A new year, a brand new season of forecasts for market researchers. Aside from the widely-publicized report of The Kelsey Group, Borrell Associates releases another bold 2008 prediction: local online ad spending will double by the whopping 48% in 2008.
According to Newsfactor.com, the demand for paid search and video advertising will drive the demand, according [...]

The voice of the consumer will now become all the more vital in web advertising. User-generated content in particular, the growing proliferation of user reviews of businesses on the Web are set to play a more major role for local online advertising, according to the recent Kelsey Report on 2008 forecasts.
Local businesses will begin to [...]

Widgets offer a range of digital marketing techniques, including online PR, strategic viral marketing, brand advertising, direct response sales, and lead generation through affiliate marketing.
Although they may seem like trivial and playful applications on your desktop or  social networking site of choice, widgets are actually the new marketing phenomenon with lots of potential.
Sanaz Ahari, Microsoft’s [...]

Cyber Monday, one of the largest online shopping days of 2007 (November 26), brought in over a whopping $700 million in online sales, according to Loren Baker, Editor of Search Engine Journal.
But not through Yahoo Stores (now known as Yahoo Merchant Solutions), which suffered a dramatic loss in revenue from over 10,000 online merchants which [...]

The Toronto-based Call Genie a provider of enhanced local search products and services to Yellow Pages publishers, directory assistance providers, and wireless carriers has closed its previously announced acquisition of PhoneSpots for a consideration of $5.75 million. (This consists of $5.093 million worth of Call Genie common shares and a net cash payment of $711,000.)
The [...]

Yellow Pages will survive the shift but some immediate changes must be made. On January 10, the analyst firm Kelsey Group released a report that identified what they termed as “Key Local Media Trends” to watch out for in the year ahead. The report touched on local search, interactive local media, vertical directories, classified media [...]

Listen up, real estate agents, a new web-based product is about to make your job a whole lot easier, and hassle-free.
RealBird (www.RealBird.com), a leading provider of Internet marketing tools for the real estate industry, announced last December 17 the release of a groundbreaking new version of its RealBird Listing Publisher an innovative, fully web-based product [...]

According to a recent survey of more than 2,000 U.S. Internet users conducted by web metrics firm comScore (together with the Kelsey Group), online reviews have a big impact on consumers when it comes to offline spending.
The study, which was carried out last October, examined the impact of online reviews on offline spending at restaurants [...]

A recent press release from AT&T (Yellow Pages) revealed some interesting information for local businesses, the Local Advertising Journal reported last December 18. Here are some interesting statistics from the survey they conducted using 1,000 small businesses across the U.S.:
* twice as many small businesses use the Yellow Pages as opposed to other forms of [...]

“It’s the next generation of the mobile Internet,” says mobile pioneer Nihal Mehta, in a recent article published in the Chicago-based Advertising Age magazine (www.adage.com).
Mehtawho was named an M-Commerce Baron by Newsweek in 2006, and the founder of ipsh!, one of the first full-service mobile marketing agencies is referring to his new local-search/networking service, BuzzD.
BuzzD [...]