The June calendar is definitely filling in. It is the most active month in memory. I’ll be attending five events – three in San Francisco, two in San Diego. As Richard Rogers says: “June is bustin’ out all over.”

In San Francisco, we’ll be at StreetFight Summit West on June 5. Get a 20% discount if you use Code “BIAKELSEY20.” On June 18, we’ll be at Converge Labs Social-Loco event June 18. Our own event, Mobile Local Media, of course, is June 27.

At MLM, Mike Boland has put together a great one day program, uniquely focusing on the big issues surrounding mobile monetization (even more important and timely, perhaps, given Facebook’s revelation that it can’t do as much with mobile monetization as it had initially suggested).

MLM will feature VCs Stewart Alsop and David Hornik, and top speakers from Google, Yelp, eBay/PayPal, AT&T, SuperMedia, others. For us, this is where the action is. We’ll do a free webinar around the event on May 22. Register for the Webinar here.

Converge Lab’s Social-Loco event, meanwhile, considers how brands work within the social-local ecosystem – a valuable approach. The event will feature social-oriented speakers from Facebook, FourSquare, Nokia, HearSay, Waze and others. Converge is providing a 25% discount to the BIA/Kelsey community. Click here for a direct link to the discount registration.

I’ll also be at The San Diego Venture Summit June 6, featuring a discussion with Elevation’s Roger McNamee, and San Diego Interactive Day, which is a strong agency-oriented event June 15. I’ll look forward to seeing speakers from ExactTarget and others there.

Business to Consumer (B2C) companies have tried to invade the Business to Business (B2B) space in multiple instances; almost always with disasterous results. The logic for B2C companies is always there: move up the value chain with great big accounts that require no branding efforts. But they don’t work.

What are the secrets of B2B? That’s what our former Kelsey colleague Sean Geehan tackles in The Executive B2B Executive Playbook, which reached #1 on the Amazon business bestseller list in January. Since leaving Kelsey, Sean has built the Geehan Group, an 18 member firm that advises top B2B players in a variety of areas, including best practices for building advisory boards.

Sean recounts the worst thing a B2B company can do: hire a P&G executive. They’ll spend a fortune on new logos and advertising and entertaining end users, such as sales and marketing personnel. But they never get to the point of their B2B company – it’s all about the engagement, collaboration and advocacy of your customer decision makers: top executives.

It is really more of a symbiotic effort to achieve sustainable, predictable, profitable growth – the goal for any company. But in a B2B company’s case, “customers are your brand manager.” And typically, they’re more knowledgeable about what they need then the B2B company itself.

To be successful, you have to move up the special B2B value chain: beyond being a commodity supplier or reliable supplier or problem solver to the golden land of being a trusted advisor or business partner. You know you’ve made it if you pass Sean’s “phone call test”: when the admin openly shares the decision-maker’s schedule and availability with you.

I don’t normally read business best sellers and have little patience for football coach platitudes. But this book is full of insights, case studies and practical tests.

The arrival of Groupon and Living Social four years ago appeared to be a no money down, fail-safe way to get ahold of small business accounts. But the followup hasn’t been easy, and the race to win SMB accounts is still anybody’s to win.

In fact, there is no single “disruptive” door into the marketplace , says Constant Contact Founder Randy Parker, who has been watching the transition of SMB marketing since 1995. Parker believes the richer opportunity is in SMB platforms that plug in “presence,” social and mobile opportunities from best-of-breed providers. He’s currently trying to do that with SMBApps, a startup that he’s been incubating for a couple of years.

What you have today is a bunch of SMB solutions that typically rank below aggregators such as Google, Yelp and Twitter on search pages, he says. SMBs, to their great consternation, have to work with each platform.

Where does the “feature creep” stop? he asks. Moreover, as it gets more and more complex, Parker fears that the vendors are overwhelming their customers. Meanwhile, the severe fragmentation in the space keeps driving the costs of merchant acquisition up.

Parker says the ideal solution manages three things: an SMB’s data (such as deals and menu items), the content side, such as blogs, social media and copy points), and visual presence. The best way to “future proof” the Web is to build a single Web presence with “pre-made building blocks” for social, email, click to call buttons, delivery tabs, promotional links and mapping.

What won’t work is the extension of new platform after new platform. All that does is result in under-performing and marginalized channels, he says. Take mobile, for instance. Mobile is extremely important, and results in 1 of 3 leads, he notes. But the people pushing dedicated mobile apps for SMBs instead of universal HTML pages are “in la la land. The typical SMB may get 35 installs of their app,” he says.

Parker appears at ILM East March 26-28 on the “Local Business Success” summary panel, along with Kudzu Founder Tom Bates and Schedulicity’s Dave Galvan. You can register here.

MerchantCircle, which was sold to Reply.com in May 2011, continues to rethink the traditional Yellow Pages small business model. The company today unveils a web site that is less oriented towards directory listings, and more oriented – it hopes — towards winning more consumer traffic, generating more SMB leads, and better monetization.

While the new platform has been launched on the core Merchant Circle site, it will soon be available on a white label basis for other publishers, such as Internet Yellow Pages and City Guides. A key driver of the move has been the company’s desire to leverage a larger consumer base for Reply’s “clicks or leads” model.

MerchantCircle has actually been moving towards a “social commerce” model for some time, in recent years adding Answers, community content and other features. But EVP Darren Waddell tells us that the site has now more clearly moved away from an IYP “silo” model, where consumers basically encounter a business and its merchant page.

“It is not about the merchant value proposition,” says Waddell. “It is about helping consumers to connect with local business owners in a meaningful way.” Consumers will be able to seek requests for quote, see pictures – which Waddell stresses are “really important”; build deals; enter business subscriptions; and access the company’s trove of six million+ pieces of user generated content. Merchants, meanwhile, move up from a simple IYP-like enhanced listing to Reply’s Marketplace.

“We really blew out the entire MerchantCircle front-end,” Waddell adds. “We’ve developed an entirely new look and feel.” In beta tests involving up to 10 percent of its user base, the new, improved MerchantCircle has yielded a 2.5 X improvement in consumer engagement.

Being consumer friendly has also required Merchant Circle to crack down on merchants that were aggressively gaming the site and hurting its credibility. “It was a small but loud minority,” notes Waddell. “Algorithmically, we’ve really cracked down on people gaming the system.”

Initially, some of its merchants have not been pleased with the changes, which put most non-featured businesses below the fold. Waddell notes that some merchants on the site’s forums have been “really upset,” but MerchantCircle is sticking with it’s more balanced approach.

In the long-run, the company believes that they’ll realize they’re better off with the consumer-friendly features. In the meantime, Waddell suggests that Merchant Circle has hit an effective balance , with 1.2 million active merchants being able to respond to a strong volume of consumer requests – a capability that he believes is unmatched in the industry.

Waddell appears at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston on our all-star “Local Business Success: Picking Winners” session, along with AT&T’s Maria Kermath, Schedulicity’s Dave Galvan and SMBApps’ Randy Parker . Register here.

Local isn’t easy, or even worthwhile. Chris Devore, Seattle-based co-founder of Judy’s Book, wants to remind entrepreneurs to stay away. In a new blog post, Devore gives three top reasons NOT to do a local + Online startup:

1- There’s no money in it
2- It doesn’t scale
3- It’s too obvious.

“ Combine expensive, high-touch selling, small budgets and high churn rates, and you have a perfect recipe for persistent negative margins,” says Devore. “There are literally millions of business opportunities that (are)…. better than the best local business I’ve ever seen.”

It’s a good blog post with sound reasoning. I suspect Devore, one of the most passionate entrepreneurs out there, has a major local project up his sleeve and will be socializing it at ILM East in Boston March 26-28.

We’ve been having a lot of fun putting together the ILM West conference December 12-14 in San Francisco.

As noted in our Webinar yesterday (slides here), the conference has really come together with cutting-edge speakers, important research, and the introduction of several great sessions, including a major focus on SoLoMo (Social-Local-Mobile) on Day 3.

You already know about our keynotes and lead speakers, which include Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, AllThings D‘s Kara Swisher, Entertainment.com CEO Dean Debiase, Cox Target Media CEO Michael Vivio and Dex Media CSO David Sharman.

Some new adds to the program include a special session on targeting local consumers and merchants with Yahoo’s targeting manager Jeff Minich, and LocalYokel Founder Dick O’Hare. We also have a great panel on the next wave of Deals with CBS Local Media President Ezra Kucharz, Belo Interactive GM Joe Weir, Thrillist VP Mike Rothman and Local Offer Network CEO Dan Hess.

And then there is our deep dive into verticals, featuring an A list group of vertical executives, including eBay U.S. Classifieds GM Larry Illg, Avvo CEO Mark Britton, Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney and Trulia CEO Pete Flint

We’ll also have in-depth sales interviews with Yodle CEO Court Cunningham and Google Global Channels Sales head Todd Rowe. And a great look at best practices for working with Facebook featuring Trada CEO Niel Robertson, Oodle CEO Craig Donato and Kenshoo Local GM Sivan Metzger.

And that’s just the tip of the ice-berg. This is a major, two-and-half day event full of learning, networking and insights. There is much more to come. You can register here.

It is an article of faith that small businesses drive the U.S. economy, acting as incubators of innovation, and leading all forms of employment growth, especially for immigrants determined to raise their living standards. I’ll always remember New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani citing New York’s surging immigrant base as the source of the city’s booming economy in the late 1990s.

Now comes the contrarian view of New Yorker writer James Surowiecki. “The fetishization of small business continues apace,” writes Surowiecki. “Some of the support derives from the real virtues that small companies offer – diversity of choice, connection to local communities –(but) the truth is that, from the prospective of the economy as a whole, small companies are not the real drivers of growth.

“One can see this by looking at the track record of the world’s economies,” he says. Small business-driven countries such as Greece, Portugal, Span and Italy are basket cases. “The countries with the lowest percentage of workers employed by small businesses are Germany, Sweden, Denmark and the U.S. – some of the strongest economist of the world.

“It reflects a simple reality: small businesses are, on the whole, less productive than big business,” says Surowiecki. “Big businesses are able to enjoy economies of scale and scope. Big businesses are also better able to make investments in productivity-enhancing technologies and systems.”

Anticipating arguments that small businesses retain their vital role because they are the ultimate driver of innovation, Surowiecki points to a recent study by Erik Hurst and Bejnjamin Pugsley. “Only a tiny fraction of small business owners have any interest in becoming big-business owners, or even in bringing a new idea to market,” he notes. “Most are people who simply want to run a small company, do work they enjoy, and have some control over their own financial lives.”

Facebook has become an important marketing channel to SMBs, according to InfoGroup’s quarterly Small Business Marketing Outlook. Twenty percent of those surveyed said Facebook was extremely/very important, and 24 percent said it was somewhat important.

Twitter’s important, too. Twenty-four percent said Twitter was either somewhat or very important. Local coupon sites were also cited by 26 percent as somewhat or very important.

In general, 31 percent expect to boost their budgets over the next 12 months. Fifty-seven percent expect their marketing budgets to remain flat. Ten percent expect a dip in their marketing budgets. Sixty percent also said that their website was the most important marketing technique, while 50 percent said email marketing was important.

As deals verticalize, we’re intrigued by opportunities for B2B plays. MarketSharing is offering deals tailored for SMBs (office cleaning discounts, office copier repair, etc.).

Now, Cardinal Health, a Fortune 20 company, has launched a pilot with Local Offer Network to provide up to 70 percent off professional health practitioner “consumables,” such as medical gloves, hand santizer gel, respirators etc. Daily deals and multi-day deals are being offered.

“It boosts the purchasing power of medical, dental and veterinary practices of all sizes,” says LON CEO Dan Hess, who suggests that such “unique product and experience,” niche deal offerings are becoming one of the next big waves in the deals space. More generally, bigger ticket items are also coming on strong in the consumer market, such as medical procedures. “If all else fails, promote a deal with a laser in it,” he jokes.

Local Offer Network provides a white label deal platform, aggregation and syndication network services. The 17-person, Chicago-based company operates in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, and publishes about 7,000 deals a day. The company also produces and recently re-launched Dealradar, a personalized deal aggregator now in 130 markets.

It isn’t well remembered, of course, but Apple had made an early stab at being an online service: EWorld. The successor to AppleLink, it licensed the platform from AOL, syndicated a lot of content, and made some stabs at leveraging the huge Apple community. At a time of forced cutbacks in 1997, and uncomfortable being tied to AOL for technology, Apple gave up on E-World,.

At that time, it seemed to retreat from media and community — our world — to a world that focused on technology innovation. But that was, of course, before it came full circle with iTunes and then its ingenious App Store, which enfranchised thousands and thousands of content entrepreneurs.

A couple of summers ago, there I was in the middle of Yellowstone, miles from anywhere, on a horse back riding adventure. I was enjoying the solitude and nature’s delights. And the lead cowboy pulls me aside, and pulls out an iPhone. He had something to show me: a beautiful Yellowstone app he had created in the off season.

Apple gets criticized for creating a new walled garden, perhaps rightfully so. But I suspect that the legacy of Steve Jobs will ultimately be about his technology of freedom, and his pursuit of excellence. All of it, of course, “designed in California.”