We all think a differently thanks to Steve Jobs.

Apple just announced the passing of  Co-Founder Steve Jobs.

As I write this post on one of my many Mac computers and dismiss a call on my iPhone – I draw breath at the sheer impact he has had on millions of lives.

We are a wired society thanks in large part to his vision, his demands for nothing less than perfection and because he always believed he could do better.

Before you send out that tweet from your new iPhone 4s . . . remember back just a few years when a cell phone was the size of your grandmothers purse and be grateful for a man like Steve Jobs who demanded better.

As my husband so aptly tweeted : “Steve Jobs passing marks the capstone of an era of innovation. Design such as Apple has revolutionized more than just the computer industry.”

The world of technology is a bit dimmer today from the loss of this master of innovation.

Jobs loved what he did. And pursued that love with a passion. In a 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Jobs said:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

[EDIT 9:51 PM OCT. 5, 2011]
The White House just posted President Barack Obama‘s statement on the passing of Steve Jobs – I think this says it best . . . .

“there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.”

The man changed virtually every American citizen’s daily life with the ipod and iphone, that is a rare occurrence in today’s world. He was a genius and a revolutionary inventor. R.I.P. Steve.  You were amazing.  Thank you for all that you have done to advance technology and design.

Read Steve Jobs Tributes

Read Tribute at NPR.

Read Time.com’s thoughts on Steve Jobs.

Boston.com: Key dates from the life and work of Steve Jobs

LA Times: Steve Jobs mourned by Apple workers, Cupertino residents

Cult of Mac: Mike Elgan’s What Steve Jobs Means to Silicon Valley

NY Times: Remembering Steve Jobs – Send in your Pictures

Wall Street Journal: Apple Chairman, Former CEO Steve Jobs Has Died

Cupertino City Council: Steve Jobs Presentation to Cupertino City Council about Apple’s New Headquarters in June 2011

A simple and fitting tribute on Apple.com's home page.

Related Steve Jobs Stories When He Stepped Down as CEO in August:

• As Apple’s Steve Jobs Steps Down, Tim Cook Steps Up Aug. 25, 2011
• How Steve JobsChanged The Way We Listen Aug. 25, 2011
• Steve Jobs And The Cultural Apple Aug. 25, 2011
• A Story About Steve Jobs And Attention To Detail Aug. 25, 2011
• With A Spotlight On Jobs, Time To Talk About Cancer Aug. 25, 2011
• Can Apple Fly As High Without Steve Jobs? Aug. 25, 2011
• Apple CEO Steve Jobs Stepping Down Aug. 24, 2011
• Will Jobs’ Departure Take A Bite Out Of Apple? Jan. 18, 2011
• Is Steve Jobs Irreplaceable As Apple’s CEO? Jan. 18, 2011
• Steve Jobs Takes Another Medical Leave Jan. 18, 2011

One out of every three mobile searches has local intent.

So, if you are a local business and you aren’t engaging your connections via mobile, you maybe missing a vital component of your interactive marketing.

Here at the SMX conference, they call it SoLoMo, but we call it Mobile, Local, Social. (duh.) SoLoMo doesn’t do it for me, but I have the feeling they may have called it MobLoSo, if we didn’t already own the name. Mwhahahaha.

But whatever you call it, it’s very important.

According to Greg Stewart, here at SMX, the intent of a consumer using a mobile device with social and local utility, 50% want to get coupons.

A study from 2010 of consumers using sources to find local info and content, the numbers show clearly that cell phone and mobile devices have the highest YOY growth rate.

Facebook is accessed on a mobile device 1/3 of the time.

Consumers are increasingly using more sources to find local information and content.

• 76 percent using search engines
• 67 percent use a print YP or WP directory
• 60 percent use IYP sites
• 47 percent local search sites
• 14 percent use mobile, up 40% from 2010
• 9 percent use social media, up 28% from last year

Where is Local Business Information Found?

• 56 percent find it via Company Page
• 55 percent Recommendations (from friends)
• 48 percent Promotions
• 43 percent Ads
• 42 percent References
• 35 percent Apps
• 25 percent Consumer Reviews

Local Search Foundation is about Listing Management

• Accuracy: Ensure that business listings contain the correct information.
• Distribution: Disperse listings to multiple distribution channels.
• Signal Strength: Business listing is accurate and identical across multiple channels.
• Enrichment: Add additional information/features to listings

Claiming and optimizing local listings leads to additional visibility in local search. Nearly half of social network searchers select a local biz based off of consumer ratings and reviews.

So, this is where the rubber meets the road.  Make sure that you have a system in place to help convince your customers to leave reviews for you.

Three key factors in local search rankings:

1. Reviews
2. Citations
3. Links

Despite the importance of this information, only 23% of consumers have ever left a rating or a review for a business and only 6% are active in leaving reviews and ratings. People WANT the information, but most are lazy bastards.

5 Mobile Local Search Takeaways from Greg Stewart

1. Make sure basic listing information is visible and accurate
2. Optimize your pages
3. Engage and capture users through promotions
4. Ask consumers for rating and reviews
5. Monitor all local search sites to see what’s going on and what’s being said about you.

Next up at the panel is Gib Olander, the local guru for Localeze.

It’s never been more crowded and more exciting to be involved in local, social and mobile than it is right now.  People want to get started and create apps. They’re excited about it. That fragmentation is always proving some difficulty in marketing things. He’s gonna share some trends.

• 38 percent of mobile searchers frequently look for local retailer info including phone number and address
• 70 percent of all mobile searches result in action within 1 hour
• There are 6.8 billion people on the planet. 5.1 billion of them own a cell phone, but only 4.2 billion own a toothbrush.

Honey badger even thinks that is disgusting.

Mobile Local Social is getting more personal. Increasing at the local level, our friends’ recommendations are apparent and very important.

Also, services are taking check-in history and presenting similar types of businesses in search results when you visit new destinations. This makes it very important for marketers to upload meta info into listings services.

Our friends are influencing what we’re seeing at:

• Google+
• FourSquare
• Gowalla
• Yelp
• Facebook

What does this mean?

• Establish your online identity, it anchors customer experience.
• Claim your listing or your identity won’t exist across Mobile Local Social.
• Avoid fragmented listings.

Word of mouth is still important

• 83 percent of online shoppers say they are interested in sharing info about their purchase with people they know.
• 90 percent of customers trust recommendations from people they know and 70 percent trust the opinion of unknown users
• Consumers say word of mouth is the #1 influence on Electronics and Apparel purchases
• Many local searchers still considering multiple businesses. 45 percent of consumers say they have products in mind, but don’t conduct a local search for specific businesses.

For more information on Mobile Local Social, here is a post from June from SMX Advanced on how Mobile Local Social drives sales

Behind every screen is a person, who wants to connect. We spend hours and hours of each day behind computer screens, mobile devices and televisions.  Sometimes, they are so concerned about connecting in the screens, that they miss can out on real life offline experiences.

“Now is the moment of power.”, or “Manawa“.as they say in the ancient Polynesian philosophy called Huna. I rarely mix my spiritual thinking with my tech thoughts, but in this case, I feel that it is important. Recognize that we only have this moment, and that your walking around with your face in your phone is fucking annoying.

Now, is the only time that we have, so if you are around real people, interact with them! And if you are driving, put down your phone, at LEAST OCCASIONALLY.

How many of you have had the opportunity to go to conferences and meet the amazing people that you’ve connected with online? For those fortunate enough to go to the cool conferences, you can be amazed finally putting a face to the avatar and a real life connection with people you “met” online, 1000s of miles apart.

It’s about the people. At one of these conferences, Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco, I met the director of emerging media from 360i in NYC. We had a great face to face real life discussion. It was funny seeing most people walk around tweeting, updating statuses and texting and not connecting with people right near them. But, we kept in touch. BTW, this guy is the person who hooked me up with my Google+ invitation. [He may have given me my Google Wave invitation, as well, but I won't hold that against him.]

Tonight, I saw one of Tamar Weinberg’s posts, [another TW, I might add], and she mentioned how she met someone offline, and has been helping him online… which is awesome of her. But, he has been too busy tweeting and checking in on foursquare… and not responding to her job assistance. Plus, the dude is currently unemployed. Yeah, he is too concerned about growing his Klout score so he can get a job, than actually talking to someone who is trying to hook him up with a job.

When we blog and tweet and socialize/whore ourselves out there in the interwebz, it’s important to remember, that it’s not the platform, the tools or your online influence score that matter. It is the connecting with the people. Not to sell them, but to authentically connect. To help. To share. To teach. To care.

We are on this Earth for a very short period of time. Let’s not waste it on worrying about Klout scores and what our social stock is worth… let’s connect and help add value where we can.

Are you authentic? Do you care about the people? Because, that’s what matters.

This appears to be a relatively new phenomenon. There are several sites out there that gauge our social influence. They take our actions on the top social media sites, sees who interacts with us the most, sees which content we are sharing, see who is sharing our content and comes up with a composite score based on your actions, social influence and general online awesomeness.

They each take into consideration things such as:

• How influential are the people who @ message you?
• How influential are the people who retweet you?
• How influential are the people who follow you?
• How influential are the people who list you?
• How influential are the people who follow the lists you are on?

Each site does tend to measure the social influence a bit differently.

Klout Ranks Social Influencers

Klout was one of the first companies to begin ranking social influence.

According to their definition, Klout is defined as:

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential your engaged audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.

Empire Avenue is a Social Influence Stock Market

Empire Avenue is the Social Stock Market, where you can Grow your Social Capital online. Here’s how it works, you get to discover valuable, interesting, cool, fun people online and then based scores or share price, invest virtual currency in their profiles by buying shares in our Social Stock Market. It’s an interesting concept. The simple act of buying shares in someone you think is worth your currency, you will create new connections and as people invest in you, grow your own social influence within the game.

Empire Avenue is what you make of it. Empire Avenue can be used as a complement to your social networking, as a way to meet and make great new connections, find individuals who are engaged in each of their networks and as a way to connect online. If you’re new to social media, Empire Avenue can even be a great training tool – a fun way to discover the power of social networks, find out how strong your social media efforts are and how to make your online presence even more effective by growing your social influence.

Triberr Creates Groups of Social Influencers

Basically, its a syndication network. You can build a group of influential people, who like what you like. And everyone agrees to share everyone elses content in their Twitter following.

To join, you must be invited. Which doesn’t look to hard. Seems lots of people are eager to “build their tribe” (especially given that then you will broadcast their content to your following – everyday). Who knew that people would be so eager to promote themselves?

From Triberr.com:

Every time you publish a new post, Triberr sends it to everyone in your tribe and they tweet it to their followers. You do the same for everyone in your tribe. All this is automated of course.

Creating a tight tribe with like-minded people has an interesting impact on the other social influence ranking systems such as Klout and EmpireAvenue. You can literally see the effect on your rankings. I posted a blog post earlier in the week, and my Klout went up 2 points in 4 days. The traffic to the blog post was much higher than normal.

Social Influence is very real.

People gauge your worthiness as a marketer or thought leader by the information that you share, and by who you are connected to, and who shares your information. Some people even put their social influence scores on their resume!

Razorfish also put together a Social Influence Marketing Report, that is worth checking out. There are becoming more and more companies that measure social influence by all of your social accounts, and some that just measure certain networks. Like TwitterGrader.com just measures your twitter account. And PeerIndex does some of the same things that Klout does. So, the space is gaining attention.

Have fun out there, and make sure to invest in my social influence capital on EmpireAvenue (e)TEEDUBYA. But, when my social influence scores start to drop, don’t be afraid to “Sell, Mortimer!! SELLLLLLL!!”

Brian Solis has a great writeup on this topic of social influence. How do you increase social influence? Don’t think about the score

Anyway, Mike put together an amazing resource that walks through the history of Google and the changes they have made over time when dealing with the evolution of local search. If you have a local business or if you are an interactive marketing agency or consultant, then this will be interesting to you.

Performics’ Nicola Smith started the session with some stats that served as a good reminder for search marketers about their need to enter the mobile space. For instance, there has been a 400 percent increase in mobile searches in the past year. She shared that 63 percent of people use mobile search before purchasing, one in three mobile searches are local and 59 percent of mobile users share content with their friends.

Together, this data points to the rise in social, local and mobile convergence. All of the panelists agreed that brands need to engage in mobile friendly social content marketing to increase the likelihood that they will reach the right person in the right place at the right time with compelling reasons to click. Smith offered her theory that loyalty (via social advocacy) combined with proximity would translate into marketing power to drive nearby leads and sales.

Read more at Brafton.

Mobile, Local and Social is even getting its own conference, SMX SoLoMo. I’m telling you guys, MobLoSo, sounds SOOO much better. But I digress. This is a conference that I am going to have to attend!

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to more businesses, that they need to have strategies in place for mobile, local, social, search and email. For those that do this, they find they make more online sales, grow influence and create more loyalty. They will have a better shot at long term business success.

For those that don’t… well, don’t be surprised to see this sign on those businesses windows.

Adiqus was birthed out of the idea that we need to give people deals and discounts based on proximity and location. A Groupon meets Foursquare… 2-3 months BEFORE the iPhone came out. So, we worked diligently on our project. Having a daily deal program where everyone would see ads based on where they log in from. And… having local agents in each market called Advangelists.

This is what Groupon and Living Social in some ways now actually do. Being in Kansas City, it is a small market that tends to get few investment dollars. So, we didn’t get to build the vision. It pisses me off and disappoints me… but, I realize that I am on the right track. Having a solid idea that you don’t capitalize is my own fault and there is lots of lessons to be learned. And I keep getting on the horseand will continue to do so. But for now, let’s marvel at the millions that I have lost. lol.

Here are some of the numbers that Groupon through out in 2010. The Wall Street Journal says that the CEO mentioned $760 Million in revenue in 2010. So, this chart I’m about to show you is about 8 months worth of data.

Read More: What $480 Million Looks Like to Groupon

Paul Butler a student of math and visual design badassness. He had collected approximated data from Groupon by monitoring deals at the end of each day. He then put this data into a large database and began to map it out. Each box is a deal. He used height to represent number sold, and width to represent the price. Area is therefore gross revenue, and color is city for the top 20 cities.

Click for a larger, interactive version. Only works in browsers that support SVG, i.e. not IE.

This is seriously bad ass and shows which types of businesses succeed in the daily deal market.

Via FormStack

Seriously. This will be awesome. Designed by Finland’s own MultiTouch, the Multitouch Twitter Wall will consist of “at least” six MultiTouch Cell 46 displays, each one being 46-inches wide.

Look at this video demo.

Source Engadget

The reason is, AT&T’s customer experience is consistently bad. Worse than bad. Actually WORST.

Take a look at this. If I were head of AT&T, heads would roll over this.

AT&T has the WORST Customer service by far, according to the new Consumer Reports magazine coming out Jan 2011.

I’m more of a tech “outsider” than insider, hanging out here in Kansas City, Mo. But it just seems the writing is on the wall for AT&T. Once the iPhone is announced on Verizon, I’d bet that ATT takes a hit on Wall Street.

Steve Jobs was willing to partner with Verizon on the iPad charger deal. And they’ve been advertising together. This was logically the next step.

Apple is wise to not lean too much on AT&T now, and go to a competing service. Then, open it up to Sprint. Quit being a stingy bastard and open up this bad boy and see what it can do.

In my opinion, just to ornery, I’d like to see Apple release the mysterious white iPhone on Verizon first. That would make me chuckle.  Maybe we should start a rumor?

It sounds silly but “password” is a great password.  The reason people use it (myself included) is because they have other passwords for actual important sites.  Face it – half of the sites that you visit are probably time-sucks.  Like this site.  It’s the value of the internet.  There are places that provide valuable services and there are places that provide information and entertainment.  Entertainment web sites simply do not need strong passwords for the end-users.

For example, I have two passwords for my bank.  One is about 9 characters long and fairly strong and the other is 9 and gets typed on the virtual keyboard with the mouse.  Neither of those are “password.”  Likewise, my student loan website and 401k websites have robust passwords that use random characters and symbols.

For blog commenting, however, I don’t bother.  I use “password.”  I almost expect a blog to have some crummy pseudo-security and, when that low-grade security gets breached, hackers will get access to only the worthless password for that blog – i.e. “password.”  ”Password” will not open my GMail, my Yahoo Mail, or even my comatose Hotmail account.  ”Password” will not open my WordPress dashboards here or on my other site.  ”Password” will not let you into my Tumblr or my Twitter.  ”Password” will only let you comment as me on random blogs where I’ve spouted off at some point in the past.

“Password” is great for that blog that you comment on once every 3 months.  It’s good for the NYT blogs or WSJ or other big-media-trying-to-have-a-blog blogs because you just show up, type in your screenname and “password.”  No requirement to memorize an additional password.

Another good trick is to use the name of the website/blog.  If you were to randomly comment here once in a blue moon, for example, “mobloso” would be a perfectly good password.  I trust you don’t keep PMs of your bank’s routing number so, in all honesty, security isn’t that big a deal.  The problem comes when you use a half-decent password for blogs and sensitive sites.  Then, if the blog gets hacked, your sensitive sites need new passwords.

Net security is about being savvy.  So, use your memory cells to remember strong passwords for places that actually need a strong password and have something inane for places that, honestly, don’t require security.  Then, when there is a breach, you can just say “Meh.”  (Please note that “meh” is not a valid password because it is only 3 letters)

When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

As an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, Paul was able to take all of this information and all of the friendships on Earth, and create a view of the world. We are all connected…

When I shared the image with others within Facebook, it resonated with many people. It’s not just a pretty picture, it’s a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders.

My only question is… where’s China?

High Resolution Image

Read his blog post for more.

Before you tear me apart for a sensationalist title, let me explain.

I do not think that Gawker Media, the multimillion dollar blogging corporation, will fall.  As a general rule, I do not second-guess the business strategies of multi-million dollar companies.  However, the bloom is definitely off the rose as far as Gawker’s standing in the public eye is concerned.

Fair disclosure: For over four years, I have been a commenter on Gawker blogs, most notably on Gizmodo.

I remember when Gizmodo pranked CES.  Which was a pretty bad thing considering that the prank consisted of a Gizmodo blogger screwing with companies’ presentations at a trade show.  The videographer responsible was not fired and still works quite happily under Gawker’s main imprint.

This year, as with every year, Gawker blogs have found themselves in hot water for their practices.  Gawker itself received a takedown notice and the rather disingenuous ire of Facebook celebrity, reality tv show host, and author Sarah Palin for printed large excerpts of one of her books.  But the Gawker story that really took the cake was “iPhone4gate,” in which Gawker/Gizmodo paid $5,000 for a working prototype of the iPhone 4, destroyed it through disassembly, and then wrote about it at length, before sending it back to Apple, Inc.  Whether this was legal I will not opine.

I do think that it was not a major departure from established journalism practices.  Gawker’s bounties for tips and the like are well known and, frankly, paying $5,000 for the iPhone 4 is no different than paying $5,000 to a paparazzo for naked photos of Insert Hollywood Starlet Of Little To Middling Talent.  It was a major development for Gizmodo and got Jason Chen’s face on many news segments.

It also marked a turning point for Gizmodo’s writing and authorship in my opinion as a blog historian of Gizmodo.  For a goodly amount of time, Gizmodo had been a tech news site in the “traditional” sense of the word.  It featured specs, photos, tear-downs and reviews of upcoming consumer electronics.  It favored the big companies – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Motorola, etc. – but it still had a lot of bleeding edge information about the tech world.  To read it today, one would not recognize it.

Last month, Joel Johnson, whose personality tends to raise hackles with the readership, wrote an entire post telling the commentariat in no uncertain terms that they could go to hell (actually, his language was far more harsh than that).  Again, fair disclosure: I am not a fan of Mr. Johnson, or his pretentious writing which, frankly comes across as preening, and was banned for openly criticizing him.  After that, I tended not to comment on Gizmodo.  Several weeks later, Mr. Johnson had angered some other readers and some hacking was their retaliation.  Mr. Johnson’s response was to tell commenters to all f**k off.  It was petulant, counterproductive, and off-putting.

At present, there is an article about a wooden roller coaster someone built in their backyard.  There’s a posting about a YouTube video shot by putting a camera around a cat’s neck.  There’s a story about a girl who got trapped in an arcade claw machine.  There’s a YouTube video about multiplication tables in Japan.  In contrast, Engadget (Gizmodo’s main competitor) has stories about a 100-disc Blu-Ray changer, a useful hack for a portable WiMAX device, Kindle sales data, several upcoming Android handsets, and stories about tablet computers not called the iPad and about patent cases and Senate legislation about technology.

In short, Gizmodo is now US Weekly to Engadget’s Economist.  The Economist has better writing and better serves its readers but US Weekly sells more because it just goes for the low-hanging fruit.

Putting this in perspective, this last week really brought to the fore how the sea change is a real thing and not the product of selective perception.  Last week, Google announced the Chrome laptop.  Engadget liveblogged the event with a dizzying gallery of photos and ample coverage of all the details.  Gizmodo didn’t even attend.  Instead, they posted about an ice hotel decked out like Tron and then wrote about the laptop later on.

Finally, capping out the fiasco was a massive security breach of Gawker’s servers in which all accounts – user, editor, and commenter – were compromised.  The hackers gained access to thousands upon thousands of passwords.  My password was on the list compromised but hackers were not able to decipher the password (which has since been changed).  Gawker had known about the flaws in its securities for months.  In one internal chat exchange, Hamilton Nolan remarked about the hacking of accounts, saying if it was editor accounts, “that’s a problem”, if just the commenters, then it was “unimportant.”  This was reported far and wide.  NPR mentioned the hacking of Gawker accounts on its “Morning Edition” program.  Additionally, Forbes magazine wrote a lengthy detailed piece on its blog, including a screencap of the chat in which Mr. Nolan called the breach of commenter accounts “unimportant.”

For their part, Gawker sites are now having to cover themselves as a story.  Several have had to try to assure readers that they aren’t considered “peasants” by the editors.  While I’m sure that Jason Chen and Kat Hannaford don’t consider the commentariat to be peasants, as someone who was banned by a Gizmodo editor (notorious blowhard Joel Johnson) for disagreeing with him, rote assurances don’t ring true with me.  UPDATE: JASON CHEN JUST BANNED ME FROM GIZMODO AND CALLED ME AN ASS FOR POSTING A REMINDER THAT JOEL JOHNSON WROTE AN ENTIRE FEATURE DEVOTED TO INSULTING THE COMMENTERS.

In the meantime, Gawker sites are to launch a massive redesign next month.  This may be too little too late.  As it is, the software code is on the internet to be compromised, the site itself at present loads somewhat slowly because of all of the scripts embedded in it, and the content, quite frankly, is fairly piss poor.  If the new Gawker empire to be feature the crown jewel of Gizmodo writing more three-sentence stories about jackasses riding skis while being towed behind a truck (another story Gizmodo ran instead of covering the Google Chrome event), then it will lose its title as a place to go for tech news.

And that’s where Gawker stands: as a blog network that is vicious, vindictive, and populated by people who, at best, scoff at their readership and, at worst, are openly hostile to them.

As one who used to post between ten and twenty comments a day on Gizmodo, I cannot say that I will continue to comment on Gizmodo (or Gawker) in the future.  There’s not much to say about a two-sentence story about Android-themed wedding cakes.

Watching the search landscape evolve these days, I can’t help but think of the real estate agents’ mantra: “It’s all about location, location, location!”

The emergence of location-based services, such as Facebook Places, Twitter Places, and Foursquare, is clearly a game-changer on the web. Social networking sites are more locally focused. Online media are now the primary source of local business information and a huge competition is underway to determine who becomes the dominant force in local search.

In Search Marketing, “It’s All About Local-Mobile-Social!”

Even more compelling is the fact that this rivalry is taking place in the midst of several other equally powerful trends — rapidly growing smartphone usage and an explosion of social media and viral strategies. Increasingly, these trends are tied together and feed off one another.

Read the rest at:

Are you ready for some liiiiiiveblogging!  It may be a rainy Monday but all is right with the world here at SMX East.  The next few days will be jam-packed with conference coverage and antics so I hope you’re stocked up on vitamins and coffee.   To kick things off we have a killer local panel to tell us about the local/mobile/social crossover happening in search.  Presenting together are Gillian Heltai and Greg Stewart.

Local search is increasingly driving local behavior.   Greg says his company wanted to study the ROBO effect – Research Online, Buy Offline.  They wanted to know how consumers went into the marketplace and used local search in their research for products. They partnered with comScore to help make that happen. He’s going to talk about the findings of the study they performed together.   This going to be FILLED with data, so let’s jump right in.

Study Objective: To understand the use and value of IYP, Print YP, online and mobile search in the consumer shopping process for local information.

They conducted the survey via two methods:

Consumer Survey

• Email invitation to participation in the survey.
• Online survey structured to take approx 15 minutes to complete.
• ~4,000 completed responses collected and grouped into three major site categories.

Observed Online Behavior

• Online behavior was based on a sample of one million consumers who agreed to have their online searches monitored anonymously.

Definition of Local Search: Local business information includes details such as the business name, phone number, address, hours of operation, specials, promotions, products carried, payment types accepted, etc.

Continue Reading:
The Search Crossover by Lisa Barone