AUGUST 2010

Welcome to the latest issue of our PinPoint newsletter, providing important insights, announcements and intelligence you can use. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook! Feel free to pass this on to clients or friends and we hope to see you at an industry event soon.

Spotlight on our Local Search Platform Partners

Facebook

In case you missed it, last week saw the news media buzzing over the announcement that Facebook was launching “Places.” After many weeks of rumors and conjecture, Localeze confirmed its relationship with Facebook to power Places with its premium local business listings, including those managed and enhanced by local businesses. This gives our national brand and local business clients additional visibility on a platform that will rapidly evolve into powerful interactive tool, allowing businesses to claim their Places page and link it to their Facebook page.

Founded in 2004, Facebook was initially only available to college students, then later to high school students and finally opened up to everyone in September of 2006. Since then its growth has been exponential and is currently over 500,000,000 users. Not only does it have a huge user base but its users are engaged--checking their Facebook accounts as frequently as hourly.

The new Check-In service provided by Places allows you to pull up a list of nearby businesses, choose the one you are visiting and check-in. You can see other friends who may also be there and if permitted, you can check-in with them in real time. As use of this new feature grows, it will be more important than ever for businesses to actively update and manage local business listings being utilized in Places by on-the-go consumers.

TomTom/TeleAtlas



How many of us remember family vacations with a map spread out on the back seat and many arguments about finding the hotel?  Those days are long gone! With handy GPS-enabled navigation devices that track location by satellite anyone can have a friendly voice leading them to their destination. One of the biggest navigational systems, TomTom actually was founded in the Netherlands in 1991 by Harold Goddijn, Peter-Frans Pauwels and Pieter Geelen.

TomTom initially developed B2B applications such as meter reading and bar-code reading. Subsequently the company moved its focus to PDA software for the consumer market. Early mapping software included EnRoute and Citymaps. The company released its first navigator product, TomTom Navigator in 2002. From there the company has grown from a small start-up to the multinational, blue chip stock exchange listed company it is today.

In 2008 they finalized the purchase of TeleAtlas, one of the largest global digital mapping companies.This has madeTomTom the world's leading provider of location and navigation solutions with a focus on in-car navigation. In an effort to improve the local search functionality of its in-car devices TomTom chose Localeze to enhance its categorized points of interest (POIs) product offering with our over 14 million U.S. local search business listings.  They will also make the listings available for location and navigation application developers and device manufacturers, leveraging TomTom digital maps and content. "Localeze has a wide network of local search platform partners and far-reaching, pervasive local search business listings," said Dan Adams, vice president of partner development, TomTom. "By working with Localeze, we can strengthen our product offerings with relevant content for our vast range of industry partners.”

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Intel from the Localeze Database

At Localeze we are continually working to improve our product and our data. Some of the projects we have on the radar are:

• More granular "neighborhood" data
• Richer and more comprehensive brands, products and services data fields
  
• Adding Twitter and Facebook URLs
• URLs for storefronts 
• Videos and other multimedia

US consumers and businesses are on the move

The Localeze database holds a wealth of interesting insights into the changing dynamics of Local Search. One important insight is into the number of households and businesses that move every month across the United States. Our data intelligence team in Orem, UT reports that there were more than 850,000 moves recorded in the month of June 2010 alone, with 80% of those being residential relocations.  That means in the US almost 10,150,000 moves take place each year.

These statistics by association illustrate the dynamic nature of local search listings – they are only as good as their accuracy and recency. Actively monitoring and keeping your local business listings up to date and enhanced is vital if you want to be found everywhere online where consumers are searching for you. 

The importance of new movers to the economy cannot be overstated. For businesses, when a new mover arrives in town they are the most motivated buyers in the market.   In fact, new movers spend more money in the first five months on establishing their new homes than they do in the first five years. Unlike the established resident, they do not know where the closest grocery store, doctor, auto repair shop or Mexican food restaurant is located. They are also more likely to go online to search for local products and services, as print directories often lag many months behind a move. As a business, you want to be easy for these consumers to find. Localeze helps by giving you direct access to certify for anchor listing information (Name; Address; Phone, or “NAP”) and enabling you to enhance your listing with important links and keywords describing your   services offered, brands carried, hours of operation and much more, to guide the consumer to your location and turn them from a visitor to a long term customer.

For local search platforms, understanding how much the Localeze database changes month to month just with the example of business-move data is vital. The fact that almost 1.5 million businesses moving in the US every year, highlights the importance of regularly updating your local business files. Again, the data is only as good as its accuracy, validity and recency. Keeping your data accurate and fresh helps you gain loyal, long term users that have recently relocated. With data feeds available as frequently as weekly, you can be sure that you are making the freshest local business listings data available to consumers at a time when they most need it.

Tools, Technology and Products

Putting user generated feedback from local search platforms to work…for everyone

Local search platforms have long known that feedback on business listings from their users is an important tool for keeping the information current and correct. When businesses or consumers find outdated or incomplete business listings on a particular local search site they typically reach out directly to that site to report the issue.   While the update is made on that one property in all likelihood the listing needs the same modification on many other local search platforms.  Plus, the site has to invest precious time and resources updating the information and, they have no way to verify that the user providing the feedback is a source to trust.    

But that’s beginning to change.  Due to our large portfolio of local search platform partners, Localeze is rapidly becoming a central hub for many of the change requests partners receive on a daily basis.  By using the Localeze Business Registration Manager (BRM), our partners will just need to add a link from their site to the BRM Help Center where their users can report an issue.  With our advanced identification, authentication and authorization processes, Localeze either verifies the individual and authorizes them to update it, or will notify the business owner that a change request has come in from a third party and asks the owner for validation.

For our local search platform partners this is an effective way to take the pressure off their customer service departments and provide a valuable service to their users.  For local businesses, it gives them a single source for making a modification and having it updated across the largest local search platform network in the industry. This also gives them security and control over their listing.  For consumers that find erroneous business listing information, it is a way to quickly get an issue addressed.  

Managing user generated feedback is just one of the key components Localeze is building out to realize the benefits of Business Listings Identity Management and to improve the accuracy of online listings data.

Coming soon from Localeze – XML data delivery

Localeze will soon be providing data delivery in the form of XML files, an important development that will benefit all who use Localeze’s industry-leading products.

Benefits to the XML structure include:

• XML is the favored language for business software developers—so XML will be familiar to most of them
• Provides simple data definition and captures relational data removing limitations on the number of fields and attributes
• Flexible format without limitations of fixed-length formats to eliminate truncating of data within listings fields
• Structure easily rendered into web pages, making it easier to utilize full content in listings
• Provides for easier and quicker data updates on your schedule through use of data dimensioning
  

On the last point, Localeze will be providing version numbers with each XML business listing, so local search platforms no longer have to load the entire dataset upon every delivery, or process or “calculate” incremental updates. Data versioning will enable partners to obtain the latest listings on whatever their schedule calls for – whether it’s monthly, weekly, or some other schedule, only the records that have changed since the previous version will be streamed through HTTP.  This exciting development will lead to near real-time data update capability, so that businesses will be able to get their certified listings in front of consumers faster and local search partners will have the most current, relevant and accurate data in the local search space, whether on desktop, mobile or GPS.

For help with technical issues, to provide feedback or to learn more about our applications please contact Data Update Technical Support at operations@localeze.com

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Our Guest Expert Says

We recently sat down with Alex Oliviera, Director of Localeze' San Diego Technology group and asked him for his thoughts regarding current the role of technology in improving business listing performance in the local search space.

Q: Alex, what is the most significant challenge facing both businesses and search platforms today regarding local search business listings?

AO: For businesses, it’s the ability to get control over and manage their business listings consistently across the Web; for local search platforms, it’s about trusting the source and accuracy of the information.  As a result the local search listing conversation has shifted from simple listing submission and data access, to Business Listing Identity Management. This evolution was ignited in part by the adoption of social media and the greater role user participation plays in local search platforms.  Any local search platform powered by business listings is having, or will soon have, internal discussions around the need for some form of real time Business Listings Identity Management.

Q: What does Business Listings Identity Management do?

AO:  Business Listings Identity Management adds intelligence and authority to the relationships between local search platform users and businesses’ listings.  It breaks down into three components, identification, authentication and authorization. These are all traditional information technology security concepts that are now making their way into local search and quality conversations.  Local search platforms will have the need to uniquely identify business listings and implement technologies that identify and qualify anonymous users, while minimizing the time and effort required of them.  There will be many real-time solutions addressing these challenges.  The most successful solutions will be ones that best leverage available data assets and technology across the Web.

Q:  How do identification, authentication and authorization apply to local search?

AO: Identification is the most familiar of the three components.  It is the ability to assign a consistent and persistent method of uniquely identifying a business listing or individual user.  There has always been the need of an identification system within a local search platform; the industry now needs standardized, cross-platform identification systems that enable multiple local search platforms to share information on business listings.  As an example, for a business listing it could be standardizing on the unique “anchor” listing fields of business Name, location Address and local Phone number or “NAP.” For a local search platform user, it could be standardizing on phone number and email address.  The most important aspect of identification, especially across a multi-partner network, is standardization.  Everyone must be speaking a common language to be able to have a meaningful conversation.

Authentication of individuals making claims on business listings is by far the most challenging to achieve in real time and to continuously maintain in a cost-effective, scalable manner over time.  Authentication becomes a delicate balance between security, cost and user experience.  The result of authentication is establishing the amount of trust applied to individuals making claims on business listings.  It is not a one size fits all solution.  The amount of trust required and the level of effort to mediate risk  is application dependent.  For example, the authentication trust level is significantly higher for creating a paypal.com login then a pandora.com login.

Authorization is the most straight forward component but may prove to be the most difficult to realize its full potential.   A business owner or manager can claim their business listings once on one platform, and then manage it across the Web on multiple platforms and explicitly control access to the content of their listings.  Cross-platform authorization requires co-opetition across local search platforms; a simple concept with many complex business and technical challenges.  

On the business side it will require local search platforms to embrace a “no walled garden” approach to business listings--when all participate in the update and sharing of standardized local business listing identities, the ecosystem benefits as a whole.  Technically it’s always a challenge to exchange information across multiple platforms.  Fortunately it’s a common challenge with many well accepted technologies today like xml, REST and SOUP that facilitate communication between disparate systems.  The key may be the industry standardizing around a single solution.

Q:  How does all this help both businesses and local search platforms?

AO:   An increasing number of local search platforms have successfully leveraged user participation to either to create, update or remove content or introduce novel business models.  The most prevalent examples are Facebook, Twitter  Foursquare Groupon and many others.  User participation, however, is a double edge sword.  If not properly implemented, it can introduce nearly as many problems as it solves.  For example an anonymous user claims that an address has changed for a particular business listing.  This is invaluable user feedback, but is the user a trusted source?  Is the user an owner or employee of the business, or a local competitor hi-jacking the listing?  Business Listings Identity Management gives authority to the authenticated business owner or manager to control and manage their online business listing identity. It also allows local search platforms to redirect scarce resources away from support cost centers and onto their core competencies and ultimately their bottom line.

Q: How soon will Business Listings Identity Management solutions start positively impacting local search performance?

AO: There already are a hand full of local search platforms  using very basic Business Listings Identity Management solutions, but the technology solutions available up until today have been relatively immature.  However, the demand by businesses for control, and the demand by platforms for trust are accelerating.   The best and brightest engineers in the local search industry have already started working on advanced Business Listings Identity Management solutions.  I would expect the near future will reveal several innovative technology solutions that empower local businesses to certify, control and manage their local online identities, and give local search platforms trust and confidence that the businesses managing their listing identities and the users providing feedback about those listings, are identified, authenticated, authorized and trusted.

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Best Practices for Maximum Visibility

Active business listings management – A key to visibility

It is vitally important for you actively manage your local listings. In this article we highlight the reasons you should regularly update your business listings with Localeze.

The sooner Localeze has updates, the sooner they are distributed and available to online consumers

This seems simplistic, but less obvious are the other factors in play behind the scenes. Localeze makes its 14 million+ business listings available for upload by its partners on a weekly basis. Currently, many of our over 100 local search platform partners pick up the data once a month. Some partners with more resources may do so as frequently as weekly and on the opposite end of the spectrum, some may take a little longer. Once you give us your updated information it may take as long as 60 days to have your data fully processed and in production across our local search platform network. With that kind of turnaround it is critical that you minimize any upfront delay by getting your updates into the pipeline as quickly and frequently as possible.

Verification tools are continually being improved by Localeze

We are constantly evolving our technical ability to verify and analyze the data that you provide to make sure your listings are accurate, complete and up to date. As part of the value to our local search platform partners we score each and every listing we deliver to them based on a variety of parameters,  all designed to give partners confidence in the quality and accuracy of each business listing. Scoring parameters include; source, presence of required fields, verification of deliverable addresses and connected phone numbers, content, and proprietary Validators.

Localeze Validators are in essence “status indicators” applied to each listing as a result of important checks done against them to ensure that they conform to best practices developed through our relationships and experiences working with our local search platform network. The various Validators indicate whether or not each listing is optimized for distribution. Since Localeze is constantly adding to the library of Validators it is important that you review your listings frequently to make sure they’re local search optimized.  Validators are made available through various methods depending on which solution you are using to manage listings with Localeze.

For more information on scoring and Validators, please contact your account management representative.

Recency of update or review is becoming essential

Local search platforms are beginning to pay attention to how recently a listing has been “touched” by its owner. Even if you have no changes to make to your business listing information for long periods of time, it is important that you check in frequently and “audit” your listings so the local search platforms know that you are actively monitoring the accuracy of your data.

For more information on how to audit or update your local business listings, please contact your account management representative.

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