Yelp is heading down under to Australia via a partnership with the directory company Sensis where it will integrate Sensis’ local business listing data into its site. In turn, Sensis’ local sales force will sell Yelp.com.au to Australian SMBs.

Neither company has revealed the financial details of the partnership, but Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst did discuss the idea behind the new alliance. “Small businesses are looking for customers to come through their door, and the whole phenomenon of Yelp and what they’ve been doing is a rich source of leads and customers for small businesses,” Akhurst said in an article from The Australian.

Just last week, we reported on Yelp’s sizable growth. Since March of last year, reviews on the site have doubled. It now boasts 20 million user-generated reviews. Yelp was founded in 2004 by two former PayPal execs. Cofounder Jeremy Stoppelman said the Sensis partnership was the first time Yelp had chosen to team up with a directory service business for an international launch.

Yelp’s previous international launches include Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Austria, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

The new partners expect that Yelp.com.au will go live by the end of this year with Sensis’ Yellow Pages sales reps offering Yelp advertising options to customers in 2012. This deal represents the continued evolution of Sensis in terms of how it views competitors. In the not too distant past, it’s fair to say Sensis would have been loathe to consider a partnership with Yelp. Today, it seems to take the view that it’s better to work with than against potential competitors.

If you’re a publisher, Yext CEO Howard Lerman wants to share his plumbing with you. Not literally, but in the “presence product” marketplace, where Yext will soon open up its Tags platform to enable participating publishers to create their own to-market tags offering. This is done by leveraging Yext’s API (i.e., “the plumbing”).

Lerman’s enthusiasm for tags is as transparent as the API that he’s now allowing publishers to leverage. Since launching Tags two months ago, Yext has enrolled more than 1,000 paying subscribers with simple, flat-rate pricing.

Merchant tags (special offers) are created in a blink, populate a dozen premium publisher sites (Yelp, Citysearch, Superpages.com, etc.), boost search rankings, and can be changed in real time. This is step one in Lerman’s master merchant vision: allowing locals to disseminate relevant information instantly.

He’s even willing to work with Google, which to date has been unwilling to work with him. Very willing, in fact. Lerman spent much of his ILM East address highlighting the powerful impact that Google Tags are having on the overall marketplace … for local advertisers and sellers alike.

In the diverse yet confusing local advertising ecosystem, the new mandate calls for media companies to engage local business clients with holistic solutions that engage their customers in new ways. Deals and mobile optimization have received the lion’s share of attention, but targeted lead generation is another vehicle through which publishers can connect with local merchants.

Reply.com is pursuing more cost-efficient and effective lead gen models through its real-time auction marketplace for multi-targeted (intent + location) leads. Now it is introducing a white-label platform for publishers to fuse “competitive quote buttons” into their directories that deliver advertisers enhanced clicks from prospective customers.

The first publisher to enroll is MerchantCircle, which will integrate the technology to pair category-specific local service providers with online customer prospects. Other media companies are expected to partner soon. Reply’s marketplace serves leads across several verticals, predominantly auto, real estate and home improvement, but also moving into education and insurance.

Reply.com also works with a variety of channel partners to service SMBs, in addition to its telesales force and self-service option.

Reply.com COO Sean Fox will address the evolving local leads marketplace in a presentation at ILM East, March 21-23 in Boston.

Last week, the latest spree of entrants forayed into the deal-a-day arena, with AT&T and The New York Times announcing group buying platforms that appear to be almost identical to those popularized by Groupon and LivingSocial. The most interesting of the newcomers, however, could be Microsoft Bing, which opted for an aggregated approach through The Dealmap’s DealExchange for its Web and mobile properties.

Rather than dedicating resources against selling deals itself, Bing will instead rely on the network to source locally targeted offers from more than 300 group buying channels that open up their content to DealExchange. CityGrid Media, Local.com and SuperMedia are among the growling list (now 36) of publisher/distribution partners.

Leading search engines and portals have used different strategies to jump into group commerce. But this much is certain: They all feel the urge to play. AOL (through WOW) and Google set up their own deals platforms, while Yahoo opted for an aggregated network initiative through Tippr that resembles Bing.

As noted above, Bing mobile is also included, reinforcing what The Dealmap’s Jennifer Dulski told BIA/Kelsey at ILM West — that mobile and social commerce would make for a potent combination. Dulski noted that half the site’s usage already comes from mobile devices.

The enthusiasm over deals is well-founded, with BIA/Kelsey projecting that domestic revenues could touch nearly $4 billion by 2015, at a 35 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

As the market becomes increasingly fragmented, aggregators will play a central role in both organization and distribution. DealExchange positions The Dealmap particularly well to strike partnerships, especially with the functionality it provides for the deals being sourced — location, price, sentiment and time (all part of its “relevance algorithm”).

With destination sites, white-label providers and aggregators all crowding into the deal-a-day space, the struggle to differentiate and scale is complex. DealOn, which operates its own group buying sites in 16 markets and also offers white-label branding, thinks it has uncovered two ways to rise above the noise: verticalization and an offer network.

CEO Rich Razgaitis told BIA/Kelsey that DealOn has developed an early “lock” in restaurants, one of the most popular deal verticals. As Zagat’s white-label solution, DealOn powers deal sourcing and post-transaction processing for Zagat Exclusives (heady savings on premium, Zagat-rated local restaurants) while also integrating these offers on its own sites. A similar partnership with Nation’s Restaurant News gives the 70,000 restaurant SMBs represented by the portal access to DealOn’s suite of services. DealOn isn’t alone in the restaurant realm, however, with OpenTable having hatched a successful deals platform. Food-and-drink heavy reviews sites such as Yelp must also be contended with.

Once deals are developed, they can be fed across DealOn’s OfferEx network. This exchange relies on an open API to connect deal suppliers with resellers and distributors. Providers achieve greater reach on their deals, while publishers with existing content management systems can integrate deals that fit their markets and audience demographics. Razgaitis noted that this could be most appealing to publishers that “want the ability to sell into the system [and capture consumer on their sites], but not be limited by it.” Tippr and Local Offer Network are also players in deal distribution.

To date, more than 20 partners are integrating deals through OfferEx. Most offers are supplied by DealOn, but the company is hoping to enlist more outside deal sites.

DealOn has a feet-on-the-street sales force totaling 20 (an average of one per market), backed by telesales. The company believes that personal sales are critical at this still-early stage in order to better educate SMBs on the value of participating. Down the road, however, Razgaitis envisions a self-service marketplace where merchants can self-select creative, geography and timing and then serve up their deals for distribution across the network.

Google galvanized a lot of mainstream attention for the online-research-for-offline-purchases market with its recent rollout of Product Search. But with the total sales pie expected to eclipse $1 trillion in 2011, it’s a big enough playground for more than just the big G to stock store inventory online. Milo, which jumped into online-to-offline product search while Google was beta testing Blue Dots (the precursor to Product Search), has added a series of new features and enhanced its partnerships to make it a viable option during the holiday shopping spree.

First, Milo teamed with PriceGrabber to list product inventory at local stores on its site. It has a similar deal with consumer reports, and well as integration with Yellowbook.

Milo currently teams with 150 retailers (Best Buy, Nordstrom, Advance Auto Parts) encompassing more than 50,000 stores to show real-time product availability and price. CEO Jack Abraham not only wants to recruit more retailers, and perhaps move down-market to attract a new breed, but also sees partnerships as vital to expanding Milo’s visibility for those stores. He told BIA/Kelsey that partnerships span four categories: “search, shopping, local and media.”

The Palo Alto, California, start-up also went mobile for the first time, unveiling an Android app (and soon an iPhone counterpart). The early success sent Abraham a strong message about the fundamental value of mobile shopping and the importance of fostering a seamless mobile experience. “I was skeptical from a user standpoint initially,” he conceded. “But it’s been huge for us. The direct relationship through the mobile platform allows you to truly own your users.” Now, ensuring that their retailers are automatically optimized for mobile is an important next step in Milo’s evolution onto the new platform.

With Google already allowing businesses with registered listings on Places to offer coupons and Facebook having recently rolled out Deals, it was inevitable that Milo would counter with a similar option. Indeed it has, offering both printed and buy-online, redeem in-store coupons that pop up automatically based on a user’s location and specific product search.

Coupons are also equipped for mobile, so consumers can simply call them up on phones and have them scanned in-store. And unlike Facebook, Abraham stressed, no check-ins are required for special offers to activate. Instead, they appear when consumers — potentially new customers — are already deep in the purchase funnel, searching for specific goods and already primed to buy.

Abraham is serious about moving down-market to target smaller businesses, even local SMBs. But can this be accomplished with any measure of efficient scale? Abraham acknowledged that “it’s a hard problem to crack,” but one that Milo is working on.

The company recently conducted a trial with inventory from 100 pilot stores and found the local merchants, generally speaking, to be engaged. Among many challenges, the greatest may be adapting the technology for smaller businesses, which have different inventory systems and product data than the national brands that Milo is accustomed to servicing. A turnkey solution that SMBs can easily install will be necessary.

The scale challenge extends to merchant recruitment as well. That’s where media companies with embedded local sales forces such as Yellow Pages companies could be natural partners. Abraham said that Milo has been approached about this idea, and though nothing is active yet, it is in the company’s consideration set.

Chicago, the original home base of deal a day, courtesy of Groupon’s Windy City headquarters, has its latest DOD offering through the partnership of a prominent local publisher and white-label provider. Wantsa, a group buying platform that teams with newspapers, online publishers and social networks, is launching a Chicago division across the Sun-Times’ portfolio of properties. 

Sun-Times Media is the parent company of flagship daily the Chicago Sun-Times. It owns eight dailies and operates more than 30 Web sites in the metro area, all of which will be featured in the partnership.

Vancouver-based Wantsa is one of a fleet of emerging white-label deals providers that includes Analog Analytics, Nimble Commerce, Deal Current, Shoutback and Tippr, among many others. Some, such as Matchbin, offer a rebrandable and trackable deals platform (often in widget form) as part of a larger suite of online services (CMS, SEM, SEO, SMS, business directory). 

Wantsa gives participating publishers the opportunity to not only sell deals to local merchants, but also to select existing offers from the company’s syndicated network to be featured. Deals can also be displayed in a variety of formats to better service user preferences. Among the options are geotargeted maps for deal searching and mobile-optimized applications.

American Express has recently been leveraging its powerful relationship with SMBs on the Web, including a tie to search engine marketing and lead generation via a deal between American Express Open and Clickable.

Now Amex is going deep with social media, specifically Facebook. It is giving up to 10,000 SMBs up to $100 of customizable Facebook advertising.

The giveaway is on top of two other promotions tied to “Small Business Saturday,” which is designed to drive traffic to SMBs on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. These include a promise to donate $1 every time someone likes Amex’s Small Business Saturday page on Facebook (up to $500,000) and a $25 credit card refund for Amex consumers who shop at a Amex-accepting SMB on Nov. 27.

It isn’t clear whether there is an official relationship between Facebook and Amex. But the program looks like a mutual winner for both. It kind of reminds of us of earlier SMB promos, such as one between Google and Intuit.

Facebook execs Emily White and Tim Kendall will discuss Facebook’s local initiatives during a presentation on Day 3 of ILM 2010.

If getting customers to pick up the phone is the first priority for SMBs, the second is vetting caller traffic to distill quality leads from noise … and to understand the drivers behind each activity. “Bridging the online-offline gap” is emerging as a critical component of SMB reputation management. VendAsta is now incorporating call tracking intelligence from Telmetrics into its white-label reputation management platform that publishers can offer to their local clients.

In addition to monitoring customer reviews across social networks and online review sites, VendAsta’s Step Rep will now offer a layer of speech-to-text call tracking through Telmetrics’ Voice Trends that will enable deeper understanding of  customer sentiment through keywords spoken and call duration, location, demographics and time.

VendAsta’s ultimate goal in this integration is to paint a comprehensive picture of consumer interactions with SMBs. This connects online presence to offline lead generation in a more holistic reputation management solution. It also allows businesses to build off of phone conversations to push into social media and deal-a-day offers through a deeper understanding of met and unmet customer demands.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts that local advertising spend on ERPM will reach $3.5 billion in revenues by 2014, and several major brands — Marchex, MerchantCircle, ReachLocal (through SMB Live), Yext (Yext Rep), Yellowbot and others — are lining up to compete for these SMB dollars. 

Telmetrics President Bill Dinan told BIA/Kelsey that VendAsta’s move into call tracking represents an important step in the company’s “drive to distinguish” in this crowded sector. “The wave of the future in local search is that you have to specialize in somthing.”

StepRep is one of many white-label products that VendAsta offers for publishers to rebrand for their local merchants. The Saskatchewan-based software provider offers a daily deal white label called Daily Deals 3S that has been picked up by both DirectWest in Saskatchewan (MySaskDeals) and Winnipeg publisher EX Finder (EZ Deal). Its suite also includes a social recommendation engine to validate consumer reviews through users’ personal networks.