{"id":12101,"date":"2012-01-25T14:32:01","date_gmt":"2012-01-25T18:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=12101"},"modified":"2012-01-25T17:38:48","modified_gmt":"2012-01-25T21:38:48","slug":"loci-2011-gib-olander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/25\/loci-2011-gib-olander\/","title":{"rendered":"Loci 2011: Gib Olander"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gib Olander currently serves as Vice President Market Development for Localeze and frequent speaker at search marketing conferences. Localeze is a leading provider of business listing identity management, which includes; collection, organization, validation and distribution of merchant content. This content is widely used in the local ecosystems and the data is the foundation of place information at a\u00a0large number of sites<\/a>\u00a0including Bing, Facebook and Twitter amongst others.<\/p>\n

From this vantage point, Gib sees the industry dynamics from the inside out, providing useful insights to many in the industry.<\/p>\n

******<\/p>\n

While my day job keeps me out of the day-to-day practice of optimizing local listings or sites, I still dabble at night to stay dangerous. So I have to give a shout-out to all the in-the-trenches practitioners who write articles counseling on the tactics of local search. THANK YOU for sharing your knowledge as you have saved many of us countless learning cycles.\u00a0 Local search is in an interesting position as we kick off 2012, so it is important to share some of the bigger trends coming together<\/a> to change the local landscape as we know it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve used this stat a many times in 2011 but it is more important than ever in 2012! Global <\/em><\/strong>smartphone usage<\/em><\/strong><\/a> set to hit 50% by 2013<\/em><\/strong>. Smartphones are outpacing PC<\/a> sales and, according to Greg Sterling\u2019s comScore mobile review, mobile advertising<\/a> is ready to take off.<\/p>\n

So my guess is that most of the readers of this blog (like me) are avid smartphone users (if you\u2019re not GO BUY ONE RIGHT NOW).\u00a0 Think of all the things that you do with this device \u2013 and think for a minute about your life without it. So now go wipe the sweat off your brow. It\u2019s ok, you can keep it.\u00a0 My point is we aren\u2019t the typical user today.\u00a0 We are early adopters, but once you start using a smartphone you never go back. If the numbers are correct, and the smartphone-using population does in fact double, look out because our little local world is about to explode.<\/p>\n

I believe this dramatic shift in smartphone usage is going to lead towards \u201ccommerce\u201d instead of advertising, or in support of advertising, so GrouponNow and the Foursquare partnership<\/a> is going to be huge. We have to enable SMBs\u00a0to manage the cost of sales with a new look at inventory management and provide tools to reach potential customers during the slowest times of day.<\/p>\n

Panda<\/a> rocked the directory world and is creating the need for authoritative content \u2013 who wrote the content, when and why are starting to be a more important again.\u00a0 More content isn\u2019t going to be the answer, it\u2019s better, more authoritative content that will be king.<\/p>\n

Another major change is the evolving world of apps. Being found when searching on the big PC is only part of the answer or equation now. The apps landscape has introduced us to some of the promise of the semantic web. Siri is amazing. The long tail has a new meaning in local and with mobile shoppers being likely to buy within hours, as opposed to PC searchers who take weeks, this local mobile fragmentation<\/a> is ripe for the smart to gain an advantage as the traffic continues to segment.<\/p>\n

But maybe the most important article of the year from my perspective was about a key acquisition<\/a> by Neustar! For those that didn\u2019t know that TARGUSinfo (now Neustar Information Services) was the parent company of Localeze, the future is bright, with loads of innovation coming in 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gib Olander currently serves as Vice President Market Development for Localeze and frequent speaker at search marketing conferences. Localeze is a leading provider of business listing identity management, which includes; collection, organization, validation and distribution of merchant content. This content is widely used in the local ecosystems and the data is the foundation of place …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-maps-google-local"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12101"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12104,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12101\/revisions\/12104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}