Infoserve Group

Well there are numerous predictions for 2010 floating around, from continued trends in online advertising through to how significant local search will be this year.

We’ve just pulled together a few salient arguments which will hopefully get your brain cells thinking about the future direction of online marketing

“Local search providers will vie for social”

There are many blogs like this one that believes this will be the ultimate test in 2010; major players competing for ad spending on the top social media sites.

You can see the appeal - online social communities are a relatively untapped source and in theory can provide a perfect platform for local businesses to sell their goods and services. If you’ve already built good online relationships with these communities, surely it will be easier than ever to promote yourself?

On the other hand, have a look at this post here, which predicts that social network advertising will rise and then fall flat. Perhaps you can develop good brand recognition but at the end of the day it’s a social site and preying on this precious space may prove disastrous. Any thoughts?

“Mobile search will capture the imagination of consumers during 2010“

The question is, will mobile search become bigger than desktop search? Local search has been shaping the general search landscape for a long time now, but maybe this is the “year of the mobile” that everyone has been quoting for the past few years.

Most people agree that the stumbling block will be user experience, which we’ve blogged about before, so weigh this argument up too. Websites and technology need to be spot on for this to expand as rapidly as predicted.

Finally, in terms of pay per click trends,

“We should see an even greater focus on display ads in 2010″

Rather than the simple (however effective) text ads there are, a whole new range of ad formats will offer a choice of appealing promotions - which surely will also improve everyone’s search experience as well.

Either way, we believe that SMEs can drive change and this is the year for them to succeed online. Maybe just having a website was enough before, but with local search soaring, and people recommending and reviewing, a whole online conversation seems to be brewing… which means 2010 points towards a range of different strategies needing to be considered.

My colleague came across an article in Marketing Magazine about how paid-for search is suffering as brands reduce online spend.

This is despite paid-for search being “hailed by the IAB as ‘the advertising recession-buster’, with more customers searching online for cheaper goods and services.”

We left a comment (how could we be expected to resist?) about how Infoserve disagrees. We wrote how we are

“…experiencing record levels of new customers who are turning to the internet to market themselves. Within the SME sector, paid for search obviously presents a huge opportunity to target local searchers looking for specific goods and services, and businesses are finding the ROI that online advertising can provide incredibly useful when budgets are tight.”

It’s also worth reading the last couple of paragraphs of the Marketing Magazine article about social networking sites and advertising, which pretty much reiterates what I wrote about last week.

Whilst Twitter is taking the world by storm, and is the hottest topic on most people’s lips at the moment, whether - and how - we can ever “successfully monetise” social networking sites is the million dollar question. Literally.

I think this is one of the best explanations I’ve read recently about how powerful Twitter could be:

“Over the last couple months we have heard many different ideas on how Twitter can successfully monetise their surge in popularity, growing user base, and overall traffic. The ideas range from charging for an account, charging for premium accounts, simply adding Adsense, and the list goes on. What we haven’t heard is how Twitter could add local search into their business model, monetise it successfully, and create more user generated content.” [local search news]

What do you think? It seems wherever I turn at the moment, it’s Twitter this and Facebook that, but how can businesses ever judge the real effectiveness of an online presence?

Increased sales? Maybe. The usual indicator of a successful online campaign - measurable results from advertising - seems to fall a long way short on social network sites.

I’ve posted before about how effective social networking can be for businesses and I still not convinced how far it can go. After all, we aren’t there to search for something but be sociable, aren’t we? Will we ever find a way to engage with businesses and measure success via Twitter and Facebook the way we do through search engine advertising?

The internet has become a whole different world. We now have social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, social bookmarks sites like Delicious and Digg, video sharing sites, people are blogging, twittering… the list goes on.

Is this going to be the future for promoting yourself online? For SMEs only just catching on to the idea of having a website, yet again it may seem impossible to keep ahead of it all. What exactly does Web 2.0 mean and how does it affect you?

Web 2.0 describes the changing nature of the internet and how we are now sharing, developing and evolving the ways we interact – or put simply, it’s like a new version of the web.

The ways businesses are building their online presence is changing; they are interacting with consumers via social networking sites and sharing ideas rather than simply advertising their product to a blanket audience. What’s more, they’re doing this with an amazing number of people at the same time and generating conversations amongst consumers from across the world.

This blog has already begun to offer its opinions on all the changes, and no doubt will do so in the future, but advice for now is not to panic if Web 2.0 seems incomprehensible to you. You’re not alone. We’ll help break it down and its worth remembering that you shouldn’t forget the basics – the importance of local search, having a website, looking at the already proven and measurable ways of getting your message across - so make sure this is in place first before you take on the next hurdle.

It’s been a great internet success and it’s made some enterprising graduates very rich; Social Media has been the most recent dot com boom. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Bebo to name but a few have created huge communities online and become a modern phenomenon.

These places where you collect friends, post comments, images and videos, and share them with the world, have been great success stories and who gets bought by whom for the largest sum is hot news.

This success hasn’t gone un-noticed and social media is now an integral part of many a website. Building your online community is building for success is it not? Users want to get involved, be part of a site and part of a community!

It’s not just about collecting friends and posting videos though, Social Media takes on many different forms. Take Amazon for example, their user review system is an integral part of their site. They rely on the contribution of their users, and if we’re looking at buying something we don’t know a great deal about, it’s encouraging to see several people rating your intended purchase as fantastic or the best buy!

Amazon is fortunate though; they’re a re-seller, they’re not selling their own product so it doesn’t effect them if something gets a terrible review. People are writing reviews on Amazon even if they haven’t shopped there; there’s an inherent drive amongst the new breed of internet users to ‘be heard’ and have their ‘voice’!

The Amazon business model is not harmed by allowing users to speak their mind and cast their opinion; on the contrary it’s an invaluable resource for the shopper. But what happens when we try and move this review model into a local search arena?

They’re trying. Yahoo!Local and Google Local have both added a business review element to their local offerings in the US and now the UK as well. Neither Yahoo! nor Google make their money from providing a local search solution; they’re a search engine/portal and do not have the right geocentric data to offer a perfect ‘local’ solution. Their core business is not selling advertising solutions to SMEs. This is why we at Infoserve now work in partnership with Yahoo! Local selling featured listings and providing them with geocentric business data for the UK.

Google Local in the US came unstuck when they offered the user the ability to contact a business directly from the site free of charge via SMS. It wasn’t long before this service was withdrawn due to it being abused. Adding a social media elements is not without its problems, even for the likes of Google!

If you want to find a local plumber you really don’t want one that wears a Stetson, chews tobacco and arrives at your house on a horse wearing a pair of chaps! Ok, a little artistic license there, but we all want someone we can trust and can be sure will do a good job at a good price. Recommendations by word of mouth is how many of us would choose a tradesperson or business, but popping over to the neighbours and asking them if they can recommend where you can buy some sexy lingerie for the wife isn’t always possible! I jest, but for many services and products we’re interested in buying these days it’s just not possible to find someone you know who can point you in the right direction.

If I’m looking to buy a new LCD Display for my computer, I want to know how good it is and how reliable it is on top of the technical specification. With the popularity of user reviews this information is at my finger tips, and looking at the average score from multiple reviews allows me to make an informed choice on whether to buy.

It’s not without it’s pitfalls though! How do I trust the review of someone I’ve never met? It’s open to abuse is it not? What’s to stop me or you from writing a selection of bogus reviews on a product from one of my competitors?

If I’m looking for a restaurant online, I’m interested in what others have to say about their dining experience. If there’s only one review, and it’s highly negative, I’m unlikely to choose that restaurant. If there are several reviews, the majority of which are positive, then I’m more likely to visit that restaurant. But who’s writing the reviews?

Some websites are now trying to prevent abuse of their review systems by allowing the reviewers to be reviewed! They’re building an online community, users are making online friends with other reviewers, rating them on the quality of their comments. If I read a negative review from a user and that user has a large number of ‘friends’ that rate their reviews, then I can deduce that this is likely to be a genuine review, and someone who’s opinion can be trusted.

Here at Infoserve, our business model is based on selling local search solutions to SMEs. We offer a wide variety of excellent solutions, but as yet don’t allow users to post reviews of local businesses. Why not?

The sales pitch! When a potential client realises anyone can write a review about their business and they can’t remove or edit that review, they are understandably apprehensive. What’s to stop one disgruntled customer or competitor posting a highly negative review of their business?

The Holy grail of local search will be the product that offers the best possible results and experience for the users, and the best possible, cost effective, advertising platform for the business; a site which serves both the consumer and the advertiser in equal measure.

Reviews are great for the user who wish to make an informed choice about a service or product, but they’re a potential deal breaker when trying to sell a local search solution to a restaurant for example; they just don’t like the idea that they could be given a poor rating! Here lies the conflict of interests; we at Infoserve strive to provide the best possible local search solution for our clients, making sure the consumer can find them when they are actively looking for a product or service, and we do this very well.

However, one cannot exist without the other. Without high visitor numbers, we couldn’t put our clients in front of a large number of potential customers, and if we don’t offer the best possible user experience for people searching for businesses, they could potentially use another site. Our cityvisitor site has 4 million users each month so we certainly have the traffic, but can we improve the experience for our users searching for a local business?

With an ever growing database of 3 million UK business records, we offer the best local search solutions in the UK, but the holy grail is still out there, and we’re searching - pardon the pun - for that illusive perfect solution!