ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of do-ers and innovators that are transforming and re-defining the local space.

Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon Vice Chair/Amex Board Member/Sports team owner/AOL mastermind), along with keynotes/interviews from Jason Calacanis, Leslie Berland, Jay Herratti, Michael Zimbalist and Michael Silberman.

Other highlights of the 2 ½ day event includes a pre-conference rundown on Local search run by Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide; a full plate of Top BIA/Kelsey research and forecasts; a special Venture Capital panel; and innovator panels on Social, Mobile, Deals, Video and Hyperlocal (the latter co-moderated with Merrill Brown.)

KEYNOTES/KEYNOTE DISCUSSIONS
• Ted Leonsis: Owner, Monumental Sports (Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards;) The Vice Chair of Groupon;, Board member of Amex, former Vice Chair of AOL; Author, The Business of Happiness
• Jason Calacanis: CEO, Mahalo; Investor. Calacanis’ career has been at the cutting edge of local and social media and reflects all the big trends, from his development of The Silicon Alley Reporter to Weblogs (AOL), Mahalo, and the creation of TechCrunch50 and Launch.
• Leslie Berland, Vice President, Social Strategy, American Express. Berland’s a major deal maker deeply involved in Amex’s mega FourSquare and Facebook deals.
• Jay Herratti, CEO, CityGrid Media. Herratti always gets top rankings at our events. He runs IAC’s super quad of the CityGrid Media Network, Citysearch, UrbanSpoon and InsiderPages.
• Michael Zimbalist, VP, Research Operations, New York Times Co. Zimbalist leads the NYT’s 12 person research unit. He’s deeply immersed in cutting edge social, mobile, tablet and video efforts.
• Michael Silberman, GM, New York Magazine Silberman is the mastermind of NYMag’s development of a super set of verticals catering to the “New York state of mind.”).

FEATURED SPEAKERS
• Bill Bice, CEO, SpaBoom
• Merrill Brown, co-founder. MSNBC.com, Court TV
• Jim Douglass, EVP, Cartera Commerce
• Jere Doyle, CEO, EverSave
• Walt Doyle, CEO, Where
• Adam Japko, CEO, Digital Sherpa
• Maria Kermath, Dir.,, New Tech & Sales Apps, AT&T Advertising Sales
• Mark Josephson, SVP, AOL Local
• Charlie Kim, CEO, Next Jump
• John McIntyre, CEO, Pixelfish
• Randa Minkarah, SVP, Revenue, Fisher Communications
• Randy Parker, President, SMB Apps
• Mark Schmulen, GM, Social Media, Constant Contact
• Andrew Shotland, Publisher, Local SEO Guide
• Andy Slater, VP, Digital Agency Sales, Katz 360
• Christopher Tippie, CEO, FindNSave
• Darren Waddell, EVP, Product and Corporate Marketing, Reply.com

Join hundreds of senior level local executives at ILM East for the local community’s best networking and insights. You can register here for earlier bird rates.

Internet Pioneer Ted Leonsis

We’ve wrapped ILM West in San Francisco this week — another terrific show. Lots of great stuff. Thanks very much to the 50+ speakers, 32 sponsors, nearly 600 local leaders and various #ILMWest Tweeters who participated.

Now our attention is focused back on our research and analysis… and to ILM East March 26-28 in Boston, featuring an initial lineup that includes the great Ted Leonsis (here’s his Wikipedia entry), Jason Calacanis (CEO, Mahalo) Michael Zimbalist (dean of NY Times research), Jay Herratti (CEO, CityGrid), Michael Silberman (GM, NYmag.com); Charlie Kim (CEO, Next Jump); and Merrill Brown (Carnegie Fellow, co-founder MSNBC, Court TV, etc.)

Our goal with all the shows, of course, is to provide “context and contacts” for executives, entrepreneurs and investors building the local space. The testimonials now pouring in make us think that we were quite successful.

Internally, insights from ILM thought leaders, and the show’s in-depth research will definitely help the analysts from our six research programs shape the next waves of local innovation. Here are some of my personal takeaways:

1. No expectations of a runaway local winner. Some years, we think we’ve ID’d the next big thing. But this year, nobody really thinks that Facebook, Groupon, Living Social, Yelp or FourSquare is going to disrupt and run away with the entire market. This is one fragmented space. Google remains the only wildcard.

2. Time to rethink digital and traditional media separation. The New York Times, Washington Post, Morris and others have re-integrated their prints and online units. They’ve seen the light from Digital First. It gets better. The San Diego Union Tribune just named Mike Hodges, its digital leader, as president of the entire operation. But as Clark Gilbert points out, it is still important to delineate where it makes sense to integrate, and where it makes sense to keep operations separate.

3. Hail to the Phone! Or at least, to phone calls. As Marchex’s Matthew Berk brings up, the technology aids for search and discovery don’t point to replacing phone calls for leads. They point to reinforcing and supplementing phone calls. “The explosion of mobile is about being call-ready,” he notes.

4. There’s life in video and audio formats as add-on channels. We heard a lot from broadcasters at the show (i.e. Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman). What really struck us is what a great local promotional add on they are to Internet verticals (i.e. IHeart Radio). That’s mostly what they are.

5. We’re all in the games business – at least, a little bit. Kara Swisher disagrees, but games are being deployed in many walks of local, with new demographics, added frequency and stickiness. Just looks at what GrubHub is doing. It is something that leads providers learned years ago.

6. The deal platforms appear to be interchangeable, with little changing costs. We’ve been impressed by the development of white label deal platforms. But it was kind of shocking for us to see several major media outlets give so little credit to their platform providers.

The ability to marry store inventory with search and promotions is an intriguing one for interactive local media. But what closes the loop on this vision?

Sherry Thomas-Zon, VP, Local Shopping, Local Corp – the new name for Local.com – suggested this week at ILM West in San Francisco that inventory can serve as an anchor for a 360 shopping offering. The key is to break the components of shopping into functional departments instead of making it “one size fits all.”

“The opportunity is to add value across the retail mix,” says Thomas-Zon, former President of Krillion, which was recently acquired by Local. You don’t just want to have shopping content. “You want a shopping module. It is what product search looks like on site in a mobile context.

Speed and convenience is a key part of it. Components include grab and go shopping, need it now, where to buy, nearby stores. She notes there are different types of shopping.

For instance, there might be high consideration items, contrasting with shopping types such as low cost replenishment, habitual purchases with limited decision making, big box stores, off price stores and small format products.

Google’s local efforts have grown tremendously under the direction of Marissa Mayer, and now encompass a wide range of products, including Google Maps, Google Places, Zagat, Google Offers, and Get Online a new SMB initiative.

At ILM West this week in San Francisco, Head of Local Consumer Marketing Jeff Aguero provided a rich portrait of Google’s thinking on local. “We are ten percent of where we are and where we need to be,” says Aguero. “There is so much that needs to be done.” He adds that Google is eager to work “closely with partners to create a rich opportunity” for all.

“The local experience is mostly disconnected,” says Aguero. “It is not consistent across user experience,” whether people are engaged in researching, finding, experiencing, reviewing, or sharing. Google’s goals are ultimately to “get more local searches, more customers, more reviews, better content, higher engagement, and more businesses online.”

Local is obviously an important part of Google’s core search business – 20 percent of desktop search is now local- oriented. But local is “fundamentally about places. Any type of action; how does it get there; how do you share what I am doing about my experience (i.e. photos, check-in); how do I save money on a deal?”

Within Places, Place Pages is a major effort. Currently, there are 50 million, dynamically generated Place Pages worldwide. Of these, eight million have been claimed by the business themselves. “It is the greatest catalog of place data on the Web,” notes Aguero.

The big trend is the convergence of Place Pages and Host Pages. “They have the same type of audiences in different ways, “ he says. “The functionality of both entities are likely to converge.”

Expanding ratings and reviews is also clearly a major initiative. Google Places is now getting more than a million ratings per month.

Mobile, meanwhile, is in the middle of it all. “Fifty percent of maps usage is mobile,” Aguero points out. “Mobile search usage has surpasses desktop usage on holidays. “People are using mobile phones as guides to the real world on an ongoing basis. Recently, the company introduced TalkBin, which leverages mobile to provide real time customer feedback.

Google Latitudes, a check-in product, is also is getting a lot of attention, and already has 10 million users. “It is not just how many people are enjoying and sharing products,” says Aguero, noting that Latitudes has been greatly enhanced by the introduction of Google Plus social circles.

And then there is Google’s Get Online initiative, a partnership with Intuit that lets SMBs claim a place, update information and provides a free web site. Get Online started in Michigan and is now in 14 states. New tools will continue to be added, says Aguero. “We need better toolkits for businesses.” Recently, the company introduced Adwords Express, which lets businesses set up an AdWords program in ten minutes.

Google has experienced five times growth in mobile search during the past two years, according to Google Mobile’s Surojit Chatterjee, who was keynoting our SoLoMo Morning at ILM West in San Francisco.

Mobile usage generally complements the desktop, with huge spikes on the weekend and in the evening and at lunch, says Chatterjee. “When people go out for lunch, people are searching more on their mobile than on the desktop.

Chatterjee says that vertical segments have been especially high with mobile. Almost 17 percent of auto related queries are mobile; 17 percent of travel and car rental; and 32 percent of restaurants.

Mobile also is very strong for converting searchers. Seventy seven percent of mobile searchers contacted a business; 44 percent lead to a purchase; 59 percent lead to a merchant

Proximity and location, in fact, has become an important criteria for Google search ranking. Make your ads location aware and help users make a decision quickly,” says Chatterjee.

It’s obvious that the deals business is going to quickly move to a broader set of offerings. But how? That was the question posed today at ILM West in San Francisco.

Belo Interactive GM Joe Weir noted that deals remains a great space to be in. Demographics of Belo’s deals are dominated by college educated women with a lot of disposable income — deals users extend many missions for Belo, he noted.

But CBS Local Media President Ezra Kucharz said that deals need to change because merchants and consumers are fatigued. Email open rates are declining significantly. And merchants want a higher revenue share.

Kucharz’s solution is to provide a richer experience embracing SoLoMo (social local media) and segmenting deals differently. CBS is adding experiential deals that may be once in a lifetime experiences; aggregating deals; allowing consumer to rate and review deals.

Some things he would like to do, however, aren’t necessarily going to be easy. For instance, he might like to add more deals from big national brands, but “they are being tight with deals,” he says.

Experiential deals have also been embraced by Thrillist, a site that is geared towards young men, or “dudes,” as VP Mike Rothman call\s them. Thrillist has developed experiences such as micro brew pub beer crawls. But these are hard to scale from market to market; What works in New York doesn’t necessarily work in Detroit, says Rothman.

The most extreme position on deals was taken by Michael Tavani, co-founder, ScoutMob. The idea of “Daily deals make us cringe internally at the office,” he says. ScoutMob is a mobile service based entirely for on the go mobile users. Its customers have no idea where they are having dinner that night, and they don’t want to pay in advance for deals, he says.

The company, which considers itself a “reverse FourSquare,” takes $3 or $4 commissions for customers that it points to merchants. Instead of printing out deals, customers simply show the deal coupon on their phones to merchants.

The emergence of deals has reinvigorated local merchant promotions, but traditional promotions leaders think they can absorb some of the best parts of deals as part of their “offer cloud” while strengthening their existing direct marketing businesses, according to panelists speaking at ILM West in San Francisco.

Entertainment.com CEO Dean DeBiase said that the traditional Buy One Get One Free premium coupon book, which sells books in 150 markets, is now actively adding deals to its online product, along with other features, such as maps and reviews. “We are repositioning Entertainment to go heavily into digital.”

At the same time, DeBiase says it is critical that Entertainment’s digital upgrade continue to attract a mix of “old schoolers” that provide low value offers, such as consumer packaged goods; and Win- Winners, with high value offers. “We are spending most of our time in Win Winners,” he says.

What he wants to avoid, however, is the “short timer” with low quality , unsustainable offers, which is how he characterizes much of what groupon and Living Social initially focused on. Entertainment.com has 80 percent retention and most values the long term relationships, he adds.

Cox Target Media President Michael Vivio said his plans are to create synergy between the company’s huge and low cost Val-Pak print coupon business and deals. “We are in the process of disrupting our business model,” he said.

“Our premise is that merchants can have two offers in the same envelope.” Valpak is in a unique position to give away its printing for free in order to push the prepaid offers, he says. We are teaching people to prepay for coupons. Not many companies can brag about a distribution list of 500 million envelopes a year, he adds. Like DeBiase, Vivio emphasizes that Valpak’s key asset is its merchant database. Our retention rate is as high as other people’s churn rates, he notes.

Viveo and DeBiase at ILM West

Universities stimulate major business zones in various cities. So do airports. Hence the Dulles tech corridor in DC. So do the success of major companies.

People leave with their stock options and develop their own companies. Witness Wang in Boston; Microsoft in Seattle; AOL in DC; Qualcomm in San Diego. Too many to count in Silicon Valley. Qualcomm alone has lead to at least 500 wireless companies in San Diego.

But the impact dies down after a while, and local development slows. That makes it harder for a market to recruit quality engineers and other positions to the area.

Now, two former AOL principals seeking to re-inject the infusion of cash that AOL once provided for the DC metro area: Steve Case and Ted Leonsis.

Case and Leonsis – interestingly, competing investors in Living Social and Groupon, respectively — have announced a $450 million Revolution Growth Fund to jumpstart the DC area’s technology startups, and hopefully, find the next “Living Social.”

Both men have been major philanthropists in the DC area, but this, of course, is also a major business initiative.

Leonsis – owner of The Washington Caps and Washington Wizards, vice chair of Groupon, board member of Amex, investor in SB Nation, author of This Business of Happiness — – is keynoting ILM East, which is taking place March 26-28 in Boston. Can’t get enough AOL nostalgia? Former AOL Time Warner President and current CEO of Clear Channel Entertainment Bob Pittman, is keynoting the great lineup at ILM West Dec. 12-14).

ILM West is shaping up to be one of the great ones. Taking place Dec. 12-14 in downtown San Francisco, ILM West really reflects a sea change in local marketing from advertising to the new hybrid model of advertising and commerce (i.e. prepaid deals, reputation management, mobile app sales etc.).

We’ve made some big additions since our last update, starting with Google and Facebook. These add to the existing lineup, including our “rock stars” (Clear Channel CEO and industry legend Bob Pittman AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, Media News Group/Journal Register CEO John Paton and Deseret Media and former Harvard Business School Professor Clark Gilbert), and major sessions on deals, offers, verticals and the whole spectrum of local trends.

We will pursue three unique angles on Google at ILM West:

1- The local efforts, under Marissa Mayer’s local team. Jeff Aguero, head of local marketing, will present on everything local, from Zagat, to Google Places, to the Big G’s new “Get Online” program for SMBs. These strategies have really developed since this summer.

2- The global reseller effort. Global Channels head Todd Rowe will engage in an in-depth conversation with BIA/Kelsey President Neal Polachek on all his efforts.

3- Google Mobile. Mobile and Local Search exec Surojit Chatterjee will provide insights into this critical area for Google as part of our All SoLoMo morning on Day 3.

We’re also going deep with Facebook at ILM West. Facebook’s new local leader Matt Idema is our afternoon keynote on Day 2, with a lot of new details and a progress report on the local and vertical strategies. On Day 1, we are also taking a special look at working with Facebook’s platform with execs from Trada, Oodle and Kenshoo Local/Social weighing in. Eager but not sure how to play with Facebook? You will be when ILM West is done.

The SoLoMo event on Day 3 itself is going to be quite the cornerstone for ILM West. Curated by the research teams from our Social Local Media and Mobile Local Media programs, SoLoMo features top line data; and indepth and fresh looks at SoLoMo implementations from leaders at Google, AT&T Interactive, Zaarly, PayPal, XAd, JiWire and AppStack (Steve Espinosa’s new project.)

You can see the full agenda here. And register here.

Remember: We are making a donation to the SF/Marin County Food Bank for all registrations that come in by Thanksgiving.

For newspapers, the 1/3 circulation/1/3 display/1/3 classifieds revenue model of the print days hasn’t made the transition to online, and there doesn’t seem to be enough time to right the ocean liner. But as a local media channel, newspapers have been written off before their time. Newspapers, of course, remain the single largest source of local content. As analysts, we like them as a giant laboratory for online services, with hundreds of different tests in different markets.

David Carr’s must read Sunday profile on Media News Group and Journal Register Co. CEO John Paton in The New York Times showcases an industry executive as “change agent”. The profile of the ILM West Dual Keynoter (along with Deseret Media CEO Clark Gilbert) shows Paton on a mission to capture the best of the newspaper model that still works, and to abandon what does not. In his first year at Journal Register, notes Carr, Paton’s efforts boosted digital revenue by over 200 percent.

It helps that Paton hasn’t always been an ink-stained wretch (that’s what we used to call industry people). While he started in newspapers, he also worked as the leader of Canoe.com, a large news site, during the first dot-com bubble, and then invested in Hispanic media, buying El Diario La Prensa in New York and other Spanish-language properties, eventually forming (and running) impreMedia in 2003.

“Mr. Paton has become something of a darling among media thinkers for putting his business where his rhetoric is,” notes Carr. “He issued Flip cameras to all the reporters at Journal Register papers, helped create a newsroom cafe that’s open to the community in Torrington, Conn., and has been pushing to dump ancient proprietary newsroom software in favor of free, Web-based publishing tools. He has financed a lab to foster employee innovation, and the company has formed partnerships with a number of Web companies to provide news and information.”

As Carr notes, what began as a tidy little experiment has become perhaps the single biggest bet in the whole newspaper business: The Journal Register and MediaNews are now in 18 states, with over 800 print and digital products, with revenue of over $1.4 billion and 10,000 employees. The second-largest newspaper chain in America is now being run by someone who thinks that print is, if not exactly dead, dying a lot faster than anyone thought. “

Carr also note that Paton isn’t talking to himself, having added sharp tounged new media advocates (and newspaper critics) such as Emily Bell, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen to an advisory board.

“Mr. Paton hears all sorts of clocks ticking. His newspapers are mostly owned by hedge funds and investment banks, which are not known for patience, and part of the reason that the percentage of digital revenue is rising so fast is that the print revenue that it is compared with is dropping so precipitously,” notes Carr. ”Although he is something of an evangelist, he says he is also a pragmatist.”

We’re honored that John Paton and Clark Gilbert are doing back to back keynotes at ILM West, which takes places Dec. 12-14 in San Francisco. You can register here.