Just six months after it launched its SP411 Twitter integration, Superpages is at it again with an offer to Tweet any coupon that businesses upload to an online profile.

To do this it has created 72 city-specific Twitter accounts, which users in those cities can follow to get daily tweets for coupons and promotions happening around them. Businesses interested in taking part can register on Superpages and go through a process to create or upload coupons.

According to the press release, this includes:

• create up to three different coupons,
• set a start date and expiration date,
• add a disclaimer,
• apply coupons to multiple store locations,
• include a promotion code to track specific offers; and
• update coupons at any time.

Coupons are then automatically tweeted out by the geographically appropriate Twitter handle. Of course this is only as good as the number of followers of each of these city-specific accounts, but they should build followers quickly.

The growing interest for coupons on Twitter combined with Superpages ability to cross promote this, will make it happen. Meanwhile you can check out the aggregated feed of all of the 72 city promotions on Twitter (and link directly to your city’s account) at @superpages/superpages-cities.

Like SP411, this is a clever integration, utilizing only a standard Twitter account to communicate and create additional touch points with users looking for local business information. The coupon angle makes it that much more enticing.

As we said at the SP411 launch, media is fragmenting and Superpages is meeting users where they are going. This is an important paradigm that traditional media need to take to heart, as a once siloed world becomes more about presence across platforms and less about owning destinations.

Groupon has a roaring head start in the deals of the day category for groups, with more than a million users. We’ll hear all about Groupon from CEO Andrew Mason at next week’s Marketplaces conference in San Diego, where he is keynoting. But there are now countless imitators adding their own deals.

New York-based 8Coupons.com, which aggregates coupons from content partners such as Valpak, Money Mailer and RedPlum’s SuperCoups, has now put them all together in one spot (great idea). 8Coupons launched the top 10 U.S. cities last month, and now has 55 different Group Buying “Deals of the Day” Web sites in 100 cities. Based on what we are hearing around the industry, many more sites are likely to enter the space soon.

Redbeacon, one of the new breed of social/local leads providers for SMBs, said it is now available throughout the entire Bay Area and teaming up with BigTent, a mega-moms network in the Bay Area with more than 100 local cells. BigTent will receive a revenue share carved from Redbeacon’s 10 percent commission.

The deal between BigTent and Redbeacon positions the company not only against Yellow Pages and other newbreed leads providers (i.e.m ServiceMagic, AlikeList, HelpHive, ThumbTack and Sears’ ServiceLive) but also against other sites that specifically tailor to moms (and women generally). These include sites such as Angie’s List and Center’d. It plays on the theory that some women are intimidated by home and trade professionals and may be more likely to seek out a social network for advice and recommendations.

For BigTent, the partnership marks the first time it has partnered with an organization to promote local businesses. It had previously worked deals with a number of national brands.

The BigTent news caps off a campaign to land associations and other organizations as partners. The results of the effort means that the site now boasts listings of 16,000 service pros with the badges of their organizations — a major trust factor. One of the key prizes has been the local branch of the Better Business Bureau, which previously hadn’t loaned out its list.

In other site developments, Redbeacon, which won the top prize as best new idea at TechCrunch 50 six months ago, is adding “Friendly Advice.” The feature lets friends comment on job bids (and the bidders). This complements the company’s matching engine, and reviews and ratings found on other parts of the site — including both positive and negative reviews.

“We’re crowd-sourcing recommendations and sharing,” says CEO Ethan Anderson. One added benefit is the viral element and the added exposure for Redbeacon: 500 views may become 2,500, he says.

Anderson notes that the company has been in a constant state of “iteration” since launching, and will only begin the process of raising money when it is satisfied with the end product. So far, the site has added several features, such as enabling private communications between consumers and providers in the middle of a bid and allowing providers to additional information upon request. “Consumers need lots of information to make a decision,” he says. The site has also syndicated reviews from Yelp, Google and Yahoo to complement its own.

One milestone reached by the site is that it can now successfully furnish a quote for every job that is bid. In fact, it had more than 1,000 service providers almost immediately after launch, and continues to rapidly grow its base. “We don’t have a chicken or egg problem,” says Anderson. “Signing up (service providers) has been easy.”

Redbeacon CEO Ethan Anderson will join AlikeList CEO Jim Delli Santi and Reply.com COO Sean Fox on the “SMB Marketplaces” panel at Marketplaces 2010. ServiceMagic CEO Craig Smith is a keynoter at the conference.

Location-based services continue to roll out left and right. TechCrunch won’t stop saying this year’s South By Southwest conference will be all about location (except for this contrarian piece by Paul Carr). We mostly agree.

But with all the start-ups crowding the space and rapidly growing, albeit from a small base, Facebook looms as the category killer. With 400 million global users (100 million of them active mobile users), it could have quite an impact when it inevitably “turns on” geolocation for status updates.

There’s been speculation about when it will do this, including here. But today, the first tangible signs were shown in a New York Times Bits post that quotes unnamed sources within Facebook. The venue for the launch will not surprisingly be the annual F8 developer’s conference in April.

The update will involve some form of automatic geotagging for the status updates that have become the main dish of the social network. Like Twitter has done with its API (and today on its own site), this will automatically append status updates with location.

This will be based on GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation, IP address, explicit notification (think Foursquare-like check-ins) and/or users’ account information. Like Facebook’s recent regulation of status updates, it will also undoubtedly be governed by users’ opt-in privacy settings.

That last part is critical, and involves one of the reasons Facebook has taken a relatively long time to do this. With a company like Facebook that has all eyes and forms of scrutiny on it (especially being a social network), nearly all moves are met with privacy backlash.

So with new feature rollouts, it’s one step at a time to not rustle too many feathers. And of course location tagging is at the top of the list of privacy advocate seething factors. We’ll see what this eventually entails, but for now you can be sure that when location gets turned on, it will be huge.

The third-party apps and sites that utilize Facebook Connect will plug right into this, and there will be lots of implications for the local space. The Times agrees, stating this will be less of a threat to the Foursquares of the world than to Google’s local efforts — an area Facebook as been eyeing for a while.

One of the people familiar with the project said the company was not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Instead, Facebook wants to go head-to-head with Google in the fight for small-business advertising. Facebook redesigned its business pages last year, with the hope of offering more features for small-business owners. According to Facebook, the Web site currently hosts more than 1.5 million local businesses from around the world.

AT&T Interactive has put up a beta version of its new Buzz.com site dedicated to eliciting positive social recommendations and answers to questions from friends, friends of friends and throughout the Buzz site (which, unfortunately, may get confused with Google Buzz, which was developed after AT&T had announced plans for Buzz.com.)

The site’s main purpose is to zero in on nontraditional categories that aren’t really met by Yellow Pages (such as “romantic hotels”). While no advertising is currently being sold, it will be sold in the future. There is currently no plan to integrate with the reviews that users provide Yellowpages.com, or its new prototype, YP.com. Buzz.com users will have a different intent in mind.

The beta hooks in with Facebook Connect, and will roll out over several weeks after initially being limited to invites only. Project leader Charlie Hornberger notes that Buzz will eventually also be enabled for Twitter, instant messaging platforms, Q&A sites (such as Answers.com), and other social networks as well. “Social search is the future, but not in 2010” he says. As with AlikeList, which we also wrote about this week, the positive nature of a recommendations-only site represents “extremely qualified leads.”

Hornberger notes that the user interface remains a work in progress for the project team, which has less than two-dozen people. Initially, for instance, the site was going to limit its big red heart for favorites to a single choice. It quickly found out that people want to have multiple favorites. The site also currently has a list of favorites for each user. But in the future, that list might take more creative forms, such as tag clouds.

The site will also eventually feature “best recommenders.” Future versions may also have some aspects in sentimental analysis and reputation and presence management. AT&T is investing in these areas. But Buzz.com is actually a fairly simple idea. It just needs strong execution. “You don’t need a Ph.D.” for it, says Hornberger. Current plans are to market it virally, with some advertising on social media likely as well.

AT&Ti Executive Director Greg Isaacs is a featured speaker on the New Directories Panel at Marketplaces 2010, along with execs from Local Matters, SuperMedia and MerchantCircle. r

Self-serve ads will bring the SMB masses to the Web. But they haven’t made much of a dent in SMB advertising at this point. That hasn’t stopped a rush of new self-serve products coming out, several married to social media features. The latest is “minute ads” from AlikeList, one of the new crop of social/directory plays that also includes Redbeacon, Thumbtack, HelpHive, PriceLocal, Center’d and many others.

AlikeList’s Minute Ads allow business owners to create and publish offers on the fly, and change the offers as often as they like. They can be sent out to consumers that specifically request recommendations for a specific type of provider (i.e., plumber).

The Minute Ads are part of Alikelist’s “Business Central” platform, which is being priced at $19.99 a month. Included in the subscription is a “PromoSite,” along with presence and reputation management capabilities that enable customers to see how many people have “liked” or “want to try” their business, or who have clicked to their Web site or phone number.

CEO Jim Delli Santi believes that ALikeList’s like-only platform is highly differentiated from simple reviews and ratings sites (i.e., Yelp and Citysearch). “Review sites are more like media companies broadcasting review content generated from consumers,” says Delli Santi.

In theory, the site also does away with the “volume” problem of not enough reviews on a social site by letting users see “likes” from their friends, friends of friends, and then also from all over the Web.

By focusing only on “likes,” it also skims off the negative reviews. That obviously has pros and cons. I tend to like negative reviews because they provide nuance and important warning signs and make for entertaining reading. But negative reviews may also be the work of consumer vigilantes, and they don’t necessarily help people quickly find a business that they want to use.

AlikeList CEO Jim Delli Santi is speaking at Marketplaces 2010 on a hot session with Redbeacon CEO Ethan Anderson and Reply.com COO Sean Fox.

Local/social leaders from Facebook, Yelp and Twitter took the stage at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, this week to discuss what IAB President Randall Rothenberg called “the mobile/social local real-time medium that does not have a name.”

Facebook’s Tim Kendall, director of monetization, said Facebook has essentially introduced “marketing on the social graph” by tracking its unique information, such as “pages,” “events,” “like,” “share” and “connect.”  “We’re getting pretty good at showing you ‘who matters to me’ on news feed and topics,” he said.

Advertising on the site is now in full play. “We have created a social marketing experience that we think it the most interesting social advertising on the Web,” he said. And Facebook’s advertising success is demonstrably strong. “Our click to conversion rate is two to three times other sites. Social wins every time.”

Kendall added that Facebook’s effective CPM ends up being “a couple of dollars,” but that advertisers also come in via the service’s self-serve advertising, which is priced on a flat rate basis.

Jed Nachman from Yelp estimated that the site’s effective CPM was $200. One example, Little Star Pizza in San Francisco, for instance, had 1,500 looks (and presumably pays $300 for the ad). Nachman also noted that on average, Yelp users look at 2-4 reviews before making any decisions.

Meanwhile, Twitter is preparing to launch its first ad product next month, according to Anamitra Banerji, who is “Product Management, Monetization.” Banerji said his prior experience at Overture told him to “innovate really, really quickly before anyone else comes up with it.”

Banerji added that people should “be focused on what you are doing and not worry about what people are doing around you.” He also noted that Twitter is a distributed product. “We don’t see ourselves as a Web site,” he said.

Weighing in on social during a separate session at IAB was MySpace Co-President Jason Hirschhorn. Hirschhorn noted that MySpace is refocused on entertainment and music. “We’re not jettisoning our roots as a social network. But our fans want to be entertained. Not everyone is a publisher.”

Hirschhorn spoke admiringly of Facebook, which has basically deposed MySpace as a leader in social media with almost four times the traffic — 128 million uniques versus 400 million uniques. “The media community itself has its social graph on Facebook,” he said. “But there is a completely different behavior and mind-set you are tapping into when you are a brand marketer.” He noted that MySpace still has information on 13 million bands, and a “16-34 type audience.”

Yodle, the third-party SMB reseller, has now divided its business into “Yodle Sponsored” and “Yodle Organic.” The formation of the latter division, which has been live for a month with 150 clients, is a recognition that SMBs are increasingly relying on organic search as much as paid search — and they need help driving exposure to their Web sites, blogs, YouTube, and social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

For $400 a month, with six-month initial contracts, Yodle Organic is set to pump up its clients’ organic search rankings. It will provide personalized consultations, design and code Web sites to maximize search rankings; help create and syndicate video; distribute local business profiles to search sites and directories; and provide a dashboard that allows SMBs to measure goals.

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham says the timing feels right. “SEO’s price-per-lead and price-per-click is substantially lower than SEM. But it isn’t ‘either-or.’ They complement each other,” he says. “SEO takes time to build your site so it becomes visible and builds authority in the eyes of the search engines. It is about building equity in a brand that is long lasting.”

The challenge is to properly scale the effort for each client and make money — Yodle gets an average of about $1,000 per month from its 7,000 paid search clients. “No one has productized and automated and put clear accounting” around something like this, he says. But “we’ve been building Web sites for three years. We’re experts in automation.”

Still, it is an ongoing experiment as Yodle works to get clients non-paid traffic in such new areas as maps, article sharing sites and even Google’s 7 Pack. “We look at these things as organic distribution,” says Cunningham.

Content production is probably the biggest question mark for Yodle (and for any company entering this space). Out of the gate, Yodle is using a combination of external contributors, internal editors and curated content from other sources. It hopes to provide at least 10 fresh pieces of content a month to each client.

Yelp has been on a roll, and is now reporting that it gets 29 million unique visitors a month. Given that, the company’s immediate challenge is to move beyond its core base of restaurant and shopping reviews and dive deep for Yellow Pages-arena services reviews, as well as reviews for classified categories, such as autos and real estate/apartments.

Restaurants currently make up 29 percent of reviews, while shopping constitutes 23 percent. Other major categories include beauty and fitness (9 percent), arts & entertainment (8 percent), home and local services (7 percent), entertainment (5 percent), and nightlife (4 percent).

Apartments are certainly a good place for Yelp to concentrate on, especially given the youthful target sought by apartment managers. Almost half of Yelp’s users (46 percent) are between 18 and 34 years old, while 36 percent are between 35 and 49.

So it was no surprise that Yelp COO Geoff Donaker was out evangelizing the cause this morning on a webinar conducted by NCI’s Apartment Finder, a leading publication for managers of mega-apartment complexes.

The evangelism effort’s a good idea. In a survey before the call, just 35 percent of the webinar audience said they were already familiar with Yelp, and just 5 percent said they were already engaged with Yelp as a business owner. Sixty-one percent, however, said they had never heard of it.

Donaker told the webinar attendees that while he hoped they eventually advertised on Yelp, he was mostly interested in getting them tuned into Yelp as a marketing resource and to get them to access their business owner accounts and improve their pages. He noted that most reviews on Yelp were actually positive ones and they shouldn’t be afraid of the community feedback.

Many apartment managers, however, have cold feet vis-a-vis reviews due to what Apartment Finder VP of Operations Judy Bellack suggested was “extremely negative” experience with one site in particular: Internet Brands’ ApartmentRatings.com.

Serial Web entrepreneur Mark H. Goldstein  has been the founder of such sites as Kmart’s BlueLight and Impulse Buy. More recently, he invested in green ecology-based ventures, but he grew bored and came back to ecommerce with Loyalty Lab and  Home-Account.com, which matched homeowners with mortgage brokers, competing with the likes of LendingTree , Bankrate.com and Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace (whose free to the consumer model is similar).

Today, Goldstein launched a sister site, Refinance.com, which is using the same engine as Home-Account to match refinance prospects with the lowest “TrueCost” loan over time.   Both services rely on a matching system developed with Jack M. Guttenberg, better known as “The Mortgage Professor.” They also collect recommendations and reviews, marrying social networking with leads.

Goldstein contends that the free matching service is far superior to lead generation sites such as Lending Tree, which provide consumers with lists of five or six brokers.  That doesn’t help consumers much, he argues. They’re almost as poorly informed as when they started.

“We’re getting rid of the ‘last mile human being’ and pinpointing exactly the right product,” says Goldstein, noting that consumers will still have an option to self-select their brokers. “They don’t have to take the first one, the second or third.”

The site is currently launching local and regional lenders, with hundreds of lenders ready to sign on.  Goldstein’s timing, however, would appear to be shaky, with many banks still very conservative in their lending practices, post TARP mode.

But  Goldstein contends  “they do want to lend,” and notes that real estate has been in recovery for the past six months. Lending Tree has been doing good business, for example. And Bankrate.com was just taken private in October for $700 million.

“There are very specific people they want to lend to,” says Goldstein.  “What we do is make you look as good as possible before the lender picks up the phone. “