Marketing Pilgrim

By now you may be aware that Google made another purchase yesterday. This time they jumped into the deep end of the places review game by buying the venerable review service Zagat’s. They have made no bones about what this means to the Google local offering which is still in flux and coming together one purchase and baffling systems change at a time.

The Google blog post from Google’s VP of Local, Maps and Location Services, Marissa Mayer tells us

So, today, I’m thrilled that Google has acquired Zagat. Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.

Yesterday the New York Times ran an article that addresses what is becoming a rather serious issue in the local online marketing space.

The issue is around just how easy it is for someone to get a Google Places listing tagged as “Permanently Closed”. Now, in a world where there was respect and decency this shouldn’t be that big a deal but we are talking about the Internet here. If there is a way for someone to make a buck or prevent someone from making a buck by exploiting a hole in an open system like Google Places you can bet there will be those who will do it and even smile when they do.

The article reads

We contacted Darren Shaw to talk to our Marketing Pilgrim readers about local SEO. Darren is the founder of Whitespark located in the Edmonton, Alberta area (that’s in Canada for those geographically challenged readers).

Darren has made a name for himself in the local search community with his development of the Whitespark Local Citation Finder. Darren was kind enough to conduct an e-mail interview with us so we could learn more about the local search game. Enjoy!

MP: Darren, give our readers some history about your time in the industry.

Darren: I started developing websites in 1996 while in my first year of computing science at university. I would skip my calculus classes and hang out in the labs fiddling with HTML and Javascript. I failed calculus 3 times

There was a time when all a local business needed was a phone and an ad in the Yellow Pages in order to bring in customers. Today, 97% of Americans go online to find local services but only 63% of small businesses have a web presence. Why? Because as hard as it may be for anyone who reads MarketingPilgrim to believe, not everyone knows how to build a website.

Then there’s this: “the nation’s 27.5M small businesses comprise half the US GDP and create two-thirds of all new jobs.” SMBs truly are the backbone of our economy and they’re also the ones who struggle the most to remain afloat.

The State of Missouri wants to help, so they’ve partnered with Google and Intuit for the “Missouri Get Your Business Online” campaign.

Seems like a lot of big names are steering clear of the deals space. The latest news comes from Yelp. While they haven’t abandoned the space completely they are certainly rethinking their position and just how much effort along with resources they will throw at it. Is this a yelp for help? Not really but it does make one wonder about the deal space in general.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports

Yelp Inc., a website that collects local business reviews, is scaling back its year-old deal service, following Facebook Inc.’s retreat from a market where consumers and merchants say they’re becoming inundated.

Yelp will cut its sales staff dedicated to Yelp Deals by half, the company said yesterday. Facebook, the world’s largest social network, said on Aug. 26 it would shut down its Deals local-discount feature, decamping from a business it entered in April. Both services were started to compete with Groupon Inc.

Groupon appears to be up to some tricks. This should surprise no one since the company is far from conventional and does things their own way in most instances.

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with doing things your own way unless that way actually pushes what is legal to, or past, the limits. It’s not so much about the pushing of legal limits, since people and companies do that all the time. Rather, in the case of Groupon, it’s the shady culture that appears to be emerging and this latest flouting of convention really pushes the envelope in my opinion.

Facebook has been busy lately with sweeping privacy and sharing changes which are in response to the ripple that Google+ has sent through the tech writer technologist Scoble following social media world with it’s initial “success”.

Now the social media leader has decided to scrap its Deals offering. This comes on the heels of their Places feature getting the boot as well. It looks like Facebook has decided to go back to its roots and try to help people communicate better with friends, family etc.

Reuters reported last Friday

“After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks,” the company said on Friday in a statement emailed to Reuters.