Google Adds End User Offers Signup to Google.com/Portland

Portland has been a keystone city in Google’s Hotspot Hotpot Places marketing efforts. They inundated Portland businesses and individuals with high visibility ads, marketing, schwag and high profile sponsorships. We don’t know the number of additional claimed Places listings but we do know that it lead to a dramatic uptick in their ratings and reviews, …

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Google Offers Beta – More Details

Greg Sterling pointed out a new Offers video and merchant sign up page. Here is the content from a newly posted help file explaining the program: Google Offers Help Overview  What is Google Offers? Google Offers BETA will get you great deals in your city on things you like and things you need. Whether it’s …

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Google Expands Offers with Groupon Like Features

Yipit reported yesterday that Google is rolling out an expansion of their Offers program with Groupon like features in the test markets of NY, San Francisco, Oakland and Portland.  Users may sign up Google.com/offers and if you want to be notified of future launches you can leave your email with Google on this form. When …

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Google Latitude Adds Checkin Offers Nationwide

Yesterday was a busy day for Google local. Google management changes in Local & the Hotpot rebranding made front page news around the web. An announcement that snuck through the cracks was the limited nationwide rollout of  check-in offers at “thousands of places across the U.S. using Latitude on the iPhone and Android”. Offers (aka …

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Google Places Tidbits

This in from frequent contributor Plamen. Google has shifted their current “Offers” down on the Places Page to the bottom of the Page. Plamen speculates its perhaps to make room for paid offers higher up the page. Google has in the past noted that they are continually testing page content and moving down and out …

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Why Groupon Makes Sense (to Google)

David Mihm has an excellent piece (that I happen to agree with) on why Groupon in a broad sense is synergistic for Google. I think coupons and the new twist that Groupon brings to them will be a successful  and profitable advertising medium. John Battelle thinks it worth significantly more than $2.5 billion. Greg Sterling though …

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Google Places Odds and Ends

Google Places Help: Instructions Included for Multi-Language Listings Google has long noted that having the same listing in multiple languages was acceptable. If you were not extremely careful merging of the multi lingual listings might occur unless they had been bulk uploaded. Google has now updated the Places Help Pages to include instructions (if not warnings) as …

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Google Coupons Joining the Witness Protection Program as Google Offers

You won’t have Google Coupons to kick around anymore. It appears that they are joining the witness protection program under a new name: Google Offers. Google Coupons had been the Rodney Dangerfield of Google local products, always hidden, never talked about and for years, after an optimistic start in 2006, they languished. Until Google removed …

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Google Places Coupons Now Integrating Coupons from CitySearch

It appears that Google is bulking up Places Pages with coupons from CitySearch. I had not seen any third party coupons in Places previously but according to Google the ability for “various partners to make coupons and other content available on the Place page has been available for some time”. I ran across the coupon sharing …

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