Back in 2008, when Pat Sexton and I were brainstorming the ideas that would eventually turn into GetListed.org, one of our very first long-term goals was to put together a low-cost seminar series that would introduce business owners to the world of online marketing. It pleases us greatly to announce a major step towards that goal: the very first GetListed.org Local University event in Spokane, WA on February 4th.

I am at The Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media conference in Los Angeles this week, though–speaking on a panel with Andrew Shotland later today. For those not in attendance, the official hashtag to follow on twitter is #ILM09, and I’ll be posting tidbits from the conference sometime Friday afternoon or over the weekend.

As many readers probably know, Telmetrics president Bill Dinan responded to my original Search Engine Land column about call-tracking last week. Greg Sterling was kind enough to let me post a response to Bill’s response on his blog this week.

Please check it out & let me know your thoughts either in the comments area on Greg’s blog, or on this post.

Google Maps appears to have introduced another innovation to their interface recently: Zagat-like review snippets on Place Pages for individual businesses.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s SMX East recap, Google announced a new ad format–Local Listing Ads–on Monday afternoon.  Both Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal have written fairly in-depth summaries of what the ads entail but I’ll try to lay out the highlights below:

Only businesses with claimed LBC listings are eligible to participate.
The landing page MUST [...]

TMP & Comscore’s annual study of the Local Business space was published this morning, and hot off the presses, Gregg Stewart, the President of TMP’s new Interactive wing called 15miles, shared the initial results with those of us in attendance at SMX East.  There wasn’t really anything earth-shattering, but some interesting data came out nonetheless.  The [...]

A continuation of some of the most important stories in the Local Search world from August and September.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything of real value to readers (unless you somehow derived value from my last post on random vanity searching), so I hope to rectify that situation this week with some more content-based posts.

We’re going to go through the AMAZING day at Local Search Summit in reverse order; posts on other sessions will be forthcoming.  For those of you not in attendance, Steve Espinosa (moderating the session) just made fun of me for not liveblogging the session so here I am complying.  Because obviously fellow attendees haven’t made [...]

As those of you who follow me way too closely on Twitter probably know, I was at my 10-year high school reunion all of last week.  So, sorry the posting has been a little light.
I’ve also been hard at work on SEVERAL presentations for the upcoming month, and looking forward to all the upcoming conferences [...]