I (Tim Judd) attended the morning session “Google’s Latest Word on Local” and while the description in the Agenda promised that “the reigning power in Local on line advertising” had a new sheriff in town, most of us mulling in the hallway before the early session didn’t expect much to be different. Then Todd Rowe, Google’s director of global SMB reseller partnerships, presented Google’s new approach to working with Local Ad Words Resellers. Now, I have sat through any number of presentations by various Google’s team at various conferences. Each one was given by a different person…the job of looking after Local gets passed around a lot at Google…they were uniformly mysterious cagey and generally opaque. Google is Google…and who the heck are you anyway was the general approach. The attendees would walk away scratching their heads, did Google understand the potential of Local Search? Did we just sit through an hour long session and not learn a thing?

Today was different. The new guy for local channel addressed the conference today and there was a surprising difference. The new guy isn’t from Google…he’s an ex SAP guy (elocallisting runs our accounting on SAP, btw) who is all about building and running a big powerful channel program.

While not actually apologetic he did concede that historically the Local Search crew had been inaccessible, inscrutable, and generally a difficult to work with (a hush came over the room, yeah we know this) and then something we hadn’t expected – that is going to change. In the new world, Google is appointing a Global Partner Council which will meet a couple of times a year and at those meeting (I picture them as happening in dark smoke filled rooms) Google will share the vision of Local Search and ask for input. Also they have up’d their head count, increased the number of partner relationships and they have decided that from now on they will actually answer email. That’s incredible, and very exciting. If it works and it gives us poor integrators and resellers better visibility into where Google is headed so we can plan our products and strategies accordingly that will help a lot.

Meantime, at eLocal Listing we’ll keep slogging away getting local businesses leads from Local Search, making the phone ring with new business for local businesses. The world is changing rapidly and if you are a local business even trying to keep up is a huge task. In fact it’s impossible. We’ll do what we do, we’ll get our customers found in search….and we’ll see what happens with the new Google guys.

I will keep my ears and eyes open to see if somewhere in a closet, empty room, or hallway, the real Google guys aren’t tied and gagged and desperately trying to get free and give the morning session on Google’s Latest Word.

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

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

As guys go I think I’m reasonably calm, doing my job it’s pretty much essential. I have been known to yell on occasion but I’m in severe danger of blowing my stack about the cool new feature from our good friends at Google called SideWiki. It’s almost entirely brand new but I imagine it has already set off alarm bells all over the world. Just in case this hasn’t crossed your metaphorical desk yet let me fill you in on the details.

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

I had the privilege of being invited to Webmaster Radio to speak on SEM Synergy Hosted by Bruce Clay, president and founder of the international SEO and SEM company Bruce Clay, Inc. I was interviewed
by Virginia, an Associate Writer and director of the radio show. Also had Ben Saren as a guest who is an Online media entrepreneur and CEO of CitySquares.com.

We began talking about the new buzz about hyperlocal content. Which as Ben Saren says “Has actually been around for over 100 years.” Ever since the days of the newspapers.” Everyone wants Hyper Local news going on in there local neighborhoods. It’s not just about the main city in question anymore, it’s about the towns and neighborhoods. Now with the usage digital media means like photo and video cameras, audio recorders, and blogs.

Hyperlocal Blogger Toolbox:

Smart Phone or any find of digital phone that can take picture, tweet, and record video!
GeoToolKit http://outside.in
http://flickr.com
http://youtube.com
http://twitter.com
http://theflip.com

Hyperlocal Websites and Blogs:

http://neighborlogs.com/
http://wikicity.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://everyblock.com/
http://fwix.com/

Hyperlocal Twitter Tools:

http://localtweeps.com/
http://chirpcity.com/

Listen to this Podcast on Hyper Local Content.
Connect with me:
http://twitter.com/seotips2go
http://twitter.com/elocalrocks

TechCrunch50 was probably the biggest event I have been to yet! The amount of companies there was astounding! I had the privilege of meeting one of the biggest Hip Hop superstars there, Chamillionaire! Don’t be quick to judge, Chamillionaire has some deep insights when it comes to social media and web 2.0! He was on the judges panel for reviewing the startups at TechCrunch50. There were over 47 companies that were selected from over 1,000 applicants.

These were the selected TechCrunch50 Companies:

• 5to1.com
• Affective Interfaces
• AnyClip
• BreakThrough
• CLASEMOVIL
• Clicker
• ClientShow
• Clixtr
• Cocodot
• Crowd Fusion
• CrowdFlower
• Dataxu
• Glide Health
• Hark!
• HealthyWage
• iMo
• Insttant
• iTwin
• LearnVest
• Lissn
• localbacon
• Metricly
• MOTA Motors
• Perpetually
• rackup
• Radiusly
• Redbeacon
• RefMod
• Sealtale
• SeatGeek
• SGN Platform
• Spawn Labs
• Sprowtt Marketplace
• Storysomething
• Stribe
• The Whuffie Bank
• TheSwop.com
• Thoora
• threadsy
• ToonsTunes
• ToyBots Woozees
• Trollim
• Udorse
• Yext

All these companies were competing to be the top presenting company at TechCrunch50 to win a $50,000 grand prize! The TechCrunch50 Best-In-Show Award was determined by a panel of experts and the conference organizers.

Recently eLocal Listing was a sponsor at the Local Search Summit conference during SES San Jose. Local Search Summit was one of the first conferences with it’s main focus being local search. Some of the highlighted speakers were Jason Calcanis (Mahalo), Steve Stukenborg (Google), Jeremy Stoppleman (Yelp), Jennifer Chin (Google), Sarah Smith (Facebook), and plenty of others.

Since Local Search Summit was only one day each panel was jammed packed with today’s thought leaders on local search, social media, and mobile technology.  Steve Espinosa moderated quite a few panels, and eLocal’s Todd Johnson made an appearance on the panel about “What kind of products do small businesses really need” and shared his sales experience and knowledge with the crowd. I personally was honored to share a panel with Will Scott of Search Influence, and Sarah Smith of Facebook where we discussed social media’s impact on the ability to drive and convert leads for small businesses. You can see my presentation here, and Sarah’s presentation here. (make sure to turn up your volume, as the audio is a bit low).

Overall I enjoyed every session and was able to take away something valuable from each one. eLocal’s Own Steve Espinosa headed up the conference and was well applauded for a great event that ended up being the talk of SES San Jose.

Here are some links to other blogs that covered the events and their feedback/wrap up’s.

SES San Jose YouTube Chanel

Local Search News Wrap Up

Aaron Irizarry Social Media Session and Q&A

Expand 2 Web by Don Campbell Summit Wrap up

Facebook‘s strategy in acquiring friendfeed is very interesting. Look at the lineup of the people involved in the friendfeed project, who are mostly ex-Googlers: Paul Buchheit,Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. With an arsenal of lethal talent, where can we expect to see future of the facebook go. Only time will tell. Here are some hot quotes from other sources:

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in a release. “Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,”We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.” -cnet.com

“But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers. Perhaps best known of these is Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. And so begins the next step in Facebook’s assault on Twitter.” -TechCrunch.com

However twitter has just recently changed there whole brand image from “What are you doing?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” This is twitter now saying” Hey World! I’m a real-time search engine. So the next wave search is coming to be. These are Real time conversations where users must learn to lead, engage, and influence. Stay tuned to see how this impacts small businesses who want to use twitter as part of there Internet Marketing Strategy.

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