenshoo plans to make a big announcement, he says.