If you a) believe in the power of search—as a technology, as a consumer experience and as a business model, and b) believe in the economic promise of the “local” opportunity, then you need to commit to a simple axiom: the ultimate destiny of a local search is a phone call.

Two relatively new macro trends have converged on the phone. First, as everyone’s data will attest, web searches are increasingly local in nature, focusing on discovery of products and services offered in the physical world. The second is the migration of a very large small and medium business marketing spend from antiquated offline models (the phone book) to performance-based online vehicles (search, etc.). But while consumer behavior has changed (using search and social media instead of the book), nothing has changed the fact that the great majority of local businesses—whether the sole-operator plumber or a national advertiser like Roto-Rooter—still consider phone calls to be the lifeblood of their business.

To sweeten the deal, for many of these businesses, the phone call is much closer to what they consider the “transaction.” And as we already know from operating an active pay-for-call exchange, phone calls in aggregate convert at 3-10x the rate of clicks.

After a half-decade of connecting, tracking and analyzing hundreds of millions of phone calls, most generated from online marketing activities, we know that one of the key challenges our customers face is preventing fraudulent calls. In the search world, giants like Google and Bing have invested heavily in their ability to detect, understand and scrub fraudulent click activity. But in the calls world, we’re still at the beginning of a long learning period.

Unlike fraudulent clicks, which merely skew tracking data and cost calculation and which can often be backed out of totals for a marketer, phone calls that don’t come from customers have a serious side effect: tying up the line and blocking calls from live customers and leads. And much like the conventional wisdom from the web, a dropped call results in the same outcome as an abandoned visit: a lost customer.

Since the 2003 advent of the National Do Not Call Registry in the U.S. enabled an estimated 150 million consumers to block telemarketing calls, bulk dialers have turned to targeting business lines with B2B offers. And with the explosion of web-based activity focused on finding local businesses, those local business numbers are easier and easier to crawl, scrape and aggregate.

For some of our largest customers, the problem reached a critical point not long ago. Our response—which is half research and half product feature—was to deploy a “honeypot“ (a pool of hundreds of thousands of inactive numbers) to detect bulk-dialing activity. When we detect and confirm patterns of repeat call activity across multiple calls, we can calculate the likelihood of telemarketing activity and block the origin. Over time, the system learns more and more about bad behavior and self-corrects for false positives. And because we’re using a dedicated, ever-shifting honeypot, we can learn without affecting actual customers.

While we have thus far been very successful at identifying and blocking hundreds of thousands of fraudulent calls, we’re just at the beginning of the learning process. And given the axiom I laid out above and some of what we see on a daily basis, making good on the promise of “local” is going to mean—for all of us in the industry—beginning to identify, understand and creatively solve the challenges that stand in the way of delivering phone based leads to local businesses.

In today’s rapidly changing media landscape, local businesses of every kind are tackling the same challenge: how do we determine which advertising platforms to incorporate into our marketing mixes? The race is on, it seems, to see who can reach the greatest audience by creating the largest presence across print, online and mobile.

But while the tools available to deliver business messages to consumers are increasing, the key considerations have stayed the same. When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of advertising, return on investment (ROI) is the most important factor. Building brand awareness and market share are positive long-term goals, but growing a business requires a measured, tactical approach to advertising that is based mainly on turning a dollar of marketing money into a pile of sales revenue. Otherwise, the business won’t be around long enough to achieve its long-term objectives.

Before a conversation about advertising options can even begin, a local business must have a firm handle on three aspects of their operation: 1) demographics of their target customers, 2) geographics of their marketing area and 3) psychographics of their customers. These data play key roles in determining which marketing tools will make the most sense from an ROI perspective, so that businesses don’t waste valuable resources on offerings that won’t generate leads.

To help explain the importance of background research, let’s use the example of a new ice cream shop opening on the main street of a busy suburb. Here are the types of questions its owners should consider:

Demographics: What is the demographic profile of the local area? Let’s say there’s a large share of families with kids and college students living in dormitories. Based on that information, what customers will the shop try to attract – all of the above? Or just one of these target groups?

Geographics: What are the geographics of the area like? Are walk-ins mainly college students, while most of those driving to the store are families? How close are nearby competitors, and what demographics do they target? Depending on established competition, the initial target geography may be very small – requiring an even closer look at the demographic profile in the store’s vicinity.

Psychographics: What will motivate target customers to purchase ice cream from this shop? What are their spending patterns? What influences their buying behavior, and what specific promotional efforts will they respond to? While an ice cream shop’s business typically peaks in the summer months and drops off in the winter, do these rules apply in this particular area?

It’s only when the ice cream shop owners have firm answers to these questions that they can begin to map out an advertising strategy designed to deliver high ROI.

For purposes of this discussion, let’s assume the owners determined the following:

• They want to target both families and college students, and because of several already-established competitors, they’ll pursue potential customers within a half mile radius.
• Research shows that while the local student population includes frequent social med and mobile users, many of the local families spend less time with online and mobile technology.
• Indeed, many college students in the area walk to where they need to go, while families are more prone to drive.
• Summer months are busy with families, but college students go home for the summer.
• Disposable income is limited and price oriented stores do better than high-end establishments across both demographics.

Based on these determinations, the shop owner can work to develop a marketing strategy that will work to deliver quality leads for the business. Here’s a sample of how that might look:

• Due to differences in purchasing patterns, the shop will establish two distinct advertising strategies: one directed to college students and another to families.
• Since the shop is new, focused on a narrow area, and includes target customers with limited disposable income, coupons are determined to be an effective first step to get customers in the door.
• Because local college students are high social media and mobile users, a local coupon distribution channel on Twitter and a popular online mobile app are seen as effective, targeted delivery methods for coupons. Since these students are less likely to be in town over the summer—and summers are easier times to draw customers than the colder months—the majority of this marketing budget will be spent during the winter.
• Parents of families are also attracted to discounts, but those in this community are less likely to spend time finding them online or via mobile. Also, since most families in this area are drivers—they may need more incentive to travel to the store than the average college student who walks by it every day.  In this case, direct mail with coupons is seen as a good option in reaching local families.
• In addition to offering coupons, the shop owner can ensure additional referral business by listing the shop in print and Internet business directories.

While this scenario is hypothetical, it provides real lessons about the types of considerations local businesses must make when drafting their marketing strategies. There are an unlimited number of local advertising options out there—everything from Internet Yellow Pages to website creation and SEO/SEM visibility—but each individual tool may not be effective in delivering ROI in certain situations. In some regions or specific business categories, circumstances may apply that make it imperative for a local business to advertise in print directories—while in others, online directories plus a variety of additional digital tools may be considered critical to reach target demographics.

In the ice cream shop scenario, it may take years before the store establishes a reliable customer base and reputation. Once the store’s reach stretches beyond its initial half mile radius to compete with other shops and attract new types of customers, it will need new advertising strategies in order to maintain growth. At that point, its owners will need to go back through the steps of determining who their customers are at the time, where they’re coming from, and what motivates them to buy their products before changing or adding advertising resources. They must ensure that their local advertising efforts consistently deliver high ROI, or their efforts will be in vain and the business will suffer.

Many small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) are awakening to the marketing potential found in Facebook’s massive audience, and have begun developing their Facebook pages to promote their companies. While posting status updates is a great way to engage with your customers, there are some ways to kick them up a notch to expand your promotional potential, and a few tips for optimizing your Facebook status updates.

A large component of Facebooking is “preaching to the choir”—most of the people who will “like” you and follow you on Facebook are those who already know your company exists. Existing customers will search for you by name, and people might discover your Facebook link on your website. Marketing to this audience which already likes you and knows about you is certainly worthwhile for the sake of increasing sales and for retaining existing customers.

However, you also want more customers and for more people to discover your business and think about it.

A feature introduced by Facebook back in September enables your status updates to appear on other popular pages, opening the possibility that a lot more people could potentially discover your page/business. The feature was overlooked by many people who aren’t staying up-to-date on Facebook development news, so relatively few make use of it. The functionality I’m referring to is “tags,” which allow one to connect up names of people and pages which you’ve “liked” to create hyperlinks within the status updates by prepending with the “@” sign.

To set up a tag, once must first “like” a page or “add as friend” the subject you’re attempting to link up. For instance, to mention my name and have it link up to my profile page after friending me, you’d first type the “at”-symbol, “@,” in the status update box for your page and then start typing “Silver…”. Facebook will display matching pages/people below the status update field, which you could then select:

What catches my eye about this feature is that once you’ve tagged a post, it can then appear on pages which Facebook has created for all sorts of various topics, such as for well-known items and places. As people have customized their personal profiles, they added in lots of “likes and interests” which Facebook subsequently linked up with pages about those topics. For instance, when setting up my personal profile, I’d selected “listening to music” as an interest, and more than 2.3 million other people have as well. Some of these types of “community pages” are light on content, while in other cases Facebook has sucked in Wikipedia articles to populate them out a bit more.

Increasingly, people are visiting these topical pages on Facebook after searching for the page’s name or after clicking through when they’ve found the topic under a friend’s info tab. And, as people visit these pages in greater numbers, the pages become worthwhile targets for their promotional value.

Status tagging allows your status updates to appear on these Facebook community pages, allowing individuals to discover you, click through, and potentially “friend” you or “like” your page. For an example of this, I’m going to use a couple of Whole Foods Market status updates from the past week. They are not one of my clients and I have no affiliation with them—I’m just using them as an example because they do so social media really well. They already enjoy 300K-plus people who like their Facebook page, and I just like Whole Foods.

Here’s a couple of their status updates from the past week—one about iced tea, and the other about a film:

As you can see, they don’t have any tags within the text of their posts like I’m describing, although their status updates are otherwise well-constructed. But, what if they’d added tags? How many more people might these status updates reach if they were pumped-up a bit?

For the iced tea one, I did a quick search on Facebook for “tea,” and I found a Facebook community page for “drinking tea“—”19,541 people like this”. I also found a page for “iced tea” which had 6,145 people liking it. Further, the blog article Whole Foods is promoting mentions “whole trade,” which is their branded name for something like “fair trade” products. By searching for “fair trade” on Facebook, I discover the “fair trade certified” page for an organization that 42,582 people “like” which validates whether a product is fair trade or not.

Returning to Whole Foods’ update about their iced tea contest here’s what it would look like if I rewrote it to introduce tags for the related pages that I discovered:

Once this optimized status update is published, it would appear on the “drinking tea,” “iced tea,” and “fair trade” pages where people interested in those topics could discover it:

If you add it up, tagging the Tweet would’ve increased its potential reach by a bit over 68,000! Of course, the relative popularity of the topic/community page involved will impact its actual audience reach. The “drinking tea” page has a lot of people associated with it because they mentioned this on their personal profiles, but relatively few of them are likely to actually visit that page on a regular basis. Even so, the tagging will increase the pages where the status update appears, which increases its promotional power. And, for some popular topics, the tagging would likely result in bursts of more visits if done effectively.

The Whole Foods status update about the film, Fuel, might appear to have much more potential than the iced tea example. The Fuel movie has 7,263 people liking it according to its Facebook page, and it’s a Sundance Film Festival winner—a topic that has another 151,795 people liking that. However, Sundance has perhaps set their wall to not display posts from people who like them—so, it’s virtually pointless to tag their name.

As for SMBs which market primarily to local areas only, the potential audience is going to be sharply reduced, but still worthwhile. Local businesses might want to mention the names of their local towns and neighborhoods as well as local events—with tags—in order to attract more people who could potentially convert into Facebook “likers” as well as customers. For instance, various competing Chicago pages have hundreds of thousands of people associated with them, but some are operated by companies who would not allow your status updates to display on their pages.

You want to tag the pages which are set up to have visitors to default to to their wall pages when first arriving, and which allow your tagged status updates to appear on it. In the case of Chicago, you’d probably select the community/article page for Chicago which shows the related Wikipedia content since it has 44k of people liking it and it allows status updates to display by default. It’s tempting to associate with the pages for the Chicago movie or band, since they are more popular. Even though they might match your geographic term, they’re off-topic for your uses, so avoid tagging those since they’re the wrong demographic for your business.

Mentioning your geographic areas as tags consistently will allow local consumers to discover your company. By using this tactic consistently over time, you may be able to increase your Facebook audience and your customer base.

Additional tips for status updates for your local business within Facebook

• Include tags within posts, as described above, particularly for local topics.
• Finding reasons to use multiple tags within updates will expand your reach more than using only one. Facebook puts a limit of six tags per update, however.
• Include links to pages outside of Facebook with your posts, particularly links to pages which have images that will display a thumbnail in your Facebook status update. Pictures are more compelling than mere words.
• Sing more than just one song! Post stuff that’s not solely about you and your company. Mentioning local charitable events and local news items intermittently can help break things up and keep you from being boring.
• Periodically update by adding items to your Facebook photo albums. Include pictures of local interest in addition to pics of your business.
• Similar to adding images for status updates, upload videos sometimes, too.
• Reward those who follow you with a spontaneous discount offer every so often! One of my favorite local eateries in the Dallas area, Cafe Brazil, offers free entrees sometimes to their Facebook fans—and it gives one the delicious feeling of being an “insider in the know” to be able to show up on a certain day with a Facebook page printed out to get a freebie. They’ve been particularly effective with their Facebook promotions in large part because of this generosity, IMHO.
• Say something witty occasionally, so people will “like” your status updates. Facebook watches interactions to assess how effective a page is at engaging with its audience. So far, this doesn’t translate directly to any benefits that I know of, but if they allow one’s page updates to appear on the pages of the people who “like” it down the road, they’ll almost certainly work in various factors to assess the popularity of the page to decide whether to show an update or not in people’s news updates.

One suggestion I have for Facebook is a feature that would be very useful for companies managing their pages—if they could moderate posts submitted to their wall as well as posts which tag them. In this way, companies could allow posts to display that they like while keeping unwanted content out. Currently, user-posting to your company page is an all-or-nothing according to one’s settings.

Some other articles that are helpful/interesting for optimizing for Facebook:

• 8 Tips For Getting Your Fan Page Found In Facebook Search
• How To Quickly Customize Your Facebook Page To Attract More Fans
• How To Put The Facebook “Like” Button On A Site
• Facebook Marketing: how to locally optimize your Facebook presence
• Facebook Pages & Local Search Engine Optimization

Here’s a look at some fundamental local search features/tools that seem obvious, and that should be fully functional—but don’t exist, or don’t work. At least I think they don’t exist yet. Feel free to prove me wrong in comments, tweets, Molotov cocktails, etc.

Change the name of your Facebook business page. Perhaps your business’ name could use a little updating so you decide to change it. In most cases, you go to all of your profiles on the web, submit changes and over time they are updated—except on your Facebook page. Once you select a user name for your Facebook page, you can’t change it. I have heard that you can petition Facebook for one change but this seems pretty impractical. The option Facebook endorses is to delete your current page and create a new one with the new name. Too bad you had spent the past year building up thousands of fans on your old page.

Local keyword estimator. One of the problems with trying to target local queries for search marketing is that there is not enough volume around particular local service queries to generate meaningful data. Marketers try to get around this by creating paid search campaigns to see what kind of volume a particular query can generate, but it would be a lot easier if you could use one of the big keyword tools, typed “Pleasanton butcher” and got a report that aggregated this query with similar queries across every U.S. city to show the most popular variations when a city name is appended to the query. Bonus points for allowing me to filter the results by city size, location and cultural bias—perhaps tea party members search for local tea-bagging providers differently than latte-sippers, for example.

Local Twitter deals. I am sure this one is in the works, and there are plenty of services offering local deals via Twitter, but it would be great if a verified business could feed deals into Twitter and have them show up in a “local deals” list for users in their service area. Bonus points for being able to filter by product/service types.

Google maps analytics. A plugin or modification for Google Analytics that provides useful local/maps referrals without having to jump through hoops.

Competitive citation checker. Think SEOmoz Link Comparison tool for citations. I found this while writing this post. It hadn’t launched yet, so even though it may be live now, it doesn’t count.

CraigsList spammer (er, I mean Marketing Tool). Craigslist is one of the best marketing vehicles for local service businesses. It’s cheap and it’s simple. The problem is that it’s crowded and the chronological nature of the posts gets your ad pushed down pretty fast. I’d like to see someone build a tool that knows how to defeat Craigslist’s spam detection (or even better, a tool that is blessed by Craigslist and can bypass the spam filters) and allow a marketer to schedule new posts and take advantage of trending queries (Craigslist trends? Craigslist insights for local?). We’d only use this to make the world shinier and brighter right? And 10% of profits will go to feed families of mediocre marketers.

Centroid ranker. So the big local engines have all decreased the importance of centroid proximity in their map ranking algos, but location still makes a difference for a variety of reasons. I want a mobile app for businesses researching new office locations. It locates you on a map and shows you where your location will appear in the current set of local results for each of the different maps displays (Google, Bing, Mapquest, Yahoo, etc.) for specific queries (e.g. “pleasanton restaurant”). I guess you could do a mobile search and just look at the map that comes up, but if I have learned anything from my years on the web, it’s that same s#%t, different wrapper can work wonders as a business model.

Place page citation blocker. Citations on Google place pages can be helpful or hurtful, usually depending on how vocal your customers are. Google recently introduced the ability for merchants to respond to customer reviews on place pages, which helps in dealing with the great unwashed. But what about those citations that show up in the “details” section? Quite often I see lead-gen sites that businesses advertise on show up here with a “request a quote” link which takes you to a lead-gen page with a call-tracking phone number. So instead of just getting a potential customer call from a Google search, the merchant now gets a call they have to pay for. How about giving merchants the option to block these types of links?

SMB “pitch me” list. A common problem with selling marketing services to small and medium size businesses is they don’t have a lot of free time to take calls from the numerous services competing for their attention. Another common problem is the SMB typically does not have a lot of knowledge about web marketing in general so when they are ready to start buying marketing services, they don’t even know who to contact. How about something similar to the “do not call” list, except it’s a “pitch me” list that SMBs opt-into when they are ready to consider their options? If they are not on the list and you call them, you automatically lose half your Google traffic.

Fake address finder. A browser plugin that highlights listings with fake addresses that show up in Google Maps and tags them with a “WTF?!” emoticon. Paid version includes ability to purchase property, file with municipality to create an actual address and automatically create new place page to further screw up Google’s local database.

Do you have another genius idea for local search? Would love to see your thoughts in the comments section below.

Since the beginning of the year, many of us have predicted that mobile will be the top driving force behind local search growth in 2010. A rapidly-increasing number of smartphone users — combined with faster mobile technology, better search offerings, and higher advertiser engagement  — suggests that consumers will be more likely than ever to begin using their phones as local search tools.

New research released today provides some support to that argument, showing that the number of mobile subscribers turning to their devices to find local businesses is growing by double digit percentage points.

The study was conducted by comScore and released today by the Yellow Pages Association (YPA).

The report shows that the number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile phone increased 14 percent year-over-year to 17.3 million users in March 2010. This increase outpaces 10 percent growth in the number of mobile media users who browsed the mobile web, used applications or downloaded content during the same time period.

Additionally, the number of people accessing business directories on a mobile device at least once per week increased more than 16 percent year-over-year to nearly five million in March 2010.

This is good news for Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) and other local sites because it suggests the opportunity to reach more consumers is growing quickly. This high growth illustrates that as more consumers use mobile devices to search and access content, they are continuing to rely on Yellow Pages’ convenient and reliable business listings to help them find local businesses on-the-go.

So what do these results mean for advertisers?

The data shows that in addition to the benefits of advertising with IYPs to attract those searching for business information on their personal computers, local businesses are receiving added value in online listings being accessible to a growing number of mobile users.

The report provided additional contexts about the ways consumers reach business directories on their mobile device. According to comScore, the mobile browser was the most common access method for users, with 10.8 million subscribers in March 2010 and 21 percent year-over-year growth. But even as the browser remained the most used mobile feature for access, apps grew at a more rapid pace with 42 percent year-over-year growth, totaling 4.1 million subscribers in March 2010. These results indicate that IYP reach is not limited to a specific platform within the mobile category, but accessible to a broad range of mobile users.

The research also found that consumers accessing business directories via mobile represent a younger, wealthier, and content-hungry base to advertisers:

• 58% are 34 or younger.
• Over half of those have a household income in excess of $75,000. These are attractive figures for local businesses seeking to better position themselves to attract local leads.
• Mobile users are three and half times more likely as the average mobile media user to access women’s magazine content, health information, real estate listings, and job listings via their mobile devices.

And while local mobile grew double digits, local searches on personal computers saw single digit growth year-over-year. Searches on IYPs and portal sites increased 4 percent to 444 million in March 2010, or 5.3 billion annually — indicating that more consumers are coming to rely on Yellow Pages when searching from their computer.

As local businesses look for new ways to maximize advertising opportunities in today’s changing media landscape, Yellow Pages continue to provide attractive platforms to reach important consumer bases as they increasingly adopt digital and mobile. And as this new study shows, an integrated approach pays offs when listings on one platform are easily accessible on others—giving advertisers added exposure and more bang for their buck.