Here’s a look at the contests:

1. Staples’ “Give Your Small Business the Push it Needs.” To enter, contestants must submit a 15-second video about their business on Staples’ Facebook page. In order to win, each business must get the most votes for their video. Staples offers the winning five businesses up to $50,000 in free television advertising in a Staples ad or $40,000 in free advertising and $10,000 in cash each. Winners also get $500 in Staples merchandise and services. Deadline is March 14.

2. Wal-Mart’s “Get on the Shelf.” The world’s largest retailer is offering the winner of this contest an opportunity to have its product sold in Wal-Mart stores and Walmart.com. In addition, the winner will receive marketing help and assistance in scaling production to meet the retail giant’s demand. To enter, contestants must submit a video via YouTube. Deadline is Feb. 22.

3. Facebook’s “Small Business Boost.” While some companies are using Facebook as a contest platform, the social media network itself is offering tiered prizes in its SMB contest. The 10 U.S.-based businesses that can drive the most “likes” to their Facebook business pages by April 1 will receive up to $10,000 in free advertising. Smaller prizes include receiving $50 in free Facebook advertising for attracting 50 Facebook “likes” before the April 1 deadline. Winners with 100 “likes” on their business pages will receive a $100 ad credit.

CSO Insights recently completed its annual global sales force survey and has come to some interesting conclusions. While sales objective achievement has increased overall, 2012 sales objectives are being projected at their highest level in recent years coupled with the lowest confidence levels in actually achieving them. One of our core beliefs with sales objectives is you can’t expect increased performance without increased support. CSO Insights’ data seem to support this:

“Increases in revenue goals need to be backed by investments in sales rep efficiency and effectiveness,” added Jim Dickie, managing partner, CSO Insights. “The study uncovered a wide variety of factors that can positively impact sales performance including optimizing lead generation, better alignment of the sell cycle and the buy cycle, and leveraging CRM 2.0 technologies such as sales collaboration, sales management analytics, and sales intelligence. Best-in-class sales organizations that focus on formalizing their sales process and deepening their relationship with customers are significantly outselling their competitors.”

From our point of view, those organizations willing to provide updated training on a more consistent and effective sales process, coupled with better market intelligence, are the ones winning in the local media space. So much of what we are seeing are inconsistent sales methods, lack of central management control over the sales process, more managers who are player/coaches, and a void in preparing media salespeople to have a deep strategic discussion on how digital media works with their core media or how digital media supports a small and medium-sized businesses’ needs and goals.

Recently, BIA/Kelsey has developed many new tools and research to help support managers and salespeople with market intelligence, education on the value of digital media and, more important, how digital media and traditional media can be sold side by side. Our core philosophy is that media salespeople should be the value experts with any of their portfolio products. As the value expert, they need to understand the customer’s challenges and the industry’s challenges so they can translate their portfolio of solutions to the customer’s needs and goals.

Sales is becoming less about personal relationships and more about information relationships. There is too much information on digital media available for SMBs and even brands to process which means the salesperson has to fill the role of information interpreter to become the valued consultant. Translating the myriad technical functions and features of digital media into concrete value messages, supported by simple to understand facts and figures, is what SMBs crave.

So while contemplating how to move the sales needle, think about how best to support the sales team and what support is needed to achieve even higher goals in 2012.

Amazon.com, which is moving in multiple directions vis-à-vis local, has agreed to buy TeachStreet, the service for matching teachers and students. Amazon’s interest appears to be less in TeachStreet than in the underlying e-commerce platform for SMBs. The platform already is being used by The Washington Post for its Service Alley SMB leads service.

TeachStreet had raised just over $3 million from Madrona Venture Group, Bezos Expeditions, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and others. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has obviously been involved form the beginning of the company.

The connection between Amazon and TeachStreet is partially personal. TeachStreet founder David Schappell previously worked for Bezos from 1998 to 2004. GeekWire reports that the entire TeachStreet team has already joined Amazon Local, which is now in 40 markets. It reports that TeachStreet itself is being shut down.

Schappell also told Geekwire that he’s pumped to be “working on things that millions of people use.” At TeachStreet, he said they had been “pushing the peanut up the hill for a long time.”

In 2008, Schappell told BIA/Kelsey that he eventually expected TeachStreet to evolve into all kinds of expert services. “We’re helping to find local experts near you,” he says. Categories could include a full range of advisory services, such as career counseling, or kitchen remodeling. “You might need someone to guide you through some of the steps. Or you may want some help negotiating to buy a car.”

According to additional data from Compete and Google, we’ll continue to see B2B companies duke it out in paid search. Their report cites 73 percent of U.S. B2B execs used an online search engine last June to conduct purchase research.

In addition, the study also revealed more reliance on video. Google and Compete polled more than 1,600 U.S. execs and tracked the online activity of U.S. Web users both to and from selected B2B websites. Between February 2010 and March 2011, B2B-branded YouTube searches doubled.

Recently, Yelp posted a video on its business blog of SMB advertising success stories. Time will tell if we’ll see more brands using video content to share product-specific information, demos and testimonials.

The Home Depot is set to significantly boost its home contractor leads network with today’s acquisition of Redbeacon. No price was announced for the acquisition. The deal puts Home Depot in the same boat as Sears, which has been quietly developing ServiceLive, its own contractor leads service.

Redbeacon, which takes a 10 percent commission for service jobs, was one of a number of socially driven leads companies that started in the 2008-2009 time frame. Others include Cox’s Kudzu, which has developed an intriguing partnership with Scripps’ HGTV; The Washington Post’s Service Alley; LikeList; HelpHive; and Thumbtack. The latter received $4.5 million in venture funding last week.

Last year, Redbeacon announced $7.4 million in funding from Mayfield and Venrock, but it hasn’t been easy sailing for the company. The service never landed media partnerships that it had been hoping for and replaced its founder last year with new CEO Anthony Rodio. It has, however, managed to launch services in nine markets. Under Home Depot, one assumes it will take a national approach to contractor leads.

Constant Contact, an email marketing company, announced its acquisition of mobile app developer CardStar this week. CardStar developed a mobile app where consumers are able to store all of their existing loyalty cards, rather than having to carry multiple, physical cards. Constant Contact will continue to operate CardStar’s free mobile loyalty application, which is available on major mobile platforms, including iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Retailers can also offer coupons and special deals through the app. Terms of the deal are undisclosed.

Constant Contact’s acquisition is part of its makeover into an all-purpose marketing platform for SMBs. At the end of last year, Constant Contact launched a new offering, Social Campaigns, aimed at helping SMBs grow their fan base and drive engagement on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Mark Schmulen, general manager of social media at Constant Contact, is scheduled to speak at ILM East in March about local social media, customer engagement and the direct connection to sales.

CardStar’s employees will join the Constant Contact team, including CEO and Founder Andy Miller and CTO and Founder Danny Espinoza. Miller will serve as the director of mobile products. Espinoza will join Miller’s team to lead future product direction.

Thumbtack, which has set itself to compete against Angie’s List and ServiceMagic in the SMB leads space, has raised $4.5 million from Javelin Venture Partners, with MHS Capital and Tim Draper participating.

The eight-person San Francisco company, founded in 2009, claims nearly a quarter-million active merchants — up from 150,000 in July — and “hundreds of thousands” of visits. Founder Marco Zappacosta tells us that the company continues to scale well on “both sides of the marketplace” — merchants and consumers. He says the company will use the funds to hire 12 people as soon as possible and focus on building the user experience. “The money is all about investing in the experience and really develop a marketplace solution,” he says.

Zappacosta notes that the company provides standard features such as quotes and finding the right people, but “there is a lot more we can do.” For instance, Zappacosta hopes to add payment and invoicing capabilities throughout the site, as well as scheduling.

How big can SMB scheduling be? And how universal across SMB categories? Those are the questions posed by the addition of scheduling to Groupon (Groupon Scheduler) and MerchantCircle, as well as the rise of several independent scheduling sites, such as Full Slate, Agendize, MaxiPage, Appointy and Genbook.

Another contender is Schedulicity, a scheduling pioneer that is now two years old and has 15,000 customers. The 21-person company, based in Bozeman, Montana, sells monthly scheduling services to one person for $19, or for $39 for up to 20 people who work out of the same location. Veteran local exec Dave Galvan (Topix, InfoUSA, Yahoo) has recently joined the company as president and head of business development, quickly forming partnerships with L’Oreal, Modern Salon, Vista Print, Yext, the GiftCard Café and Marlo Beauty.

Galvan tells us that Schedulicity’s approach is vertically focused, and that the company is now working with 45 vertical categories. Typical SMB customers have between 300 and 500 customers, he adds. While Galvan acknowledges that other scheduling companies might compete for mindshare with potential partners, the space is so undeveloped with SMBs that the real competition is “pad and paper.”

How scheduling companies ultimately compete can take lots of directions. Schedulicity, for instance, is adding email offers and personalization features that could pit it against SMB marketing giants such as Constant Contact. Sending an offer out on Schedulicity takes just a few seconds, while Constant Contact is “a complex email product” with a learning curve, he argues. Moreover, lists can be customized for such things as birthdays, residential address, etc.

At the same time, the company is also focusing on such specific scheduling areas as classes and workshops, which would pit it against vendor sites such as TeachStreet. It has already scheduled more than 100,000 classes.

The company also has the potential with partnerships for companies in the deal space, that might want to work with its “deal manager” feature, which meters the number of deal customers that can be scheduled, and ropes off sections of the day for regular customers — features that competitors such as FullSlate also have.

“We have done 1,000 daily deals since the summer,” says Galvan. He emphasizes that the company is agnostic toward deals providers and is not in the deals space.

Galvan adds that the company’s ultimate success will be the spread of word of mouth, aided broadly by social networks. He notes that company already has 66,000 “likes” on Facebook.

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.

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