The Near Memo

Send us a textVendasta, which provides an app store for agencies, has acquired PPC pioneer MatchCraft. The acquisition will fill out Vendasta core marketing offerings with paid ad campaigns and allow more traditional media companies to transition more easily from an ad model to a full service digital marketing model. Despite Supreme Court refusal to require businesses to vaccinate their employees, those companies that are requiring vaccination are seeing success despite Omichron. Case in point is United Airlines which has 3000 of their 47,000 employees out with Covid has seen no hospitalizations or deaths since requiring the vaccine. Previously one employee a week was dying from Covid. Airlines though are the perfect business to require vaccinations and doing so will increase those willing to fly. The TLDR Act, which stands for "Terms-of-service Labeling, Design, and Readability Act," would require any website/app – SMBs are explicitly exempted – to offer an easy to understand summary of key terms. And it would have to appear at the top of TOS pages. While a step forward it is unlikely to change user behaviors as the companies will still hold the power. The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 47Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textUsing a traditional golf course model with an NFT twist, over $10 million was raised in 48 hours. The project got lots of media coverage even though no golf course has yet been purchased or even identified. However this type of activity might point the way towards crowdfunding other start up ventures. Google, by degrading the user experience and being unwilling to get into the nitty gritty of real world retail has lost the battle for high value intent driven product searches. Can they regain this market? What would it take?In this recent Washington Post poll only Amazon garnered trust amongst more than 50% of US consumers. The rest all were trusted by less than half of the population and some significantly less. Yet the numbers indicate that despite this mistrust we continue to use these services and products. The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 46Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textLast week, Google released a new, more horizontal Local Map Pack with more white space, a bigger, squarer map and bigger images. How will this impact ads and ranking?New Yelp consumer survey indicates that over 90% prefer written reviews over just ratings. This survey is ostensibly aimed at Google and their lower review and rating standards but in some ways might also be targeted to their partner Apple that might be considering dropping Yelp. Interestingly the reviews that Yelp says consumers prefer are not the reviews that they typically highlight. Go figureNew research from SOCI that looked at  1.1 million business locations across the US and analyzed 169 million reviews associated with them. The research found that over 60% of all reviews are written by Local Guides and that those reviews tend to be shorter than reviews written by regular users. Is this due to gamification of the fact that non Local Guide reviewers are the more emotional reviewers?The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 45Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textIn this interview with Darren Shaw we take a deep dive into the Local Search Ranking Factors. We look at the key take aways, the strengths and weaknesses of the survey and areas that Local SEO’s should focus on.In this interview with Darren Shaw we take a deep dive look at the results of the recently released Local Search Ranking Factor survey and explore the key takeaways to good ranking and conversions.  We discuss: what a citation means in 2021 the growing impact of images on local searchthe top myths of local search and the things that Darren (and most of us) think are a waste of time.The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Ep 44 Near MemoSubscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textAfter the release of iOS 15 it has become clear that Apple is not just a wannabe in the mapping space. As they move towards AR, Maps has become a discovery platform and a fully functional travel tool. Mike, attempting to eat his own dog food, takes it on his cross country journey as his sole mapping and discovery tool. Twitter, despite its outsized role in our news focused culture, has long underperformed financially. Whether Dorsey left willingly or was forced out, there is an opportunity to redefine how it can survive and thrive. Is that a subscription or is a better API model?Greg Sterling highlights how the maturation of Google has led to inevitable ethical conflicts. Is this unique to Google or part and parcel of a larger pattern? Is it an inevitable outcome as the fair haired offspring of The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 43 12-03-21Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textIn this recent Uberal study conducted by Greg Sterling consumers confirm the importance of local search with over 50% of their searches being local and that they trust local businesses more than they do internet only brands. Apple, with their consistent and regular builds for Apple Maps has increasingly included new features on Maps to both aid business discovery and to provide a transaction layer that is fast and easy for the consumer. Apple Maps has increasingly become an important source for new customers and these developments are likely to continue as Maps takes its place in the real world. Apple’s long term development of Apple Maps when viewed together with the many other cross product developments point to an Apple AR future which looks quite different than Facebook’s metaverse. In that future it is likely that local businesses will have increasing opportunities for consumer discovery as Maps will likely play a critical role in The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 42Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textVistaPrint in creating its new brand, Vista showed how to elegantly rebrand a legacy company that has become digital. It created a new umbrella brand for its many acquisitions and space for future brand building. Vista is another company that demonstrates the possibilities in the very small business market. With some notable funding You.com released its new search engine. Can any of these new search engines make progress against Google? Why are so many coming to the fore now? What exactly is the future of search? Is privacy enough of a differentiator?Google has pulled out all the stops in its propaganda crusade to convince small business owners that SMB interests in fighting possible Google ant-trust regulation align with Google’s… in doing so Google has expanded their campaign from Google My Business to now include Adwords clients and domain registrants. Is Google running scared?The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.EP 41 Near MemoSubscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textThis week we discuss but one topic, the rebranding of the Google My Business tools to the Business Profile. With enhanced in-search and in Maps editing, Google is trying (once again) to lure small businesses to edit their listings via new features. The GMB API will become the Business Profile API and they claim that the GMB dashboard will become the Business Profile Dashboard in 2022. But they also announced the sunsetting of their GMB app. Join us this week as David and Mike bet on the outcome. The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 40Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textLargely uncovered in the news, Amazon has announced a new program, Local Selling, that allows local merchants selling on Amazon to apply for the ability to take an order on Amazon and deliver curbside from their location or to deliver via their own delivery process. Clearly this is a response to Google’s successful push of Product Merchant center into local and might lead to additional local relationships for Amazon. Google is understanding more and more about the content of images using their Cloud Vision AI and this understanding of entities, labels, logos, sentiment and text is being leveraged to use images to answer searcher intent in ads, local and the mobile web results. This is part of a long arc where Google will now start using images to not just answer queries but to ask them as well using their new MUM AI/ML and is likely part of their AR future.  Google Local has been “stealing” local conversions for years. Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky recently reported that Google local leads are both the dominant source for leads as well as the fastest growing source for leads for most of the verticals that she works in. What does this mean for local businesses? The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 39Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textThe consolidation of internet, cable, voice, content, distribution, smart devices, advertising, and analytics exemplified by these large vertically-integrated ISPs—which represent approximately 98.8% of the mobile internet market—has increased the volume of information they are capable of collecting about consumers, improved their insight into consumers’ behaviors, and strengthened the persistence of identifiers capable of tracking users across platforms and assets.Snap blamed Apple for their shorfall this quarter but the real question is whether that is reality or just part of the “privacy theater”? In 2020, AirBnB cut $542 million of performance advertising spend and saw no measurable falloff in attributable sales. They continued this ad-slashing practice in 2021, with similarly eye-popping numbers. Could it be that all those ads did nothing?The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 38Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/