Explaining the basics of local and social marketing to clients and prospects is a tough task for companies, who might come off as patronizing. Why not give them a book?

A couple of years ago, Yodle CEO Court Cunningham wrote Local Online Advertising for Dummies, which did a great job explaining local advertiser options. Now, Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman has done the same for social media. Goodman calls it: “Engagement Marketing: How Small Business Wins in a Socially Connected World.”

As industry analysts, we look to Goodman for all kinds of insights into SMBs at every level. This book is more geared towards the basics of the engagement marketing cycle — as a means of managing good word of mouth.

Goodman defines the cycle as providing the “Wow! Experience”; Enticing customers to stay in touch; and Engaging customers via social media. She emphasizes that SMBs really need to develop nuance when they are applying messaging via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and G+. Each has different strengths.

While a lot of SMBs don’t think they really have much to say – a real problem in working with them for social media — Goodman provides insights into possible subjects, and case studies on how and when to apply social media techniques, including discussions, promotions, events, polls/surveys, shared information and news and announcements.

Groupon Rewards — “the easiest rewards program in the world” — rolled out nationally this week after tests in 36 markets that began in October. The product is Groupon’s answer to the emerging “transaction marketing” space that many believe will be the natural successor to the daily deals business. BIA/Kelsey Marketplaces has counted more than 24 vendors vying in this segment, with solutions ranging from Cartera to Swipely.

In Groupon’s model, consumers register a credit or debit card with Groupon. Every time they shop at a participating merchant, they can get points that can be applied to a Groupon at the merchant. Spending is automatically tracked, and reward vouchers are unlocked when goals are hit.

Merchants set reward terms, such as free deserts or spa treatments after a certain number of trips or dollars spent. They don’t need to participate in Groupon’s voucher business, but Groupon gets a commission based on the value of the reward when it is redeemed. As part of Rewards, merchants receive reports assessing the profitability of their Groupon campaigns.

A full report is being issued for our Marketplaces clients.

The local event calendars are filling up. A new event we’ll be attending is The Street Fight Summit West, which in June 5 at Bently Reserve in San Francisco, a classy location.

Street Fight head Laura Rich tells us that the event will be more tech-oriented than the company’s two day East Coast event, which takes place in late October, and is inevitably more media oriented. Both events ultimately aim to reflect the latest in hyperlocal developments.

Among the 30 speakers set to present are a number of our friends, including Topix CEO Chris Tolles, AOL Local SVP Mark Josephson, Where CEO Walt Doyle, Closely CEO Perry Evans, local pioneer Rick Blair, local and tech news pioneer Jon Weber, and Yelp Biz Dev leader Mike Ghaffry. There are also many companies that we are looking forward to learning about; and a Merger & Acquisition panel.

Readers can get a 20 % off rate using this code: BIAKELSEY20. Click here to register.

If anybody wonders whether the considerable “legs” of Facebook justifies a valuation now set for $83 Billion, have a listen to a terrific BIA/Kelsey Webinar on Facebook’s IPO, featuring Trada CEO Niel Robertson Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom, and Plink Co-Founder Peter Vogel (and BIA/Kelsey analysts Jed Williams, Matt Booth and Jeanne Dattilo).

People have to understand that “Facebook is more than advertising,” said Trada’s Robertson. “It is a platform that takes people through the digital marketing funnel. It lets you acquire prospects and move them through the different stages,” he said.

It will be more of a challenge over time as Facebook moves its client relationships down scale from the giant brand companies to mid market brands and SMBs. Creative is really hard at those levels. But the basic idea of collecting fans is a winner all around. “It’s like collecting email addresses you can use over and over again,” he said. “Fans amplify your own message.”

Wildfire’s Ransom said that most of the trends for Facebook in social media are very positive. “There was a lot of anxiety from businesses about the Timeline,” she noted. But Wildfire studies show that Timeline has proved to be a smashing success, with a 22 percent jump in photo sharing, and a 90 percent jump in video sharing.

The challenge for Facebook is get beyond the sheer quantity of Facebook friends. “How do you engage them? Who are the right fans? The valuable fans?” asks Ransom. Facebook is getting better and better coming up with answers. And “there are more tools coming out.”

Plink’s Vogel, meanwhile, noted that Facebook watchers are looking for signs that the company will break out big in transactions and payments – an area enabled by its games-based Credits feature. It hasn’t happened yet – perhaps the Facebook’s 30 percent “tax” on transactions performed via credits.

Vogel, however, expressed confidence that the transactions and payments space will soon break out. The company is known for constant adjustment until “it gets things right,” he said.

If Facebook does get transactions and payments right, that “will be more than enough to justify its valuation,” added BIA/Kelsey’s Matt Booth. Facebook is “the biggest website that’s ever existed,” said Booth. Indeed, classifying it as a ‘website’ is misleading since the company encompasses so many things. And will encompass even more as it begins to buy a lot of companies to round out its offerings. “The entire U.S. display market won’t sustain Facebook,” he said.

BIA/Kelsey’s Jed Williams said one of those forms will inevitably be an ad network – an ‘AdSense’ for social,” he called it. Williams also predicted that Facebook will march quickly into the deals and offers space. It will introduce a new offers tool for managed service accounts such as Macy’s and extend down market, he predicted. Mobile is another mega-opportunity, although a risk as well since it hasn’t yet been monetized.

BIA/Kelsey’s Jeanne Dattilo, a BIA/Kelsey valuation expert, said signs were very good for Facebook’s valuation to hold up. She noted that Facebook’s EBITDA of 56 percent last year has got to be considered “really impressive.” Google was in the mid-30s; Yahoo was in the mid 20s.

Listen to a replay of the Webinar here:

Last November, major players in the newspaper industry bought Travidia as the cornerstone of a new shopping strategy. Travidia had been mostly known for its print to digital circular business, but it had recently repositioned itself with FindnSave, a new shopping platform that included digital circulars, along with inventory search via eBay’s Milo.com, and slots for deals, offers and coupons.

Investing newspapers represented local titles reaching 80 percent of the U.S. population. They included Advance Digital, A. H. Belo Corporation, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., Cox Media Group, The E. W. Scripps Company, Gannett Co., Inc., GateHouse Media, Inc., Hearst Corporation, Lee Enterprises, MediaNews Group, The McClatchy Company, and The Washington Post Co.

Today, FindnSave announced the appointment of Ben T Smith IV to lead the effort as an outsider more wedded to consumer preferences then to newspaper sales requirements. Smith is the founder of Merchant Circle, and previously served as CEO and founder of Spoke.com, a LinkedIn-like social site for professionals.

In a discussion with BIA/Kelsey, Smith noted that FindnSave will have to be both a social experience, utilizing tablets and smart phones, as well as a “lean back” experience. “Shopping is not a lean forward and search” medium, he says. “It is a series of destinations.”

Smith says he plans to bring his experience as a Silicon Valley insider to bear, and in fact, will move the company’s headquarters from exurban Chico CA to the Valley. “Six or seven person teams make things happen,” he says. “We’ll have a series of teams, including mobile talent and people with a bunch of social DNA. There will also be a series of Apps addressing very specific demographics.”

Ultimately, FindnSave will serve “two constituencies – and newspapers aren’t one of them,” says Smith. “The constituencies are consumers and major advertisers. People looking for 49 cent chicken aren’t the same people who are flipping Nordstrom or Macy’s ads,” he observes.

We’re seeing three models in the new loyalty and engagement space: “punch cards” where merchants reward you based on how often you come back; “Frequent flyer” or diner points that give you a leg up on airline or hotel points for shopping; and the “universal currency” model that hands out points towards programs of your choosing from a broad number of participating merchants.

The latter is being pursued by Local Bonus, a one year old company headed by former banking consultant Derek Webster. The eight-person company is based in New York and has raised $500,000 in seed funding. It has launched in New York, Sacramento, Portland, Ore., Denver and Seattle and reports 800 merchant customers at this point. Sales are a combination of in-house and partnerships with existing sales orgs.

It is not exactly virgin territory. There is currently an intense amount of activity in the loyalty space– BIA/Kelsey counts 20+ companies. Banks and credit card companies are making the biggest bets and have some advantages, including the ability to broadly track transactions. But Webster questions whether they’ll stay committed given that it represents an untraditional market for them, and their various compliance issues. “They have very little engagement with just a low, single (digit) percentage of their customers engaged in their products,” he says.

Local Bonus’ winning differentiator, meanwhile, is its universal currency model, which Webster calls a “modern version of the Green Stamps.” Without universal points, “you never get an award anywhere,” he says.

“You get one stamp here, two punches there. In the end, you might have enough points for 1/10 of a frozen yogurt. ” Under Local Business’ scheme, consumers can easily add up points from many of the local merchants they go to. They can also get “wolf pack” bonuses if five or more members buy at a given location.

Webster adds that Local Bonus will be single-mindedly focused on providing a compelling value proposition to consumers and merchants alike: perpetual offers that any merchant can tap into without any opt-in required. “You just sign up once with any existing credit or debit card,” says Webster. “A lot of merchants want more help; make it fun and exciting to shop,” adds Webster – ideally, without having to hand out the massive discounts associated with the daily deals space.

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.

American Express is all over the deals and promotions space, with its Link Like Love campaign on Facebook; Twitter offers; and Geo-based deals on FourSquare. Its Serve product also has been providing deals for AOL’s Patch.com.

Until now, there has been little response from the bank-originated credit card companies: MasterCard or Visa. Today, MasterCard announced its own, initial deals initiative: “MasterCard Offers Services,” a daily deals and promotions distribution effort for its bank members. At the same time, MC promises that consumers will have a “simple, easy-to-navigate technology system.”

Initially, MasterCard is teaming with Local Offer Network, a deals aggregator and network. Member banks will be able to pick and choose deals in various formats and vertical segmentation from local and regional merchants. Vertical segmentation will likely include shopping, travel and experiences. Content will be available by the end of this quarter.

MasterCard has also been working with loyalty providers such as NextJump to provide them with anonymized data. It is not clear whether MasterCard will also be working with merchants to enlist them in deals. It also doesn’t appear that there there is a loyalty angle with the arrangement. Perhaps that will be included in the next phase. Last year, MasterCard reported that it had 37 million merchants and 63 billion annual transactions coming through its network.

Many banks already work in the promotions space with various loyalty and engagement programs such as Cartera Commerce’s OfferLink and Edo Interactive. The relationships reinforce the banks’ merchant relationships by providing them with extra value. It also keeps the commissions in house (i.e. away from e-wallet schemes), and reinforces their own brands as trusted commerce channels.

One of the big bets in 2012 is that merchants will transition from one-time deals to loyalty efforts that keep bringing customers back. Swipely is one of the more ambitious efforts in a loosely defined space that also includes players such as Cartera Commerce, Edo Interactive, LevelUp, CardSpring and Kostizi.

Swipely’s ambition is to provide a “turnkey loyalty program” to merchants, who pay the company based on generated sales. It is targeting “Big SMBs” with revenues between $500k to $3.5 million who accept credit cards — beyond Square.

The Providence-based company has raised $8.5 million from investors that include Index Ventures, FirstRound Capital, Greylock Partners, Lowercase Capital and angel investor Ron Conway. Launched in May 2010 in Providence, the site has now launched in Boston and San Francisco, with launches imminent in New York and Washington D.C.

It has outside sales in those markets, and some inside sales as well. Over 350 merchants have signed up.

Consumers sign up to the service once, providing a credit card of their choice to link to merchant deals. They can sign up via word of mouth, or come in via merchants’ email lists or social media. After consumers opt into a merchant deal (typically $10 off and/or merchant loyalty points), they receive followup email promotions based on their purchasing history and purchasing frequency, and guided by day-parts, day of week and other factors.

We talked with CEO Angus Davis, a co-founder of TellMe and also a Netscape vet. Swipely has the advantage of not requiring any change in consumer behavior, he says, noting that 93 percent of people can just deploy their pre-existing credit cards. “There are no coupons, no vouchers. And merchants don’t need to upgrade in the store.”

The service has been especially built “with the goal of calculating the information behind transactions and tying the Web to payment networks,” adds Davis. “It is about more than moving money.”

And apparently, it is about more than social media, which was the site’s initial focus. “Social media is not as compelling as saving money and (receiving) rewards,” says Davis. He suggests that in the context of working with merchants, social is primarily useful to “review purchases in a seamless way.”

Home and Trade lead sites often take a simple, category-by-category directory approach, but visual contractor rankings might make more sense, argues Jiyan Wei, Co-founder of BuildZoom. Wei says that his team canvassed Home and Trade sites such as Angie’s List, ServiceMagic, RedBeacon, Thumbtack and others and noted that many don’t do much more than provide basic listing data and reviews.

Even if the Home and Trade sites are generating good traffic, they aren’t always producing a lot of leads, says Wei. That’s because consumers don’t have much to go on. Enter BuildZoom, which has developed a comprehensive ranking system. The company’s Big Data approach is based on assorted information from state licensing boards and Better Business Bureaus; crowd sourcing via social media sites; insurance and bonding status; and self-provided information.

BuildZoom’s “Pro Ranking” provides consumers with information on up to 25 candidates per job. For $100 a month, the site will provide consultative services to drive up ranking and search results, including access to copywriters, photo placement etc. “The core asset is consumer value,” notes Wei. Sites that charge commissions to contractors could have an element of built-in bias. The site also earns revenue from sponsored placement.

The site, founded in August 2010, is angel-funded and currently receives over 250,000 unique visitors a month. More than 8,000 businesses have registered, and it has 120 paying customers. A handful of sales people have been assigned in Arizona and southern California, but they are not limited geographically.

“We already have lots of East Coast contractors related to remodeling projects in New Jersey, Georgia and North Carolina,” says Wei. He adds that Home and Trade is seen as just the first of many possible verticals for the company.