Q. What is schmap.me?
A. Schmap.me is a simple way to share map links using a meaningful, memorable, custom url.  For locations that you share frequently this can be a much more effective way of communicating location than sending a cumbersome google map link. For example, you can see the schmap.me url for Donald McMillian, VP of marketing. It includes additional information related to the location, such as phone numbers, directions, and photos – schmap.me/donald.mcmillan

Coincidentally, venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently commented on exactly this issue on his blog – http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/linking-to-google-maps.html (we’ll have to get him a schmap for Union Square Ventures)

Q. I see you have a limited number of preloaded cities on your publish or widget programs. Will those cities listed be expanded at any time?  What if someone like myself wants to publish or schmap about something not in one of those cities?
A. We do plan to expand those cities for which we offer browse-able guides, but do not have a release schedule at this time.  However, our services, including schmap.it, schmap.me & geotweeter, are designed for the sharing of information from any location.  And in fact we have seen schmaps created for places in all corners of the world, in cities as wide ranging as Singapore, Moscow, New York, Reykjavik, and many many more.

Q. So how can a small business benefit from using schmaps?
A. Many small businesses are already using Twitter for local marketing: bars tweeting happy hours, stores with discount sales, restaurants promoting lunch specials, realtors marketing property – these are examples of local businesses trying to drive foot traffic from Twitter for commercial gain. Schmaps give these same local businesses a much better way to do this – extending a 140 character tweet into a rich local marketing resource.

Q. Are they any costs involved in using your site/services?
A. The basic service is free, with an optional $9.95 /month PRO account for power users. The PRO account has some nice additional marketing resources, including tweet scheduling, direct message and @message marketing campaigns, and the ability to track campaign metrics. We’re currently offering a limited number of free PRO accounts – details at www.schmap.it/PRO-account-for-FREE – if any of your readers would like to take advantage.

Q. Where do you see local mobile marketing going in the near future.
A. Right now, we’re seeing an epic commercial migration taking place at the intersection of ‘local’ and ’social’. The same local restaurants, bars, shops etc. that took ten years to discover the Internet are now adapting to Twitter and Facebook with much greater speed, finding some great opportunities to engage local consumers with a blurred mix of content, service and local marketing. Local consumers are increasingly accessing social networks and local content from mobile devices: we see the future of local mobile marketing being driven by these two trends – local businesses going ’social’ and local consumers going mobile.

Again, I want to thank Paul for his time and insights.

Mobile-local and social-local are growing areas small business needs to understand and areas where they can reach more potential clients. Schmaps is one of those companies doing some interesting and cool stuff online in the mobile-social-local market. I wanted to learn more, so I reached out and was able to interview CEO, Paul Hallett of Schmap. Below is part 1 of that interview. (The more I investigated their site and business, the more questions I have. I hope I covered everything you might have a question one.)

Q. Good day Paul, can you tell us a little about your company?
A. We started out in 2004 – at that time, there were just three of us, developing a platform to combine maps with local content (reviews and photos) in a compelling and dynamic way. This platform became the foundation for our popular Schmap guides – www.schmap.com – a series of desktop and mobile local guides for 200 worldwide cities.

Q. What is schmap currently doing?
A. Our current focus is at the intersection of local and social, making it easier for local businesses to reach local consumers, and help these same consumers discover vibrant, real-time local content. One aspect of our rollout here is the geoparsing of content shared on social networks. Taking Twitter for example, at any point in time, there’s a wealth of vibrant local information being shared in tweets: people tweeting about great restaurant experiences, bands tweeting about gigs, bars tweeting about happy hours and so on.

The challenge is filtering and deciphering: if someone tweets ” Cool bash tonight at Joe’s”, has that person just returned from a private party at a friend’s house, or is there some kind of event coming up at Joe’s Bar? What is the event, where is Joe’s Bar, and who might this information be relevant to? The second aspect of our local/social rollout is http://schmap.it – a Twitter app for event marketing and local promotion.

Q. I recently signed up for that app,  can you tell us what this new tweeter app does?
A. Our schmap.it Twitter app basically allows the user to add rich local content to a tweet, in the form of a schmap – a map with text, photos, hash tags, and functionality that allows the recipient to retweet, add comments and RSVP to local events. The app is designed for commercial users – event promoters, marketing professionals and local businesses trying to drive folk from Twitter to real world locations: we saw a gap for this type of service left by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla (services that focus on individuals sharing their current location).

Q.  After looking at your website, can you tell us a bit about your mobile apps….Schmap GeoTweeter?   Any Android or Blackberry versions coming out?
A. Geotweeter is an app that allows users to share their location via twitter as a customized map that can include photos, notes and custom icons. It was among the first iPhone apps to combine GPS coordinates with Twitter’s service.  We are currently developing a new iPhone app that uses many of the concepts from Geotweeter, but will integrate with our offering of real time local information.  We are considering Android and Blackberry platforms for development following the release of the iPhone app, but have no firm plans at this time.

I will end Part 1 here.  Tomorrow I will finish up the interview but if you are interested, you can sign up for a Free PRO account at  http://www.schmap.it/PRO-account-for-FREE.

After I reviewed the book, I contacted Yodle to get a few questions answered. Below are my comments, thoughts, and answers (in italics) to questions I had.

Before I get into the book, thought it was important to know who Yodle is.

“Yodle is a leader in local online advertising and named fastest growing local online advertising company by industry analyst Borrell Associates. Yodle connects thousands of local businesses with consumers in a process so simple and cost-effective that business owners can’t imagine any other way to advertise. Yodle has developed an integrated approach to signing up and serving local businesses that are transitioning their marketing budgets online. Yodle is headquartered in New York, NY with a presence in 25 major cities across the United States.”

On to the book. ..
This book came out a few months ago and is one of the newest addition in the “for dummies series”.  The book does a good job providing definitions to many terms we in the search market know and use all the time. Thus it definitely will help small business owners understand what we, local search marketers are saying. 

The book is broken down into 20 chapters and many, many sub sections within each chapter. For a list of the chapters and purchasing info, you can head over the official dummies site. This is also where you can purchase a copy if you wish.

I liked how the book is organized and does a very good job breaking stuff down into bitsize pieces.  It is very “readable”,  not too boring and dry.  The material is presented in way (or order) that if one follows it, they would have a “reasonable” and “obtainable” marketing strategy. What I am saying is that the books gives good basics on the main and proven marketing techniques, no “do this and you will be #1 overnight” material.

As I was reading though, my first question was, “why a book? wouldn’t it get outdated soon?” A lot of this information is online. So I asked them.

“While there is definitely a lot of information available online that may be very “up to date,” no one has ever vetted all the information that local business owners need to know about online advertising and put it one place.  A book seemed like a good vehicle through which to “bundle” all this information and make it available to the average local business owner – who themselves may not be all online savvy such that they would otherwise be able to find this information.

Additionally the opportunity to create this book in conjunction with a brand so universally recognized as the “For Dummies” imprint, was an opportunity we just couldn’t pass up.

The last thing I’ll say about the book becoming “outdated” is that we really tried to write the book in a way that empowered local business owners to think about local online advertising broadly as opposed to just making it a laundry list of tools and resources.”

I also asked if any updates were in the works. “If we sell enough copies.  Did we mention that the book is available on Amazon?”

The majority of the book is about local search, but it covers other areas like email, analytics, paid search, banner ads, budgeting, web design, hosting.  It does not go into huge details on all of these areas, but gives a nice intro to each.  All are areas small business owners need to know about.

Throughout the book, there are many references to websites and companies, that they recommend. Now being “nosy” I asked if these references asked to be put in the book or were paid. You might think it a silly question but I wanted to know.

“We absolutely did not receive compensation from any companies other than Wiley (the publisher) who paid us to write the book.  Any time we may have listed specific companies, it was a product of us asking ourselves the question: if we were acting as a business consultant for a small business owner who was a friend or relative of ours, which resources or companies would we tell them to check out?

Also, it’s worth mentioning that Wiley was very stringent about being as “non-biased” as possible.  I put that in quotes only because we have a natural bias which is that we believe in online advertising for local businesses – however, I think there are quite a few stats that would back up that bias as well.  In fact, more along the lines of being non-biased, if you look through the actual text of the book (outside of dedications and the like), the word “yodle” only comes up perhaps two or three times.”

So what else can I say? I could go on for a long time commenting on each chapter or section. What I will do is open up the floor to you — send me any questions you might have about the book and I will do my best to answer them.

In conclusion, should a small business owner buy this book? If he wants to understand local online marketing better, I would have to say yes!  The material in the book is current, accurate (best that I can tell   ), nicely organized and easy to understand. It provides good solid advise and resources. Could a small business owner  do all the work themselves? LOL (see my previous posts on that one)

Thanks Yodle for a good local search marketing resource.

Why Local SEO is Harder Than SEOs Think by Matt McGee. Matt does a nice job going through a local listing and trying to figure out why one listing is not listed higher than another on Google maps.

Local SEO Citations: Response to SBSM by David Pavlicko, sort of takes off where Matt left off and comments on citations in local SEO.

Finally, there is Local Ranking Factors and Core Data Confusion by Mike Belasco, Mike says “Despite all of your other optimization efforts and all of the other ranking factors that we may consider, core data confusion can hurt your ability to rank in Places.  I took this theory and applied it to the listings that Matt McGee recently researched [see above article], using a few simple procedures”

How does anyone learn things, these days-school of course. In continuing my topic of local search DIY (do it yourself),  I interviewd my good friend David Mihm about his GetListedUniversity. This appears to be an excellent opportunity for small business owners to get some hands on training in local search.  Getlisted, just recently expanded to include a UK branch. If you are interested in see if a class is coming near you, David has provided his contact info below.

Q. What is Getlisted University?
A. Local University is essentially a four-hour crash course for business owners in local search engine marketing.  We bring in Google Places and Bing Local reps for the day, along with some top-notch experts in Local SEO, and try to get business owners up to speed, as best we can, for how to get found online.

Q. Why did you start it?
A. Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling, and I started tossing around the idea of a Local roadshow at SMX East last fall–an idea that Pat Sexton and I had discussed internally since before we even started what became GetListed.org.  All of us were committed to getting beyond the search marketing community, right to business owners, to cut through the snake oil and bogus internet marketing sales pitches they receive every day.

Q. Who should attend?
A.  Our seminars are definitely geared towards business owners themselves, but we’ve had considerable interest from chambers of commerce, offline media, and online marketing agencies who have sent their clients or member business owners–and in some cases junior employees or account managers.

Q. What should one realistically expect to get out of the course/seminar?
A.  We hope that attendees leave with an overall idea of how the search engines work–especially for local keywords–and a few tactics they can implement immediately to get their business to rank better.

Q. Is it just another sales pitch?
A.  We’re 100% sales-pitch-free.  Every tool, product, and service we talk about in our presentations is a legitimate recommendation, and none of the speakers are shilling for more clients.  In fact, our goal is to partner with local marketers and agencies so that business owners have someone to talk to in their own area after we leave town.  I think we all have a pretty good reputation in the search community, but outside of our little world, we’re not exactly known entities .  So we’re really proud of the number attendees who have remarked to us “You guys really knew your stuff–it was great that it wasn’t a sales pitch” or something along those lines.

Q. Where will you be having your next seminar(s)?
A.  We’re geared towards less traditional (and more affordable) venues than those of the typical SEO conference circuit.  So next up are Cleveland/Northeast Ohio (June 30), Denver and New Orleans in the fall, and Phoenix in the winter.  We’d love to do events in towns even smaller than that, but it seems like we need a critical mass of business owners
in order to break even on our travel expenses.  We’re still trying to find out what that critical mass is, though & are open to entertaining ideas from any area.

Q. If folks want more info, where should they go?
A. We put up a landing page a couple months ago http://getlisted.org/university which has some high-level bullet points, but people can feel free to email me at david@getlisted.org if they’d prefer, too.

Q.  In your opinion, how realistic is it for SMBs to DIY local search?
A. I think it’s very realistic for the ones who are motivated.  A lot of SMB’s do need their hands held by a trusted (and trustworthy) advisor but there are an incredible number of low- or no-cost positive steps that they can take to get themselves started.  As the online space becomes more competitive, or more sophisticated, they may need more help, but one of the things that I love most about the local search world is that there ARE so many non-technical things business owners can do to improve their visibility, without even touching their websites.  They just need a push in the right direction–which we hope to give them with Local U!

Thanks David for your time and hope to see GetlistedU in my neck of the woods soon.

I have decided to put together a number of posts on this subject, as it has been on my mind for a while. Online DIY can be a great thing – you learn a lot of stuff, save money, and have an increased sense of ownership of in your website and marketing plan.  The negatives about online DIY are the time and energy spent simply learning the material, (the learning curve), having todo the updates yourself, and not having anyone to help you out along the way. 

In addition to the question above, I have another one: “Is DIY local search or Internet marketing  realistic for the small business owner?”

What do you think about these questions? What is my two cents? I say that “yes“  to both, but….I think small business owners can learn and do SOME local search marketing themselves but I do not think it is realistic that EVERYONE can do it alone.

I know a number of small business owners that have taken charge of their online marketing and are doing well.  It has not been easy for them and has taken years to get where they are today.

As I stated above there are a number of things small business owners can do to help out their cause online but with the search engines constantly changing and updating themselves even those involved with search marketing can have a hard time keeping up.

Ok, so you want to try your hand at doing some online local search marketing? Where do you begin?  What is important in local search? If you have the time, head over to David Mihm’s world famous Local Search Ranking Factors posting on his site. The 2010 version, has just come out.  For the last few years, he has asked a number of search marketers their thoughts and experiences in the local online market and has summarized the results.  It is a very well done and through review, so see what the experts (and yours truly LOL)  think is important in local search rankings.

Once you have read that, then I will have some more goodies for you.

I contacted Martijn about his presentation and asked him what was the key point(s) that he would share. His reply,  “Most important thing is that you need to track as much as possible.  For all else, you will have to use an attribution model that fits your  business.”

Martijn also was featured in a podcast over at Webmasterradio, Using Local Search back on May 4th. Yesterday, May 25th,  they had a podcast reviewing SMX London. So if you have a few minutes check them out.

Mike has been in the local search arena for some time, so when he talks, people should listen. LOL I found his presentation well done and should be easy to follow. If you have read Mike previous articles online, some of this info should be familiar. Enjoy

Local Search Talk Series Part 1: Miriam Ellis Interview
Local Search Talk Series Part 2: Dev Basu Interview
Local Search Talk Series Part 3: Matt McGee Interview
Local Search Talk Series Part 4: Chris Silver Smith Interview
Local Search Talk Series Part 5: Ed Reese Interview

I enjoy always spending some time hearing what others are saying.