We like the idea of using corporations as a distribution base for media and services. In the 1990s, The Family Education Network built a great newsletter business distributed in corporate lobbies. The concept’s been widely extended with the addition of email and the ability to more effectively target employees based on different criteria.

NextJump, for instance, has built a business providing discounts and deals sent out as part of employee communications. The deals are generally aggregated from other sources, but it can target the offers based on buying and browsing habits. It takes a commission from sales. The service is free to companies.

Now we’re also looking at San Francisco-based AnyPerk, which shifts the employer shopping model to a premium offering, charging $5 a month per employee. CEO and Founder Taro Fukuyama tells us that the 15-person company — a graduate of Y Combinator — now has 2,500 companies signed up, distributing perks from 250 different marketers. Investors include Andressen Horowitz, SV Angel and a number of individuals, as well as Japanese-based funds .

Fukuyama says that AnyPerk’s goal is to use its volume-buying capability to drive discounts of 5-50 percent. It proves its value as a consumer-centric service from the get-go, rather than serving the interests of merchants. “We do everything we can to save them more than $5 a month” he says.

Typically, customers will start with 15 percent monthly discounts on mobile phones and services and work their way up to other products, specifically monthly utility products such as gyms, video services or rent. There may be 20 things you pay for every month, he says.

Entertainment, especially, stands out. AnyPerk’s top products, in order, are fitness, entertainment, travel and cell phone. Among its perk providers are Verizon, AMC, Redbox, Regal Entertainment Group, Equinox, AT&T, Budget, Zipcar, T-Mobile and LA Fitness.

Fukuyama, a native of Japan, tells us that employer shopping services are common in his homeland, where there are four major companies. But the concept is still relatively new to the U.S.

Payment processors and related companies work with most SMBs and are increasingly seen as a potential sales channel for reaching them with additional services. This week, we talked with one processor, Boston-based Merchant Warehouse, about its efforts to leverage its base of 75,000 business customers beyond terminal sales.

CEO Henry Helgeson told us the 15 year-old, 300 employee company got its start selling terminals, but has seen strong growth in new products such as integrated coupons that anchor its “Genius” customer engagement platform. A horde of companies have introduced coupons, for instance, but many businesses have no idea how to redeem them, given the constraints of their existing POS systems, he says. The rising use of mobile phones for payments and promotions has made it an especially big issue.

The move to integrate promotions such as coupons and a wide range of payment types into payment solutions has also changed how Merchant Warehouse works with its customers, which range from alternative payment companies such as LevelUp to value added resellers. “We are moving from working with tech teams to working with marketing teams,” he says.

What has become increasingly understood is how complex it all is. Many businesses had hoped to have a single point of presence for payments, just as they similarly had hoped to have a single search engine and online point of contact in the 1997-98 time frame, he says.

And as it turned out they had to work with 50 search engines and points of contacts, they’re beginning to see they have got to plan on working with a wide range of payment solutions. “They want one closed loop wallet. But there will be many, many wallets,” says Helgeson. There are 200 entry points in the POS value chain, he notes.

Olander’s new company, Local Viewpoints has won seed funding from Wavetable Labs. It launched at the end of March, starting with four sales people hitting businesses up in hometown Chicago, as well as other markets.

The company basically sends out a short survey after customers shop a location, providing instant feedback to the location, analytics (time of day, products purchased) and most importantly, an online review . The surveys take about a minute to complete.

Seventy-five businesses are currently subscribing to the service, which is $299 a year. Business categories range from chiropractors to furniture stores to plumbers to high-end restaurants.

“We’re trying to bridge together all the forms of customer feedback” and measuring customer satisfaction, including online reviews and customer feedback, says Olander. The problems with other sources is that customer feedback simply isn’t being captured, he adds. Just six percent of consumers are willing to write reviews. With the world going mobile, and everyone being just seconds away from providing feedback, however, there really are no excuses.

Local Viewpoints, of course, is not the only company focused on driving up reviews via short response surveys. We’ve recently covered the efforts by SupportLocal to drive up local business recommendations via a fast-paced, 27-question local recommendations page.

Here’s an interesting InfoGraph that Local Viewpoints has put together about the Word of Mouth space.

Is appointment scheduling poised to be a new anchor for service promotions? That vision –”look for an appointment, get a deal or upsell ” — has been articulated by a number of scheduling vendors, such as Agendize, FullSlate and Schedulicity. Most recently, RedBeacon founder Ethan Anderson has launched MyTime as a scheduling supermarket that allows shoppers to find discounted appointments at unfilled times.

Now comes Spafinder Last Minute, which provides same day and next day appointments. Started as “bTreated” by founder Josh Brenner, the company was acquired by SpaFinder last August. SpaFinder works with over 20,000 spa and wellness locations, and has recently spun off from the Booker platform service.

Now rebranded as “Last Minute,” it has initially launching in New York, where it has 50 merchants; Miami (25 merchants) and Chicago (25 merchants). Launches are expected this Summer and Fall in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, Toronto and Dallas.

Local sales teams will be hired in some of the markets, with other markets served by telemarketing efforts. The service can be filtered by category, daypart and neighborhood.

Brenner tells us that he is especially looking to see merchant defections from deals companies such as Groupon. “They are burnt out” from the high commissions. he says. Last Minute enables healthy levels of discounts.

Customers get a “really good deal,” with minimum discounts set at 30 percent to 50 percent off, says Brenner. Some spa treatment with very high margins, such has medical specialties and laser hair removal have discounted as high as 80 percent. SpaFinder, for its part, takes “sustainable” commissions of 20-25 percent (although the reality is that this isn’t far off from what many deals companies will negotiate for desirable merchants).

Brenner says the appeal of Last Minute is that it fills in empty slots. And it doesn’t “tarnish” the merchant’s brand.

At this time of year — pre-summer –most spas are booking a lot of massages, adds Brenner. Gyms are also booking a lot of classes. Most of the site’s users have been women. While men might buy spa treatments for wives or girlfriends, appointments are almost always booked by the persona receiving the actual treatment.

Will tech companies like Google, Apple, eBay/PayPal, Amazon, Microsoft, Square and Intuit move in on the role traditionally played by banks? It is a distinct possibility in the not-too-distant future, as digitalized transactions, mobile payments and offers, and digital wallets usher in a debit-oriented environment that loosens traditional ties to credit cards and bank branch activity – not to mention merchant advertising.

That’s the message from several panels at NACHA’s Payments 2013 this week in San Diego. Much of the shift will lean on Browser and Web-based purchasing that we associate with the likes of Amazon today, which will account for roughly 60 percent of digital transactions by 2015, or $12.08 Billion per Javelin Strategy & Research. The rest of the $20.7 Billion digital spending pie will come from Browser- only purchasing ($6.4 Billion), App only purchasing ($1.9 Billion), and Mobile POS payments (.4 Billion).

Javelin head James Van Dyke suggests that a lot of it depends on the consumer acceptance of mobile wallets. In June 2012, one-third of mobile users were already receptive to receiving rewards or offers based on location, he said. This will quickly jump with the rise of smart spending tech via bar codes, NFC and mobile proximity tech. And if today’s experience in market leader Europe is any guide, it will lead to “multiplying financial relationships, ” especially among Digital First younger people.

PayPal Head of Financial Innovations Dan Schatt colorfully suggested that the days of consumers as “cattle” are over. They are more like “free range chicken,” he says. But alternative payment companies like PayPal – which is often regarded as a disruptor – actually represents new kinds of growth opportunities for financial institutions and bricks & mortar stores.

Banks, for instance, can take deposits from Coinstar loose change-to-cash machines that hook up with PayPal and are located in thousands of grocery stores. “We generate more interchange revenue, not less,” he says. “So long as you are connected to the Internet, there are so many ways to surface data and five consumers compelling experiences,” says Schatt.

The new environment is also related to loyalty and understanding the consumer. It can level the playing the field for smaller merchants by providing higher quality service. “It is the tech arms dealers versus Amazon,” Schatt says. But he also notes that PayPal is just part of the equation for a company like eBay, whose efforts are oriented towards being “the center of someone’s life.”

Schatt noted that eBay has bought over a dozen companies related not only to banking, but also discovery and engagement uch as Red Laser and Milo in recent years. Payments are just a very small piece of a very compelling reason to spend and frequent retailers.

Visa has similar ambitions. It isn’t just about supporting banking needs anymore. “We power all monetization,” notes Jennifer Schulz, Visa’s head of Global eCommerce. “If we can’t support client needs, we will fall behind.”

That means opening up the Point of Sales to produce highly relevant data beyond the “total consumer profile data, which has been around for quite a while,” says Schulz. “Over the next 15 years, POS won’t be looked at in the same way.”

Today, Schulz notes that POS systems are generally focused on the negative side of revenues – reducing risk from bad payments and fraud. But in the future, they’ll be more oriented towards generating loyalty and revenue generation.

Disruption happens. In the local space, we’re seeing it happen with Yellow Pages and newspapers. Banks are seeing it happen as well, which will cause a major change in the way that customers keep track of their money, buy goods and services and stay “loyal” to merchants.

At NACHPA’s Payments 2013 in San Diego this week, speakers discussed how the move to digital is impacting banks and their relationships with customers and merchants – and how the payment space is evolving.

Keynoter Brett King, CEO of Moven,, an online bank. suggests the biggest sea change is that customer relationships aren’t determined by anything that goes on at the branch. “Nine of 10 customers can’t remember getting advice at a branch,” he notes. “By 2015, digital interactions with banks will outnumber branch interactions by 300 to 1.” And branches will only be visited once a twice a year.

“The mobile phone is undoubtedly the next banking platform,” says King, citing a Gartner forecast showing that 70 percent of GenY will be “mobile banking first” by 2015, and that 50 percent of all customers will be using mobile as their primary channel by 2016.

The other part of the equation is the rise of prepaid debit cards, which is growing 25 percent a year, which checks are shrinking 4 percent a year. The prepaid debit cards are evolving into smart accounts for some users that can tally total spending in a category – and even show areas to cut back on.

Smart accounts are about putting context in payments – good spending versus bad spending. It might show, for instance, that the daily $10 Starbucks fix is adding up to $280 a month. “Instead of making it an impulse decision, make it into a planned purchase,” he says.

“It is all about getting rid of friction,” adds King. The correct analogy is Uber, which provides cashless car service. By linking payment accounts and wallets to the cloud, merchants are increasingly positioned to add offers, loyalty programs and other incentives.

Banks, however, haven’t reduced friction with their online products. “We have simply reinforced it online,” says King, in words of warning. “We haven’t seen the industry embrace mobile as the bank account.” Meanwhile, there are “a lot of players coming in to create new infrastructure, with new rails, new pipes.”

Facebook is the undisputed king of social media. The average Facebook user has 124 friends, and 70 percent of its users have “liked” at least one local business. But at this point, how local is Facebook really? And as an open network, it the ideal medium for local recommendations?

This is the soft underbelly to Facebook seen by SupportLocal, a new site that has been designed — it hopes — to capture true word of mouth – and a huge list of recommended local businesses.

SupportLocal has raised $1.7 Million, and is being supported by Punchlime, an accelerator manned by ex-Googlers that is backing 25 “breakout” companies. Its founder is Justin Sanger, who previously founded the LocalLaunch sales network. Its board includes such local luminaries as Home Advisor’s Craig Smith, former Dex exec Sean Greene, and longtime local exec Chad Schott.

Users sign up, create their own list of friends, and answer a set of questions about their favorite service providers and merchants. They start with 27 questions, in theory yielding 27 local recommendation – a highly efficient, 10 minute haul.

Based on factors such as gender and various behavioral algorithms, the question set eventually expands to up to 188 questions (sent in bites). Users can also ask a question to their friend’s list for more obscure subjects (“Can you recommend a Judo instructor?”)

In my experience, I found it tough to remember local business names (“the place next to Texaco” doesn’t suffice). But service provider and merchant names are auto filled in after a few letters based on listings in the surrounding areas. Listings for my location, for instance, included not only those in my town or zipcode (Carlsbad, 92009), but all the neighboring towns that I’m likely to shop at (Encinitas, San Marcos, Vista, Oceanside, Solana Beach and DelMar.) The site is currently using a database from Factual, and will be enhancing it with additional sources.

By grabbing a high number of recommendations from the get-go, and relying on friends, it can be a better solution than a Google search, or taking the one-off advice of strangers from Yelp – who may be more interested in entertaining their public than writing a careful review — or even the carefully callibrated reviews of Angie’s List’s premium users (which take a lot of time to fill out, actually.) IF the site can attract a high volume of users, the end result will be a highly credible list of local recommendations.

Speaking at the Local Search Association meeting last week in Las Vegas, Sanger said that “social and search are converging in a manner that enables us to get better answers for local businesses.” In a dig at Facebook, Sanger said that “a like is not a proxy for recommendation. The two are completely different. Who among you is going to ‘like’ an OBGYN?” he said, noting that Support Local allows users to restrict who gets to see certain recommendations.

Sanger emphasized that the Beta version that is up now will be vastly improved in future versions, with such features as tagging added. There will also be more structure built around the user questions, creating more Yabbly-like discussions (Yabbly is a nice question-based social/lifestyle service started by former Marchex exec Tom Leung.). Sanger expects the real driver, however, to be the mobile app, which will be geo-enabled and released in a few weeks.

As for business models, Sanger says he is looking to create an annual support package for businesses. The support package will allow businesses to talk about how they support the local community; provide social objects; push questions as alerts, and let them create offers. All of these tools will spur more recommendations, he says.

I think Yelp is a fantastic service and a top resource, especially when I am travelling. But it was disturbing to read a column in The Los Angeles Times on Saturday by Sandy Banks, which suggests that Yelp is suppressing good reviews, and implies that there is a linkage between ad sales and allowing good reviews to be posted.

This isn’t the first time that Yelp has been accused of unsavory behavior. Yelp generally says it is all a series of misunderstandings about its business practices and technology. Some reviews get caught up in its algorithmic filters, which are designed to prevent businesses from hyping themselves via “fake” reviews from friends, family or paid agents. The system, unfortunately, favors frequent reviewers, who have essentially been validated.

Yelp also implies that if it has rogue salespeople lying about what they can and cannot do for advertisers, they’d be fired. “There’s no amount of money anyone can pay Yelp to manipulate reviews,” spokeswoman Kristen Whisenand told Banks.

But Banks notes a sign in the window of Bai Thong Thai, a San Francisco eatery, which asks customers to “Stop the Bully. Boycott Yelp.” The sign says that “Our customers repeatedly tell us they have submitted very good reviews. We asked Yelp. We were told ‘perhaps if you paid to do Yelp ads, we could help with this.’ We earn our good reviews. We will not pay bribes to Yelp to post them.”

Banks says the restaurants experience mirrors her own. She has posted positive reviews for her favorite hairdresser — presumably, a non-advertiser — but these reviews have been excluded, along with other acquaintances that she knows have written good reviews. Meanwhile, what is posted is a string of negative reviews.

She also notes that a number of a knitting store’s customers discovered Yelp at the same time, and sent in positive reviews. But “just about all of them were banished to Yelp’s untrusted file – while the negative reviews are all on page one. “ (Personally, I had a limo driver last year tell me that the same thing happened to him.)

I have a hard time believing that Yelp is purposely corrupting its system. The majority of Yelp’s reviews are positive. And the majority of the reviewed businesses on Yelp are not paid advertisers. But it needs to get out front on these issues.

Ads aren’t just valued for bringing in calls and walk ins. Local businesses increasingly place value on consumers looking up maps and directions, or participating in loyalty efforts, notes SuperMedia Director of Mobile Development Chris Folmer, who was speaking on a panel at The Local Search Association conference April 16 in Las Vegas. “There are lots of ways to drive true value,” he says.

Loyalty programs represent a real growth opportunity. Consumers are already engaged with the client. They need to maintain the relationship,” says Folmer. He notes that SuperMedia is rolling out a number of new loyalty programs. The programs are great acquisition tools. They are “really good to talk to new clients about. They really like it.”

The traditional backbone of loyalty programs have been text messaging, he adds. Texts really deliver results, and are “exploding” for SMBs. The key is to “get people to want to engage in content.” But they can also be tricky because they are so easy to unsubscribe from. “It only takes one bad offer for someone to opt out,” he notes.

Speaking on the same panel, Placecast SVP Blair Swedeen also emphasized strong results from text-based programs. Promotions sent out when consumers are near a store result in a 2.5 x boost in frequency, and a 22 percent purchase rate. There is also a 5 percent increase in average order value, he notes.

Increased smartphone penetration has greatly expanded the universe for smart offers, says Swedeen — smartphone users will also get push offers on their Apps and emails. “Most customers want delivery across all channels,” he says.

Edo Interactive VP Jeff Fagel says that texts in fact have already been surpassed by smartphone emails. Apps are also proving to be very effective. Merchants that have a promotion on a mobile app are seeing a 20 percent boost in their response rate.

Redemption rates are also soaring. A program that Edo ran with Subway, for instance, achieved a 15 percent redemption rate across the board. It drove the value of purchases up 30 percent. Moreover, 40 percent of those customers who redeemed offers came back at least once or twice in the next 90 days.

The key is driving “the right offer to the right customer,” and keeping it simple, adds Fagel. “There is nothing as impactful as ‘thumbs in faces,’” he says, noting that mobile offers will see 10-15x redemption rates of traditional coupons.

“Local search is really important for Facebook,” with a major boom in local business adoption, and the synonymous nature of mobile usage and local search, notes Facebook’s Dan Levy, who spoke April 16 at The Local Search Association conference in Las Vegas. Levy says there are 15 million SMBs on Facebook now, and 680 million monthly mobile users.

“The best way to judge Facebook is to look at where we are spending our efforts,” adds Levy. While Levy concedes that Facebook’s changing lineup of ad products may be hard to keep track of, the current lineup of ”Promoted Posts,” “Nearby” and “Graph Search” are “a real testament” to Facebook’s commitment to local, he says.

What Facebook is ultimately shooting for are products that best leverage Word of Mouth, says Levy. “Getting a recommendation via word of mouth is very important. We are building that into our ad products.” It also doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. “Social advertising isn’t a new industry,” he suggests. “It is just advertising that is social.”

Promoted Posts are seen as a success for Facebook because it has been picked up so quickly. A million businesses have used a promoted post in less than half a year, and they have kept using it. The product has a 75 percent retention rate.

What doesn’t work for Facebook is when value isn’t being added. Deals didn’t work so well because they didn’t provide many unique values. But a new product, Offers are a homegrown success story, with “70 percent of users connected to at least one local business,” says Levy. More importantly, offers quickly go viral. Most offers aren’t being claimed by the original audience, but by friends of fans, says Levy.