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 …

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 …

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 …

Facebook investor and press events have become spectacles unto themselves, where distilling signal from noise is a tricky task. But that’s what we’ll flesh out here in the aftermath of the company’s first earnings call post-IPO…a call that featured an appearance from Mark Zuckerberg, nothing overly substantive from Facebook execs and persistent questions about the …

Elevation Partners‘ Roger McNamee — friend of Bono’s, the lead in the failed resurrection of Palm and a winner in the Facebook IPO to the tune of $1.5 billion — is known as a contrarian thinker. He did not disappoint in a keynote address yesterday at the San Diego Venture Group’s annual summit.
His main …

Are deals still being driven by shares, posts, likes and other social media features in an era of Groupon and LivingSocial Super Bowl ads? Yes, definitely, according to Second Street Media, which held a webinar with The Washington Post last week to discuss social media and deals strategies.
Referrals, “like-gating” and brand building via social …

In the run-up to Facebook’s ballyhooed IPO, BIA/Kelsey has released Wave III of its U.S. Social Media Advertising Forecast, which reveals overall market acceleration in 2012 and 2013, and steady growth in locally targeted social spend.
From 2011 to 2016, U.S. social ad revenues will climb from $3.8 billion to $9.8 billion (21 percent CAGR). Several …

via CNN
If anybody wonders whether the considerable “legs” of Facebook justify a valuation now set for $83 billion, have a listen to a terrific BIA/Kelsey webinar on Facebook’s IPO, featuring Trada CEO Niel Robertson Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom and Plink Cofounder Peter Vogel (and BIA/Kelsey analysts Jed Williams, Matt Booth and Jeanne Dattilo).
People have to …

Among the myriad questions swirling around Facebook’s imminent IPO (other than “when will it actually happen?”), the two most pressing are: 1) Can the social network actually support an assumed $100 billion valuation? and 2) How?
BIA/Kelsey sought to answer both by pairing financial modeling and strategic analysis. We recently published a comprehensive report exploring the …

Facebook’s acquisition of mobile photo app Instagram earlier this week wasn’t especially surprising (though the $1 billion price tag may have been). Mobile is a fertile, untapped channel for the social giant, but a growing risk factor the longer the opportunity remains unrealized. And with $5 billion to $10 billion in cash reserves expected after …

By now, there isn’t a single page of Facebook’s S-1 filing that hasn’t been exhaustively picked through and dissected in advance of the social network’s spring IPO. But what about the metrics that were underreported or unreported altogether? Moreover, which metrics really matter as a gauge of the current health of Facebook’s business and its …

By now, much of the connected universe, and certainly all of technolphilia, is aware of Facebook’s IPO, which seeks to raise up to $5 billion (and perhaps eventually $10 billion) when its shares go public this spring. The net effect is a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion for the 8-year-old social network.
Mining the …

How many small businesses have done a deal at this point? Twelve percent, according to a new survey of 2,500 SMBs by MerchantCircle. That’s about a third higher than MerchantCircle’s June survey.
The survey also found a lot of Facebook ad usage. About 23 percent of local merchants report having tried Facebook Ads to date, …

Facebook and Yelp are downsizing their separate deals initiatives after launching them with some fanfare. Facebook is now limiting its deals to users who check in to businesses, and Yelp is sharply reducing the number of deals it features, while continuing to support self-serve efforts that are integrated with other Yelp ad products.
Are these …

Facebook touts itself as a platform that allows and encourages partners to further build out its social graph. In Deals, it has now found its most significant partner yet, inking a deal with American Express to push socially curated deals to cardholders.
Cardholders will link their AMEX accounts to Facebook’s “Link-Like-Love” application. They will then …

Writing about Google+ wasn’t an option. When an 800-pound gorilla makes a frontal assault on Facebook, Skype AND Twitter, sending the tech punditry into breathless buzz and sparking curiosity about the potential seismic effects on social networking, well, that warrants ink. The question wasn’t if…but how. What hasn’t been said already (10 times over)? Where …

Not a day passes without the question “Can Google Get Social?” popping up in the tech punditry. After several ill-feted answers (Buzz, Wave), the search leader has a new social reply: Google+.
Actually, it’s the Google+ “project.” VP of Social Vic Gundotra says that’s an important distinction, as this is an evolving set of tools and …

We’ve been focused so much on deal a day that we sometimes forget it is just part of the mix when it comes to successful SMB promotions. Seth Gardenswartz of SpaBoom, a provider of promotion services for spas and restaurants, held a helpful webinar last week that stressed the six “common elements of successful promotions.”
The …

CityGrid Media has released a study it conducted via research firm Harris Interactive that suggests people are more likely to “like” a local business than write a review as a way of expressing their approval of the service they received. However, good old-fashioned word of mouth (the analogue kind) still reigns supreme, with 75 percent …