Local search is impatient.  It’s directional in nature.  It’s not exploratory.  It’s more about the physical facts, and less about qualitative information.

Therefore, for small business owners, local search is about being there and being found — wherever consumers might be looking.

Imagine yourself as a consumer and you’re late to a dinner party in Leesburg, Virginia.  You’re driving around an unfamiliar town looking for a wine store to pick up a nice bottle of French white wine.  At this moment, you simply don’t care about who’s content has position 1, 3, or 5 in organic search results.  You only care about what’s there in the real world, whether it’s close to you, and whether they’re open at 7:00 pm on Saturday.

Google, of course, understands this dynamic.  They know that search is not always about “ranking” and they understand that “relevance” itself is contextual to one’s circumstance.  For example, depending on your situation, you might be: 

• >relaxing on a lazy sunday afternoon searching for things that entertain you
• >shopping for a friend’s birthday gift and searching for a particular product
• >interested in learning more about the conflict in the Gaza and searching for the latest news
• >driving around an unfamiliar town desperately searching for a wine store

Therefore, to facilitate search experiences Google continues to refine their universal search algorithm by blending different types of content into search results. Depending upon the query, Google will present not only organic results based on page rank — but they will also blend in videos, images, news clips, product info and a variety of other content types.  For queries involving business service and locality, Google will blend in the so-called 10 pak – a list of 10 local businesses in town, plotted on a map, that might be relevant to your needs.  BTW, below is a screen shot of the 10 Pak results for wine stores in Leesburg, VA:

Consumers are constantly searching in Google,  in Yahoo, in MSN, in the phone book, in GPS navigational systems, over the phone with 411 operators, on their mobile phones via search-based apps.  In addition to practicing basic SEO hygiene, it is critical that SMBs take additional (different) steps so consumers will find them in the context of local search.

In the coming days I will be authoring a follow-up post that will cover (a) specific steps that SMBs can take on their own to get found, and (b) the emergence of business profiling platforms designed to help SMBs create, maintain, enhance and openly distribute their content to any and all services where consumers might be looking to find them.

While it’s relatively quiet now – it’s going to get very noisy soon.

This post, for example, highlights a recent scuffle between the FCC and Comcast dueto inconsistent VoIPquality on the Comcast network.  Specifically, the FCC wants to know why the company says some VoIP phone calls might occasionally sound “choppy” — but not those placed through Comcast’s own digital phone service.

In my opinion, VoIP is just the appetizer.  Online video is the hedonistic main course that is feeding the elephant’s appetite and forcing many people, including President Obama, to pay closer attention to issues surrounding network nuetrality.

Net Neutrality

Video is driving per user network costs through the roof, and in many cases there is no value added to the carrier.  Consider that Youtube is now the world’s second largest search engine behind Google.  Millions of videos (many of them senseless) are chewing up bandwidth and driving up costs.  Also, think about the impact of NBC’s Hulu on US carriers.  See if you can guess how much extra money Verizon makes for streaming an HD episode of The Office?

No matter which side you might be on — the fact is that online video is exploding and it’s rapidly driving network costs higher for carriers.  As a result, carriers are aggresively rethinking their position with regard to network nuetrality.  They can either lobby the FCC like hell to get compensated for delivering value added (priority) content — or they can get creative to figure out ways to deliver new, higher margin, services that work with the tide rather than against it.

Personally, I’d love to see them innovate — rather than regulate.  Time will tell.

Both highlight the gradual demise of outbound advertising/marketing and emphasize the importance of participating thoughtfully in the conversational web as a mechanism for attracting prospects through inbound channels.

The first video is from Scholz & Friends.

Scholz & Friends from BUBBLECLOT on Vimeo.

The second video (my true favorite) is from the clever folks at HubSpot.

Inbound Marketing/You Ought To Know from Oscar Rylin on Vimeo.

Now, more than ever, markets are conversations.  Consumers are increasingly in control.  They decide which marketing messages they will consume.  Everything else they ignore.

As a result, one way monologues (adverts) are less effective.  Two way dialogues (conversations) are the future of marketing.

Are you ready?

Therefore, any product or service delivered to the SMB mass market would be greatly enhanced if it were capable of helping business owners get online and generate inbound sales leads.

The statement is especially true as it relates to the dumb pipes sold by telcos and cablecos — and yet they continue to battle each other in an effort to sell commodity connectivity services.

Are you found on Google?

Don’t get me wrong, voice lines and high speed internet connections are critically important services for millions of SMB.  The point I am making is that there is a latent and powerful value hidden inside of these pipes that has yet to be exposed by either side.

Telco or cableco — high speed pipes have the ability to incorporate simple services to help SMBs get online, get found in search engines, and generate inbound sales leads.

It’s a value that SMBs are desperate for.  If either side can expose it, there is no doubt they will sell more pipes, reduce churn, and increase ARPU.

First, I received a tweet this morning from @TheKelseyGroup with a link to a case study about a local search portal called Weblocal.ca that has managed to generate large amounts of traffic after only a few months of being in market.  The company is actually a partnership between a software company called YellowBot and a Canadian print media company called Transcontinental with a collection of newspaper and magazine assets.  The portal itself is simple and clean.  Content is spotlighted for videos, pictures, users, and reviews.  Plus there is a tag cloud for popular topics and for popular places.

If you’re interested in local search, there is a lot to think about for sure.  However, in my opinion, the most intriguing part of the story is the 1 million UVs after just 60 days.  2.5% of Canada’s population visited the site in December 2008.  Transcon is pushing hard to promote the site through their 400 person sales channel and traditional media assets and it’ll be interesting to see how far they can go when taking on the leaders such as YPG and Canpages.

Second, in a sign that VC is not dead yet — or perhaps a sign that local search and generating inbound leads for SMBs remains a huge opportunity – Yodel announced that it closed a $10 million sercies C round.

I’ve said it before.  I’ll say it again.  In a down economy like this, SMBs are aggressively on the hunt for inbound leads.  Those that are positioned to help generate inbound sales leads for SMBs have an excellent opportunity for growth in the next few years.

It’s hard to tell exactly what the platfrom offers (does not offer) but Dan Scheinman tells a good story about how the broadband network is the platform for a new generation of compelling business experiences that are more social, personal and visual.

 The SaaS based platform is taregted at media companies so they can focus on their core competency of building content — while Cisco handles the technical plumbing necessary to support communities of people interacting around rich content.

Scheinman says Eos is allowing Warner Music to create socially oriented web sites at a fraction of the cost of custom web designs. I’d personally be very intersted in comparing the cost of Eos with cost of Getcloser.com, a social network built by UK based retailer HMV by the folks at digital agency LBi.

In summary, I think Cisco’s slogan definitely has it right, “The network is the platform” 

But only time will tell if they got it right with Eos.

Make no mistake, this is a hugely strategic deal.  It’s not just about Microsoft purchasing the right to place their search bar on Verizon’s phones.  It’s much bigger than that.  This deal is about how Verizon, an old school phone company, is working to create a purple cow by doing something truly amazing in support of it’s business customers.

Instead of just selling commodity phone lines and data plans, Verizon is transforming it’s ordinary phone service into an inbound lead machine by helping businesses get found in local search.

Traditional telcos and broadband providers should wake up and stop munching grass.  They should pay very close attention to this deal because from this point forward, the value of business broadband (wireless, wireline, otherwise) will be increasingly determined by the number of inbound leads that it generates.

In order to maintain existing customers and attract new ones, commodity broadband providers must find innovative ways to incorporate inbound marketing values into their core connectivity solutions.

All together now, repeat after me….

“Business broadband connectivity is all about getting found by customers.”