I will be attending and covering the upcoming Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Local & Mobile conference, being held in Denver this coming Monday and Tuesday, October 1st and 2nd. Some excellent preliminary information on the event and particular sessions is already available in podcast format by the event hosts. The following is an interview I recently conducted with Greg Sterling, founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, and co-host of the conference.
Why do local and mobile search lend themselves together?
Local and mobile are individually distinct categories, and we can speak about them both from the consumer side and the search marketing (advertising/organic) side, but there is also a high degree overlap between them. In mobile, the content categories that most people are interested in are local – maps and businesses, directory information, travel, etc. Local is a high use category in mobile; which make sense from the standpoint that people are on the go, they want to find out how to get from here to there, where a restaurant is, etc.
Local naturally lends itself very well to the SMBs (small-to-medium size businesses). But not so much for the mobile space. Has that changed?
I don’t think mobile is ready for small businesses yet. Mobile is not something that small businesses are every going to do on their own. The few exceptions are the small businesses that aggressively do search marketing may ultimately find acceptable ways to do mobile marketing. But what’s likely to happen in mobile is that the sales channel, the aggregators, the folks that currently work with small businesses on a large scale (e.g., IYPs and web hosting companies that offer marketing services) are going to push that data, those listings and ads, out into mobile. So you’ll have a distribution in mobile without even much awareness on the part of small businesses.
Here are two examples of that: one, is what Google is doing with AdWords, where mobile marketing is going to be an “opt out” starting November 19. They’re going to take most of the adwords which meet the criteria that they’ve laid out and push them into mobile search. So by buying into Adwords, you’re also going to get mobile distribution across Google Mobile Search. That may not be optimal for everyone and there are separate mobile SEO rules and things like that, but it’s really removing some of the friction that would be involved with setting up mobile as a separate product, queue or campaign.
On a specifically small business note: SuperPages.com is using the 1-800-[___]-3411 phone listing as one of its mobile distribution strategies for advertising clients. They have a pay-per-call product which they call “pay-for-call”, which they currently have about 5,000 advertisers which they’re sending into the 1-800-[___]-3411 system for mobile distribution. Again, that’s not a separate buy, nor is it something that the advertiser has to be involved with. They simply set up the campaign on SuperPages, and SuperPages takes care of that mobile distribution. I really think that’s going to be the model, or the means by which most small businesses get into mobile.
Also, you’ll see organic listings come up in mobile searches. Businesses adding their enhanced listings to Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, some of the IYP sites – those will all get mobile distribution as well.
Now, when talking specifically about the local desktop search space, that’s a more complicated matter. A lot of small businesses are now aware of the consumer behavior of audiences migrating online, and the Internet as the dominant tool for business hookups. But it’s still quite complicated for them to figure out what to do. They know the big search brands and some internet yellow pages (IYPs), but the majority of small businesses are still generally unaware of the “how” – how to get online distribution.
So what’s happing is small businesses are being sold Internet marketing by existing sales channels – web hosting companies, newspapers, yellow pages sites, etc. – are all pushing web marketing as part of a package of clicks, or clicks-to-calls, in a simplified way to the local small business. More and more small businesses are buying that, especially since most small businesses aren’t tech-savvy, and don’t have the time or personnel to really engage in that learning curve. So they’re relying on 3rd parties to make that simple – to buy search marketing, online marketing, search distribution – with simplified pricing and packaging – so they don’t have to do any of the campaign setup – keyword selection, distribution, etc. That’s all outsourced. Its usually sold on a flat-fee basis. Sometimes they’ll have packages with guaranteed clicks. The IYPs have been the single largest group of aggregating these advertisers. Over time you’ll have more and more self-provisioning that most of these small businesses, and the goal is to give these local businesses broader and broader distribution (on the desktop).
Mobile is a lot more complex for marketers to attempt to market and optimize to on their own, especially in comparison to desktop search. What are the variables that make this more complex?
There are different platforms in mobile, there’s voice search, there’s SMS or text messaging, there’s WAP (the mobile browser experience), and there’s rich clients that browsers are trying to push, because that often represents the best user experience. A good example of that would be Google Maps for mobile, or the Google mapping application on the iPhone. This immediately presents 4 different areas where you’ll find usage. Then, there’s the issue of all the devices, plus the various operating systems.
Right now, the bulk of mobile data usage is in text messaging, although there’s a substantial amount of people using WAP search to varying degrees. And there voice, which is the broadest segment of the market, because that’s how people have been accustomed to using mobile phones for directory listings.
You just need to have a very diversified strategy to reach the same user base that you might reach on the desktop. The desktop now has many more people, but over time, mobile will have a very high degree of usage. Especially when you consider the huge mobile phone penetration in the U.S. is much higher than computer penetration.
On your preview podcast, you alluded to the Community Local panel discussing some controversial topics. What will those be?
Paul Ryan, who is the CEO of a company called Done Right!, which is sort of a local-vertical site in home improvement space, has some contrary views about the local community in the local search experience. Obviously “community” is a well-established area online, but it can also get unwieldy. I think we’ll be getting into that paradox, where its very hard to get participation, but once you’ve got it, there can be a lot of noise and clutter that dimishes the user experience, in an ironic sort of way.
A good example of that would be TripAdvisor.com, which has a lot of great content, but can often be time-consuming and laborious to wade through. The debate could be over what if you’re TOO successful at getting outside participation and the negative effects. Does the excessive content compromise the user experience, and lead to diminishing returns at some point?
Another issue I can think of is “social exhaustion,” where there are already so many socio-local community sites to participate in and stay active in.
That’s another major issue. Just the clutter of all these sites sort of emulating each other, the functionality and labor of having to register and set up a profile on all of these different sites, does create a kind of fatigue.
Your podcast preview also mentions the Pay-Per-Call Ads session, where you said that mobile seems to be a much better model for this ad type than desktop search. Why do you think that’s the case?
There are two things responsible for this. One, there were high hopes for pay-per-call on the desktop Internet for distribution. But most of the high-traffic search sites, with the exception of AOL, have not chosen to adopt pay-per-call as a business model and make it an option for their advertisers. Most of the IYPs have also not done that, either. So you don’t have the distribution that might have been anticipated a couple of years ago.
However, in the mobile space, one of the primary ways people take action is by making a phone call. While that’s true on the desktop as well, on the desktop it’s a different behavior. With mobile, you’ve got a handset in your hand, literally. You’re looking for a local service and the primary way you’re going to achieve that is with a phone call. It’s a very natural fit between the pay-per-call business model and the user behavior there. You will see more penetration in the near-term of the pay-per-call model in mobile. In the long term, it may hold out the promise that was held initially on the desktop for more distribution.
You’re also having a debate panel. What are some of the debatable issues we can expect from that panel, or that you think are the biggest controversies today with local and mobile search?
I think one of the biggest controversies is, where’s the traffic going to be? Obviously on the Internet, search has been the starting point for so many different use cases, such as SEO and advertising for gaing traffic. Is that going to be true with local? Or, are Google, Yahoo!, MSN going to suck up all the traffic, and the other sites competing for organic search and SEM placements with local keywords, or will they be able to establish their own brands with strong destination traffic over time? That issue extends over into mobile, but mobile also includes the carriers. Are the carriers going to develop viable, widely used, consumer search tools? Or, are they simply going to become what had happened to most of the ISPs online – delivering connectivity but little else, and not really a bona fide search provider?
Craig Smith, who used to work at SuperPages, argued that IYPs are sort of waning in popularity, and will simply be SEO vehicles for local businesses over time, with not much consumer loyalty. That’s a debatable point, and people will have differing views on that.
One could also argue that because search has had such a profound impact with everyone on the Internet obviously, that search has become a brand-killer. Everybody just goes to search engines to find everything, and that dilutes the individual sites, loyalty and brand to some degree.
There also the issue with mobile, specifically, about the user experience. That’s something of a key factor that really has yet to be worked out. Most everyone is complaining that its still very hard to do search on a handset, that its awkward to use the keys or keyboard they provide with these phones. Questions arise, such as: where’s the usage going to be? Where’s the usage going to come from? What’s going to drive adoption, beyond the fact that there’s kind of a pent-up demand from consumers for mobile content on the go. Who is going to be able to innovate and create user experiences – perhaps like the iPhone or Google411 – that are going to be able to capture people’s imaginations in a way that desktop search has, and build audiences? That’s a story in-the-making, that has yet to be definitively determined.
Overall, mobile today is very much like the late 1990s of the Internet. There’s a lot of anticipation and hype, and you can see the usage starting to come, but many things are undetermined.
Outside of the U.S., mobile appears to be growing faster, or has already achieved some of these goals you described. What do you think will need to be the catalysts for the simpler-and-faster adoption rule for mobile search in the U.S.? Is it technology, legislation, consumer demand, all of the above, or other things?
There are layers of issues that you just suggested. Some of them are regulatory and legislative. For example, in the U.S., you really are at the mercy of carrier selection with the devices. The iPhone is the most acute example (with AT&T being the only carrier option). A lot of people want to get the iPhone, but don’t want to switch carriers. All the frenzy over a hacker unlocking the iPhone (and making it open to other carriers), indicates that consumers would like to have whatever phone they choose work with whatever carrier they have, but the structure of the U.S. market doesn’t permit that right now. Google is making a big push to do this, but we may not see any opening soon with the structure of the U.S. market in the way that I suggested.
But more important than that really, is with the audience of search, and the genius of search. Search involves a single box where you type in a query that represents an intention and get a response – either an advertiser or organic link – which in most cases, is going to give you more information or lead you to a transaction. Its just very, very simple and elegant (on the front end) in that regard. That’s what needs to happen with mobile. You have to be able to query the database in some form, either with voice, or text, or a desktop-like keyword entry of a term or terms, and get a response that essentially fulfills your need or expectation.
The situation is, you can’t exactly translate the desktop search into the mobile environment. We cover that issue in our Mobile Search: Beyond 10 Blue Links panel. The idea of simply presenting links to people in a mobile environment, given the small screen size on a mobile phone, the challenge of going back and forth between results data and an individual site, especially since most sites are not yet rendered for mobile display; it creates a lot of frustration and most people aren’t going to do it.
Yahoo! is trying to make the mobile search experience more suitable, by creating an application that’s much more intuitive and gives people answers, rather than links. Everybody is using that language now, to describe their own efforts in mobile. Its just has to be very, very simple.
There’s some other interesting applications out there, that are not out of left field exactly, but represent a different use-case or paradigm. There’s some local-mobile social networking efforts going on, where users in a distributed network text questions to each other for responses – kind of like putting “Yahoo! Answers” for Q&A discussion in a mobile environment. Questions like, what’s a good bar in midtown Denver, or a good place to stay. Or, general questions, such as outcomes of sporting events, or trivia, or whatever. The idea of tapping into the collective wisdom in some distributed user base in a mobile environment, is a very intriguing alternative to “pure search”, that may have some traction. But whatever the innovation, they have to conceal the complexity, make it very, very simple and intuitive for the end user, and they have to take into account the limitations of the device in ways that nobody has to content with on the desktop.
I also think that there’s going to be some interesting integration between mobile and desktop applications. You’re starting to see it with search engines and portals, such as the idea of setting up an account and personalized list of content, social bookmaking styles, or personalized home pages that then translate into mobile. We’re starting to see some personalization make its way into mobile. AOL’s WAP site is focusing pretty heavy on personalization. I think that will gain some traction in mobile that hasn’t really happened on the desktop. Not withstanding the popularity of social bookmarking, Most people don’t do much personalization actively. Some of that will lend itself to scenarios where people can manage their social bookmarks and have it transfer to their mobile device.
How about performance tracking for mobile? Do you see mobile eventually, or even on a small level right now, as a means of also capturing analytics and effectively measuring campaign performance?
I think what’s going to emerge is that some percentage of distribution from a campaign will be in mobile. Its like what Google is doing cross-media – audio, television, print, etc. – and include those data in a single integrated, campaign dashboard. I agree its still early for the advertiser, and certainly early for the small advertiser (aside from participating in existing programs with major providers I mentioned), but the consumer interest is very high. Again, it’s the same scenario with the computer desktop in the late 1990s. You gained larger consumer audiences, and they were monetized very effectively, and the advertisers followed. It took the Internet 10 years for it to become a serious medium for advertisers with widespread monetization. For the mobile space, It’s going to be half that time, or maybe even just a few years. There’s already a high level of interest and anticipation, a lot of competition, and a lot more interest being driven by that competition. Marketing agencies such as DoubleClick are feeling compelled to develop and promote mobile marketing strategies and work with mobile networks. It’s a much more integrated phenomenon than search engine marketing on the desktop was, or is today.
At the SMX Local Mobile Keynote on October 1, Michael Jones, Chief Technologist for Google Maps, Earth, and Local Search, talked about the comparisons and contrasts between online local search and the concierge business.
Sorry to any of the blog readers here for the delay in posts. I’ve returned from the Search Engine Expo Local Mobile Expo in at the Denver Tech Center Oct 1-2nd, and gathered some exclusive coverage of the events. I’ll be posting news, interviews and commentary on the local search marketing sessions and panelists, and hopefully some podcast clips for a nice audio touch. Hopefully that can be forgiven for me not being a super-speedy blogger, as I sometimes like to take a couple days and clear my head, so I can put just a bit more thought into what I write than a bunch of scribbled notes. (Perhaps that makes me an SMX Slo-Mo blogger.)
