As some of you likely know, it was announced in early December that CitySquares was sold to Backyard, a west coast based startup with funding from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, celebrity entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis, and self described greedy, blood-sucking venture capitalist Dave McClure. It’s not the investors that make Backyard exciting, to me anyway (although it certainly has a nice ring to it), it’s the founder and CEO Steve Espinosa. I’ve known Steve for a few years now, and at 22 he’s already a very well admired veteran of the Local space and I’d bet on him any day of the week. So it’s an honor to have sold CitySquares to such a great guy with an equally great vision.

Now that CitySquares is largely behind me (I will still be involved as an advisor), I’m moving on from Local. Plainly put, 2010 kicked my ass, and CitySquares’ prospects for regaining its edge wasn’t getting any brighter as this year passed for reasons I won’t get into right now (but I will once the dust settles). As Greg Sterling penned on his site announcing the acquisition of CitySquares,

Given the noise and competition now in local Saren is not unahppy about exiting the segment for now…When CitySquares launched, for example, there was no Google Places, no Facebook Deals, no Groupon and no Foursquare (et al).

There’s a whole lot of truth in those two sentences. More truth than you know. I can proudly say that CitySquares pioneered hyper-local search. No one was doing local search at the neighborhood level until CitySquares came along – and I mean really doing it at the neighborhood level. And to this day, I will boldly state that still, no one has the mashup of hyper-local geospatial data and local business listings that CitySquares.com has. Alas, the mobile platform is the future of local search, of hyper-local search. OK, it’s not the future, it’s the now! So of the many things I can hang my hat on as I close the door on my CitySquares.com chapter, this is one of them.

Another thing I can hang my hat on are my relationships with countless people, of so many background, cultures, and talents. I’m proud to call many entrepreneurs, investors, employees, associates, vendors, partners, across the country and in many corners of the globe colleagues, acquaintances, even friends. CitySquares took me places I never imagined going, both literally and figuratively. I’m most proud of this.

So it’s with both excitement and with sadness that I say goodbye to 2010, and with open arms that I welcome 2011. I will be making an announcement about my next step within the next week or two. In short, it’s a big change for me, and a change I’m thrilled about.

Before I sign off for the year, I’d like to wish you a very healthy, happy, prosperous 2011. See you on the other side!

Au revoir

I was asked to speak at the Marketplaces show alongside Colin Pape with ShopCity and David Vazdauskas of Local Thunder. The panel will be moderated by Steve Marshall, who I always enjoy. He doesnt pull punches and he adds a certain kind of intensity to the panels. I’m looking forward to it.

I’ll be at the show from Sunday through Wednesday with my colleague and VP National Sales Todd Salerno. We have a few meetings teed up but if you’d like to catch up with one of us just email me, tweet me or send smoke signals, whatever works for ya!

If anyone wants to go, but does not yet have tickets, please get in touch with me, I have a discount code for you to save a little.

Looking forward to seeing a whole lotta people! See you there!

“You stay classy San Diego” – Ron Burgundy

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Today, though, I am in rare form. I think it’s all the cold and flu medicine I’m doped up on. The voicemail came through as a wav file, as they all do, and I decided to play it over the speakers in the office for everyone to hear. We all laughed. But I wasn’t done.

So I decided take full advantage of this opportunity today. They called me, for the third time, and this time I responded. I went to their site, I claimed my listing, and voila CitySquares.com now has a profile in Merchant Circle’s directory. Actually, it seems we’ve had a profile there for some time, I just had to claim it. The address they had for us was three years old and it was a little tricky figuring out how to change it, but we figured it out.

Ya know I gotta say too, I was very impressed with the process! The obnoxious, spammy phone calls aside, claiming my profile and spicing it up was actually a very painless and enjoyable experience. In fact, we really should emulate some of it. But that’s all we’ll emulate, that’s for sure.

Anyone wanna place bets on how long it takes for them to take this down?

… there’s no shortage of predictions and opinions, that’s for sure. But as it pertains user intent, nothing is changing. Consumers still have a need – they’re still searching for local business information. They still use Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. They still go to the IYPs, the city guides, the local directories. But now we’re seeing them turn to different devices and different sites than ever before. Consumers are using their mobile devices to call free 411 services, or use free text messaging services. They’re using their mobile browser, or mobile application. Consumers are starting to find local business information from stranger places too, like Facebook, YouTube, even twitter. How about that! As if this local search thing wasn’t fragmented enough, it seems to be fragmenting even more. Yet the consumer isn’t really looking for anything different, are they?

Videos may be more prevalent, more available, more accessible. But are consumers specifically searching for local business videos? Unlikely. Local business profiles, and the websites they’re on, may be optimized for a mobile device, but the user doesn’t necessarily care about clever bells and whistles. Local search apps may have really fancy user interfaces that take advantage of the wow-factor on say, the iPhone, but the user’s intention is still very much the same. They’re looking for the same information as always and they’re still performing recovery or discovery searches.

read more…

I just don’t see Google coming into this space, sprinkling it’s Google fairy dust on the marketplace and voila – cracking the code. OK, so maybe Google’s isn’t trying to crack the code, but just penetrate the market a bit more than they’re able. Google should want to penetrate this space, of course they should, but doing it themselves? Gimme a break! And this approach is just silly. I kind of get the sense that this is a desperate move by an increasingly clumsy and goofy corporation that will yield very little. Next step for Google? Snatching up local search players.

Success in the local search market will not come from a giant like Google or Yahoo or Microsoft. It will come from the small startups like, well, like CitySquares.

Here’s Matt McGee’s post on the demise of the program, which gives some more detail. Here’s what Google had to say:

On December 31, 2008, we will end the Google Local Business Referrals program, which was one of many Google Labs initiatives that we had developed as part of our ongoing commitment to experimentation and testing new ways to help businesses establish a presence online.

Many relationships have been built as a result of Google Local Business Referrals, and local connections between representatives and businesses have been forged that we hope will continue. However, the program will conclude at the end of the year as part of our effort to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.

So, what’s next for Google and their local ambitions?

I’ve uploaded the audio file here but you can also find it up on WICN’s website.

I believe that this local search thing is quite early, and to keep up with the Jones’ I’ve started to refer to it as Local 1.0. Hear me out here, because I’m diving deep.

Web 1.0 was a passive web, about adoption and about moving to an interconnected digital medium, and Web 2.0 is very much about participation, creation, and transforming that interconnected digital medium into a platform. Just as Web 1.0 was static, passive, and largely about adoption, so is local, today, and as we’ve come to know it.

Resourceful Idiot does a pretty decent job of explaining the iterations of the Internet. He starts by saying:

“You can group each of the ‘Web x.x’ as a different movement when it comes to internet usage. Web 1.0 is the movement that took place during the beginning of the internet.”

Web 1.0 was about adoption, and about the movement of media, business, and commerce, to the digital medium that is the World Wide Web. Everyone was moving online to reach a larger audience and achieve better efficiencies. The first to move was big media like newspapers, news stations, music, magazines, etc. Everyday services and resources went online, like the post office, libraries, phone books, the dictionary, the encyclopedia, public transportation services, travel agencies, shipping services, mortgage companies, banks, day trading. Consumer services, business services, B2C, B2B, all of them were moving their data and content to the web. All of this content was mostly static, and that was fine.

Lots of everyday people got online, mostly through dial-up. They got online with their brand spanking new Macs and PCs, they tied up their home phone lines, they even planned their evenings around it. Most people, in mainstream America that is, went to chat rooms, which was about the coolest thing going at the time, before anyone ever heard of “social networking” or “social media.” The web was new and there was so much to be discovered and explored. People struggled with actually getting value though, in their daily lives. What was there to do on the web but conduct research and join chat rooms and maybe pirate some music? I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but to mainstream America, this was the reality.

If you were entrepreneurial and had an idea for a business, like lots of the companies I helped out in the mid-late 90s, meant that you also had to host your own website. To do that meant you had to have a domain name, you had to host the site, hire an HTML programmer, maybe even an application developer to do ASP, a database administrator if you wanted to have dynamic content, hire a graphic designer, even an IT person to make sure you’re site was hosted properly. Want your own server? Pay up and collocate it somewhere. Next thing you know, you’re into this website thing for a budget busting amount, with more overhead than you know how to pay for, and human resources coming out of the woodwork. Moving your business to the Internet seemed like a mad dash to the finish line – either you get there now or you’ll be lost in someone else’s dust and live to regret it. if you didn’t get online, you were going to die. It was simple. Move or die.

So, over time, lots of industries did this. Big companies, small companies, new companies, old companies. But not all companies went the way of the web. Small businesses, mom-and-pops, brick-and-mortars, Main Street USA businesses – they didn’t. They didn’t care and mostly couldn’t afford it. To a lot of them it was a flash-in-the-pan, a fad that would pass like so many other things over the years and decades that supposedly challenged their businesses. Construction on the street is about as bad as it gets, same with recessions. This Internet thing was a joke. And the return on their investments were practically negative too. They’d spend money on these websites, and for what? Just to have a web page? So what.

In those days there was a lot of hype about e-commerce, which was probably the most exciting and radical thing facing consumers and retail cash registers, depending on how you looked at it. E-Commerce was going to destroy mom-and-pops! It was to be the apocalypse of brick-and-mortars, of retail, of traditional commerce, and we’d all be transformed because of it.

Then, along came a company called Sidewalk.com. Started in 1997, Sidewalk was a city guide – the first of its kind. There were a couple of other city guides, notably Digital Cities, owned by AOL, but Sidewalk was different. Microsoft owned Sidewalk and quickly turned into a top destination site. The popular website featured businesses, events, and activities for your city, and they even showed some of the content in a neighborhood context. You could find lots of local businesses on Sidewalk.com too. I remember using Sidewalk regularly in the late 90s, looking for things to do in Boston, shows to catch, clubs to check out, and places to go on a date.

Some argued that Sidewalk was arrogant and attempting to put city weeklies out of business. Some thought that Sidewalk was a glorified database of listings. In 1999 Microsoft sold Sidewalk to Citysearch. In my opinion, this was a mistake. Apparently Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer agrees, as he recently stated,

“Sidewalk was really aimed at what we now call local search” and “Sidewalk is one we should not have gotten out of.”

In my opinion, this was the opening salvo of the Local 1.0 era. Everything until that point was irrelevant. Sidewalk made the first real impact and most people who know the local space, know Sidewalk’s story.

The burst of the bubble was in March of 2000 and the American economy entered a recession shortly after. If small businesses ever bought into this whole Internet thing to begin with, they certainly weren’t going to make the plunge now. Too many fortunes had been lost as a result of the crash. Too much hype around e-commerce destroying traditional retail. Too much hype, too much nonsense, not enough value. Business went on as usual for these guys. “Just a fad,” they all told themselves, “just a flash in the pan.”

For the next couple of years no one challenged CitySearch in the city guide space. The phone companies weren’t making much progress either, but they had traffic and they had the brand recognition. Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, Bigyellow.com, they all had a huge opportunity in front of them. So did the newspapers. They all had a massive opportunity right in front of them and based on branding and market share and clout alone, they should have been able to do make moves. But they didn’t. They all stayed still and thought that print was the medium to stick with. When they did make the right moves, and started selling online ads to small businesses, they mostly sold them as add-ons to their print advertising products, which was their primary revenue stream for previous several decades.

So here you are – Local 1.0 at full steam now. The IYPs had a market to grab, the newspapers had a market to grab, and Citysearch had their piece. Right? No one could stop get in their way! Wrong! Out of left field, like a bat outta hell, came this new company called Google.

Google had been around for a couple of years already but it mostly appealed to techies who were plugged-in. The growth of Google usage was nearly entirely organic, through word-of-mouth. It was simply a better search engine, and soon, even soccer moms were using it.

By 2003, everyone was Googling. If you weren’t using Google, than you really weren’t using the Internet properly. Google simply provided a better experience when you wanted to find information on the Internet. The relevance of the search results was paralleled and the user experience was uncluttered. Suddenly, Google.com was the de facto search engine and if you were using something else you were just behind the curve.

Google then started monetizing by way of Adsense, and almost everyone jumped on board. Now, Google wasn’t the first to do this. Many folks used Overture long before Google was a household name, but through Google’s popularity, and through some differences in their approach, Google simply kicked ass. And ya know what else, they even started to penetrate the SMB advertising market. This meant the war was on!

Google also gave birth to entire industries, or, if those industries were already there, they were now exploding. Notable examples of this are Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is another. SEO and SEM businesses are sprouting up all the time, mainly to help business get exposure on Google, lots of them are helping SMBs. Those very same businesses who didn’t want to get online.

Here we are now, in 2004, and we start hearing “Web 2.0″ being uttered from the lips of industry gurus, specifically Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle. Web 2.0 is still with us today, in late 2008, and it’s redefined our perceptions of what the Internet is, and shaped our ideas of what it could be. Web 2.0 has certain attributes that we could debate about, but mainly the core characteristics of Web 2.0 are participation, web based applications, community, lighter user interfaces, richer user experiences, openness in technology, and using the Internet as a platform, among other things. All of these things have lent themselves to new verticals on the Internet, like Social Networking (MySpace, Facebook), or the transition from static personal websites to blogs, or Software as a Service (SaaS, Salesforce.com), folksonomy oriented content and data sharing sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, and many more. But where are the small businesses? Everything in Web 1.0 and in Web 2.0 seemed to leave the small businesses behind. Why? Because they weren’t ready for an online identity, and they didn’t see a reason for it.

Like most people, you have some sort of online identity now. This is due mostly to broadband Internet access and affordable computers. The days of dial-up are behind us, and nearly everyone has a computer. To have a computer, to have broadband access, is to be a node on the Internet. Got an email? You’ve got an identity. Email is the linchpin of your online identity. Sign into any websites? You’re on the Internet. You’re only one small step away from joining a larger community, perhaps it’s MySpace, perhaps its Facebook, or Eons, or Jdate. You have an identity online, and more likely than not, you’re connecting with your friends there too, real world and virtual world friends.

All of this is appealing to some almost primal need that we all have as humans, and that’s a need to connect with each other in meaningful ways. It’s not enough for me to know that you exist, I want to know more about you, I want to learn about your attributes and characteristics that make you distinctly you. What makes Ben, Ben? Where are you? Where do you live? Where do you eat and hang out? All that is conducted locally. You life is conducted where you live, where you work, where you play. Your life is not conducted on the Internet. It’s conducted at home on the couch and at your kitchen table, but also at the subway station, at the local convenience store, at the library, at the farmers market, the bar, the ballpark, your cousin’s house. This is your life, your local life. Your local life is also, and greatly, where you spend your dollars, take your dry cleaning, find your plumber, and so much more.

So you have an online identity. Who’s left? Let’s see, users are online, and have been. Governments are online, newspapers, pornography – all online. More music is purchased online than any other method, thanks to iTunes. Even movies are online now, and if they’re not, you just add add a DVD to your Netflix queue. Enterprises, real estate companies, hospitals, libraries, everyone is online, well, that is, everyone except mom-and-pop.

What’s going on with mom-and-pop? The whole world is moving without them! Even the people who run these businesses, mom and pop, have online identities. You can find them on LinkedIn, on Facebook, but what about their businesses? What’s going on here?!

Here we are in late 2008, and Web 1.0 still feels like yesterday. Web 2.0 is moving fast, so fast that it’s simply leaving most people and most businesses in the dust. It’s hard to keep up with all this stuff unless your in the industry or just have a lot of spare time.

And SMBs are finally, finally starting to move online, but not on their own. They, like so many businesses in the 1990′s, need help, and they know that their customers use Google to find things. They, too, use Google to find things. They don’t have websites for their local businesses, yet 30% of all online searches (or ‘Googles’) are local searches – that is, consumers seeking local goods and services. I’ll say that again: 30% of all online searches are local searches!

This local search thing is very young. It’s still in its first iteration, not even close to a local 2.0. And just like with the early web companies, the early search engines, the early travel sites, there isn’t going to be just one winner. Citysearch has paved the way for folks like CitySquares. So have the traditional yellow pages, and the newspapers. This small business sector is always behind the curve, always behind the changes in the market. And for good reason.  But they’re moving now, they’re adopting the Internet because it makes sense for them now. Their customers are there, all of them. The extent of this today is limited to SEM (through various firms or direct with the search engines), their own website despite that only 55% of SMBs don’t have websites (and those that do are largely brochure sites, built long ago, and not SEO’d), and local search sites, city-guides, and directories.

Greg Sterling says it best,

“One of the most challenging aspects of local search is small business (SMB) advertiser acquisition. Everyone is aware, especially Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, that the US SMB market is where the advertiser volume is: almost 99% of US businesses qualify as small businesses (here defined as < 100 employees).

According to the US Small Business Administration (SBA), more than 20 million firms qualify under the definition above, with almost 19 million of those having no employees at all”

Greg even makes the argument that we’ll soon see the end of SMB websites. And I agree. As I’ve stated, these businesses can’t be bothered. The value does not match the expense. And ROI? Most SMBs don’t even know what that means.

Local search is so young, it’s Local 1.0. The shift to a Local 2.0 will only happen with the help, the encouragement, and the efforts of the IYPs, the city-guides, and local search players. No question the SMBs get it, no doubt about it, they’re just afraid. They understand the value of the Internet, and research is showing a dramatic shift in where they put their ad dollars. And it seems to be happening faster and faster, it’s really picking up  momentum. It only takes a few drips to start melting a glacier, and we’re seeing that drip become a steady stream now.

Circling back to my lengthy take on Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, what we saw then was adoption. That’s all it was about, adoption, and going digital, surfing the Internet, exploring the web. Web 2.0 is about engaging, participating, collaborating, building, platforms. Local 1.0 is no different, it’s about adoption, going digital, getting online in an affordable way, and in a way that provides value. Local 2.0 will be about engaging and participating, and openness, and most importantly, mobile, the next and most inherently natural medium for local.

This is local 1.0. The tectonic plates are moving, and opportunities are opening up. The plates are moving faster now, and giant masses of land are revealing themselves above sea level. CitySquares is positioned to plant our flag. Move or die!

Five years from now I hope to look back on this blog and some of the various entries I’ve made on local search, some of the speculating I’ve done, and some of the research that I point to, and that I subscribe to in RSS daily, and remind myself how wild local 1.0 was. How I was a part of it, how CitySquares was a part of it.

Local 1.0 is here and now.

So without further ado, here is the final product:

You can find the original Flash version of the movie here on CitySquares.com. We also threw it up on YouTube and the CitySquares Facebook page.

What do you think?

Some notes I took:

1. 71% of SMEs prefer a phone call vs clicks (no shit but who are the other 19%?)
2. 20% connection rate for phone calls – meaning only 20% of SMEs actually answer their phone. This was a topic of debate, and I have a hard time with that number.
3. 70% of yellow pages advertisers are service businesses. Something I always figured, but never knew the stat. A good nugget.
4. Google and Yahoo both flirted with PPCall (or was it click to call?) but they haven’t really rolled it out. I seem to recall reading somewhere recently that Google actually rolled something back in some expiremental market. Anyone know?
5. IYP users buy quicker and spend more. Interesting conclusions can be drawn about one’s online vs offline intentions.
6. 82% of online searchers follow up with offline visits – local search, not IYP
7. James Price, with Idearc, had stats that showed huge ROI for service businesses. He wouldn’t be more specific about what kinds of services businesses.
8. Ingenio charges a flat $2 rate for all pay per call customers – that’s something I can appreciate vs the other pricing model option.
9. Idearc said that their median cost per call is somewhere around $15-$20/call.

CitySquares expiremented with Pay Per Call long ago, in late 2005. It was a mistake for us, because a) we just didn’t have the traffic to justify it and b) the merchants didn’t want to, in essence, give up their phone numbers. I think it’s something we’ll revisit again at a later time, once we can better justify it and it just makes better sense across the boards.

Lastly, note to self: use 1-800-FREE-411 for now on! Cool – but I’ll admit I’m not looking forward to the ads. When I call 411 it’s usually because I’m in a rush and listening to ads is going to steam me, I just know it.

The Ultimate Local Ad Model

More notes and take-aways:

1. See Genbook.com – sort of an OpenTable for SMEs. Kind of a pay-per-action opportunity.
2. Pay per action was a big topic.
3. Steven Chuck, Director of Strategic Alliances, Yahoo!, had a great presentation. I want it.
4. Digital word of mouth is “one-t0-many” because it’s published via reviews, that’s powerful, if its managed well.
5. I love Yahoo! Locals 3 silos on their city guide pages, very smart. Very clean too. I’ve always like Yahoo! Local’s solutions.
6. Yellowpages still, to this day, has only sold 1 out of 3 businesses, nationwide. I had no idea it was that low.

Show Me the Money

More random notes:

1. Justin Sanger, of Local Launch, is a very intelligent and personable guy that captivates the audience. I thoroughly enjoyed the 2 chances I had to see him speak. His deck had a “nebula” slide showing, well, hard to explain and I’m in a rush, but I’d like to get my hands on that – it was great.
2. Justin: “SMEs just don’t self provision” – I hear that!
3. Justin said this twice this week: “SME’s don’t buy advertising, they are sold advertising.”
4. He said something along the lines of “Google just isn’t going to build a local salesforce – it’s not gonna happen.”
5. Random note: forget about postal codes
6. Out all SMEs, 33% are in yellow pages, and about 7-8% of them are online. Need to clarify this a bit more – what is “online” ?

So that’s my digest for day 2. Its brief, albeit, but I’m in a rush to catch my flight.

SMX LoMo was a great event, very well organized. I thoroughly enjoyed Greg Sterling – I had no idea he was such a fun guy, very refreshing. Also, the attendees were of the highest quality – just good people. I made some new friends that I look forward to seeing again at ILM:2007 and working with too.

SMX LoMo, final session

Originally uploaded by Benee

Final session at SMX lomo, the future of lomo, when technologies collide.

I will post a complete digest for day 2 after dinner with my cousin later tonight, or on the plane tomorrow.
……………………………………….
Ben Saren
Citysquares.com
617.459.4922
blog: www.yoursuspect.com

Sent from my BlackBerry