A deeper look at the real PlaceRank and local search opportunity
A thought to get this started: The way Google analyzes links online is really just a mass analysis of human opinions. The analysis of links offline, using mass amount of mobile device location data is the mass analysis of human actions. What people say and what they do can be entirely different things.
So anyone that’s been around the online advertising world will be familiar with the famous Google Page Rank algorithm. While maybe no one other than Larry and Sergey truly knows how it works, there are literally small armies of SEM and SEO experts that wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat wondering if they left out an important keyword, or whether they need to pay for links to get a boost for their clients. It’s a fascinating micro economy that has developed almost exclusively around servicing customers and their interaction with Internet search providers, particularly Google and its $20B in annual revenue.
I haven’t bought search in well over a decade, before Google existed, and am by no means an expert in search, let alone local search, but if you’re looking for more information I’d suggest starting out by reading SEOmoz or Greg Sterlings Skreenwerk blog or reaching out to a local search SEO specialist like David Mihm or Mike Blumenthal who are frequent speakers on those circuits and regularly share some invaluable experiences on their blogs at Mihmorandum and Blumentahals.
But to greatly over simplify, fundamentally there are two main components in play for Google on the web, and how well they translate into a true mobile location aware search is fuzzy at best. So for the current Google web search here are two key factors being looked at:
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Presence at Place of Sale (PAPOS) The New Click Rate?
So if you’ve followed the news in the mobile social networking world recently, first we had people like Yelp introduce “check in” and word that Facebook has the feature on its way, then Foursquare struck a number of big media deals which has kept the mobile location aware world on the front pages of the trade press with thoughts about new ad models focused on cost per check in.
Well after giving it a bit more thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the industry needs a more broad “presence at place of sale” (PAPOS?) metric that could capture all the events where a person actually walks into a brick and mortar retailer and that action is recorded by any available means.
The PAPOS could then be looped back into the marketing ecosystem serving as the click or conversion rate for all advertising, both on and offline, targeted at driving brick and mortar foot traffic. Read more
PageRank to PlaceRank Is More Than Changing a Few Letters Around
There was a great article yesterday by Chris Silvery, who works for search engine marketing firm Key Relevance and is a regular contributor to the Local’s Only Section of Search Engine Land. The article highlights some of the ways that location oriented search within Google behaves, and frankly how it very often doesn’t behave the way it ‘should’.
Per John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local from a recent TechCrunch article : ”PlaceRank is like PageRank for places, it tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as references on the Web, reviews, photos, how many people know about it, how long its been around.”
By the way I think it’s notable that the thing being “figured out” here is “prominence”.
Now I understand that you’ve got to start somewhere, but Read more
Kelsey: Interactive Local Media 09
The Kelsey Group held their annual Interactive Local Media conference last week in Los Angeles, focused on the role of digital marketing in driving offline and local commerce. I didn’t make it, but there was ample Twitter and blog coverage. I posted many of the presentations from the event in the presentations section and many are worth a closer look. Reading through all the coverage there seem to be a few overarching themes:
- From the macro point of view, everything points to a significant opportunity here, high mobile phone penetration, more powerful and sophisticated devices, better mobile internet connections and experience, and the consumers strong predisposition to act offline and locally, etc
- many companies are swarming to create solutions ranging from digital out of home, to online local SEO, local display ad networks and online reputation management.
- The highly fragmented nature of the SMB market is challenging to sell into, and sales feet on the street seem to be a pre-requisite. It seems that SMBs won’t just find their own way to your online services and begin participating, you need a sales guy in the store at some point to get the ball rolling.
- as with a lot of things in this world, making offerings targeted to this market simple and easy to understand will go a long way. Many small business don’t even have a website and have never heard of Facebook or Twitter, so keep it simple!
Here are some of the top stats culled from the Twitter Streams (#ILM09) and various Internet coverage of the event. Read more
Warning to Sprint Customers…
Thinking of knocking over a bank? Be sure to leave that phone at home. An Indiana University student was hanging out at a wiretapping and interception conference in Washington DC, gathering information for his PhD thesis, and was suprised to hear that law enforcement had used Sprint’s nifty new self service web site for law enforecment to pull up Sprint customers historical GPS data a whopping 8 million times over 13 months. Chris posts more details and audio from the event on his blog.
Am I suprised that the goverment actively looks up peoples location data, no. Am I surprised that they did it 8 million times, well yes! Maybe they should lend the login to the Sprint field sales team so they can track down and give a personal face to face pitch to the ~1 million customers that Sprint is losing each quarter!
Location Aware Mobile Search: Pages Vs Places
Ah the random stuff you think about when you can’t sleep at night. Tonight’s edition for me… how search engines work and how that may potentially translate to creating a search capability around people visiting places… you know places like gas stations and hamburger joints. Yeah I know, I am getting sleepy too!
I’ll be honest I don’t know very much about search engines, a few years ago I printed out a copy of Larry and Serge’s Stanford paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine and read it on a cross country flight for a job interview on a related subject… needless to say I didn’t get the job and I pretty much dropped any more digging on the subject.
But after attending last weeks MetaPlaces conference and listening to the various speakers, including one on the opportunities in mobile search and also a refresher on Sense Networks, the subject is back top of mind again. Read more
Metaplaces: Random Thoughts Day One
Some other random take-away’s from day one at Metaplaces. They stuck out to me as particularly interesting or thought provoking, even if some are not particularly new:
- On advertising front, search and action oriented is getting more traction than display, and it’s hard to cover costs with just low cpm banner and network inventory
- From the carriers perspective, location look-ups are expensive and taxing, almost the same overhead as setting up a full call
- None of this stuff really takes off in a mass market way until we figure out ubiquitous always on location
- The fragmented nature of mobile/carriers is still quite an issue when it comes to trying to get any one thing to scale and for getting advertisers to take notice
- There are a lot of cool and interesting LBS things being built with only the faintest idea of how they’ll one day make money. Reluctantly, advertising seems to the revenue source of choice… but often knowledge of the industry is very limited and attitudes borderline hostile. If you’re a vegetarian, animal rights activist, it’s going to be very hard to make a career as a butcher.
3G = GPS, Government and Glitches
Unlike reading a corporate report, where bad things are often described as ’soft’, ’sub optimal’ and ‘unfavorable’, the GAO doesn’t mess around with such niceties and refreshingly, yet starkley, tells it more like it is. The title says it all “GPS: Significant Challenges in Sustaining and Upgrading Widely Used Capabilities” and it only gets worse from there… some key thoughts:
- The US Govt recognizes GPS as “a key tool in an expanding array of public service and commercial applications” and “In light of the importance of GPS… GAO was asked to undertake a broad review of GPS.” and what was found was well seemingly a mess, and a mess with potentially big consequences…
- The guys put in charge of GPS, the Air Force, are not sure they’ll be able to get new satellites up to replace the old ones in time to ensure uninterrupted service. See the chart above showing the probabilities of having the full 24 satellite constellation. Depending on which and how many satellites fail without replacements, this would mean that not only could consumers not know to take a left in 1/4 mile, but also maybe our military’s smart bombs could becoming dumb bombs as soon as next year.
- What seems to be the problem with getting the satellites up? Well the Air Force can’t seem to stick to a budget and schedule… currently at three years late and at $1.6B…more than twice the original budget of $729 million… citing ’significant technical problems’ and the lack of one central point of authority to guide the project… even with the admission that “GPS had already been ‘done’ before.”
- contributing factor #1: too many cooks in the kitchen and different priorities between military folks and commercial oriented folks about requirements of the system
- contributing factor #2: its so hard to find good help these days. From cnet there were problems with mergers related to their GPS vendors”the aerospace and defense bits of Rockwell were acquired by Boeing shortly after it won a GPS contract. A year later, Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. The work was moved again. Next Boeing acquired Hughes Electronics’ space and communications business, which meant another move; all the while shedding “valuable workers and knowledge.”
The net net here seems to be that there needs to be a government GPS czar who makes all the decisions and leads the project. Any takers?
Mobile Search Will Beat and Steal Lunch Money From Mobile Display Advertising
A great blog post over at Local Search News about the mobile local opportunity. Definitely worth the full read, but key take aways for me was the expected shift in ad dollars on mobile to move away from the largely display oriented stuff we see today toward an explosion of mobile search revenue. The Kelsey Group shows display revenue at over 60% of total 2008 mobile ad revenue, but sinking to just under 10% by 2013, mostly as the result of massive search growth from a mere $39 million to a whopping $2.27B or around 70% of all mobile ad spending in just five years.
I dug around to get the latest and greatest, and it looks like in the good old fashioned web world search is about 45% of ad revenue today with premium display close to a 1/3. So Kelsey’s predictions for the mobile world certainly seem to magnify the trend we’ve seen so far on the web with search having an even bigger role and display, a decidedly smaller role. To some degree this makes a lot of sense, since the small footprint of the mobile handset doesn’t leave a lot of room for all that lovely creative ad work, the sight sound and motion and all, and search is simple, quick and to the point which is well suited to the phone.
An even more interesting part, was not just the AMOUNT of search revenue, but the TYPE of searches expected… citing data from Google that mobile searches are 2-3x more often to be local in nature than searches done via a desktop, The Kelsey Group calls for over 1/3 of mobile searches to be “local” in nature in five years, and for over half of that whopping $2.27B in search revenue to be generated from “local” search queries.
Kinda makes you wonder what kind of local stuff all those folks will be searching for on their phones and who will be the benficiaries of that cool $1B+ in local oriented search ad spending. 
More on location based twitter
There seem to be a lot of the sites popping up for twitterers to register themselves in a geographic area, I know there are many more, but the ones that have caught my eye include geofollow.com, twitterlocal.net, localtweeps.com
After playing with the geo location features on my mobile twitter client Tweetie and also playing with the location oriented Twinkle application by Tapulous, which all use various types of technology to determine your location and the filter out tweets from folks outside a certain radius… going back to the old school way of registering yourself on a good old fashioned website
with your twitter name and your city or zip code just felt well, very old school…
So I had to dig around and find out why such an old school thing like a local twitter registration site would even exist, let alone seem to be proliferating.
From the best I can tell, there seem to be two potential drivers… one is that I was suprised to learn that nearly 2/3 of twitter users are using the service directly through the web or via a desktop application. Maybe it’s because of how I was introduced to Twitter, but I always thought it more as a mobile thing… you know with the 140 character limit thing and all… well evidently it’s not. So that alone explains alot, most people don’t have the technological approach to a geo-filter available and they just want to find local people to twitter with… fair enough.
But the other cool aspect of a list of local twitter users is for accomplishing the opposite of what the location aware technology does for ya… location aware tech allows you to see those immediately around you and their tweets, but the old fashioned registration site in theory could let you drop in on virtual tweeps and their tweets in a specific area somewhere else.
Now the inner Colbert in me may joke that focusing in and reading the tweet stream of the general public in Shanghai if you live in New York, seems pretty damn useless, and in many cases it probably is. But in some cases it could be valuable, for example if you’re heading to a new city and are looking for recommendations on where to get a good steak, who better than to ask than the local twittersphere in the city where you’re headed. Or if you want to keep tabs on what the buzz is in your old college town, you can drop in on the local tweet stream there… in theory having a local group to zoom in on could have huge possibilities in allowing journalists to zoom in to follow the local action related to a breaking news event in a particular area.
On a related note there is a great article on Local Search News about how Twitter should register and create accounts for local businesses to help better identify them in the twittersphere. Not so we can follow the local Italian restaurant to read a constant stream of tweets about how good their last batch of lasagna is, but to allow for a common currency for referring to specific places and establishments as twitter nation so often does. It makes a lot of sense to me.
