The long anticipated data point that Facebook has just passed the 500 millionth user mark was greeted by a flurry of press reaction and an outage on the Facebook site….maybe the half billionth user was one too many for a while. With more members than the entire populations of the US and Brazil put together we should perhaps just declare them a separate country and be done with it…my suggestion is the Peoples Republic of Facebookonia.

The phenomenon which is Facebook prompted my hero the King of All Media, Howard Stern to rant for about half an hour this morning about the demise of traditional media, in his case terrestrial radio. His logic was “If you can reach half a billion people with an ad on Facebook why would anyone ever use radio.” It’s an interesting argument, but there is still a way to go…online media is still only 10% of all ad spend…and search is the largest component of that. Search is already significantly larger than magazines as a medium.

Will Facebook evolve into a media powerhouse? No doubt. Will it get bigger than magazines or radio for that matter in the immediate future? Beats me. However, in the world we currently inhabit (as opposed to Facebookonia) search remains the best way for companies to reach customers…and at least for now, we’ll use social components to increase the reach of our products and stay focused on driving a huge amount of visibility to local businesses through search.

~Tim Judd
President and CEO of eLocal Listing, the nation’s leading provider of internet marketing.
www.elocallisting.com

Facebook recently announced changes in their search offerings which have been seen by some as them declaring war on the mighty Google with their Facebook’s search strategy and their recent statement that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”.

I thought I’d just try it out …. I was in Vegas so I thought I’d check out the hotel I saw a show at. A search for Rio Hotel Las Vegas on Facebook yielded two results neither of which were the actual hotel, but both were masquerading as such. I then searched for ‘Pen and Teller’ and got a bunch of likes from various people, but not until I searched for ‘Penn and Teller Rio Las Vegas’ did I get any results which might have helped me go see their show at the Rio…and they were provided by Bing.

Needless to say, any of those queries done on Google yielded just about perfect results for both the hotel and the show. Facebook  is following (in part) the premise that a “like” on Facebook is similar to a “link” as counted by Google. It’s an interesting idea, but at first glance I would have thought that’s an approach which is highly prone to spam…in the same way that Digg seems to be….but they are the guys with the war chest of cash so what would I know?

I’m a fan of both Facebook and Google (no pun intended). Google has tried some interesting social media stuff of late, to very mixed reviews, and it makes sense that Facebook would want to take a swing at the massive piñata that is Search. This is obviously early days and if I were Google I’d be concerned that someone with as much traffic as Facebook came after my cookie jar. I’m probably a bit on the old side to really use Facebook, I tend to watch on the sidelines at the fascinating lives led by people I know, but I use search all day, every day and I like to think I know enough about it to be dangerous.

In terms of getting our customers new business through Social Media we’ll continue to integrate as much social content as we can with our products. The opinion of others is enormously important when it comes to choosing a product or a service, but when it comes to getting found through search then Facebook has a very long way to go if it intends to compete with the mighty G.

Meantime….if you happen to be in Vegas and want to see an  amazing show those magical funsters Penn and Teller at the Rio are worth every penny.

~Tim Judd
President and CEO of eLocal Listing, the nation’s leading provider of internet marketing.
www.elocallisting.com

I have to admit that somewhere in the cluttered attic of my brain I had thought that “Now we are Three” was a book about Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh (I just wrote that as Winnie the Pho…who is presumably a kind of Asian soup…). On further investigation I think I was confused by “When we were very young.” which is a Pooh story. In any event…it’s our birthday…eLcoal Listing is three years old today. I have to admit that on occasion it feels like much longer, it’s been a very intense and interesting time. We have built a considerable business by providing effective and affordable internet marketing for small businesses all over the US.

In those three years time we have established a strong track record and a huge customer base of companies who thanks to eLocal get found on the front page of the major Search Engines every day by people  looking for their products or services locally. We have driven millions of visitors to our customers through Local Search and have helped our customers land  thousands of new projects from new business. We have launched successfully in Europe and become a force to be reckoned in the US.

Looking back at what is perhaps most remarkable is just how important the world of Local Search has become. A few years ago Local was the redheaded step child of Search. The focus was squarely on national brands and national search driven mostly through Pay Per Click advertising and traditional site based Search Engine Optimization. A few short years later the landscape has changed dramatically. Recently Google themselves announced that at least 20% of all queries they process are local in intent. With the emergence of social media with Facebook and Twitter which themselves also generate enormous amounts of local content, local is gaining in importance all the time.

We find ourselves squarely in the middle of this exciting and fast growing market. It turns out that local businesses, many of whom have minimal experience in advertising let alone online advertising, have figured out that they can track every dime spent online through our products. That means that every day we are held accountable by tens of thousands of local businesses who ask us “what have you done for me lately.” The answer is typically “we have driven a bunch of calls to your phone and visitors to your company information online and we are helping you to grow your business and pay your bills”. Every month a local business lands a couple of new deals because eLocallisting.com made their phone ring through local search. As our customers grow and thrive so do we.

I am enormously proud of what our team has achieved and I have every confidence that having achieved so much in such a short time the best is yet to come. Happy Birthday elocallisting.com….and many happy returns.

~Tim Judd
President and CEO of eLocal Listing, the nation’s leading provider of internet marketing.
www.elocallisting.com

I have attended many (many) Search Engine conferences. They are sometimes fascinating, sometimes dull, and on occasion soul crushingly boring. I especially enjoy the keynote sessions given by the great and the good of the Search world. What’s noticeably missing in many sessions is hard data. Understandably folks tend to play their cards close to their chests, but any nugget of real data is a refreshing change…getting hard data from the almighty (by which I of course mean Google®) is a rare and wonderful thing.

Then just the other day Google® came out with an announcement, almost casually, that 20% of all the Searches that they process are related to Local Search. I have heard the question “How much of search is Local?” debated any number of times and have heard numbers as small as 4% and as high as 40%. Clearly the pundits were throwing darts at a wall and giving their best guess. Then Google® put us all out of our misery and let the local search cat out of the bag…it’s 20%.  According to a press release from Google® itself they state that “about the percentage of local searches is “20%”.  This number is significantly higher than comScore’s estimate of 11-12% and to put it all in perspective that is 2.8 billion (yes, I said billion) local queries on Google® each month.

Is 20% a big number?…Well it’s a decent pay raise or a horrible inflation rate. In our world of local search 20% of the half a billion queries trafficked by Google is about 100 million queries per day or 2.8 billion (yes, I said billion) local queries on Google each month.

So now, at every Search conference I attend, every presenter (no matter how dull) will now have at least one amazing, heart stopping, startling statistic which validates the importance of everything we do. 20%…Wow!

~Tim Judd
President and CEO of eLocal Listing, the nation’s leading provider of internet marketing.
www.elocallisting.com

Word is that our friends at Yahoo are about to release a new real-time search which will be integrated with their current main search, it will feature all kinds of social and ‘buzz’ stuff…not 100% sure how it will look but sounds cool.

Meantime in  a related story our good friends Google who have just about a perfect monopoly (90%) of European search are getting in hot water with the EU powers that be potentially landing them in some antitrust doo-doo. A group of what sounds a lot like Fraidy Cat Italian newspapers are bringing a case against Google for excluding them from the search results because they had refused to join the Google News consortium. It sounds a lot like sour grapes (albeit nicely fermented into a fine Chianti) but if it develops into a fight and Google looses the already fairly weird European search space will get even more crazy.  Oh La La! We’ll keep you posted.

If you download the new Google tool bar (or update your existing one) you will acquire the new Google SideWiki tool. It lets you go to pretty much any page on the web and leave your comments on that page in a side pane on the left. You can see other peoples comments and they can see yours. The site owner has no control over what people have written and they can’t remove it. Short of hate speech and obscenity anything goes…anything. If I knew your Face Book page I could zip over there and leave public remarks about anything I feel about you and you can do nothing about it…Nothing.

Here’s a neat scenario. How about I hack into a bank and steal a bunch of credit card numbers and post them on CNN. It’s not legal and no doubt they would be taken down, but not until CNN had discovered the problem and protested, and who should they call at Google?)

Online reputation management has developed into a significant industry. There are many online review sites where you can say all sorts of things about anyone including businesses. Most of these are mediated in some way and you have to know where to go to find the content. Of course some of them are designed to perform very well in search results but it’s been a manageable problem. This tool opens up a whole new world of pain for websites of all shapes and sizes. On the Internet famously nobody can tell you are a dog, all that is needed is a Google account (it takes about 15 seconds to get one and it can be effectively anonymous)  and you are all set to defame and abuse anyone you think worthy of it.

You can also spam to your hearts content. I just checked BBC.co.uk and did you know that

It was a fascinating conference, I’ll admit that hour after hour focused on trends and solutions for the emerging online side of the Yellow Pages industry isn’t everyone’s idea of a fun couple of days…but I was transfixed. To appreciate the magnitude of the challenge faced by this industry you only need to look at the massive losses and bankruptcies that litter this industry. They have been hit by the perfect storm of market changes, technology advances and economic decline. The days when local businesses bought yellow page print advertising automatically are long gone golden age. The Yellow Page Behemoths are surrounded and confounded by emerging online competitors who don’t have to kill trees to reach customers. Advertisers are becoming focused on one thing and one thing alone…results. To be specific in tough economic times where every advertising dollar is carefully scrutinized they want leads.

Several interesting threads emerged from the conference worth considering in more detail.

* Competition between YP providers is hurting themselves more than anyone else. They had better start hanging together or they will be hung separately.
* Their single strongest surviving asset is the relationship they enjoy with their advertisers through their sales force…and a sales force is essential to work with local businesses.
* Their role is changing, to survive the storm they must become consultative partners for local businesses delivering the leads their advertisers need across all sources.

Perhaps the best summary of where the industry is headed articulated the need as follows.

The winners in the current battle will be those who can provide the following

1. Presence, all the things needed to ensure that the advertiser has an accurate persistent presence both online and offline on a low fixed price basis.
2. Performance, the ability for a business to get more leads to meet their needs on a performance basis such as Pay Per Click or Pay Per Call.
3. Permanence, the ability to provide to advertisers with tools to strengthen the relationship which advertisers have with their customers; social media, blogs and tools like linked in are examples of this.

The good news from our point of view is that we are already delivering on all three of these approaches. We have more to do no doubt, but it was encouraging to see that we are moving in the right direction.

I actually thought I had missread the story when I received the alert in my email this morning. I was skimming stories at the airport headed to Silicon Valley, and when I mentioned it in passing to a steely eyed VC type today he leapt gazelle like to his Blackberry and indeed confirmed that the mighty Idearc had filled for chapter 11. I’m a huge audio book fan, I get to fly a lot and I fill in the spots where my laptop is out of juice with the spoken word. When the narrator starts a section with “Chapter Eleven” a shiver runs down my spine. I wish the good folks at Idearc nothing but the very best, they are a very smart hard working bunch and we are already working with them successfully on several projects. I look forwards to them emerging stronger moving forwards.

What this story, and the pending possible restructuring of several other Yellow Pages giants, points to is the perfect storm of bad news which has swamped the decks of many fine companies. The economy is famously bad, sales are down, the Yellow Page print product has been hemorrhaging cash for years and the increasing stampede of local advertisers from print yellow pages to online offerings which generate track-able local results is becoming overwhelming.

Newspapers have been beset by many of the same issues, my own local Metro the mighty Boston Globe may stop publishing in the near future. Both the Yellow Pages and newspapers have been unable to completely replace the revenue lost from the high priced print products sold by humans on a face to face basis with much lower cost online products sold online or over the phone.

In the old days the purveyors of print ad products never had to prove that their products delivered value for money….over a hundred years or so they emerged as part of the landscape…a must have for any local business. Indeed in many, perhaps all cases the “dead tree products” proved highly effective as a way to deliver customers to advertisers. There is an advertising truism that “half of all advertising is wasted…the problem is nobody can tell which half.” Since the late 90’s print advertising products have been pecked away at by the pure play verticals. When was the last time you sold an exercise bike, bought a car or found a soul mate through a print product? Of course it still happens but it happens less often than it used to.

Even given those changes some sections have remained robust print advertisers. However increasingly local advertisers have an alternative to print products across all segments; they can count the clicks and measure the calls generated by their online advertising and those ad products don’t have to be bought on an annual basis.

Here at eLocal we see the impact of these changes every day. Our advertisers are looking to get on the front page of search results and they count every click, lead and call which we generate. They rightly hold us to a very high “what have you done for me lately” standard. If we aren’t effective we apply more effort to get them to where they need to be. The print equivalent would be a yellow pages company delivering more and more books, burying entire city blocks in paper, until each advertiser was satisfied with their results. It’s a tough standard and we are happy to deliver against it every day.

You can read the entire story here.