Category: Yodle

Just posted this on the Apple Maps Marketing blog, but it’s too big a deal to not put here as well: At the launch of Apple Maps Connect, we submitted an inquiry about submitting a client with a few hundred locations to Apple Maps.  Today we received the following email: “Thank you for your recent inquiry and interest in publishing your business locations via our new Business Portal. At this time, we are only accepting bulk submissions from businesses with at…

Leena Rao tries to make sense of Ebay’s recent acquisitions: t’s no secret that eBay has been heavily investing in a local commerce strategy. The central core of this is trying to capitalize on the $917 million online-to-offline buying market, which Forrester estimates will eventually reach $1.3 trillion (although this number seems low) and account for nearly 50% of total retail sales by 2013. Virtually every acquisition in the past year (besides the company’s $2.4 billion purchase of GSI Commerce)…

SmallBusinessShift ponders the challenges of scaling an ambitious SMB SEM play: It’s not that Yext is a scam, although they do have some problems. The bigger issue is that there’s a communication and expectations gap when it comes to these big marketing companies and the businesses they’re serving. Yext, Yodle, etc. all have lots of venture dollars and high attrition rates. The only way to hit their targets is to aggressively acquire new customers. There are a lot of channels…

Court Cunningham, CEO of Yodle, recently published “Local Online Advertising for Dummies”, a book to help SMBs “plan and launch an effective local online advertising campaign”, “set up a Web site that draws local traffic” & “maximize your presence on top search engines”. I haven’t read the book yet, and I am sure it has plenty of good info in it, but I was just looking at the this 343-pager staring at me on my desk and my first thought…

Actually this conference was Steve Espinosa’s brainchild but he has brought in a bunch of luminaries including Greg Sterling, Atif Rafik of Yahoo Local & Steve Stukenborg of Google TV.  There will be a number of other local search rock stars including David Mihm, Will Scott, Gib Olander of Localeze, Mike Boland of the Kelsey Group, Court Cunningham from Yodel and more, including yours truly. Local Search Summit is on July 17th, 2009 at the JW Marriot in San Francisco,…