Broadband Evolved

Roto-Rooter Not Only Fixes Clogs: They Blog As Well

I believe that conversation is commerce, and all commerce is powered by conversation.
I was totally convinced of this several years ago after finishing the The Clue Train Manifesto for the first time.
I am even more convinced today after reading this post by Chris Baggott highlighting how Roto-Rooter is successfully leveraging a corporate blogging strategy to [...]

Advertising in the Yellow Pages: Should SMBs Fish or Cut Bait?

For more than 100 years small business owners have been paying for placement inside of yellow pages directories and getting rewarded with lots of new customers.  It was a great ride while it lasted, but unfortunately for yellow pages publishers the game is slowly coming to end.
Seriously, think about it for a moment.  When was [...]

Click Fraud at Facebook: The Silence is Deafening

TechCrunch reported yesterday how Facebook is enraging small business advertisers due to massive click fraud.

It turns out that SMBs have been complaining for weeks — and although Facebook has invited angry customers to submit their logs for formal review — the company has been surprisingly slow to genuinely engage the issue.  Just this morning Brandon [...]

Online Marketing for SMBs: A Total Crock-of-Clicks!

Borrell Associates released a deeply insightful report this past week entitled:  The Economics of Search Marketing: Addressing the Challenges of a Scalable Local Online Advertising Model.  The paper was under written by Clickable and can be downloaded for free from their site.
In summary, the report finds that up to 90% of SMBs who invest in [...]

Are SMBs Ready to Promote Themselves Online?

Hanan Lifshitz authored an interesting post last week in which he asked the following question about SMBs:

Are they ready to promote themselves online, or, do they fundamentally require a professional middle-man to help them execute the basics of online marketing?

I would argue that the answer is dependent upon the context in which the question is [...]

Why the Open Web is Good for Mark Zuckerberg’s Dad and Millions of Other SMBs

I absolutely love Robert Scoble’s latest interview of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
It’s an excellent summary of how the increasingly open and conversational nature of the web is creating huge opportunities and challenges not just for Facebook — but for everyone, including millions of small business owners and one dentist in particular.
Zuckerberg, a huge believer [...]

The Web is Conversational: Google’s Local Business Center Misses the Point

Yesterday I found myself taking a quick look at the revamped Google Local Business Center.
They’ve done some nice things to help SMBs enhance the quality of their local listings with rich content including photos and videos.  They’ve also created a very nice little service that is designed to inform the SMB about the relative quality [...]

SMBLive Introduces Cloud Profile for SMBs

Check out Peter Krasilovsky’s blog post today about SMBLive’s Cloud Profile platform.
Peter highlights a simple fact:
It’s proven difficult thus far to entice large numbers of SMBs to regularly contribute rich content to the web and actively engage in online conversations.
Traditional web sites fail because they’re expensive and cumbersome to mange and they’re not socially optimized [...]

Brothers in Bankruptcy: Are RH Donnelly and Idearc Ready to Innovate?

As expected, RH Donnelley filed for bankruptcy today to restructure it’s balance sheet and rid itself of $6.4 billion in debt and reduce annual interest payments by $500 million.  The move by RHD follows Idearc’s bankruptcy filing announced in March — and positions both companies to “emerge” in a much healthier state.
This is truly a [...]

The Future of the Yellow Pages: Wanna See it?

Yellow pages publishers from around the world continue to struggle.  Whether it’s Idearc, YPG, RHD, or Yell — it’s a familiar refrain consisting of bad news, good news, bad news.

Bad news = overall revenues are trending down due to declines in the print yellow pages (PYP)
Good news = online revenues are trending up due to [...]