If they have a choice between social media marketing and better customer service or a better product, small businesses may in fact be better off focusing on the product rather than the marketing push. You can have the best Twitter patter and the finest Facebook page — but a half-star rating change on Yelp because you failed to flip that burger in time or didn’t make eye contact with a customer might ultimately have a bigger effect on the bottom line...

Really good local is half Q&A, half search and includes enough activity and ratings and comments to provide more than temporal relevance. But many sites that come up high in searches have few ratings, and don’t provide me with particularly useful or relevant information. And there is rarely a social graph overlay...

While social media is here to stay, the market shares a lot more with the online advertising segment than, say, the SaaS subscription business. Social media is only as sticky as its user base and only as attractive as it is fresh. I am sure that there are real benefits to tapping a social graph for sales. But I am becoming more sure that those benefits are incremental and evolutionary, rather than a step change...

Klout was gracious enough to put me on the beta list for their new version and I spent the better part of Tuesday trying it out. The revision is still in beta but should go out to the entire Klout userbase shortly. My impressions were largely positive, although I still reserve judgement on the utility of Klout. Putting my hyperlocal hat on, I’d like to see impact from even more social graph inputs such as FoodSpotting, for example, and Yelp — also tagged to geography...

Local and mobile are two areas where Yahoo could shore up its business and, over time, dramatically improve its results. And if it plays the game well, it might be able to shift from a portal to a more dynamic provider of useful things for a hungry, mobile, social Web populace...

In the purely hyperlocal sense of the word, LinkedIn is not like a Patch.com or a Foursquare. But, like Facebook, it is one of the primary filters though which people view social graph data. And social graph data, by definition, is local to some degree. Twitter's decision to exclude the network from its API risks giving up on sizable growth opportunities...

Gilt Groupe gets that shopping and magazines (or what used to be magazines) are rapidly merging. Rather than make an nod to editorial with stupid puns and obnoxious copy (not naming names, but), Gilt took a different approach, hiring journalists or writers with expertise or knowledge in the field. And they gave those writers a mandate to create useful content that not only plugs the wares but also, equally, is useful and interesting...

The only thing that saves local news is really good, unique local content and community allegiances that make it clear the news product is more than just a way to make money. The commitment has to be obvious. This is why a handful of mom-and-pop hyperlocal blogs have flourished as lucrative small businesses. And this is why the best growth at Patch is driven by the most committed local editors who weave themselves into the community fabric...

The maps product that Apple showed goes a long ways towards effectively replacing Google Maps. And its just the latest salvo in a developing campaign by both sides to capitalize on the hyperlocal market. Apple Maps, iTunes, Passport and the other developing applications on iOS are a clear path to entering the hyperlocal market in a very smooth, sophisticated and gradual way — the Apple Way...

I would say this to Marissa Meyer and the Google team: The more tightly you can integrate Google Plus with other social networks, they greater the chances are that could both make your own users happy and bring in others. People go where their friends are, and Google Plus can make it easier to tap into latent local knowledge via social graphs while simultaneously augmenting frequency of Google Plus usage...