Explaining the basics of local and social marketing to clients and prospects is a tough task for companies, which might come off as patronizing. Why not give them a book? A couple of years ago, Yodle CEO Court Cunningham wrote…
EXAI is a white-label solution for SMBs based in Israel with global resellers, that offers hosting, domain purchasing and website development. I caught up with CEO Gal Moran, who expressed one of the major challenges in selling website services to…
Meineke Car Care Centers, with 900 franchises, has a huge ad budget, which it has been spending on Yellow Pages, TV, coupons, SEM and the Internet. Recently, Meineke has worked to integrate local ad opportunities under one “local expert.” But…
Nearly 70 percent of consumers who watched this year's NCAA tournament did so on both a television and mobile device, according to a new study from Millennial Media and the Interactive Advertising Bureau conducted by Harris Interactive. More than 2,000…
While pay-per-call usage is growing across all local search media channels, Telmetrics reports today that mobile advertisers and SMB programs are the real drivers of a more than three-fold growth in adoption. The call measurement solutions provider is tracking 348 percent…
Manta announced today that it received a $44 million minority equity investment from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners. The exact proportion of the holding sold to the firm is undisclosed, but its minority stake puts the valuation…
Localeze, a provider of business listings, announced a partnership today with Locationary, a local data management company, to simplify the exchange of local business listings. Localeze will use Locationary's "Saturn" cloud-based data management and exchange platform to streamline the sharing…
Tom Bates, Founder, Kudzu Wiley Cerilli, CEO, SinglePlatform Dave Galvan, President, Schedulicity Randy Parker, President, SMBApps John Vitti, Cofounder and CMO, Mobile Spinach Which SMB solutions will stand out and make a difference in 2012? Our SMB SuperForum discussed some…
Geoff Cramer, CEO of SocialMadeSimple Adam Japko, President of Digital Sherpa Mark Schmulen, General Manager of Social Media for Constant Contact Neil Kataria, President of newBrandAnalytics Catherine Tucker, Associate Professor of Marketing for MIT Sloan School of Management Social Local…
American Express executive Leslie Berland described how the company is using its unique relationship with merchants to help national brands and local small business leverage social media. Berland delivered the opening keynote address here at ILM East in Boston. "We…
Google has been taking out major newspaper ads to promote its new "Get Your Business Online" initiative, a partnership with Intuit that lets SMBs claim a place and update information and also provides a free website. It is a strong…
The arrival of Groupon and LivingSocial four years ago appeared to be a no money down, fail-safe way to get a hold of small-business accounts. But the followup hasn’t been easy, and the race to win SMB accounts is still…
Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers,…
Infogroup, a database marketing company, has acquired GoTime, a data management platform company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The entire GoTime staff will join Infogroup and relocate to a new Manhattan office. We spoke with Chief Data Officer…
Fifteen game-changing trends are happening right now in local media, and our analyst team discussed each one in today's webinar ahead of our ILM East conference. Here's the rundown: Curated commerce or the place where social, mobile and video intersect.…
One of the most common tasks users perform on AT&T Interactive's YP.com is browsing local eateries in search of a good meal. Thanks to a new partnership with NYC start-up SinglePlatform, this task becomes easier with the addition of local restaurant menus…
Local businesses don’t have their own loyalty programs but can now benefit from tapping into bank programs. “Local is the key to our strategy,” says Jim Douglass, SVP at Cartera, a Lexington, Massachusetts-based company that manages loyalty programs for many…
In a partnership with American Express, Twitter will roll out the self-serve ad platform it's been testing to 10,000 SMBs next month. It will enable SMBs to manage their marketing campaigns and budgets without sales representatives. Only SMBs that accept…
As SMBs learn the power of online video to reach their customers, video can also be powerful upstream in their value chain. That's the idea behind a few video contests sprouting up this month from big corporations to give SMBs…
We have been meeting with a number of media salespeople, tracking articles about the transformation of the sales process, developing a number of theories specific to transforming the media sales process plus what is needed to support the transformation. We…