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.

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

Merchant data sent in by fans of merchants and from merchants themselves is becoming increasingly important. Can it be relied on as a main source, or should it only complement listing data from the big three providers — InfoGroup, Acxiom and Localeze?

We talked to Pankaj Mathur, InfoGroup vice president of business development, about it. Not surprisingly, he has mixed feelings. It is certainly useful and cost effective, and from an SEM perspective, there is sometimes the feeling that “more [data elements] is better,” he says.

But he warns that accuracy and reliability are more important than ever before, especially with mobile phones that can send people to bad locations. Also looming is the sense that merchants are incentivized to misrepresent themselves so that they can boost their search rankings or be found under lucrative-but-wrong categories (i.e., cab companies under “airports”).

InfoGroup (and probably the other leaders in the space) instead take the “trust but verify” approach to merchant data. The company receives 10,000 to 15,000 submissions per month from multiple partners such as OnStar, Yahoo and AOL. “We find that about 50 percent of these submissions are false positive like duplicates or incorrect information, “says Mathur.

In a newly issued article, Mathur goes into more detail about the importance of the duplicates issue. In franchise corporations, for instance, there may be lists of storefronts within marketing departments, operations departments and accounting deparrtments. They don’t always overlap with LBS (location-based services) requests, he notes.

Moreover, retailers often neglect to delete or change storefront information — something that creates a special mess when companies such as Starbucks close hundreds of units throughout the country. Mathur suggests one-step updaters (such as his company’s “Express Update”) are a partial answer. In the meantime, the validated information from the leading listing providers remains in the driver’s seat.

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.

Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau defended the role of the site in journalism and said it is helping to herald in “a golden age of journalism” that has more content and audience participation than ever before.

Speaking at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, Hippeau noted that HuffPo is publishing 500 pieces of content a day, compared with the 100 pieces published by The New York Times. Each piece is curated constantly with the help of the site’s “hyper-efficient editor.” And it publishes 2 million comments a month.

Much of the content comes from newspapers and other media. But Hippeau argues, “I did not kill newspapers,” echoing the five-word acceptance speech of a Webbie award by site founder Arianna Huffington last fall. Rather, he says the site brings new users to newspaper sites by links, like Google.

In fact, he contends that newspaper sites are actually doing pretty well. It is the traditional print business that is hurting. Basically, it is a coincidence that “our business is soaring while circulation at newspapers is declining.”

“If I was starting a news business today, the last thing I’d do is hire a team of traditional journalists and buy a printing press,” he says.

Hippeau also contends that the site’s success in boosting usage is based largely on successful verticalization. While the site boomed during the Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama campaign, it is now only dependent on politics for 20 percent to 25 percent of its traffic. The site, in fact, has just launched its 13th vertical section: colleges. The section enables students to contribute campus-by-campus news for 50+ colleges.

The site also has four local editions (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Denver) and has also recently launched a sports site, which now accounts for 10 percent of its traffic. The timing was fortuitous as the launch occurred around the Tiger Woods scandals three months ago. “It is the gift that keeps on giving,” he says.

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.

Gannett has always seemed to be a likely directory player. In fact, the world’s largest newspaper publisher owns a small group of print directories. It also provides a white-labeled online directory product to its media properties.

But as directories, search and user-generated content have become more commingled, Gannett has gone a step further with the launch of FindItNow.com, a new directory product from its Planet Discover division.

FindItNow.com is national, but has been localized for specific markets.  It is currently live in three markets: Rochester, Nashville and Burlington, Vermont. Only local information and content is featured. Key categories include Auto, Dining & Entertainment, Health & Medicine, Pets & Animals and Shopping.

The site is integrated with Facebook Connect, and users can add reviews, photos and business details if they register. In Rochester, 883 people have registered to contribute information; in Nashville, 828 people have registered; and in Burlington, 218 people have registered.

The site, in fact, is a lot like other search-driven directories, such as MerchantCircle, ShopCity, SMBLive’s Cloud Profile and others. As with other sites, local businesses have the option of free or paid tiers. The paid tiers are set at $49 or $99 per month. Depending on which tier they choose, businesses can have preferred search result placement, company logo and dominant photo, extended business description, additional photos and unlimited coupons.

Citysearch officially rolled out its CityGrid publisher network this week. The network moves Citysearch away from an exclusive focus on its individual sites (“Citysearch.com,” “Insiderpages.com,” “Urbanspoon”). Instead, it works on a distributed basis with partners (i.e., “SuperPages”) to marry local content and advertising.

In the short term, CityGrid represents the new face of Citysearch and the next evolution in the local market. It allows the company to leverage its existing infrastructure and content, and reach down into the distribution channel with a more automated and cost-effective option versus a focused business development effort. For its publisher network, and its 500,000 local advertisers — projected to jump to 750,000 by year-end — it also represents a real alternative to Google.

Overall, our enthusiasm for the product is as high as it was when we were first walked through it some 14 months ago. Here’s why we like it. The local market fundamentally suffers from two broad problems. First, it’s hard to make money without a substantial investment in sales. Even then, success is not assured. Second, content is expensive to create. Yes, user reviews can be acquired, but there are still large swaths of categories that still lack deep engaging content.

In theory, CityGrid addresses both problems. It gives small and large developers local content and local monetization together in package. The power of this cannot really be underestimated since both of these are hard to come by, not to mention expensive. Urbanspoon used this to great success and eventually was acquired by IAC (Citysearch’s parent). Nearly every review and ad on Urbanspoon was from Citysearch.

We have seen some reports that this product is a reaction to other companies in the field entering the space. It’s not. If anything, it simply takes the winning strategy of opening up an API to developers and letting them build products on robust infrastructure. Think Google Maps, for example.

To our knowledge, there is no one else doing this model with the same scale and focus. Indeed, 100 developers signed up to work with the API within the first two days of its release. We expect, however, that more people will enter this market quickly. But not before Citysearch gets a major head start, if Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti gets his way.

“My vision is [that it will become] the leading content and ad network for local,” he told us, adding that it is no longer just about Citysearch.com as a destination site. “This is Citysearch,” he says. “It isn’t distributed in one place. It is part of many places, all around the Web.”

The result also provides an alternative to Google. “We look at what Google is doing with local as a major competitive threat,” says Herratti. “It controls access to the Internet.

“Last year, we were building and rebuilding,” Herratti notes. “This year, we are very, very focused on execution.” Still, the current product is relatively primitive and will be rapidly evolving. “Right now, we are talking about version 1.0” he says. “Twelve months from now, there will be new geotargeting solutions, new ways of creating content. We’re taking all of these pieces and putting them together. The next thing is to optimize, and optimize.”

Center’d started its mission in June 2008 like most city guides, albeit one largely aimed at women and planning. But over time, the local space has changed. And the site itself has refocused to meet “the missing pieces” in local.

CEO Jennifer Dulski and CTO Chandu Thota, in a conversation with us, say they’d encountered  a noisy ecosystem of local sites suffering from content overload and meaningless, one-dimensional user-generated content that gives four stars + to everything. “There is certainly not a lack of content,” says Dulski.

Their solution: comprehensive information and deeper context. Dulski, the former head of Yahoo Marketplaces, says the Center’d team has spent the past year building “Sentiment Analysis,” a data platform that pulls in and analyzes data and language from social media sites, maps and other sources. “It is more robust than it appears at first glance,” she says, noting that it actually understands language, while most sites are focused on a keyword approach.

The platform, which has some similarities to Marchex’s OpenList, “understands food terms. We know that salmon and crème brulee is food.” The presentation of the analysis is also more complex, showing sentiment as a series of bar charts, rather than simple “star” systems.

“One piece of this is like Zagat,” the popular ratings company, says Dulski. “But it is much broader,” partnering with sites such as Topix, Mobimissimo, Insequent, Silicon Valley Moms Blog Network and various other local and travel blogs and Web sites (a few dozen or so). At the same time, Center’d’s own count of city guides has expanded from 12 to 50 cities.

The site has also added a Twitter page and a popular iPhone app. Dulski, in fact, projects that mobile is going to play an increasingly important part of the city guide business, perhaps accounting for 50 percent of usage within a few years.