Category: Facebook

Executive Summary: Who knows? But here’s a data point of one: The Main Street Meat N Fish Market recently opened in Pleasanton.  My wife asked me to find their hours so I went to Google and queried “pleasanton meat n fish market“.  At the top of the SERP was this result from Patch.com (congrats to them!) but no Google Place Page for the business.  The Patch article pointed to their website, but it’s serving GoDaddy ads right now.  I clicked…

Cari McGee pens a New Yorker-worthy piece on how Facebook can create incredible social-local experiences as seen through the lens of a woman who was downsizing and needed help moving: But another friend of hers, (we’ll call her Mary), said, “No, you won’t. I’ll get others to help. No biggie.” And Mary rallied the troops. She called and e-mailed and Facebook-posted “Our friend needs help!” She had a spreadsheet created, shifts posted, donuts and coffee procured, and she was ready.…

Methinks Greg Sterling has been spending too much time with SEO types as of late because his latest post on how Facebook’s Like Buttons could put Facebook on a collision course with the big players in local search sounds like a paranoid screed that I might have penned.  In other words, I dig what he is saying: The potential “dark side” of all this is the fact that all the data that emerges from all the Like button clicking will…

I haven’t seen them live on Yelp yet because years ago Jeremy Stoppleman banned my email address, but that’s another story. The big question – are Facebook’s Like buttons complementary to reviews or do they cannibalize them?

Last week I was on a panel at the Local Search Summit with Sarah Smith of Facebook.  I asked her about their platform strategy for small business and she responded that besides advertising they weren’t really focused on SMB Apps.  The FB Platform has been a big magnet for developers writing consumer apps, and while there are definitely some business-oriented apps out there, it’s pretty slim pickings. Anyone who is selling marketing services to large #s of SMBs has some…

National IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) have long been amongst the biggest benefactors of organic search engine traffic.  The typical IYP has north of 15MM business listings.  Add category pages, city pages, reviews, maps, etc and you are easily looking at a 50MM+ page site with a huge amount of high value & high volume keyword targets.  Many IYPs even use their Google rankings as part of their sales pitch.  When I got an email from one asking me to advertise…

There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over Twitter’s local search implications.  Over the past few months several Twitter services have launched with a local angle.  I thought it would be interesting to get them all in one place and provide some details: Launched by the Praized Media guys, TwitArea is an add-on to Firefox that allows you to add a shortened URL link to a business’ Praized profile in a Tweet, so presumably when you are eager…

Just saw this on the front door of a kid’s clothing store in Rye, NY. The number of online “friends” your business has may be a good indication of its health. The storefronts next to Sasha’s were empty. Must have been using Yahoo 360.

Dan Goodman of Loladex, a recently launched local search service on Facebook, tells me that the company has launched an update today improving the UI and adding a bunch of local search filters (category, distance, etc.).  The service is focused on the Washington, DC area for now but clearly has national intentions. The new UI looks nice and clean. The most interesting thing I heard from Dan is that even though there is a small user base (about 250), the…

In a previous post I stated that Facebook Local could end up being a very important marketing opportunity for you business. Since then, thousands of businesses have created Facebook Pages – simple templates to create a page about your service that can be promoted via Facebook’s social network. In principle the more networked your business’ page is (via customers, friends, vendors, etc.) the more likely you are to show up in Facebook and be found by a potential customer. These…