A few months ago, you said that while Google may be the go-to solution for search and Facebook for social, there isn’t a “default answer” for local. Do you still think that?

Absolutely.

How can LivingSocial be the default answer to local then?

I think particularly on the consumer side, there is a desire for people to be more connected with their city. And people want to support the business down the street. They want to, when they’re walking around, go and know something about their community. They want to brag about their community. ‘This is why my sports team is better than your sports team.’ Those things all matter, and I don’t think there’s been a company able to go and help facilitate that in a broad-based way. I think if we can go and do that, while providing merchants and customers with new revenue streams in a thoughtful, effective way, there is that opportunity to seek that answer for local.

viaWhat’s next for LivingSocial – Fortune Tech.

What it means: From a merchant point of view, there are two sides to “local search”. The first one, known merchant searches, is now controlled by Google. That’s when consumers are looking for a phone number, hours of operations or driving directions of a local merchant they already know. The second one, discovery, is the one that hasn’t been fully cracked yet. Merchant reviews, daily deals, local Q&A, search, recommendations, etc. all contribute to this discovery process but I believe no one fully controls that space. It’s still wide open and huge opportunity. LivingSocial is part of the solution but it’s still a small part, and they’re still far from dominating the “local discovery” space. Lots more work and evolution to the service will be needed.

Pandora’s pitch to advertisers is that its technology can cater to consumers with far greater precision than radio — it can pinpoint listeners by age and sex, ZIP code or even musical taste — and that as it grows, Pandora will effectively be the top station in many cities.
…
This year, Pandora has had 400 local advertising campaigns across the country. One new client was Planet Honda in Union, N.J., whose president, William Feinstein, said he gave up on terrestrial radio years ago because he felt it cast too wide and expensive a demographic net.

viaPandora Courts Local Advertisers by Reaching a Narrow Audience – NYTimes.com.

What it means: as radio gets atomized (i.e. the atom is now the song), the future of this media goes through mass customization (or mass personalization), this ability to listen to the music you like whenever you feel like it. Pandora provides consumers with that experience. In today’s world, that’s probably a better experience for consumers and it puts Pandora directly against local radio stations and ad dollars. Four hundreds local campaigns is still a very small number but it shows the potential. As always, the challenge will be getting these ad dollars through a local sales force. Expect radio companies to eventually start reselling Pandora ads as part of their Internet package.

Photo: Bernat Casero

After almost six years and a long, thought-out decision process, I’ve decided to leave Needium (i.e. Praized Media Inc.), the company I co-founded in 2006.

What a journey it has been!

• Creating our original concept and prototype in 2006
• Signing our first customers in 2007
• Raising our first venture capital money in 2007
• Executing our first pivot to enterprise products in 2008 (when the credit crisis struck the world)
• Constant product innovation between 2006 and 2012
• Executing our second (and successful!) pivot to Needium in 2010
• Seeing advertiser and revenue growth in 2011 and 2012!

After beta testing Needium in 2010, we brought in help to structure and scale operations/sales. We now have a dozen resellers (including very large media sales channels) and I feel I can leave in confidence that the company will continue to grow and prosper.

There are many people I’d like to thank for the incredible journey this has been for me:

• First and foremost, our customers, the people who pay for our products. We built Needium for them. They will be in good hand with the team in place.
• Our employees (past and present), especially the dev team (most of whom have been with the company since the beginning). Loyal and dedicated.
• Our investors, who have trusted us since 2007, through hell and high water.
• And finally, to Sylvain Carle, my co-founder (who is also announcing his resignation) and brother-in-arm. I will miss his daily presence dearly.

My last day will be Friday March 2nd 2012. After that, I will take a few weeks off but, as a next step in my career, I’m looking for international experience. I’d like to work in Europe or in the United States as a senior exec in a media/Internet company (large or small). I bring with me solid experience in product management, business development, Internet strategy, social media and management. You can see my LinkedIn profile here and you can reach me at sprovencher AT gmail.com. If you think I’d be a good addition to your team, don’t hesitate to contact me and we’ll discuss!

————————————————————————————

Et maintenant, en français:

Passer à autre chose (et à la recherche de nouveaux défis)

Après presque six ans de travail et une longue réflexion, j’ai décidé de quitter Needium (i.e. Praized Media inc.), la compagnie que j’ai cofondé en 2006.

Quel beau voyage au cours des 6 dernières années!

• La création de notre concept et prototype original de Praized en 2006
• La signature de nos premiers clients en 2007
• La levée d’une première ronde de financement en 2007
• L’exécution de notre premier pivot vers le modèle “entreprise” en 2008 (lors de la crise mondiale du crédit)
• Le développement constant de produits innovateurs entre 2006 et 2012
• L’exécution de notre second pivot (un succès!) vers Needium en 2010
• La croissance du nombre d’annonceurs et des revenus publicitaires en 2011 et 2012!

Après les tests bêtas de Needium en 2010, nous avons amené du renfort pour nous aider à structurer et accélérer les opérations et les ventes. Nous avons désormais une douzaine de revendeurs (incluant des grands groupes médias) et j’ai le sentiment que je peux quitter avec confiance : la compagnie va continuer à croître et à prospérer après mon départ.

Je désire remercier plusieurs personnes qui ont fait partie de cette incroyable expérience:

• D’abord, nos clients, les gens qui paient pour nos produits. Nous avons bâti Needium pour eux et ils seront en bonnes mains avec l’équipe en place.
• Tous nos employés (présents et passés), et en particulier l’équipe technique. La plupart d’entre eux sont avec nous depuis le début, loyaux et dévoués.
• Nos investisseurs, qui nous ont fait confiance depuis 2007, à travers vents et marées
• Et finalement, Syvain Carle, mon cofondateur et frère d’armes (qui démissionne aussi). Sa présence quotidienne va me manquer.

Le vendredi 2 mars 2012 sera ma dernière journée. Après cela, je vais prendre quelques semaines de vacances. Pour la prochaine étape dans ma carrière professionnelle, je cherche une expérience à l’international. J’aimerais travailler en Europe ou aux États-Unis comme cadre supérieur dans une compagnie média/Internet (grande ou petite). J’amène avec moi une expérience solide en gestion de produits, développement des affaires, stratégie Internet, médias sociaux et gestion générale. Vous pouvez voir mon profil LinkedIn ici et vous pouvez me contacter à sprovencher arobas gmail.com. N’hésitez pas à m’écrire si vous croyez que je ferais un bon ajout à votre équipe!

• Total online searches grew 9% year-over-year to exceed 19.3 billion searches in September 2011
• 2.8 billion of those searches were “local” (a growth of 9% from last year). Local searches growth is decelerating
• IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) searches are down 20% year-over-year
• 1.7 billion click-thrus to directories and regional/local content sites were generated from search in sept 2011
• Top organic search terms by click-through rates: driving directions, white pages, yellow pages, maps, los angeles
• 10% of US display ads are locally targeted
• 3 of every 4 mobile subscribers own a device with GPS capability
• Over one third own a smartphone
• Mobile search usage grew 25% year-over-year with 26% penetration in September 2011
• Search is the top activity of mobile browser users. Social networking is second.
• 88 million mobile subscribers access local content on a mobile device, up 28% from a year ago.
• Nearly 40% of mobile users access local content on their device in September 2011, compared with 75% for smartphone owners
• 16.3 million smartphone owners scanned a QR code, 43% in a retail store, 42% from a product packaging.

In a search engine marketing world, where many people think brand advertising is dead, Pittman presented a compelling integrated marketing model (loosely based on the AIDA model) that shows brand building is key to generate sales. It goes as follow:

o Arouse a consumer’s interest in a product/service (through big reach and passion)
o Remind them of their interest until purchase (via reach and frequency)
o Allow them to research the product/service (via interactive apps with scale)
o Let them effortlessly find where to buy the product/service (dealer locators)
o Let them hear advertising messages when in the buying mindset
o Reinforce their purchase decision – retention
o Encourage and facilitate word of mouth – (via viral marketing  and social media)

He also explained that brand is the thing that happens when consumers are predisposed to buying your product and have stopped comparison shopping. That’s also an interesting insight.

Day 1: Monday, Dec. 12

• The opening keynote with Bob Pittman, CEO, Clear Channel Media Holdings. Always interested in hearing from radio station executives, curious about their Internet strategy.
• The interview with Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital.  I want to know what she thinks of “local” and “local/social”. I am also curious about her point of views on local traditional media’s Internet strategy and execution.
• The unveiling of the “Wave XV” of the Local Commerce Monitor. Always a lot of exciting data points.
• The “New Wave of Local Lead Generation” panel
• The “Facebook Next: Leveraging the Platform for Local” panel

Day 2: Tuesday, Dec. 13

• The special comScore Research presentation on “The Data on Local Usage”
• The presentation from Court Cunningham (CEO at Yodle), on “The Top-Level View on Local Sales”
• The afternoon keynote with Matt Idema, Director of Monetization Product Marketing at Facebook

Day 3: Wednesday, Dec. 14

• The fireside chats on Local Media Transformation with Mok Oh, Chief Scientist, PayPal and Bo Fishback, CEO and Cofounder, Zaarly
• The last panel on The Future of SoLoMo

You can get a special $200 rebate if you signup with the discount code SEB

If you want to connect at the event (or in San Francisco), ping me at seb AT needium.com

Don’t have much time to write a long post but one of the key insights that came out of the panel was:

Main benefit of the real-time Web for consumers: convenience. You get your needs/wants answered in quasi real-time, you live a more efficient life, etc.

Main benefit of the real-time Web for businesses: differentiation. It’s difficult for businesses to adapt to the demand of the real-time Web but those that will might be able to build a strong business on that differentiating factor.

Highlights:

• Total local advertising revenues for 2011 will be $135.9 billion, down from the $136.2 billion it forecast earlier this year
• Traditional media segments such as Yellow Pages and newspapers are experiencing the largest downward revisions
• U.S. local online/digital advertising revenues will rise to $23.3 billion in 2011, compared with $22.3 billion predicted earlier this year
• Local online/ digital advertising revenues will be 17.2 percent of total local advertising revenues in 2011, up from the earlier forecast of 16.4 percent. By 2015 that share will increase to 25.4 percent, up from the 24.7 percent originally predicted
• The overall local media market will grow slowly over the next five years, at a compound annual growth rate of 1.7 percent, reaching $149.4 billion by 2015

The rest/details of the forecast will be revealed at their next conference ILM West 2011, in downtown San Francisco, December 12 to 14. I will be attending the conference. BTW, I just reserved my hotel using Hotwire and I found a 4-star hotel within walking distance for $109/night. See you there!

US/Canada:
Atlanta, GA: 709,427
Austin, TX: 116,756
Calgary, AB: 60,603
Cary, NC: 153,315
Charlotte, NC: 171,001
Chicago, IL: 712,399
Cincinnati, OH: 110,975
Columbus, OH: 221,920
Commack, NY: 116,145
Creve Coeur, MO, 43,829
Denver, CO: 172,762
Des Moines, IA: 28,702
Fort Lauderdale, FL : 118,670
Indianapolis, IN: 224,871
Laguna Beach, CA: 58,186
Long Beach, CA: 113,404
Los Angeles, CA: 1,126,143
Miami, FL: 509,411
New York (Metro): 2,746,757
Ontario, CA: 59,705
Phoenix, AZ: 230,260
Redondo, CA: 66,490
San Bernardino, CA: 36,799
San Francisco, CA: 354,707
St. Louis, MO: 255,415
Tampa, FL: 125,341
Toronto, ON: 546,470
Vancouver, BC: 173,340
Washington DC: 551,126
West Palm Beach, FL: 31,665

Europe:
London, UK (Central): 60,128 (more than 1M tweets per day when you index the greater London metro area)
Paris, France: 346,197

Remember: these are tweets PER DAY per city. As you can see, those numbers are quite impressive and we’re just starting to scratch the surface in terms of implicit geo-location. We’re adding new geo-clues like neighborhood names, points of interest, foursquare check-ins, etc. to help us increase that volume. And we’re slowly getting to a point where our community managers know what’s going in specific cities and neighborhoods.

As I wrote earlier this year, “With more and more people joining the service, Twitter will discover that its real utility is at the local level. Twitter will become the often-wished for democratic and commercial local space we’ve been expecting since the beginning of the Web. Citizens/consumers, merchants, politicians, and news sources/journalists becoming an intrinsic part of the same communication and relational system.” That’s even truer today as more people are joining Twitter (100M montly active users at last count), people use it more (250M tweets a day) and they geo-localize themselves more.

And yesterday, I was happy to see that people are starting to notice. Read what smart VC Dev Khare wrote yesterday:

Dev is probably using crude tools (maybe Twitter Search?) to retrieve the info and he’s starting to see “local” value. Imagine when we’ll be able to surface that information in a much more substantial way!

The same day, Mark Suster (a VC who invested in Twitter) wrote “We Have Only Scratched the Surface of the True Value of Twitter. Here’s What You’re Missing“.  He starts by explaining that there’s more to Twitter than “what am I eating for lunch?”. As my readers know, I wrote a whole presentation on “why you should care what @joepublic had for lunch” but that’s another story…

Mark goes on to talk about Identity, Object Communications, Predictive Data, and Augmented Data. A couple of quotes stood out for me:

“I believe that Twitter is becoming the most interesting and predictive dataset in the world and that every large company (and many small ones) will consume the Twitter stream in order to gain insights, determine actions to take and gain competitive advantage.”

“The future of data interpretations will be augmented. We will look at both the steam and the “meta stream.” We will want to augment with: location, demographics, affiliations, authority by subject area, gender, topical interests and a whole lot more.”

That’s it. That’s what makes Twitter such a powerful communication tool and even though, as the Wall Street Journal writes this morning “Web companies often upend industries but they can labor for years to fully make money on their revolutions”, social networking revenue is growing (eMarketer predicts this morning that “Worldwide social network ad revenues will surpass $8 billion in 2012 and approach $10 billion by 2013″) and will rocket past many online ad categories. As for Twitter, I believe they will find monetization success through local advertising. It’s too good an opportunity to pass.

Its description: The rise of the real-time Web is well documented.Propelled by both the social networking revolution and mobile device ubiquitousness, we’re seeing the birth of new user services and business opportunities. In this panel,  we will explore the time element in the local/social Web and will try to discover what kind of content works well in real-time, what are the benefits for consumers and what kind of business models can be deployed to leverage the
“time” dimension.

My panelists:

• Ryan Mac Jones, Founder at We&Co
• David Ambrose, Mobile Lead at Travelzoo
• Phil Leggetter, Developer Evangelist at Pusher
• Stefano Diemmi at Proximitips/Buongiorno

People that have been reading this blog and following my Twitter feed know that I’ve been interested in the real-time (sometimes called the Alive Web)and the temporal Web for a few years now.

On day two, I’m also on a panel titled Can Social Media Be Outsourced? headed by Jonathan Ewert from Codero. I’m looking forward to that discussion as well!

It should be an excellent conference with speakers from Yelp, Foursquare, European Directories, Decarta, Mueller-Medien, the BBC, in addition to Greg Sterling, Dennis Yu and Perry Evans.

The organizers have provided me with a 20% discount to my readers but I hear there are less than 20 tickets left. So, hurry up if you want to join us. I will be in London the whole week. If you want to meet, ping me at seb AT needium.com.