Print Categories Can Be Optimized, Too

June 21st, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith

My piece on how tweaking category names could double your traffic published today on Search Engine Land, and it seems nearly too easy to be possible, doesn’t it? Yet, miscategorized and under-categorized businesses abound online.

I sometimes forget that there are also optimizations possible for print directory advertisers, and an article from about a week ago in the Chicago Sun-Times reminds me how bad categorization has also been a problem for businesses in phonebooks as well. Neil Steinberg has done a biannual review of yellow pages since the nineties, and in this installation, “Marshall Field’s open in Yellow Pages“, he documents how yellow pages books are shrinking, advertisers are reducing their spend, and how some business listings appear in the wrong category — often to amusing effect.

Yellow Pages Categories

In the article, he recounts how a few businesses are listed in the wrong categories, some of them for years.

He further recounts anecdotal assessments from a few businesses that print phone book usage has decreased. I know that a lot of business owners have become dismissive of the value of yellow pages, but there is still some percentage of usage in the medium. So, just as I recounted for internet marketing purposes, fixing miscategorization/undercategorization in print directories could increase your business.

So, check your phone books to make sure you’re appearing where you should. Are there other categories where you could/should appear? Are you getting weird phone calls or visits from people seeking some other type of business? You should be listed within your most-popular business category, and if you get weird visits/calls — ask the people doing it where they saw your business listed so you can get it fixed.

There’s another compelling reason for fixing your categorization, aside from getting more referral business from YP books. The data from YP books is one of the sources of info that feeds into online directories and local search engines. So, fixing your print listing can improve your presence everywhere else.

Have Google Logos Jumped The Shark? Father’s Day Logo Illegible

June 20th, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith

Google’s special logos (“Doodles“) commemorating holidays and historical events have been successful at conveying a playful nature for the ever-growing corporation. As time has gone by, the special logo treatments have begun veering off from playful quirkiness and have perhaps actually crossed the line of legibility. The Father’s Day Google logo deployed today is perhaps the worst example of all:

Google Father's Day Logo

The neckties, intended to whimsically reference the letters spelling out “Google”, have become so abstracted that I think their resemblance to the letters in the name have utterly disappeared.

Graphic artists can certainly recognize and appreciate the rough symbolic shaping, but this sort of symbolic reference is really too vague for most of the public.

I’ve enjoyed watching Google play with their logo for years while dancing all over traditional corporate intellectual property law for how trademarks should be treated. I’ve long felt that Google was thumbing their nose at frustratingly conservative IP lawyers who anally force major corporate employees to follow logo use style guides mindlessly. After all, the name itself can be a trademark, regardless of graphic treatment, and trademark law certainly is flexible enough to allow some degree of logo variations. Google’s logo treatments have shown that temporary logo variations and nonstandard logo treatments can be effected without incurring risk of “losing control of the mark”.

The problem I see with today’s Father’s Day logo is that the humorous treatment has become way too subtle for its own good — the logo is illegible, and devoid of the website most reasonable individuals would be unable to see the company’s name in the treatment.

Have Google logos finally jumped the shark with this treatment? Has the joke worn thin?

The challenge for the Google logo artists has been continuing the thematic treatments without becoming a cliche. Recently, Google has experimented with enabling individuals to display custom background images on the homepage, and their “doodle” advertising the capability was so roundly criticized that they removed the feature. The background image treatment was so derivative of Bing’s changing homepage background images (which aped Ask.com’s earlier treatment) that many thought Google was trying to immitate the feature.

I think the takeway from this is that Google should stick with what is working for them and avoid straying too far from successful formulas. Today’s doodle logo lost the “Googleness” that made the concept so charming to begin with.

I expect they’ll continue displaying special logos, but they need to make them resemble the standard logo more closely or else the charm will be lost permanently.

Thoughts On Local Search Ranking Factors

June 17th, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith

David Mihm’s once again posted his fantastic yearly survey of local search ranking factors for 2010, scored by surveying a lot of us who do online local marketing professionally. What’s particularly cool about the survey is that he also posts a calculation indicating how much we’re in agreement along with how positive/negative we consider any given factor.

The Local Search Ranking Factors

It may be mildly confusing for newbies who want to know what they should do in order to improve local business listing rankings within Google, and I’d say that small differences the weighting of the various scores are nearly immaterial. Read the rest of this entry »

Is Facebook Planning To Steal Wikipedia Marketshare?

June 15th, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith

This afternoon, I saw a link on the lower right of my Facebook page, inviting me to become a Facebook beta-tester. Interested, I clicked it, and this is what I saw:

Facebook Beta Tester Application

As you can see, the application consists of having the applicant submit some writing which they’ll assumably assess for quality.

It would appear that Facebook may be planning to launch topical articles, similar to a Yahoo! Answers or Wikipedia.

If a large knowledge library on a variety of topics becomes available through Facebook, then the platform becomes even stickier, retaining their users for even longer. One hypothetical question occurs to me:

“How might Facebook take marketshare from Wikipedia, now that the service already is competing strongly against Google?”

I think we’ve found that particular answer.

The Nazi Google-Bombing In Google Maps

May 21st, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith

Barry Schwartz pointed out on SER a Google Places Help thread about a Jewish business owner who is complaining about receiving “Nazi” keyword traffic via Google Maps. Indeed, if you search for something like “nazi” or “swastika building” in Google Maps in San Diego, this man’s Balloon business is oddly listed in the search results:

Balloon Utopia

Now, you might wonder why people would be searching for those keywords in San Diego in the first place, and there’s actually a reason why, as Barry pointed out. In fact, I feel marginally responsible for this, so I delved into the business owner’s question to try to diagnose what might be happening.

Some years back, among all the reporting and documenting I do about what’s going on in Google Maps, I came across a unique building in San Diego — an old military barracks, as it turns out, which is shaped like a Nazi Swastika:

Swastika Shaped Building, Coronado Base, San Diego

I documented that in my Flickr account, and went along without thinking about it much.

Until it went viral.

At some point, some radio DJs glommed onto the story and also the Anti-Defamation League came across the picture and made the public more widely aware of the offensive shape. Even though the shape could only be seen from flying overhead or via online aerial photos, public outrage was sufficient to persuade the military to agree to renovate the exterior of the building in order to change the shape in birds-eye profile.

So, there’s reason why a lot of people are searching for “nazis” and “swastika buildings” in San Diego. But, to a lay person it may not be clear why a balloon business might come up as relevant to those searches within Google Maps.

After delving into this, I believe there’s an explanation, and a solution Read the rest of this entry »

How Has Groupon Grown So Fast?

May 21st, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith

Groupon, a portmanteau word which apparently was made from smashing together “group” with “coupon”, is the brandname of a local deals and discounts service which has been growing by huge leaps and bounds. Social Media meets Coupons, if you will. At this week’s DFW SEM meet on “Location, Location, Location – all about local search“, one attendee asked us during the Q&A how has Groupon grown so fast?

I think the answer is pretty straightforward. Groupon has done some brilliant advertising in Facebook. Here’s an example:

Groupon Ads in Facebook

 

Groupon Advertisement

Notice that the ad mentions the city I have associated with my Facebook profile — Dallas. The promise of the offers mentioned are highly compelling — “Half Off Dallas”, and “…up to 90% off each day”. These offers are really attractive and hard to ignore.

But, it’s the second part of Groupon’s one-two punch that really seals the deal for their rapid growth. Read the rest of this entry »

Great DFWSEM Local Search Marketing Evening

May 21st, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith
Thank you to DFWSEM & everyone who promoted Wednesday night’s session and attended! Also, thank you for inviting me to speak along with David Mihm and Brian Combs.

David Mihm, Brian Combs and Chris Silver Smith at DFWSEM. May, 2010
David Mihm, Brian Combs & Chris Silver Smith – Speaking at Dallas-Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association’s Local Search Event

The three of us spoke on local search marketing, with out-of-stater David leading off with some basic, solid tactics for ranking in local search. I followed with some observations about Google Maps’ paradigm-shift to PlaceRank and some theories on other ranking signals that Google may be using. Brian rounded out the lineup with some details on leveraging reviews for local search — an influential chunk of what likely is being used under the PlaceRank algorithms.

I was overwhelmed at DFWSEM’s advanced promotion of the event Read the rest of this entry »

New Law Makes Florists Happy, But Has Wider Implications For Yellow Pages & Search Engine Ads

May 18th, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith

A story in the Rochester, Minnesota Post-Bulletin describes a new state law that florists apparently campaigned-for which bans non-local companies from advertising local business services (in “New law removes thorn from side of local florists“). The story reports that this new law prohibits “deceptive” advertising by companies that misrepresent their location by using a false address and “local” phone number, and it would bar “any business from advertising on the Internet or in the Yellow Pages unless they also list a physical address.”

Florists in the Yellow Pages

I’ve heard florists complain about the wire services companies for many years over this very same issue. Companies such as FTD, Teleflora, Proflowers and 1-800-Flowers have long provided florists with broker services — they market themselves through many channels, both local and nationwide.

My family actually used to own a wholesale floristry service in West Texas, so I have some degree of direct understanding of how these florists feel. Many yellow pages companies, both online and print, have allowed these large, influential florist services to advertise with seemingly-local area listings. Consumers grabbing a yellow pages book or searching online for floral shops rarely can discern between the independent local florists and the ads of the brokers. Once the consumer orders flowers from the broker, they end up paying various service charges — the broker subtracts their cut and sends the order on to a local flower shop to fulfill, based upon standardized catalogs of products. Florists have long gnashed their teeth that consumers pay extra for less product, needlessly passing on money to these referral services.

I’ll confess: I’ve been a floristry industry insider, and I’ve ordered flowers both ways. I can tell the difference between good-quality flowers and bad ones, too.

You might think I’d side with the independent florists on this issue, but I don’t think it’s that cut-and-dried. Read the rest of this entry »

Local Search’s Lacuna

May 12th, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith

Tyler Bell wrote a very interesting post today, over at O’Reilly Radar: “Why check-ins and like buttons will change the local landscape“. In it, he talks about how a lack of common locality conventions is perhaps the main stumbling block of advancing local search technology, and he points to Gary Gale’s Geo Tower of Babel concept wherein different systems refer to places and placenames in different ways, meaning different things. Essentially, every different local info system out there refers to common places with variations on names and differing geocoordinates, and this lack of accurate specificity across systems causes many problems.

Local Business Profile

Tyler states that “developers are left holding the buck” in this issue, and he cites three top reasons for it. His top three reasons are the most interesting part of the piece, because I think he really describes many of the basic challenges of the local search industry beautifully. His first reason, “Focus on listings data as end rather than means” is described like this:

“Local search as we know it today is the parthenogenous child of the Yellow Pages industry. Many local search sites, and the data vendors they rely on, remain grounded in YP-era thinking, where the value was found in owning the listing data, making them discoverable in alphabetical order, and advertising against these listings. Local search for ages focused on being an electronic version of the Yellow Pages. Few organizations have looked above the horizon and considered carefully what value could be realized if listings were viewed as a means to connect users to businesses, rather than only advertise against their search.”

His other two reasons, “Attempts at distinction with common data” and “Over-fascination with pins on maps” are good, too.

However, I think his ideas on resolving the issues are unrealistic. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Verizon Get The iPhone? A Former Insider’s Prediction

May 11th, 2010 by Chris Silver Smith

So, I’ve been watching the rumors wax and wane over whether Verizon and Apple will ultimately come to a deal allowing Verizon to offer the iPhone to its wireless customers. Today is a great example of how the rumor mill is gnashing back and forth on the question. Engadget just dug up news stories and legal filings which appear to prove that Apple’s original deal with AT&T is exclusive. Greg Sterling cogently rehashes this, wondering if that deal is still valid or not — and sums up stating that if it is, Apple is screwed. However, CrunchGear is reporting on how one of Verizon’s branding/ad agencies (Landor Associates) is working upon an ad campaign for a Verizon iPhone. So, how can anyone hash the truth out of the massive rumor machinery that’s making bucks off of all of us poor schmucks who keep clicking in droves to read the next unsubstantiated claims of a VeriPhone?!?

Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search Product & User Experience, demos her iPhone at SES Conference.

Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search Product & User Experience, demos her iPhone at SES Conference.

The whole question being bandied back and forth is much more important to me than the usual tech industry story-du-jour. Read the rest of this entry »