What Can Online Directories Learn From the Yellow Pages?
I’m not advocating a return to the phone book, but I am curious about the lesson it might have to teach us. In particular, the notion of restricted and curated data sets may be worth a revisit. Without foregoing the benefits of scalability, search sites could do more to enable the curation of local data by business owners and other members of local communities…
Apple Maps: Taking the Long View
There’s no dancing around the fact that the much-anticipated launch of Apple Maps has turned into a fiasco for the company. Yet there’s little doubt Apple will buff out this particular blemish with time. The interesting part will be seeing exactly how the company chooses to address the gap in expertise that led to the current sub-par product. A big acquisition of talent or technology seems likely…
What Do SMBs Really Need From Digital Platforms?
Amidst the fog of buzzwords and the scramble for investment dollars, are locally targeted startups solving problems that are worth the effort? Within that industry we all generally have a conviction that our products and services matter, but we do spend a lot of our time within a circle of people who don’t need convincing. If our ultimate constituency is the business owner, the question we should ask is: “What really matters to SMBs?”
How Can Local Search Better Serve Service-Oriented Businesses?
Local search isn’t just about brick and mortar. In fact, a very large number of the local businesses we interact with on a frequent basis are service-area oriented. And yet service-oriented businesses make something of a poor fit in a local search model that is oriented toward my physical location and the proximity of nearby businesses on a map…
Reputation Management: Making the Connection with Small Businesses
Now that everyone has a timeline of online activities going back several years — one that family members, prospective employers, and potential life partners are looking at and judging us by — we have all become public figures to an extent, and at the same time we’ve had to transform ourselves into hall monitors of our own online activities. So why hasn’t reputation management become a de facto part of every small business marketing plan?
Where Do Business Listings Come From?
At some point in the future, local data must become purely digital, because the phone book will not be around forever. But until a critical mass of U.S. businesses understands the rationale for managing online data, this fundamental problem will continue. We need the concerted effort of all local search players to educate the local business community and advocate for the transition to digital data…
Facebook and the Latent Local Layer
If Facebook were to really turn its attention to local, it could do some amazing things. Imagine if all of our posts and check-ins related to local restaurants were correlated together in a meaningful way. There’s little doubt Facebook could recommend the new place down the street based on your preferences and those of others similar to you, with a high likelihood of successfully predicting what you will like…
Deep Data and the Semantics of Local
In the case of local search, there is no prevailing reason beyond lack of attention to prevent the industry from doing a better job of serving the full range of consumer needs. For the time being, industry attention is still directed in a self-fulfilling way toward the activities that have always received attention. This is the safe bet, but safe bets don’t lead to progress…
The Long Tail of Local Search
Far from invisible tools that merely get you to the store or service you want, local search products actually tell a story about the needs local search companies think they are trying to fulfill, demonstrating in some cases a stark contrast between the actual habits of the local consumer and the assumptions of local apps and websites…
Waze Highlights Inconsistencies in Local Data
There are too many different ways to categorize businesses, and none of them represents a unified standard for online search. Such a standard if widely implemented would make all businesses categorized as grocery stores line up neatly with each other and would provide a significant boost in overall relevancy…