Mike Blumenthal

Martin Brossman, observing the recent pivot of G+,  recently noted that he: .. so much wish[es] Google would have communicated this in clearer ways to small  businesses. The businesses I meet are more confused than ever with the Get on the Map program, that then changed everything. Not communicating the changes in a way that makes …

Google has finally made some forward facing statements about the new Google+ and how it relates to local. Essentially it doesn’t. And they have no plans to add features back that would make it more local friendly. They noted: The following features are no longer supported for Local pages – Reviews, categories, directions, stars, photo …

Google Plus has released their new responsive, mobile first design. It indicates a very clear direction for the product with its focus on collections, communities, content and curation. What it doesn’t focus on is of more interest to me. It doesn’t focus on businesses, their description, reviews, videos or business photos. In fact the complete …

Facebook, over the past 18 months, has slowly been pushing into the local space. One of those efforts has been in the review space and they have managed to become one of the leading general review sites because of user familiarity and Facebook’s periodic promotions of their review capacity. That’s the good news. The bad …

CNBC is reporting that “as of today, homeowners searching for contractors on Google will be shown results that are “HomeAdvisor screened and approved” and come with profiles, price estimates and the ability to “book now” or schedule an appointment to compare estimates for work”. This appears to be a new ad format although as of …

The Google Franken Page problem seems to have largely if not completely disappeared. In a check of 54 links from Uncle Bob’s Storage that were known to have suffered from the problem only one remains that has not yet been fixed. That is down from 2 bad listings this AM so a fix seems to be …

The inevtibale and complete separation of Google Local data and results from G+ continues. Michael Cottam reported yesterday that the Google Places API which had been returning the Plus page regardless of whether a listing was verified or not is now returning the maps result. From his post: the docs on the Place Details Requesthave been …

Google My Business List (aka GMBL, Bulk) has not seen this many upgrades in a quarter since the financial meltdown in 2008. Google rolled out last night a small but helpful upgrade that allows businesses to  set different hours for different days both en masse and on a daily date basis. The feature rolled out …

Local U Advanced is my favorite local event of the year; its collegial, casual, intimate and leading edge educational. This year the event will be held in Williamsburg, Va the night of March 4th and all of March 5th, 2016. The agenda for the event will be coming out on November 8th but if you …

I am a student of local. I read Google patents, I study legal documents. And I am reasonably a good speller. That doesn’t mean that I can spell Acxiom’s name correctly very often. Nor can I pronounce it. It is one of those corporate branding exercises that must have looked great on paper but never …