ShopCity Launches ‘City Managers’ Program

August 13, 2010

ShopCity, a storefront and marketing platform for SMBs, hopes to jumpstart its reach via a new “City Manager” program that allows local media partners to secure local URL rights owned by ShopCity (i.e. ShopMountainView.com) and market its services. City Managers, who handle sales and marketing as well as community relations, share revenues from storefront and marketing sales. They will also get a piece of the action from ShopCity’s community marketplace and upcoming daily deal feature.

One example of the program is ShopCorona.com. In this case, the SoCal city’s economic development division actively helped to market the platform to SMBs, greatly simplifying the city manager’s job – and winning an 80 percent participation rate among local businesses.

Embarcadero Publishing, a seven-title Bay Area group, is ShopCity’s charter media partner, having secured the rights to ShopPaloAlto, ShopMountainView and ShopMenloPark. Embarcadero has also begun actively soliciting support and business participation, landing partnerships with the chambers of commerce and municipal governments in all three cities, and ramping up for a September promotional campaign.

This summer, the Silicon Valley publisher hired a bunch of college kids to canvass the business community, showing off business profiles with a dedicated ShopCity iPhone app. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive” says ShopCity CEO Colin Pape. “Small businesses really identify with our ‘shop local’ message and we’re generating a lot of goodwill by providing them with a complimentary profile page and online storefront.”

In other ShopCity news, Pape says the site is also building out its new national local shopping portal via ShopLocally.com , a URL that it recently acquired.

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GroupTabs: Check-ins = Group Buying

August 13, 2010

Some people (like me) don’t like games. Game mechanics-driven “check in” media like FourSquare, GoWalla, Loopt and BrightKite mostly leaves them cold.

But what if check-ins triggered group buying discounts? That’s the concept behind GroupTabs, a new service launching in New York City next week. The idea is that offers could be floated on smart phones with a one or two hour window, and users can check in at the location. When enough people arrived, the discount (“20% of Wine Bar Purchases”) would kick in. The location pays a fee for the promotion if they reach their threshold.

Led by former Citysearch sales exec Zane Friedman, GroupTabs began development in April. It has adopted Foursquare’s open API for check-ins, and plans to work with other check-in systems as well. One modification it has made is that it requires check-ins to be made at the location: Foursquare lets you do it all from your home or other locations.

“We give people a reason to try LBS (Location Based Services),” says mobile vet Josh Malin, who is part of the three person start-up team. “Immediacy determines what they’re doing. They are not in it for the badge.”

Malin says the site will begin with one deal a day, and maybe add several deals a day after it starts adding some volume. He anticipates that the deals will be much smaller than Groupon-like deals, since they’ll mostly be tailored to bars and restaurants. Average deals might have 20 or 30 buyers. When New York is fully developed, additional markets may be pursued, perhaps up or down the east coast, or San Francisco.

GroupTabs will obviously be limited to busy metro areas. Not many suburban areas will have 30 people ready to buy a drink down the street when they are gassing up or whatever.

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Allbritton’s TBD.com (and TBD TV) Launch in DC

August 10, 2010

The latest attempt to make hyperlocal a sustainable reality came today with Allbritton Communications’ launch of TBD.com, a hyper metro site for the Washington DC area. Allbritton, which has sunk “under $5 million” into the project to date, hopes it will grab hold of the DC audience in the same way that its Politico has done with political types – simultaneously via the Web and TV, where it takes over the slot formerly held by Allbritton’s former News Channel 8.

I’ll say right off the bat that I like it a lot. Although I had the opportunity to visit the newsroom with other members of the BIA/Kelsey team about six weeks ago, I got my first glance at the site today. My takeaway? It’s fun, useful and totally up to date with social and mobile media.

Most importantly, it seems like something I’d probably read (and watch) everyday if I still lived in DC. It just seems natural and un-self conscious – completely opposite DC’s staid (and untrue) image as a stuffed shirt of a city; and other hyper metro sites that I won’t name here, but make NPR seem wild and crazy.

The site integrates, a little, with Allbritton’s WJLA TV, and it is co-located with the WJLA newsroom. You’ll see the WJLA programming schedule and its landmark weather reporters Doug Hill and Bob Ryan headline the weather page, for instance.

But it has a totally separate identity, helped by a dozen writers lead by former Washington City Paper Editor Erik Wemple. As Wemple notes in a public letter: “One of them writes nothing but lists. One is all over pedestrian life. One holds politicians throughout the region accountable. Three carry a year-round obsession with the Redskins. Three are covering some of the fastest-developing communities in the region. Three are the final authority on all things arts and entertainment.”

The entire site will eventually ramp up soon to about 50, including the TBD News team carried over from News Channel 8, and six community reach-out staffers.The site also seamlessly integrates with 129 DC area bloggers and picks up news from all the DC sites, including The Washington Post and also from WJLA competitors such as WTOP-AM. And much of its substantial neighborhood news comes via a news filter that sorts by zip code.

It has also taken some unique approaches that only time will tell will pan out, such as TBD TV, the “companion” channel that takes over from News Channel 8, the 24/7 news channel that had been featured on cable and dish services throughout the metro area. It features programs that sometimes borrow WJLA personalities (i.e. The Arch Campbell Show,) but also has begun to produce some of its own unique offerings (i.e. Capital Golf Weekly).

The site was initially slated to launch at the end of August. It is obviously up early – the testing URL leaked and they decided to roll with it. Consequently, the mobile apps (i.e. “All over the iPhone, All over the Android and All Over the Mobile Web) aren’t ready yet, although they’re being promoted; and there is a lot of content that you’d expect to see that isn’t there (i.e. high school sports) and exurban content. It is possible that they’re leaving the tough (and expensive stuff ) for the thinning Post to cover

But we know there are plans to do other things that will be totally innovative if they pull them off, such as having local bloggers for the site featured on the local news when there is a hot breaking story (i.e. the fighting among 70 teens at L’Enfant Plaza Metro station the other night).

The advertising strategies also aren’t fully unveiled, and the site will obviously focus on building up an audience first. Currently, you’ll just see some run of site ads such as Belfort Furniture and contextual tile ads, such as The Washington Ballet under arts, and McCrea Heating and Air Condition under weather.

Will this site ultimately be self sustaining? That’s the big question. It is expected to lose up to two million dollars a year as it gets going. But if the site maintains its promising start, the local dollars should theoretically follow. Another question is whether the TV companion will take off.

In the course of writing this post, I was chatting about the site’s debut with hyperlocal pioneer Rob Curley, who ran The Post’s ambitious hyperlocal strategy two years ago before moving on to Greenspun Communications’ Las Vegas Sun. Curley was very enthusiastic about the site’s design. The amazing thing is that they probably showed that sites are more likely to win with a TV station as a partner than a newspaper, he said. That’s food for thought.

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Redbeacon Raises $7.4 Million; Interview with CEO Ethan Anderson

August 5, 2010

Redbeacon, the six person San Francisco based service referral company, announced today that it has raised a heady $7.4 million in Series A financing from Mayfield Fund and Venrock. CEO and Co-founder Ethan Anderson tells us that the company needed such a huge round to quickly ramp up the staff, including engineers, designers and marketing people; aggressively expand markets beyond San Francisco (although no markets have been finalized); and build a wide range of business partnerships.

Anderson notes that demographics and population size will play a large role in determining its next markets, but that business “distribution partnerships” will also play a role. For instance, Redbeacon is currently testing with BT in the U.K.

Partnerships, however, will consist of all shapes and sizes, including communities, search engines, media sites. The commission basis for job leads will “monetize better than advertising,” predicts Anderson. It will also feel like a natural, value added feature of their sites Partners “will drive tons and tons of traffic,” he says. “They’ll be moving to value added transactions to users.” The site currently works with BigTent, the women’s group site. It also works with several companies that remain unannounced.

Partnerships are being extended to individual SMBs, who can be partners by plugging a Redbeacon widget into their site. They can emphasize specific service categories and service providers among the leads that are carried, and receive a piece of Redbeacon’s 10 percent commission for jobs. A plumber, for instance, could provide a link to dry wall repair. “It is very contextual,” says Anderson.

Anderson adds that the site’s big challenge right now is not so much online competitors such as ServiceMagic, QuinStreet and others, but “changing consumer behavior,” as people are still used to picking up the phone. The social aspects of the site should help along these lines, especially the solicitation of consumer reviews, which complement reviews imported from Yelp, Google and Yahoo. Anderson notes that 50% of consumers who use the service for a job are providing reviews.

As for learnings from the site’s launch in San Francisco, Anderson says that the site is now up to 4,000 small businesses and service pros, and “is always getting more. It is almost enough to make the service work” with price quotes on every job, he says. “People are getting price quotes from very good providers.”

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CampusLive Connects College Students to Local SMBs

August 5, 2010

College students are a rich market for local businesses in college towns. Indeed, advertising has become more important to local SMBs as colleges increasingly compete for the business and try to keep students (and their money) on campus.

CampusLive, the brainchild of UMass Amherst students in 2008, is positioning itself to serve as a media magnet for college students, and as a platform for both localized national advertising and local SMB advertising. The 11 FTE, Boston-based service, which now covers 225 schools, marries social media, RSS’d campus news, games and commerce – mostly restaurant menus and take out orders.

Key to the service is its system of 400 Campus Reps, who keep the social media conversation live and local, and help facilitate a “crowd-soucing” concept that keeps the information flowing. In exchange, the reps get points that can add up to gift cards. So far, the company has handed out $15,000 in gift cards, based on a model of 25 cents per submitted message.

In addition to the Campus Rep activity and crowd sourcing of information such as menus, CampusLive provides advertisers with access to a customized WordPress blog where they can provide updates to offers, place advertising and manage contests, where they are assessed charges on a per student basis.

Peter Pan Bus Lines, a regional player that serves many northeast colleges, for instance, has developed a challenge game where users can earn FourSquare-like badge, and compete for one of two grand prizes – a party bus for 20, or a flight to Manhattan on the corporate jet. Other advertisers include college student-hungry marketers such as The Marine Corps, Domino’s, and Buffalo Wild Wings. Advertising fees have ranged from $8,000 to $50,000.

Co-Founder and CEO Boris Revsin, 24, says the company is focusing on developing the technology and marketing for the site – mostly with an eye on widgetizing on top of social sites such as Facebook. While it has three internal sales reps, it mostly relies on outsourcing for sales and content. MediaMate, for instance, handles national advertising. At the same time, the company is working with Local.com for local news and directory services.

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OpenTable Launches Group Buying Deals (Updated)

August 4, 2010

Restaurants are among the top categories for group buying deals. Now OpenTable, the restaurant reservations service, is getting in on the game. On its blog today, OpenTable announced that it is launching a weekly “Spotlight” offer that provides diners with $50 of dining for $25 at a featured restaurant, which must be an OpenTable customer.

The revenue is being split with restaurants, and represents OpenTable’s first transaction product with consumers.OpenTable says it will feature a wide range of restaurants, both casual and formal.

Most dining parties will probably end up spending more than the offers, since typical OpenTable customers spend $50 a head and bring 2-3 people to dinner. Yelp has also been experimenting with group buying under the “Yelp Eats” and “Yelp Drinks” monikers.

Spotlight launches first in New York and Boston, with the weekly offers available beginning on Thursdays at 5pm. Other U.S. cities will follow in short order. In its first day, 1100 New York offers have been sold, and 700 Boston offers. The infrastructure for the offers is being provided by IMShopping’s Nimble Commerce.

OpenTable intends to juice demand for the coupons by dropping “get a clue” hints as to the restaurant’s ID prior to the coupon going online – something that might spark additional page views.

Here are this week’s clues:

Boston Secret Spotlight Clue #1: The chef at this hotspot in Boston’s South End learned her culinary techniques from both Bobby Flay and Malaysian street food vendors. Share your best guess here!

New York Secret Spotlight Clue #2: Dine under Midtown’s starry sky, where they’ve mastered the art of infusing classical French technique with American cuisine. Share your best guess here!

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eBay Pushes More Integration With ProStores

August 3, 2010

eBay is pushing to do more to integrate the flagship auction site and its Marketplaces products with ProStores, its online storefront software company. The effort to integrate ProStores is part of a broader effort to integrate its properties (i.e. eBay Classifieds).

ProStores, acquired by eBay five years ago, currently has “tens of thousands” of customers, who pay either $29.95 or $59.95 per month, depending on the service package. The majority of its customers comes from eBay Direct, but the service also works with independent retailers. It competes with the likes of Amazon, as well as several boutique storefront providers that focus on local marketing, such as Shopcity.com.

A new version of the software has just been released that ProStores hopes to boost conversions and order size — the two currencies of online stores. The new version lets store owners “panelize” their content, and turn promotions into graphical banners on the fly. Multiple promotions can be run at once.

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