I wrote a post on my education portal blog and thought is was highly relevant for this blog as well….so here’s the excerpt

”

Even worse, why are less than 10% of SME’s in North America adopting Internet Marketing practices? What’s even more surprising, a recent study by BIA/Kelsey reveals that, get this

97% of consumers research products online

Sure, these are people that are already online, but 77% of Americans are online, increasing at an average rate of almost 5% increase year over year for the last 10 years. Yet it still gets better!  Kelsey has also reported, in 2010, that 90% on local consumers are using search engines (Google has a whooping 66%) 48% use Online Yellow Pages, 42% use comparison shopping and 25% are using vertical websites.  In addition, over the years, consumers are using 7.9 different sources to find information about local products and services! To add to this

”

To read more, click on the Local Search Marketing blog.

Well, no one, not even facebook, is perfect.  They made a slip up, that I witnessed and disgredarded as likely some Windows error when my Facebook reported to me that my browser was not connected.

Well, to my knowledge in the last hour, Facebook screwed up and let us in on their some of the likely new features, and they are good.

Here is an excellent post describing these features.

http://www.metrolic.com/facebook-accidentally-shows-new-prototype-features-152904/

After reading this, it got me thinking.  I’ve known for a long time that capturing one’s history is valuable to a user.  I’d love to look back from time to time of what I’ve done.  Nothing has ever existed to allow this in an organized fashion, except an old school photo album or scrapbook.

Digitizing these tools just don’t cut it.  A computer is meant to reduce my time.  It seems it’s more time to organize my pictures, tag them, edit them, upload them and then organize again is simply a waste of my time.  What about all my videos?  I have dozens of hours of my children digitally recorded, scatered all over many computers and devices.

So, a ‘memories’ feature is brilliant and obvious.  What does this mean for marketers?

GOLD.

Our ability to further understand our customers only allows us to further deliver what our customers are seeking.  PERIOD.  Imagine, we’ll now have a way to understand our closest customer’s personal history, uncovering a history of their likes, dislikes, hates and loves.  We don’t just have a present moment snapshot of a buyer.  This is HUGE.

Imagine the feature of multiple account logins, is Facebook supporting multiple online persona’s?  What about a business that has different target audiences?  These different online personas are only going to further allow us to deliver taylored rich content to our customers.

Then what about the ‘outside world’?.  Gosh, I’m sure their going to gold nuggets on understanding your companies Online Reputation Management within the Facebook community or otherwise.  We use different strategies to build relationships online and Facebook is now allowing us to benchmark our online personas to their community.  Wow, brilliant.

While online changes are done for users, smart marketers will stop chasing all these algorithms and figure out how to use these changes to their benefit, and deliver what business is all about, value to end user.

When a good client of mine took on an account that become a problem account, before they knew it they were receiving 28 voice mails very two hour of yelling and screaming.  I was told “FIX IT”.

Upon my initial research, I uncovered that this is expensive and that the right systems should have been put in place in the first place.  In any event, what I learned there is VERY little on the Internet in terms of a strategy for Online Reputation Management.  There is A LOT in terms of content for explanation of this, but little for execution.

After two months of studying and recognizing that this is information that needs to out there, I decided to implement and test Online Reputation Management and Online Response Management for a Local Business.

In any event, I’ve created a very high level overview strategy.  You bet your dollar that we’re on top of this and have tested, or are continuing to test, to create the best strategy for any, and almost all locally based businesses.

I orginally posted this on the Local Biz Builders forum here.

Online Response Management Strategy Overview

1.Monitoring Online Reputation complaints and inventory complaints and put system in Place
a.Twitter, Blogs, Forums, News, *Complaint Sites (like complaintnow.com, ripoffreport.com), Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch, Yahoo Local, Angie’s List, OpenTable and Epinions
i.TweetDeck
ii.Google Alerts
iii.Monitor This allows you to monitor and track keywords over multiple search engines.
iv.Domain Ranking for keywords (I use market samurai and WebCEO – free trial for both)
v.Manual searches using search engine tools ([allintitle: company name] – check blogs, forums, web 2.0, [site:www.facebook.com company name]
b.Inventory Negative PR –create inventory file, one week dated
c.Email – update website email flow for customer service, ops, sales

2.Push Down complaint sites off front page for search phrase [COMPANY NAME] – via SEO (Web 2.0 content works great). Create 2-3 sites with COMPANYNAME in domain (.org, .net, COMPANYNAME-reviews.com)

3.Respond to negative complaints online within 24 hours
a.Twitter, complaint boards, forums, email
i.Copy and paste responses – there are 4-6 catagories.
b.Need to track what we do.

4.Remove online complaints
a.Complaint boards, Wikipedia, (manual removal is very difficult and time consuming, better to direct to customer)
b.ReputationDefender.com – A service that attempts to help you get things being said online about you removed

5.Publish Positive Content (updated phase II to aid in this)
a.Blogs, forums, web 2.0, local reviews sites, complaint boards,
b.Blog Strategy on COMPANYNAME (weekly CEO voice, weekly customer service voice, COMPANY video content) – Implement Share features – T & FB
c.Ideas for content that would be shared among our courier industry – funny video, reports, industry analysis, (such as an extensive blog post), be the ‘camera person’ at events.

6.PR Campaign

Well, it’s official.  I’m a pumpkin!

Go ahead and vote for your favorite by going here.

I’ll save you the details and you should go and check out the LIVE post I did for the world’s first announcement of uQast.

SEO is marketing.  You are merely marketing a business using a digital medium, rather than a traditional offline medium.

A component of Marketing exposure.  SEO is about creating exposure.

A business exposing themselves to the right audience, buyers, where the business product or service solves a buyers problem, yields the best conversion from a lead to a sale.

Therefore, exposing a business in the right places is important offline, just like online.  Exposing your website, or rather certain webpages, in the right places on the Internet yields results.  We do this by linking one website to another, or a link from site A to mine.  The better websites that I can have linking to me, such as an attorney spending the time networking at the Chamber of Commerce rather than the mall, the better connection I will make.

These links are like endorsements, just like how word of mouth yields results in the offline world.  Websites endorsing citations and reviews for local businesses are very important in SEO for the local business results.

In SEO jargon, we build authorative links to our sites to increase our rankings in the search engine results page (SERP).

This is creating transparancy and exposure.

This is SEO 101.

In August 2009, I was sitting in a large room in Silicon Valley with the local business product managers from Google, Bing and Yahoo no more than 30 feet from my chair.  When it was time for questions, I was the first to stand up and asked the question..

How do you plan on solving the service area problems?

Well, I’ve wanted to create this post for some time, however I’m not sure if it will really add any value to you, unless you’re a search engine!

They didn’t have their answers, or didn’t want to share them at this time.  In fact, when asked if they would listen to us marketers who represent 10′s of thousands of local business, would they listen?  As much as I love Google, I was appauled by the response, I felt like this Google employee had a chip on his shoulder and basically said “We’re Google, we don’t need you“.

On the other hand, a couple of days later my office phone rang with the caller id showing “Microsoft Corp”.  It was Kevin Hagwell, Bing’s Product Manager…how cool is that?!  I mean, scary too, I don’t remember giving him my card!

The problem the search engines are facing right now is the service area challenge in their local business listings.

Let’s take a look at this search.  Notice the keyword [courier service].  Google has kindly let me know of the local companies in my area and given me a map without telling them where I am located.  This is done via my IP address.

This is fine and dandy, but let’s consider this.  Google wants to show only companies that have a physical address, a business that you can walk into.

You don’t walk into a courier service.  Since I’m in Chicago, I know there are 350 companies to chose from in Chicagoland.

A courier company services the entire area.  They may have a physical location downtown but have some drivers who live within a mile of my business.

Therefore, under this model, the search engines won’t ever show this wonderful company located downtown chicago, because right now I’m located exactly 47 miles from the center of Chicago.

The point is, Google has decided to show about a 7 mile radius of courier companies around my area.  In fact, they show me FedEx Kinko’s, which is not a courier service!  Who is Google to decide that the right company for me should be decided on the proximity of their physical location?  This makes no sense in the same day delivery business.

What about a pizza delivery company?  What should their service area size be?  3 miles?  10 miles?  What about a delivery company, should their service area cover 25 miles?  What if they are a national delivery company?

See the number two organic listing?  That’s a business with 250 agents on a national basis, representing likely 5000 drivers around the country.  They do not have a location in Chicago, therefore won’t show up on the map.  However, this company provides  Same Day Delivery and provides a great service.  They are likely a good choice for my neighboring businesses, but will never be found in the LBR listings.

This problem stems accross many industries who typically provide a service and has a service area.  The problem is both for those business who have customers come to them and those businesses where the business goes to the customer.  For the most part, the latter is the biggest challenge the SE’s are facing.

The Solution Seems Simple Enough

OK, the problem is rather simple when you break it down.  The search engines need to define a service area for each business.  The problem is how to define the service area with trust and authority.

Well, I’m sharing this solution because I believe, from what I know in organic, my marketing background and many years in business, that the LBR challenge is solved with customers.  I believe that in time, the strategies I teach will naturally fall into this place.

Ok, so the solution is customers.  Well, take for example a mobile mechanic.  They will acquire customers throughout their typical service area.  Over time, a customer pattern will be established with a history.  With this pattern, a search engine now has a geographical service area for a specific business, which could be tied to the LBR Listings.

Now the problem is, how does a search engine capture accurate, non-bias, non-manipulated data on service areas and customer patterns?  Well, this list could be pretty long, there are many ways to do this.  The fact is, we’re living in a user generated content world with many profiles, many social sites and now moving towards mobile.  It is becoming more important to have location information tied to associations.  I believe Twitter won’t survive unless they impose location aspects, either they will lose marketshare to newer concepts or will have to adopt it themselves.

Try this theory.  You have a nice local directory like Yelp.  Yelp provides business information and a place for customers to leave reviews.  These IP’s are stored.  The search engines provide some trust to certain directories, in many cases more trust than their own data.  Right now IP information is not passed with reviews.  The data is there, but no service areas are being established.

Now consider a dozen different review sites with a variety of customer data including IP review locations, along with a customer provided service area map, perhaps some links to other customers’ sites and you have a pretty solid service area in the form of data accessible to the search engines with a high level of trust and a system that is next to impossible to game or manipulate (those black hat SEO’s).

This post is merely scratching the surface.  I mean, companies like FourSquare and other location based solutions are going to emerge in 2010.  They are going to play havoc and provide value to companies like Yelp.  Then the questions becomes, what do we do when we’re all on the move with mobile?

Well, is it over or is this just the start?  The last two weeks I’ve likely worked 200 hours, with 15-18 hour days and our site just went live and now I can not sleep.  I’m not looking forward to the time to teach, and not build an infrastructure.

I’ve spent something like almost the last two years creating material for the MLBO course and recently the LMS teams has been working hard to build a strong, robust back end.  It’s really something else actually.

Between the automation, the video broadcast, the amazing forum and comple x backend, we are able to deliver some pretty cool technology.  I’m still amazed what we can do.

In any event, this is likely the most informal post on this blog and I really no objective for this post except to announce MLBO is live!

Check it out.

Marketing Local Business Online

http://www.localmarketingsource.com/marketing-local-business-online

There is a lot you can read there.  There is A LOT of video content on the site, all for FREE.  There is information on the blog and there is a full 30 day money back guarantee.  Everything is 100% automated, you pay, you get immediate access to the content, the videos, the files, the forum, everything, right away.

Check it out, if you don’t like what you see, cancel your membership and you get 100% of your money back.

http://www.localmarketingsource.com/marketing-local-business-online

Alright, maybe not Local. Comcast provides local services, yet is a National Brand. I just wanted to take a quick moment to throw up a quick post, where I was impressed with this massive whale that I grew to hate.

August 3rd.  See, I had their service installed on August 3rd. The HD DVR box set they game begun freezing and the DVR function don’t work.

August 7th.
I made a call, then sent me a new box.

August 11th (approx).
I get a new box delivered to my office. I plug it in, it doesn’t go past channel 28!

August 14th.
Called and complained. They said the only option was to send someone out, taking more of my time and they offered me a $25 credit.

August 14th-25th.
I got busy and dealt with having to unplug my DVR every two hours to reset it. It must be running on Windows, it freezes, REBOOT!

August 25th.
3:14 pm – Tweeted “so frustrated w/ @comcast – 2 dead DVR boxes – no follow up calls – still sporadic” at 3:14 pm local time.
4:06 pm – @scottgallagher5 (from @comcaststeve) @scottgallagher5 send us an eamil w/acct info and issue. we’ll take care of it. we_can_help@cable.comcast.com.

August 28th 4:41pm
Sent lenghtly email to them. I explained how they’ve sucked about fixing my problem and that they need to compensate me for my time if I have to go home again on their dime.

August 29th – 8:38 am
The called me and emailed me telling me they called me and I wasn’t around.

August 30th.
The called me again and emailed me telling the called me and I wasn’t around.

September 1st.
Email sent saying that they’ve worked hard at trying to get in touch with me. I suck at getting in touch with, so if I don’t respond by the 8th, the matter is closed, but until then, we’re going to hound you try and solve this problem. This email came from a real person, with a real extension and is local in corporate office.

September 2nd.
I read the above email. I called him directly. No ‘push 1 for this, 2 for that….He gave me options, was AMAZINGLY nice, provided tremendous empathy to my problem (like it was a big deal with NO tv eh?). He said I can even have someone come to you Mr. Gallagher after hours (they never offer this in customer service department). I was impressed. I was even more impressed that he is sending someone over in the next 48 hours, 24 hours if I wanted. I have to wait 10 DAYS from my order time to the service being turned on!

Not only that, I asked him for a credit for my entire month. Being fair guy I am, I said I only want a credit for the entire month of my TV service, not Internet. The Internet has worked fine for the whole month so I’ll pay for that.

He gave me a credit for my entire month for everything! I still have my original $25 credit on there, so at this point, I have a month of service for free then they owe me $25!!

I have to say, kudos to Comcast. They displayed stellar customer service.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Well, I’m sitting on a plane heading back to Chicago from San Jose, where I attended Search Engine Strategies and Local Search Summit.  Cramped in the center seat in an exit isle, I’m pleasantly excited about the last few days.

While a lot of our trade secrets in the world of Local Internet Marketing are kept quiet, behind closed doors and rarely discussed during such conferences, this was no different.  The teachings of the mainstream events are, just that, mainstream.  There is a reason why 95% of Local Internet Marketers never break the fold, where one can make a decent living from Internet activity.  They say the same things year after year, conference after conference.  Sure, the information is solid and a great foundation, but these events typically teach high level overviews and little execution.  You know, the ‘what this does’ rather than ‘this is what you need to do’.  That’s fine, we need that foundation.  The execution and those new ‘trade secrets’ happen at the bar.

Local Internet Marketing was the hottest topic

Search Twitter for the hashtag #sessj and you’ll find the hottest topic discussed was local.  Awesome!  Finally!  Local Marketing is about to boom!  Besides the site reviews of adult toys and vaporizers, I found the entertainment and energy at the Local Search Summit.

I did learn a few new things

I bet the biggest ‘wow’ moment I had was during Steve Stukenborg, Google TV Product Manager’s presentation on Google TV Ads.  You know, I knew about this tool from Google and I learned about it about a year ago, but I never thought it was positioned for the local business as well.  How could a small, local business produce a Television commercial effectively, despite all the new concepts of permission based marketing rules being developed.  Well, I learned a business can get a commercial made by a firm in the range of $500-$10,000 and having it airing within 24 hours.  I also learned the value and power of the segmentation features of this tool for a local business.  The real question is, and I did stump Steve on stage with my question, how Google is going to be successful with this tool by going to old skool, non permission based marketing.  Well Steve, nice sugar coated answer, typical of Google.  He either couldn’t answer or wouldn’t answer how Google intends on handling this as television and the Internet converge in the coming years.  I can’t skip YouTube ads, here comes the death of the DVR if I can’t skip commercials.  Regardless of this, Google will not be successful with this venture if the user’s don’t profit.  Remember Google Radio Ads, that failed.  Television is close.  Needless to say, I will be watching for this and I will be deploying my own commercials in the coming my own ventures, then perhaps take a couple of clients to test in different markets.  I should have a strategy for you within six months.

And the Winning Presentation is …..

David Mihm.  Hands Down.  David didn’t have much time but he delivered a powerful, presentation on Local Search Rankings Factors, prioritized from the most relevant and to the least relevant, including those that harm you.  While there wasn’t a single piece of new information for me and it was still at a low level, I was pleased to see that those teaching at Local Search Summit are on the same line of marketing philosophies as I do along with Local Marketing Source, LLC.

As I’ve been discussing for some time now, Local SEO is very different than Traditional, because of these reasons.

• Citations
• Reviews
• Clean, aligned information web-wide.

Now this information isn’t new, David did lead me on and taught me that the bulk upload feature of Google LBC isn’t that trusted.  In later presentations, Google openly admitted that today this is true, and in the near future will be trusted much more.

What I’d love to see at these presentations isn’t the outline of a plan, but execution strategy.  Why is that execution is rarely taught? As you know, I focus a lot of efforts on execution and will be posting several execution strategies for local.

For example, we know reviews are important to Google, local or third-party.  We know quantity of reviews outweighs quality.  What about ideas on how to encourage your customers (or customers’ customers) provide reviews.  How and when to offer incentives.  What works, what doesn’t.  You know, that internal process that I push so hard.  You bet, very soon I’ll be offering execution strategies to David’s presentation.

The one problem I set out to solve – was not solved and is a bigger problem than ever

I’m in the room with hundreds of Local SEOers, Google, Yahoo and Bing product managers on the panel.

Here is an example of a typical service area business trying to market themselves on the Search Engines

You run a delivery business.  Your warehouse is located in the burbs of Chicago.  You service Chicago.  Someone searches for ‘courier service in Chicago’ and Google Maps displays companies located only downtown Chicago.  With 300 companies fighting for that marketshare in the Google 10-pack, why does Google place the physical address as a top priority to rank relevancy?  Fact is, Google completely sucks at this (not to mention the other search engine and that, uhm, decision engine).  I mean, they totally blow.  Google can not display relevant results in the authoritve listing, 3-pack or the 10-pack for service area businesses.  Location is NOT relevant for these businesses and there are 1000’s of types of businesses affected by this.  Google, come on, 20,000 employees, #1 employer in the U.S., one of the largest corporations worldwide and the company poised to monopolize our communications, can’t figure this out?

It was hands down the most discussed topic of LSS

What really upset me was the responses of *some of the panel members.  Again, I asked all three companies “with 100’s of SEOers in the room here facing this problem DAILY, we represent 10’000’s of service area businesses nationally.  Are any of you (the big three search engines) willing to listen to any of us to help solve this problem.  You guys hold the key and power to manipulate billions in the economy, let us help you help the most relevant businesses around the country”  Here are the responses.

My favorite company pissed me off the most

Google. Man, what a strange, unsympathetic organization.  Seriously, odd.  I just don’t get it.  Don’t get me wrong, Google is still my most admired company on the planet.

Ari Bezman – Google Local Product Manager
We already know of all the problems (arrogance?) and are working on them.  You can use your webmaster account to submit information to us.  I felt let down, hurt.  Here I eat and breath SEO.  I want to help.  I want to be a part of largest small business marketing transition in history.  I want be the best and make the biggest impact.  And the company poised to improve the world helped me feel belittled and unheard.  I felt brushed off like everyone in that room was beneath Google’s capabilities.  You know what, maybe that is true, considering their growth and me, well I still fly in commercial airlines and don’t have those private jets.  Although we all have the same objectives (SEOers – white hat of course, and Google).  We face the challenges hourly, I’m sure collectively that we SEOers have seen every challenge out there, I believe we in fact know more of the challenges collectively than the Google Local Business team does collectively.  Just listen to us dang it!  Provide a place where we could show some challenges, pretend we’re being heard and occasional feedback on corrections.  That’s it, but I got the Google brush off.  Maybe that should be a new phrase, The Google Brush Off!

That’s OK, Bing Local Product Manager gave his personal email address

Kevin Hagwell, – Bing Local Product Manager
I was pleased to know this so-called decision engine is being proactive.  Which ever search engine solves this problem first may potentially take a STRONG foothold in the 40% of total searches, which are local.

If Google or Bing is reading this, I kid you not that I will bet you that I personally could ad value to your board room discussions on this.  I’m not the smartest guy around and I’m probally not smarter than most Googlers, but I assure you that based on the numerous discussion about the challenges, you’re still not thinking outside the box.  There are solutions to defining service areas that are credible and have a lot of authority, which I’m sure you corporate guys haven’t considered, since hey, we are talking small business eh?  Listen to us once and if we can’t provide a single ounce of value, please, be my guest and shut me down.  Seriously, I’m willing to risk the rankings of this blog on the fact I can provide value…and I won’t charge!

So, Bing is focused on four main areas, Local being one.  Want to talk and beat Google at the local race?!  OK, perhaps some arrogance on my part, however I’m sure it’s my frustrations coming out since this problem should be solved in 2009 with billions at stake.  I’m just an SEOer, right?  What an icky feeling, anti-Microsoft, Pro-Google Scott Gallagher is commending Microsoft over Google?  Maybe it had nothing to do with the companies and simply their employees.  Maybe Ari, like most things Google, are just vague on their answers and secretly have focus groups with Local SEOers.  Perhaps this is just a typical Google philosophy.

All in all, it was a excellent conference and I give a HUGE round of applause to Steve Espinosa …….. who organized the Local Search Summit and finally provided a conference for those interested in Local search the future.

Here is a list of the following topics I have written about regarding Local Search Summit

1. Top 10 Citation Websites for Local Businesses with execution strategy
2. Top 10 Review Websites for Local Businesses with execution strategy
3. Top 3 tips to implement immediately for your Daily Local Social Media Strategy

• Tweet daily
• Participate in vertical & geographical social sites (the ones your clients are involved or might be involved in)
• Participate in your industry’s social sites, adding value and pointing references NOT to your company site, to your own social profiles and content sites

To learn strategy, go to www.scott-gallagher.net, register and download the free report.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…