Last night while at Marty Weintraub’s AimClear SMX East SchmoozFest, I was fortunate to meet Frederick Vallaeys of Google. He is the forthright (he gave me a business card!), communicative product evangelist for Adwords. He was on his way out the door but took the time to answer some of my questions about the newly announced Local Listing Ad product.

According to Frederick, email support will definitely be an integral part of the Local Listing Ad product. Supprt will take the form of an automated first response to the initial query with human escalation if the answer provided is not satisfactory. He noted that discussions were on-going and that all other support options, including the possibility of fee based phone support, were on the table but no final decision had been reached. He noted that he felt strongly that “people should be able to get their questions answered”.

Even though brief, the conversation was far ranging and touched on my of my questions about the new product:
-What will the prices be for a given market and category?
-Will the pricing be transparent to all, across all markets?
-How long will the price remain fixed and when it does change what will the procedure be?
-Will the price have a relationship to the adwords pricing and will that relationship be transparent?
-How will placement be determined in competitive markets?
-Will categorization be limited to the existing categories or will it allow for long tail catogorizaton?

Much of the conversation was off the record but it is clear that the process and procedures for this product are still very much a work in progress.

Support (or rather lack there of) for Local Bussiness Center users has long been an issue with Google with many serious problems going unanswered and unattended. Early this year, in a far ranging discussion about Why the Google Local Business Center Fails, Matt Cutts responded that:

Here’s my personal take on the “paid support” suggestion. Historically Google has been averse to offering paid support for free products. I think it’s because we don’t want to evoke the idea that Google has a conflict of interest. For example, if we offered paid support for (say) websearch, lots of conspiracy theorists would accuse Google of making search worse in order to make money off of people paying for support.

The new Local Listing Ads is an exciting product that will appeal to many SMB’s. It offers simplicity and a fair bit of transparency and can act as an effective first step for many local businesses in the world of on-line advertising. It could, by providing support for both Ad related AND other technical problems, improve the image of the Local Business Center in the marketplace.

I can envision those with solvable by Google only type problems signing up so as to just get their listing issues resolved. A 30 Day Free Trial could easily turn into 30 days of free support with an ad thrown in.

That being said, I am looking forward to Google working out the kinks on the way to this new product. It seems ideally suited to the needs of many businesses who are just now beginning to look to the Internet for an solution to replace the declining value of the print Yellow Pages and news papers.

Frederick will be speaking at Q&A session at SMX East this afternoon. I would encourage all of the Local world to come and get the answers to the many questions that you have had. Well, OK, to at least ask the questions. 🙂