Tag: local

Facebook has another attempt at local search

Facebook has another attempt to capture the small business search market

Before the web came along, advertising for the local plumber or hairdresser was just a matter of placing an ad in the local newspaper and a listing in the Yellow Pages. Then the internet and smartphones swamped those channels.

One of the greatest missed opportunities has been small business online advertising. With the demise of phone directories, particularly the Yellow Pages, it’s been hard, time consuming and expensive for smaller traders to cut through the online noise.

This market should have been Google’s for the taking however the local search platform has been drifting for years in the face of company apathy, mindless bureaucracy and silly name changes to fit in with the Google Plus distraction.

While Facebook has been playing in the local business space for a while they are now ramping up another service with a new site for local services search.

TechCrunch reports Facebook are experimenting with the local search function and while it isn’t anywhere near as comprehensive as Google’s at present the rich data the social media service has been able to harvest could well make it a far more useful tool.

However it’s not Facebook’s first attempt and Apple too has been playing in this space albeit with little traction.

If Facebook or Apple does usurp Google, the search engine giant will only have itself to blame for missing the opportunity as it was distracted by loss making ventures while letting potentially lucrative services pass.

The local business search market should be a lucrative opportunity for the business that gets it right. It may well be that all the big tech giants are unable to make this market work.

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Local gets left behind by social and mobile in SoLoMo

Local reminds the poor cousin of social and mobile in the SoLoMo world

One of the tech buzzwords, or acronyms, a few years back was SoLoMo – Social Local Mobile. In reviewing the slides for the Future Proofing Your Business presentation next week, the term came up in one of the notes.

It’s interesting look at the fates of the three different concepts over the past few years; mobile has boomed and redefined computing and social has become big business with Facebook growing into a hundred billion dollar company.

Local though has struggled with Google, Facebook and a host of smaller and newer startups struggling while the Yellow Pages franchise dies. Despite the power of maps and geolocation, local just isn’t doing as well as the other two.

This could be down to the difficulty in harvesting the massive amounts of disparate data available to any service trying to draw an accurate picture of what’s in the neighbourhood.

Google Places tried to standardise that information for local businesses but the complexity of the service and its opaque, arbitrary rules meant adoption has been slow and merchants are reluctant to update details in case they fall foul of the rules.

Local services’ failure to take off has also had a consequence for the media as its in hyperlocal services that publishers have possibly their best opportunity to rebuild their fortunes.

That failure to properly harness mobile has also hurt merchants as many local operations are struggling to find useful places to advertise given Google Adwords and Facebook can be extremely expensive places to advertise.

So the mobile space is still ripe for a smart entrepreneur – a new Google or Facebook – to dominate.

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Is Google drowning business?

Are there too many online services?

The launch of a pages function for Google+ allowing businesses to create a profile on Google’s social media and identity management service is welcome.

What jumps out immediately is there is no integration with Google Local, meaning that businesses will have to create another online profile and learn the nuances of it.

Right now big and small businesses are being confused by the proliferation of online tools and the problem is made worse by advisors maintaining you have to be on each service actively talking to your customers. That’s nice for a corporation with unlimited funds and resources but a tough ask in the real business world.

By adding another service – that doesn’t integrate with Google’s myriad of services let alone outside platforms like WordPress, Facebook and Twitter – Google are making it hard for businesses to allocate the time and resources to the online world.

What’s more, the terminology is confusing; Google’s rebranding of Local to Places started this and now we’ll see business owners and managers confusing Google+ Pages with Google Places.

That confusion will be understandable as right now the terminology between the two overlaps and it will be difficult to explain the difference to business people who have many other issues to worry about along with this.

One thing we can be sure of is there will be a whole range of strategies tied into Google+ Pages that might, or might not, affect search engine results and – given the ongoing nymwars debacle and the similar mess with Google Places listings – there’s a strong likelihood this program is going to get bogged down in opaque bureaucratic procedures.

It seems different divisions within Google are running their own races; Adwords isn’t talking to Blogger, Analytics aren’t talking to Local and the team running Google+ are taking advantage of senior management’s obsession with social at the expense of Google’s core competencies and their advantages in the local and mobile sectors.

Right now businesses are struggling with the plethora of online services and how to use them in their organisations, Google have to break down their own silos and start integrating their services to make it easier for managers, entrepreneurs and proprietors to use these platforms.

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