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Online restaurant ordering and discovery giants GrubHub and Seamless have agreed to merge their operations, creating a single company. Chicago-based GrubHub currently serves more than 20,000 food ordering establishments in 500 cities, while New York-based Seamless serves more than 12,000 food ordering establishments in 400 U.S. cities plus London.
GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney, …

Former Localeze business develoment guy Gib Olander is back in the game, this time switching his focus from local business listings innovation to maximizing effective local business reviews. Think of a variation of “Net Promoter Scores” for local business.
Olander’s new company, Local Viewpoints has won seed funding from Wavetable Labs. It launched at the end …

Increased investment, a bullseye on customer acquisition, yet unconvincing results. These are the core themes emerging from Manta’s recently-released Q1 SMB Wellness Index, a survey of small business owners focused on social media. They are the very themes called out in BIA/Kelsey’s LCM 16 SMB research. SMBs continue to pour more time and energy into …

As promised in our LSA conference coverage last week, here is a deeper dive on Facebook’s positioning and possible directions in local. I covered the topic in a bit more depth in my monthly Search Engine Watch column, including more comments from Facebook director of SMBs, Dan Levy.
This gains relevance in light of Facebook’s redesign …

Facebook is the undisputed king of social media. The average Facebook user has 124 friends, and 70 percent of its users have “liked” at least one local business. But at this point, how local is Facebook really? And as an open network, it the ideal medium for local recommendations?
This is the soft underbelly …

I think Yelp is a fantastic service and a top resource, especially when I am travelling. But it was disturbing to read a column in The Los Angeles Times on Saturday by Sandy Banks, which suggests that Yelp is suppressing good reviews, and implies that there is a linkage between ad sales and allowing …

Solocal Group CEO Jean-Pierre Remy offered directory publishers a vision for print to digital transformation built on a strong focus on building content, vertical segmentation and a relentless focus on execution. Remy was the keynote speaker at the Local Search Association annual meeting in Las Vegas.
Remy has been at the helm at Solocal (formerly PagesJaunes) …

Significant news in the online presence/reputation management space came across the wire at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference last week in Boston, as VendAsta announced $8.25 million in Series B funding to accelerate the company’s holistic identity/reputation/social management solution.
In just over two years, it has established a deep network of local publishers (Cox Media Group, …

Tuesday at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local Conference, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan emphasized that the local marketing game has changed – dramatically, secularly. Traditional “push” marketing techniques (usually requiring large budgets) no longer resonate with many consumers. Rather, small/medium businesses must be nimble and creative, qualities at the foundation of the company’s inbound marketing approach.
“It’s much …

Today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local Conference, we kicked things off with an analyst roundtable. The theme: mobile is siphoning off usage from the desktop and other media. That comes in the form of search query volume, minutes spent, etc.
Mike Boland: Sr. Analyst and Director of Content
Matt Booth: Chief Strategy Officer
Rick Ducey: Managing Director
Charles Laughlin: …

I had the fun of buying Amex’s $25 gift card for $15 the other day on Amex Sync, the new Amex Twitter Store. All I had to do was sync my Amex account to Amex’s Twitter Store page, joing the ranks of 621,000 + other people, and I was all set. The card was delivered …

Various companies have built SMB websites and landing pages by scraping the Web. PaperG comes to mind. How about using Facebook. BIA/Kelsey data from our Local Commerce Monitor shows that more than 40 percent of U.S. SMBs have Facebook pages. Many, however, still don’t have standalone websites.
Exai, a spin off of TrafficMedia, is …

In keeping with tradition, BIA/Kelsey released its annual “Picks and Predictions” report this week, offering a collective view on the events that will drive the 2013 agenda in our local media coverage areas — directional, interactive, mobile, social, vertical and video.
This year’s predictions are an eclectic collection, covering everything from mobile ad revenues to cloud based …

At this time of year, a lot of us in the analysis and strategic research world are thinking about our predictions for 2013. Some of our predictions will be based on data trends; other predictions will be based on gut instinct vis a vis the relationships between marketing developments, tech developments, and the players that …

During the third and final day of our ILM West Conference, Facebook director of global SMB markets Dan Levy introduced a full slate of new data. In addition to hard numbers, the standard Facebook messaging came through: Its Pages (and newer offerings like Promoted Posts) are effective for displaying the “personality” of SMBs.
This was grounded …

To kick off Day 2 of our ILM West Conference, CityGrid’s Jason Finger espoused the need to verticalize in local.
This comes down to the fact that local is not only such a large and fragmented market that begs for segmentation; but that the ‘idiosyncrasies’ of different verticals beg for varied advertising strategies and best practices.
This …

As many in our  interactive local media community can attest, the pace of change and disruption in social media is dizzying. New networks, native ads, SoLoMo, social commerce…we could go on for days.
At BIA/Kelsey’s ILM West 2012 conference in L.A. Dec. 4-6, we’re placing a major focus on social media business models. The headliner is …

That headline will get some pushback as AT&T has received less than desirable consumer feedback for wireless, telecom and U-Verse service. But the company is taking steps to improve that image — at least if my recent experience is any indication.
After returning from Spain last week, I was eager to fire up and start using the iPhone5 …

Among the many headlines that emerged from SMB Digital Marketing 2012 (CRM, digital loyalty, performance marketing), one that caught the attention of most in the room was the research return that social ROI is shifting dramatically toward customer acquisition. In fact, BIA/Kelsey’s LCM 16 survey highlights suggest that 42 percent of SMBs now turn to …

Before too many days pass in travel recovery mode, I wanted to get some of my thoughts down from BIA/Kelsey’s sessions at the EASDP Congress in Toledo Spain on Friday.  As background, we programmed and ran the second day of the two-day event.
We were able to recruit a quality lineup of speakers from different geographies …