The Near Memo

Send us a textGoogle, when testing new features in the chase to improve user’s experience, often pick large partners for the test period. Effectively they pick a “winner”, that, if the test succeeds, has an early mover advantage in local. often this is to the disadvantage of existing, smaller local players. That is what happened with delivery services being included in the Local Business Profile. In their local newsletter local vet created a great piece of content and sympathy from vet owners. They told the story of how as Covid left many people working from home the rate of pet adoptions accelerated but the increase in pets led to a vet shortage and significant vet burnout. The pressures to rak higher at Amazon has led merchants to follow up with customers directly with an offer to pay for a negative review take down. When that fails they move on to harassment. 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 28 Near MemoSubscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textYelp, in a turnaround from a disastrous 2020, even managed to surpass 2019 number by about 15% by targeting enterprise customers and seeing more self-serve success and success outside of the restaurant vertical. Bredin surveyed over 800 SMBs on how they learn about product and services for their businesses,The biggest takeaway: Roles one would expect to be common – such as a head of sales, marketing or HR – are not that prevalent; and those SMBs that do fill these positions fill them later in their development than one might expect. AI writing tools mean that the marginal cost of a blog post is nosediving from multiple skilled person-hours to minutes spent in a freemium SaaS product. Any company with a modest budget and a functioning internet connection will be able to pump out truly mind-numbing volumes of content. 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 27Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textDue largely to ad price increases, Facebook’s profits soared as the economy picked up. But wait, Mark Zuckerberg notes that in 5 years they will be known as the metaverse company rather than a social network. Apple, slowly, very slowly, is attempting to build out their own SMB database to improve their Map experience. Consumers say that they trust Facebook and Google less but their actions indicate otherwise. And nowhere are we seeing companies making privacy choices as clear and as easy as they need to be. 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 26Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textGoogle makes reviewing easy by adding attributes to restaurant reviews, Fake reviews are costly to SMBS but Google seems incapable of squashing them, Square’s new bank is a threat to traditional SMB banking relationshipsGoogle makes reviewing easy by adding attributes to restaurant reviews.Google, unlike Yelp, is making reviewing easier and quicker for users by adding quick standardized choices to restaurant reviews. Google, already having rolled out similar review attributes in the service industries, says additional industries and categories to come soon. Fake reviews are costly to SMBS but Google seems incapable of fixing it.In the world of B2B sales, a great deal of money changes hands and the role of reputation is critical. All too often businesses rely on Google’s review summary to spend thousands of dollars. In this case the results were disastrous and it makes it clear that Google has not really worked hard enough in this areaSquare’s new bank is a threat to traditional SMB banking relationships.Square, being at the center of many off-line businesses POS, is now providing checking, savings and loans. Many of the services are free. The tight relationship that SMBs have with Square and SMBs dislike of banks creates an huge opportunity for Square to disrupt traditional banking. 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. NearMemo 25Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textAn unusually assertive Biden who noted that this 40-year “experiment” has failed. “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism,” he proclaimed at the signing of the executive order. “It’s exploitation.” It remains to be seen if real changes will occur but this is the first time in recent memory that a President has made it clear that the whole of the executive branch is responsible for increasing competitiveness.  Craigslist has seen a decline of almost 50% over the past 3 years with much of that loss going to Facebook Marketplaces. Can Nextdoor take advantage of this? NYC has recently passed a law requiring that businesses post notice of any biometric tracking taking place and prevent them from selling that data. Will this increased awareness of the increasing use of Facial recognition technology change consumer behaviors or will it require additional intervention to allow them to prevent this.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.The NearMemo Ep 24Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textGiven the powerful standing of the leading apps, it is unlikely that, even if the app stores are more regulated, whether there will be a more competitive environment. And any anti-trust efforts focusing on competitive harms will go up against 40 years of jurisprudence that has only looked at consumer harms. The Google updates favors better content for Local too!  Sterling Sky did an interesting case study in the legal space of a client that seems to have dramatically benefited from the recent algo updates. Why? Because they had spent time pruning bad content and improving the good.  Yext Search Data Hub provides interesting GMB Insights Data across 600,000 listingsYext has created a visual interface to 3 years of GMB Insights data that can be searched by country or vertical. With this tool you can track our nascent recovery via the recent rise in driving direction as well as see which industries are still getting more website visits or phone calls. 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 23 Near MemoSubscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textFacebook’s new Bulletin product integrates tightly into Facebook groups, their newsfeed and comments. It is well a designed and a thoughtful newsletter implementation that could bring significant social benefits to newsletter publishers and new advertisers and news content to Facebook. From Localogy: “Shopify is planning to roll out an ad product called Shopify Audiences. The program will evidently position the company’s sizable corpus of shopping data to better inform and target advertisers’ campaigns on Facebook and Google.”In June, the Supreme court defined terms in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. As a result, they vacated a previous 9th Court Decision allowing scraping of publicly available information. This gives Microsoft‘s LinkedIn another chance to stop HiQ’s scraping of the public data on their site. A possible outcome? Upending of the whole of the Martech world. 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 22Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textWhy has Google, so shortly after announcing FLoC, already pulling back?Google’s delay of FLoC is signaling both the confusion and fear in the market and lack of acceptance amongst the leading platforms. The successes  of DuckDuckGo as the Avis of search engines indicates the customer demand for privacyDuckDuckGo has become the number two mobile search engine in the world and is increasingly profitable. This is no small feat given the competition, what is going on?As economy opens up, businesses need clearly communicated vaccination policy to not lose customersWith states starting to open up, how do businesses navigate the new masked, not masked reality vis a vis their employees and customers without losing customers?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 21Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textThe local arc from inventory to ordering to monopoly and consolidation Google makes it easier to upload products & services and give Pointy away for free...Google Local announced this week the ability of merchants to more easily add products, services and appointments to the Local graph. As part of this effort, they are giving away Pointy, POS hardware that automatically creates on-line inventory. It’s part of Google’s ever increasingly more granule knowledge graphGoogle Local Food Order is so easy it's magical & shows exactly where Google & Local search is going.....Google’s  web based restaurant order entry system knows so much about you, your location, credit card details,  the restaurants nearby and exactly what their menu items are, that  they can create an incredibly fluid ordering experience. They so while avoiding the need for an app, for an explicit delivery company relationship or a payment processor making the whole process totally painless. Anti-trust and local consolidation.....We explore the rapidly changing world that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple will be confronting and how some of the laws proposed just don’t make sense. Which takes us to the consolidation that is occurring the the local marketing stack where integrations and buyouts that got Google et. al in trouble are the order of the dayThe 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 20Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textWhenever Apple announces a new consumer focused privacy update, the pundits become Chicken Little. E-mail has long provided the best ROI of any marketing channel and while metrics might be harder to garner, that won’t stop a great email from succeeding. Google seems to have stopped enforcing naming abuse by businesses in Google Maps. And they have now increased the field length to 300 characters. What happens when greedy businesses meet an obtuse Google? Mayhem.People seemed genuinely glad to be there and see one another. The content seemed entirely secondary to the networking and social events, which people enjoyed with gusto. Masks were mostly worn inside but not at all outside and not at the social events -- where people were close talking, fueled by abundant wine. It all felt disorienting and normal at the same 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. NearMemo #19Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/