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Loci 2010 – Greg Sterling

Who better to start off Loci 2010 than Greg Sterling? Greg is an indefatigable writer (how does he get anything else done?) and provides the strategic insights as well as the scoop on the “daily deal” to all of us in the industry. He can be found at Screenwerk, SearchEngineland and Internet2Go. He speaks at and organizes a number of conferences and you will find him speaking next at his Conversational Commerce Conference February 2-3 in San Francisco.

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Local-social-mobile is the new mantra for many financial analysts and VCs. Indeed, we saw a range of developments in 2010 that tied these arenas closer together. It was a watershed year for the mobile Internet and the year that everyone started to take local very seriously – most notably Google. Executives at Google declared local not only a major priority but the company’s “top focus.” High-profile but unsuccessful attempts to buy Yelp and Groupon testified to that.

The following are list of the top trends and developments that I believe were significant in “local” or local marketing this year:

1. Mobile: the rise of mobile and smartphones in 2010 helped focus new energy and attention on the importance of local and location

2. Google’s surge into local was significant on several fronts and many product areas. There were so many local-related initiatives this year by Google it’s hard to keep track of them all. The launch of Place Search and the new UI that emphasizes local content on Google is reflective of this larger cluster of local moves by the search engine

3. Group buying and Groupon: in 2010 this phenomenon came out of almost nowhere to culminate in an aborted $5++ billion takeover by Google at the end of the year. There are well over 100 “Groupon clones” operating in the market and many more if you include the traditional media companies that have adopted the daily deals model

4. Facebook: Facebook launched check-ins and Places. It also launched Deals as a tool to reward check-ins. While each of these offerings is still “1.0” Facebook’s huge footprint can bring a kind of scale to location and deals that few others can match, save Google or perhaps now Groupon in some limited respects.

5. Local product inventory: a number of startups emerged and joined a group of existing companies trying to bring real-time product inventory data online. In Q4 NearbyNow and Milo were acquired and Google launched its own effort.

6. The rise of ‘free’ local data: there are now several companies, including Facebook, Google, Factual, Placecast and SimpleGeo offering free local data to developers. Over time these offerings will become better, more flexible and richer, enabling much more competition in the local, and especially local-mobile, segment. The “free database of places” removes a front-end barrier to developing local sites or applications

7. Local ad networks: CityGrid, Chitika, xAD, WHERE, Verve, Marchex and others emerged with local monetization offerings that hadn’t existed 12 months ago. This is significant for local (and mobile) publishers and developers. Now there are a number of high-quality alternatives to Google and conventional ad networks that offer generic national ads with geotargeting

8. Places (and location) everywhere: Google Places, Facebook Places, Twitter Places; location is now seemingly everywhere.

9. Social as alternative to SEM: While social media and search ultimately go together social marketing emerged as a kind of parallel universe and in some cases alternative to to more traditional PPC-search marketing. And for many smaller companies social media are more “comprehensible” than paid-search or SEO.

10. Noise and more noise: From a small business perspective the world of digital marketing and advertising became vastly more complex, confusing and “noisy.”

Google Places – You Are Not Rejected, Not Suspended – You are in Places Purgatory

When does the word active simply not mean active in Google Places? When you are in Google Places Purgatory.

Wikipedia: “purgatory”, derived through Anglo and Old French from the Latin word purgatorium.^[8] has come to refer also to a wide range of historical and modern conceptions of postmortem suffering short of everlasting damnation,^[1] and is used, in a non-specific sense, to mean any place or condition of suffering or torment, especially one that is temporary.^[9]

Google has always imposed neo-religious judgements on users of its products. Google Places is no exception and in fact seems to raise these judgements to a new level of a refined, modern theology.

Rejections are a major sin but from which one can reclaim oneself anonymously via algo with a corrected behavior.

Pending is like being at church on Sunday where the line to the confessional stretches interminably before you and you have to use the restroom but are afraid that you will loose your place. Sometimes it seems that your booth gets closed before all the cases have been reviewed and the process needs to resume next Sunday. Do not confuse this state with purgatory although it might seem like it.

Suspension is roughly akin to excommunication although with a thorough confession and plenty of time, a lister can come back into Google’s graces.

The “Term not Allowed“ word filter reflects a minor sin of thought, where just by correcting your language you can be readmitted to the fold. It mirrors formal religion’s attempt to control behaviors through imposition of minor dogmas in the hopes that compliance with larger scale issues will flow naturally from the initial compliance.

Like in many religions, the logic of these minor dogmas is often not clear. In a Google Places listing, the words Fountain, domination and stripper are banned along with sex and erection regardless of context. These words require priestly interventions to have their flags cleared but fortunately require no mea culpas or other ritualistic penitence.

The ban on the word Google must be roughly akin to the biblical ban on speaking the word Yaweh. How the word locksmith fits into this scheme is not totally clear although the common first letter with the word Lucifer comes to mind.

Clearly in this regard Google is not much different than the grade school nun or for that matter Steve Jobs. Although at least with Jobs, you can have a high degree of confidence that in the end you will not be pummeled with porn. With Google, there are no such guarantees.

But at least the above fallen states are explicit and there is (usually) a clear path to regain acceptance amongst the flock.

Google Places though, in its quasi religious secrecy, has always imposed penalties which are not flagged and only known to the initiates. These are punitive measures that are slightly ambiguous and fall into a nether world of secret handshakes and cabalistic knowledge. Often unstated, never obvious to the novice, they offer no clear way out.

These fall into the category of punishment I call Google Places Purgatory (GPP).

The newest manifestation of this condition can been seen in a Google Places Dashboard listing that has been fully approved and says active but which does not show in Places. It simply can not be found, not by direct name search, not by phone number search….. it is truly invisible.

This is despite Google current definition of active:

Active

This means that your listing is publicly available by searching Google. If you’re unable to find your business right away, try performing a search for [ business name in zip code ] on maps.google.com or click the See my listing on Google Maps link to view your Place Page.

The other indicators that you have entered the new purgatory is that the normal link to See your listing on Google Maps is not visible in the dashboard and there are no statitstics. Reports of this condition have been creeping into the Google forums for the past several months (here, here, here) and the path to relieve the hopefully temporary suffering is not yet fully clear.