June 2nd, 2010 posted by Administrator

Google, Bing, Yahoo, and a slew of startups boost their focus on small business

By Nick Leiber

On the Internet, it’s been said, nobody knows you’re a dog. And if you happen to be a dog groomer? You’re lucky if anyone even knows you exist. Fewer than half of all U.S. small businesses have websites or advertise on the Net, Nielsen Online reports, even though most consumers search online for local shops and services before picking up the phone or leaving the house.

Now, dog groomers, car detailers, and other neighborhood businesses have a host of new options for raising their profile online. Hundreds of new services have cropped up, aiming for a piece of the $17.5 billion that consultancy BIA/Kelsey says U.S. small businesses will spend on Net ads this year. By 2014, BIA estimates, that figure will grow to $36.7 billion, a quarter of all local advertising. “There’s an increasing sense of urgency around having an effective online marketing strategy,” says Court Cunningham, CEO of online ad agency Yodle, which caters to small businesses.

The biggest players on the Internet know there’s money to be made serving small business. Microsoft’s Bing is shoring up neighborhood-specific information and business listings. “Local is a key area of focus,” says Bing marketing chief Mike Nichols. Yahoo! on May 24 renewed a partnership with Nokia to power its maps and navigation services for local listings. On Apr. 20, Google rebranded an older small biz service called Local Business Center as Google Places. Google has created pages with data on millions of small businesses, and some 2 million companies have added their own information to those pages. Owners can also request a free photo shoot of their shop, and in 11 cities they can pay Google $25 a month to make their listing pop up with an icon and other information when consumers check neighborhood maps on smartphones and on the Web. “Our view is we’re in early stages of the intersection of local and mobile,” says Carter Maslan, Google’s local search boss.

Smaller companies are aiming for the same market. Business directory MerchantCircle has online profiles of 1.3 million small companies, four times what it had two years ago. Review site Yelp had 31 million unique visitors in April, up 35 percent year-on-year, and on May 5, Yelp launched a French service. Dozens of sites offer coupons that small business owners can use to attract new customers. Valpak, which has long distributed local circulars by mail, in March launched new mobile apps. Chicago-based Groupon helps promote small businesses via daily e-mails with deals on products and services. Groupon operates in 65 cities across the U.S. and in April raised $135 million in venture capital. On May 16 it acquired Citydeal, a similar service based in Germany, expanding its presence to 18 countries.

The multitude of choices is spurring rapid growth in another category of online business: companies that sort through all the options and help small business owners figure out a Web strategy. Among the biggest is ReachLocal, based in Woodland Hills, Calif. The company raised $54 million in an initial public offering on May 20. Its revenues in 2009 grew by 38 percent, to $203 million, and this year it expects to introduce a tool that lets business owners monitor what’s being said about them online. Rival WebVisible says its sales have grown by 100 percent annually for the past three years, and founder Kirsten Mangers plans to nearly double the headcount at the 285-person company by December. “There are 17,000 location-based apps” alone, Mangers says. “It’s almost impossible for [business owners] to figure out. We’re bringing order to the chaos.”

The bottom line: Local businesses face an ever-growing range of options for promoting their products and services online.

Leiber is the Small Business Channel Editor at BusinessWeek.com.

May 26th, 2010 posted by Administrator

Recent press release by the Kelsey Group.

March 10, 2010

Nearly All Consumers (97%) Now Use Online Media to Shop Locally, According to BIA/Kelsey and ConStat

New study reveals local consumers access an increasing number of online media sources before buying; use of online coupons and appointment scheduling on the rise

CHANTILLY, Va. (March 10, 2010) – Nearly all consumers (97 percent) now use online media when researching products or services in their local area, according to BIA/Kelsey’s (www.bia.com and www.kelseygroup.com) User View Wave VII, an ongoing consumer tracking study conducted with research partner ConStat. Among consumers surveyed, 90 percent use search engines, 48 percent use Internet Yellow Pages, 24 percent use vertical sites, and 42 percent use comparison shopping sites.

“The Internet has indeed become an integral part of consumers’ local commercial activity,” said Steve Marshall, director of research, BIA/Kelsey. “The data suggest we’re at an inflection point where the balance of power in local shopping is shifting to online.”

According to the study, on average, consumers are using 7.9 different media sources when shopping for products or services in their local area, up from 6.5 sources in 2009 and 5.8 in 2008, revealing a noteworthy increase in audience fragmentation. Additional findings include:

• 58 percent of respondents report using an online coupon when shopping for products or services in their local area in the past year.
• 19 percent of respondents report making an appointment online in the past six months for a service other than a restaurant reservation (e.g., business appointment, health-care appointment, auto service or personal service such as a beauty shop).

“The increase in audience fragmentation presents challenges for advertisers looking to connect with local consumers,” said Peter Krasilovsky, vice president and program director, Marketplaces, BIA/Kelsey. “These challenges may be outweighed by the targeting opportunities available with tools like coupon promotions and appointment scheduling, the latter being among the best lead sources possible, since you know where people are actually going.”

Marketplaces 2010 (www.kelseygroup.com/marketplaces2010), which takes place March 22-24 in San Diego, focuses on the fast-growing opportunities in local vertical services, media and advertising. The agenda features sessions that drill down into subjects directly related to User View findings, such as:
 

• Keynote by Andrew Mason, CEO, Groupon, a company that harnesses the power of “smart mobs” to bid on featured services in markets across the country.
   
• Pre-Conference: Critical Tools for Marketplace Success. During a special two-part pre-conference, attendees will learn about the latest developments in small-business marketing solutions, which now blend the best of digital and traditional options. Part I will cover online scheduling, promotions, live help acquisition/support, SMB video and classifieds. Part II will focus on vertical search.
   
• Local Retailers and the New Marketplaces. Local retailers have a variety of solutions to add to their Web sites, perform transactions, attract new customers and ultimately make money. A panel of cutting-edge retail enablers will discuss the new age of local retail.

Also keynoting Marketplaces 2010 are Jon Brod, executive vice president, AOL Ventures; Jay Herratti, chief executive officer, Citysearch; Sam Sebastian, director, Local & B2B Markets, Google; and Craig Smith, CEO, ServiceMagic. Conference sponsors include Acxiom, AgendiZe, Amdocs, Analog Analytics, ATG, AT&T Interactive, InSequent, Local.com, LocalAdXchange, Local Matters, Localeze, Marchex, MatchCraft, MojoPages, Moon Valley Software, Shooger, Text Link Ads, TurnHere, Universal Business Listing and U.S. Local News Network. Groupon is the promotions partner for Marketplaces. Association partners are Association of Directory Publishers (ADP), Great Outdoor Network (GON), International Classified Media Association (ICMA), Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and Yellow Pages Association (YPA). Conference media partners are Advanced Interactive Media Group (AIM Group), NetNewsCheck, SanDiego.com and SignOnSanDiego.com. For more information, visit www.kelseygroup.com/marketplaces2010.

About User View
User View is BIA/Kelsey’s proprietary user behavior tracking study, which focuses on how U.S. consumers are evolving their use of traditional and online information sources to find and locate local serving businesses. BIA/Kelsey and research partner ConStat have conducted User View since 2003, surveying a nationally weighted sample of consumers via online survey. User View Wave VII was performed online in February 2010 among a sample of 1,002 consumers.

About BIA/Kelsey
BIA/Kelsey advises companies in the local media space through consulting and valuation services, research, Continuous Advisory Services, and conferences. Since 1983 BIA/Kelsey has been a resource to the media, mobile advertising, telecommunications, Yellow Pages and electronic directory markets, as well as to government agencies, law firms and investment companies looking to understand trends and revenue drivers. BIA/Kelsey’s annual conferences draw executives from across industries seeking expert guidance on how companies are finding innovative ways to grow. Additional information is available at www.bia.com and www.kelseygroup.com. The company’s blogs are located at http://blog.bia.com/bia/ and http://blog.kelseygroup.com/, and it can be found on Twitter through http://twitter.com/BIAKelsey.

For more information contact:

Eileen Pacheco
For BIA/Kelsey
(781) 556-1026 | eileen@tango-group.com

MacKenzie Lovings
BIA/Kelsey
(703) 802-2992 | mlovings@bia.com

April 26th, 2010 posted by Administrator

US newspaper circulation falls 8.7 percent

US newspaper circulation falls 8.7 percent in latest 6-month period, but pace of decline eases

NEW YORK (AP) — Circulation continues to drop severely at U.S. newspapers, though the rate of decline slowed from the previous six-month reporting period.

Figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show average weekday circulation fell 8.7 percent in the six months that ended March 31, compared with the same period a year earlier. Sunday circulation fell 6.5 percent.

That’s a slight improvement from April through September of last year, when average weekday circulation dropped 10.6 percent from a year earlier and Sunday circulation fell 7.5 percent.

Even so, the top 25 newspapers in the country showed some huge circulation losses.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s weekday circulation dropped nearly 23 percent from the year before to 241,330. At The Washington Post, average weekday circulation fell 13.1 percent to 578,482 and dropped 8.2 percent to 797,679 on Sundays.

USA Today lost 13.6 percent of its circulation and averaged 1.83 million. That extended a slump that began with a slowdown in travel during the recession, which trimmed sales where USA Today is especially popular, such as hotels and airports.

In a way, the new circulation figures mirror the industry’s advertising trends. While most major newspapers continue to see ad revenue decline compared with year-ago figures, the drop is becoming less extreme. Newspapers are getting some help from easy comparisons — they are holding their latest ad numbers up to results from the depths of the recession — but economic improvement is also starting to restore advertising budgets.

The circulation numbers are getting a small boost from a looser standard by the Audit Bureau on how certain online editions are counted. Under a change that took effect last April, if a newspaper bundles a print subscription with a digital replica of its printed editions or access to its website, it can count a subscriber twice — as long as the online edition costs even a penny extra.

USA Today’s decline last year allowed The Wall Street Journal to surpass it as the newspaper with the biggest U.S. circulation. In Monday’s report, the Journal once again posted the only gain in circulation among the top 25 newspapers that had comparable figures from a year ago. It grew its circulation 0.5 percent to 2.09 million.

However, the Journal would have had a slight decline in circulation were it only counting printed newspapers. The Journal’s paid online circulation rose about 31,000 from a year ago to 414,025, offsetting a decline of about 20,000 on the print side.

The No. 3 newspaper, The New York Times, reported an 8.5 percent decline in weekday circulation during the most recent period and a 5.2 percent drop on Sundays. The Times’ average circulation was 951,063 on weekdays and 1.38 million on Sundays.

The new figures came as the Journal launched a metro edition in the New York City region to compete more aggressively with the Times for local readers and advertisers. The first metro section ran 16 pages Monday with articles detailing a rat infestation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the New York state budget crisis alongside advertising from Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s.

The San Jose Mercury News got itself onto the list of top newspapers in the most recent reporting period, but not with a big gain in circulation. It ranked No. 6 on Sundays, and No. 8 on weekdays, because it started treating the Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune, which also are owned by MediaNews Group Inc., as regional editions of the Mercury News. It does that to drive home to advertisers how many readers it reaches in the area. On a combined basis their circulation was actually down 5.4 percent during the week to 516,701.

There are many reasons for the declines in newspaper circulation, including the rise of free news on the Web. Publishers also have sought to offset losses in advertising revenue by raising newsstand and subscription prices. And some newspapers have reduced delivery to unprofitable areas.

In a statement, Newspaper Association of America President John Sturm said that declining circulation does not offer a full picture of the industry’s health.

He pointed to recent studies by Scarborough Research and Nielsen Online showing nearly 100 million adults still read a printed newspaper every day and that newspaper Web sites averaged more than 74 million unique visitors a month during the first quarter.

April 14th, 2010 posted by Administrator

OLDSMAR, FL–(Marketwire - 04/14/10) - Elysium Internet, Inc. (Pinksheets:EYSM - News), an emerging leader in the local online advertising space, today announced that traffic, calls, appointments and unique users generated from its network of direct navigation online directories experienced significant sequential growth during the month of March 2010.

Elysium Internet Chairman and CEO Scott Gallagher commented, “By every metric by which we measure our business the trend is up. We generated increased call volume of over 65% during the month of March when compared to the month of February. We saw unique users surge nearly 20% month over month, traffic increased across the network and confirmed appointments increased by more than 45%.” Gallagher continued, “During the quarter we also entered into several strategic partnerships that we believe will begin to positively impact our revenue by leveraging our network traffic and further monetizing our sites during Q2 and the rest of fiscal 2010.”