Online video creation tool and ad network Jivox today announced that it will bring a series of new publishers into the network. These include Examiner.com, Acuweather.com and MediaNews Group.

This will add more locally relevant inventory to its network and increase the appeal of its overall platform for small and large businesses that want to target locally. Jivox has an edge over many other self-serve online video production platforms because it has its own distribution backbone. The quickly growing set of companies in this space otherwise rely on a combination of distribution strategies, including search engines, YouTube, distribution partners and third-party video ad networks.

Video production is one thing, but the conversation is evolving beyond who shoots it to questions of where the video “lives.” As we’ve examined a number of times, the companies in this space that are targeting small businesses will be made or broken by the ability to 1. form channel partnerships to gain direct sales into the fragmented SMB market and 2. form distribution strategies to get videos out there in front of targeted local audiences.

Jivox is pushing hard on the latter and we could see it work on the former, given an extended runway from a $16 million funding round in July. We’ve also seen companies like Mixpo push hard on such deals recently (here and here). IYP relationships meanwhile have been a big goal for a lot of video production firms because, to a certain extent, they satisfy both of these factors.

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I’m scheduled to talk to the Jivox executive team on Thursday and will report back.

It has been more than 90 days since former Yellowpages.com President Charles Stubbs took the helm at Primedia, the publisher of apartmentguide, rentals.com, newhomeguide.com and DistribuTech. We’ve followed Stubbs for a long time, and have naturally been curious about his game plan. Primedia, after all, has been challenged, as have other “shopper” companies, by the transition to the Internet, and the tough climate in real estate (and autos, which it recently exited).

During an earnings call last month, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Stubbs didn’t reveal very much, but indicated that he’ll work to continue Webifying Primedia, while leveraging the print assets.

His top priority is to reinvigorate the products as something that “consumers need, that are differentiated and develop leads for our customers. I see enormous opportunity to improve on these platforms and provide more compelling consumer products to drive growth in our audience and be the premium lead vehicle for our advertisers,” he said.

Sales execution and scale are also top priorities. “We must leverage our relationships and brand awareness to reach more markets and increase penetration,” said Stubbs, noting that the company has exclusive agreements for distribution inside CVS, Kroger, Blockbuster and Albertsons.

Customer segmentation is another area of focus. “Successful companies understand that there is no one-size-fits-all solution where we will be focused on developing a targeted approach to each of the segments that we serve. Not only will that help us to better monitor our current segments but also define new opportunities to grow our business.”

In making changes, however, Stubbs tacitly acknowledged that he doesn’t necessarily have a lot of money to play with. “I believe that we have a number of opportunities to grow our business that will not require a significant amount of capital investment beyond the cash flow we generate today,” he said.

MerchantCircle announced today that it will offer a Web site hosting service on top of its existing set of local listing products. Known as Instant Website, it will offer the 550,000 companies that have MC listings, Web site creation and hosting for $14.99 per month (75 percent of these companies don’t have Web sites).

The differences between the new Web sites and its current landing page product aren’t staggering, and mostly come down to packaging. But a company that wishes to advertise itself and its online presence to a greater degree might feel better with its own Web site. This includes an independent domain that is chosen by the advertiser rather than being hosted within a MerchantCircle sub-domain.

“If a company wants to put its Web site on a business card, for example, this is something simple and more direct that [they] would feel more comfortable directing traffic towards,” Darren Waddell, vice president of marketing for MerchantCircle, told me yesterday.

The Web site creation and hosting tools are integrated into MerchantCircle’s existing dashboard (see video here). This includes the ability to choose a domain and view domains that are automatically recommended based on information MC already has about a business.

The next steps in this process involve choosing a template and populating it with business information that can be transferred from an existing MC profile. After this point, the two sets of business information sync up with each other, according to Waddell, so that changes and updates only need to be made in one place.

For MerchantCircle, this could be a good tool for growing its advertiser base — possibly part of an overall effort to clean up its image in the wake of flak it has received for its advertiser acquisition tactics. It could also be a good hook to get many of its free listings to paid advertisers (currently 7,100) and serve as a stepping stone for future paid services tied to these Web sites.

These could include calls to action such as lead gen forms that alert companies to any activity, right within their MerchantCircle dashboard. E-mail services tied to the new domains can also be offered, according to Waddell: “Some companies just use their Gmail address, which isn’t always the most professional way to present yourself.”

SEM and SEO services could also come into play, says Waddell, for companies that develop a desire to have their new Web site show up more prominently in search engine results. More importantly, click-to-call or call tracking numbers will be relevant to MerchantCircle advertisers, many of which are service-based businesses.

“The next logical step is to close the gap between page views/impressions and getting the phone to light up, which is much more tangible,” says Waddell. “The closer we are to the transaction, the better.”

Marchex has announced the launch of Marchex Connect 2.0, an updated version of its private-labeled local ad platform that is used by local ad resellers such as AT&T and Yellowpages.com.

The new version’s highlights include integration of call tracking (from the company’s VoiceStar subsidiary) and a new templatized landing page offering that can be customized and integrated with search marketing campaigns. These features are also meant to appeal to businesses that don’t have Web sites, enabling them to either get online in an easy way or have phone leads delivered to them rather than clicks. Both factors are common among service-based businesses.

“Calls are the currency that small businesses want,” says Leigh McMillan, senior vice president of marketing, echoing the stated reasons we heard when Marchex bought VoiceStar (and when AT&T bought Ingenio last November).

The new additions together also represent a move toward giving the platform wider appeal among not only resellers and IYPs, but also any national organization that can deploy a local ad platform to a large group of localized constituents or franchises. In this way, the many components to the platform can be customized for each reseller.

“A lot of focus on resellers tends to be on Yellow Pages publishers,” says McMillan, “but there is more than that, and the way we have put this platform together — to serve it as a whole or a la carte — can serve any number of resellers.”

The deal Marchex did with Cobalt in the auto vertical is a good example of this, and the platform can be likewise applied to a number of verticals. A national company like Roto-Rooter, for example, could use it to scale an ad platform across many local affiliates (insurance agencies also come to mind). Here, landing pages, which are templatized but unique to different locations, can be attractive (example below).

Along with this launch, the company will organize its VoiceStar and TrafficLeader subsidiaries into one business unit called Digital Platform Group. This will provide ad campaign management as well as consulting and sales channel training for its resellers. This follows the launch of Marchex’s AdHere pay-per-click platform last month, which similarly sought to unify some of its business units under one digestible product and advertiser brand.

“This is the second phase of our brand streamlining,” says McMillan.

The New York Times‘ David Pogue writes this morning about some of the outcroppings of new innovation at Microsoft, apparent through the newest version of Office Live for Small Business.

The product takes the “Webification” issue to heart by allowing tech illiterate SMBs to get up and running with a suite of tools for developing and hosting a Web site. This includes free hosting, analytics, and more compatibility (Firefox and Mac) and simplicity than previous versions.

In addition to upsells for added functionality to manage operations (track employees, resources, reservations), a good possibility for the product’s positioning is feeding SMBs into online advertising (via adCenter). This is similar to Google’s intended strategy of integrating AdWords campaign management into the workflow of Quick Books’ massive installed base (an integration that arguably hasn’t reached its potential).

As the tenets of Webification go, one of the benefits of being the one to bring small businesses online in the first place is to establish the trusted relationship to then be the provider of choice for their evolution to paid online advertising. Through this version of Office Live for Small Business, it’s apparent that Microsoft gets this. The proof will be in the execution.

I read with interest a recent post by Jennifer Osborne on Search Engine People regarding how Millennials fundamentally search for products and services differently as compared with those 30 years old and older. One of the fundamental differences Osborne points out:

Millennial Brains do not have the same neural networks that ours do.
That’s a fancy way of saying that they haven’t been trained to use category search. Young people no longer use the Dewey Decimal system and paper Yellow Pages (headings). If they want to find something they go to a computer terminal and look up exactly what they’re looking for. And with a few refined searches, they usually find it.

Our neural networks (those 30+) have been programmed to do category type searches. But the average 16 to 24 yr old doesn’t know how to do category level searches. If a 21 yr old has a leaky sink, they’re going to search under “leaky sink” not “plumbers.”

At The Kelsey Group, we are often asked about print product innovation from a product orientation view, but of late we have been examining how the print product can and should fundamentally change from a usage and navigational standpoint. Taking Osborne’s points a bit further, perhaps the way to fundamentally change the Yellow Pages is not a another product or specialty section but rather it is the core navigation of the product that needs to change.

One idea some major U.S. publishers have privately discussed is the notion of introducing a keyword version of the Yellow Pages that takes the most used keyword searches (natural search terms and widely used category terms) and creates a new directory that is “search” friendly. Some publishers have subtly begun experimenting with this with the introduction of new categories and “referral headings” that guide people to where they can find the information they are seeking.  

Publishers have access to the most popular keywords both from their own IYP properties as well as from their SEM efforts that should provide enough insight into the new way people search for local business information. Creating a new way of navigating the product would mean breaking apart a 100-year-old paradigm, but the fact remains that the product needs to fundamentally change if it can hope to hold off the decline of usage in the under-30 segment of the marketplace. Introducing a keyword version of the Yellow Pages would allow users to select the version that best suits their needs – category search or natural search.

The goal of local advertisers is to be found and contacted; changing to a form of natural search in print seems like, well, a natural step for publishers to explore to help push more leads and address the search needs of a growing segment.

It is hard for me to comprehend, but we are finally finished with ILM:07. We were grateful to have had 650 interesting and enthusiastic attendees from all over the world, 72 stimulating speakers, a full load of sponsors and an excellent partnership with SES.

Our next conference, April 30-May 2 at the Westin in Seattle, will be a highly differentiated affair. Stay tuned for what we are doing with that (but not for a couple of months, OK?).

For those of you who can’t get enough coverage, a virtual conference will be up with all the PPTs in a couple of weeks (but only for attendees). You can also order the DVD.

For immediate gratification, however, check out the posts from my talented colleagues on the Kelsey Blog.

I especially liked Michael Taylor’s write-up of our discussion with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis. Michael is totally correct: “The long and short of Calacanis’ comments go to several of the key themes heard over and over again at ILM:07 — relevant content, deep content and engaging, passionate people are all needed to make a highly relevant and personalized search experience.”

In addition to the Kelsey write-ups, Mike Boland has captured links from the press and bloggers who attended our event. It was good to have them aboard. And Mel Taylor took some great pictures.

Here are easy links to Kelsey ILM:07 posts:

1. TKG Analysts Lay the Groundwork (Michael Boland)

2. Winebaum Provides a Fresh Look at Local Search (Michael Taylor)

3. Cash Is King for Local Search Investors (Charles Laughlin)

4. Herratti’s Citysearch: Social Media Video Partnerships (Bobbi Loy-Luster)

5. NCI: ‘We Can Work with Zillow’ (John Kelsey)

6. ILM:07 Spotlights mobilePeople (Stephen Marshall)

7. Stubbs Discusses AT&T’s Post-InGenio Vision (Michael Taylor)

8. TMP’s McKelvey Discusses Online/Offline Research Data (Michael Taylor, Michael Boland)

9. New West’s Weber and Independent Local Media (John Kelsey)

10. Marchex’s Horowitz: Bet on People Already Winning (Charles Laughlin)

11. Google’s Hanke: Maps, Mobile and Mashups (Michael Boland)

12. An Intuit-ive Approach to SMB Marketing (Stephen Marshall)

13. Injecting Social into Local Media (Michael Boland)

14. Taking It Home: The Final Panel at ILM:07 (Stephen Marshall)

Allison Mnookin, VP of Intuit’s Small Business Division, gave a keynote address on Friday at The Kelsey Group’s ILM:07 conference that started with a recap of Intuit’s segmentation approach to the SMB market. (Kelsey conference regulars have heard an earlier version of the Intuit-ive approach at previous TKG events.)

Intuit has a huge roster of SMB customers — 7 million in the U.S., according to Mnookin. Through studying its own customer base, it has identified three main segments to the SMB market:

1. “Personal” businesses (about 22 million).
2. “Main Street” businesses (about 3.2 million).
3. “Middle Market” businesses (about 0.6 million).

The single biggest challenge facing all these small businesses is getting new customers.

To that end, as a group, SMBs spent about $110 billion on marketing last year. But only 22 percent have done any online marketing (in the past 12 months), and less than 5 percent of their marketing budgets are spent on online media. Finally, although 95 percent of SMBs say they want to have a Web site, less than 50 percent currently do.

To improve this situation, Mnookin emphasized that vendors and service providers will need to follow several simple but crucial principles in serving SMBs:

1. Solutions for “experts” don’t win (e.g., QuickBooks was the first small-business accounting solution that didn’t require the user to enter debits and credits). Mnookin pointed out that SMBs want to focus on their BUSINESS, and not have to become experts in accounting, computers, etc.
2. A vendor should provide help, then let customers do it themselves. Intuit calls this the “do it with assistance” model. Someone helps the customer with product set-up (either in person or by phone) and gets the user started.
3. To be successful, a product needs to solve integrated problems well. For example, a key customer dissatisfaction with existing payroll systems is that businesses would have to enter the same data more than once — because the payroll system didn’t automatically take data from the accounting system. By integrating these two systems, Intuit eliminated the need for redundant data entry. As a result, they have become the No. 1 payroll system provider to businesses in the U.S., with more than 1 million SMBs customers.

Mnookin described how these principles are guiding Intuit’s own product development and M&A initiatives, talking briefly about its acquisition of StepUp, which powers the QuickBooks Listing Service by which SMBs can easily get placement on services like Google’s Froogle.

Interactive Local Media: 07 is ready to roll Nov. 28-30 in L.A. That’s next Wednesday through Friday!

The show, which is being produced in partnership with SES Local, has attendees from all over the world. One exec told me he is coming on Wednesday, taking the red eye to New York that night due to a prior commitment, and flying back on Thursday night for the final day.

Attendance-wise, we have the biggest sign-up list for a Kelsey event since the mid-1990s. Almost everyone that we have slotted will actually be there. While the agenda has been tight for some time, with 70-plus speakers, here are some last minute adds:

• Christophe Maire, a cofounder of Nokia’s Location-Based Experience Development, is set for Day 3. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: Nokia’s $8.1 Billion purchase of NavTeq.

• Laurel Gilbert, from Microsoft’s Atlas division, is speaking on our localizing national advertising panel. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: How Microsoft will use Aquantative to transform itself into a true Web advertising giant.

• Doug Kilponen from MerchantCircle is speaking on the localized shopping panel. MerchantCircle just received a $10 million cash infusion from IAC and others. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: Best Practices for Signing up Small Businesses.

• Claudia Poepperl from mobilePeople is set to provide a demo of the London-based company’s cutting-edge social mobile technology.

We are also expecting a drop-in from a top executive of a company that’s been in the news, but we can’t say much more about it. And speaking of news, there are lots of interesting news announcements that will drop around the show as well. So, will we see you in L.A.? Here is the registration page.

Mr. Local SEO Andrew Shotland writes today about vertically oriented Web site development and hosting products for small businesses. This is an interesting concept because it brings together two local trends we’ve written extensively about: Webification and verticalization.

First, with Webification, the concept is that there are many businesses out there that don’t have Web sites. With this, the addressable market for online advertising is diminished. This is the reason why many search-based advertising providers such as Google and Yahoo! have lowered the barriers to getting online with free or cheap Web site hosting and development products.

At the same time we’ve seen growth in landing page or microsite offerings such as Smalltown that offer a de-facto Web presence that’s cheaper and easier (key factors for SMBs) than building your own Web site. These online training wheels, the thinking goes, can get small businesses online where they will slowly graduate to online advertisers.

Overall the goal is to expand the addressable market. And for individual providers, these products are offered with the hope that being the one to pop an SMB’s online cherry could create an advertiser for life. At least that’s the hope.

Vertical Leap

So what about verticalization? There is a lot of talk about vertical search lately. On a basic level, the thinking goes that vertical search has a refined corpus of content and ranking algorithms that ensure more specific and relevant results to certain users. There are also clearly more contextually relevant targeting opportunities and higher CTRs for the same reason.

This targeting concept carries over to Web site development, as Shotland points out, in having providers that have the design and SEO sensitivities that are specific to certain verticals. And as things are consolidating in the world of Web hosting providers (Hostway/Affinity, Websitepros/Web.com, etc.) there is a general convergence of abilities and offerings to appeal to small businesses.

This trend should continue with consolidation of search/IYP advertising and Web site development. But as Shotland points out, this won’t only join Web site development with print, online, SEM and the rest of the Yellow Pages sales tool belt, but it will be brought into the fold in specific vertical increments. This would be done to appeal to (and maintain relationships with) verticals that represent traditional Yellow Pages sweet spots, like trade services. Indeed, these are the categories that arguably need the most help getting online.

Furthermore, it’s often stated that the Yellow Pages industry as a whole has about a one-third penetration of the SMB marketplace. It could be that traditional Yellow Pages products are cost prohibitive or not of interest to these businesses. Either way, offering a new, less expensive, vertically specific and format-varied bundle of online services could help chip away at this sizable market opportunity.