Over the years, search marketing and social media conferences have grown in both number and price. You want to make them whether it’s for learning or networking purposes, albeit hopefully for both.

There’s one in Portland, Oregon that has piqued my interest. If you’re in search, you may have heard of the February 2012 SearchFest conference by now. I don’t know yet if I’ll make it, but I hope to for at least a couple reasons.

The first reason is price. For $299 (if you register by December 31) you can’t beat it.

And…

It’s a one-day conference, but it’s one, full, packed day with trusted in-the-field presenters including:

• Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz
• Marty Weintraub – aimClear
• Rhea Drysdale – Outspoken Media
• Greg Sterling – Sterling Market Intelligence
• Countless others

Here’s the full agenda.

If you’re on even more of a budget, good news. Flights to Portland (from Minneapolis anyway) are currently inexpensive if you’re willing to have a layover.

Portland hotels are also reasonable, especially if you choose to stay near the airport. Why would you stay by the airport? The Max Light Rail can take you from the airport area right by the conference located at the Governor Hotel. If you have an Expedia account, check out “Flight + Hotel” options from 2/23/12 – 2/25/12. You may find a gem.

Here are a few inexpensive motels close to the Red Line and airport, all apparently includes Wifi and appear to have Expedia discounts:

• Econo Lodge
• Quality Inn
• Roadway Inn
• Comfort Inn and Suites

Todd Mintz, David Mihm, Chris Lister, let me know if I’m incorrect in the above.

I’m a fan of mass transit, and all of this combined can probably be achieved at 1/4 of the price of other conferences.

The second reason I’m intrigued is because of the format. It looks like the presenters are mostly folks who get their hands dirty and implement what they preach.

This occurs at other conferences too, but there was a recent one that had a lot to do with big-box companies and how they sell their newer search marketing services. This is all fine and would be interested if I was in sales. However, I’ve personally seen the differences between big-box sales pitches vs. what they actually deliver.

I have a couple friends and acquaintances in PDX who will be attending this as a local event. How about you? Are you interested in making the trip to Portland? I’ve been there around five times and it’s a beautiful city.

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Not new news, but over the past few years local and social search has made an overdue mainstream surge for local businesses. With that said, there’s still a void. At the very basic level we see lots of this:

And not always a lot of this:

Notice the difference?

Claiming your Google Places page is just one, free, tiny example of what local companies can do to boost their visibility and it’s also arguably the first things recommended.

So, in 2012 Barb from Snap Communications and myself will be offering local search seminars in the Minneapolis-St. Paul areas for interested companies, groups and industries.

We’re not just talking about Google Places. The seminars will include both local strategies and tactics for the following:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
• Local Listings (Google Places, etc.)
• Web Analytics (Google Analytics)
• Social Aspects (Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.)
• Online Reputation Management

We intend for these seminars to be fairly similar to the wonderful and low-cost LocalU local search format, meaning they’re more for educational purposes and less about sales pitches. We also intend to customize these seminars to audience industry.

These could be anything from attorneys to restaurant owners to specific professional groups or associations. We’re seasoned (old) and have seen it all.

Interested? Great! Just contact us per the phone number up top or at pjahn @ localmn.com.

OK, back to the good stuff.

One thing we will be doing for each seminar is pre-selecting an attendee to come on up live to fill out and claim their full Google Places profile. It’s one thing to talk about how important this is, but showing and going through the exact process and hiccups (yep, there are a few) is something we really hope resonates with attendees.

Here’s just a partial image of the Localmn Google Places page:

Regarding the seminars, we highly encourage attendees to bring a laptop and/or tablet. We want you to take notes for things you can do on your own. Smartphones are also encouraged as we’ll be having Twitter hashtags, plus we encourage attendees to take pictures of slides or anything else they see interesting.

Another thing we’ll be doing is showing real-life examples of how local companies are using social media to help boost their brands, and eventually, sales.

The half-day seminars would include our 2-ish hour seminar of local online marketing concepts you can do on your own. For the next two hours, we’re planning for us and other niche consultants to hang around to help your online presence on-the-spot. Niche consultants could provide information about:

• Foursquare
• Websites built on WordPress
• Responsive web design
• More to come

We have a few people in mind for the above niches and will be contacting them soon. With that said, if you’re a expert in a particular niche and would like to volunteer, just let us know.

There will be nominal attendance prices TBD as we plan to keep these more educational oriented and less of sales pitches. We will be giving our awesome niche volunteers subtle pitches as they would be helping out of the goodness of their own hearts.

Are you part of an industry that would like to learn more about all of the above? Just let us know.

Are you a local venue that would like us to pay you money to host these events? Just let us know. If you have free wifi and enough AC outlets or extension cords for attendees to bring their laptops to plug in, especially let us know!

We haven’t come up with a creative Twitter hashtag for these events yet. Have one for us? Again, just let us know. We’ll give you all the credit in the world.

More to come and locally yours,

Barb and Paul

Take a look at this picture.

And this picture.

These are pictures taken from my own camera that appeared briefly in the Localmn Google Places page. Why?

If you don’t proactively include logos and pictures to your Google Places profile, Google can and will algorithmically include random pictures from your own site and/or blog.

In this case, it involved visiting my sister in Iowa City in 2009 for her son’s baptism. The day before, I stayed in Cedar Rapids and made a blog post about a running tour of the well-known flood sites from the year before.

The above pictures include a boarded-up downtown business because of the flood and one of many porta-potties on neighborhood corners for residencies who no longer had water. It’s a sad story.

Once noting these pictures in the Google Places profile, it has been updated with a Search Engine Strategies event and a search/social event presented from my sister and myself.

Others examples of Google Places pictures who could be more proactive can be found from the fabulous town of Northfield, where I made my holiday purchases. Thanks again, Northfield, I will be back.

Tips for including pictures to your Google Places Profile:

• Compress your pictures to your best abililty
• Try to make them close to square – 200 pixels wide to 200 pixels long

Don’t necessarily worry if your potential logo within your Places account looks compressed like this:

It may come out on Google Places looking like this:

It’s trial and error and just go with the flow. Again, take pictures, then make more pictures. More to come on how taking pictures can not just help your local presence, but your social presence as well.

Talks and searches for mobile design has been around for years. Responsive design is a somewhat close kin although the search habits for both type of phrases couldn’t be more different.

Using Google Insights as a gauge, I decided to check out search trends and habits for some phrases. Here are the two main searches:

And…

The numbers in both examples are relative, but it’s interesting to see the differences. Mobile design type of searches have been fairly constant since 2004 with a spike in 2011. Has mobile in general been fairly popular since 2004?

Response type of searches have been nearly non-existent to really surge in 2011. I admittedly haven’t heard of these type of searches until HMTL5 and CSS3 became hot topics in the design world around 2010-ish.

I’ve always considered mobile search a kin to local search with m.dot sites, and response a kin to usability on different-sized devices. Looking at the examples above, I’m still going with that.

With that said, what are your thoughts? Mobile m.dot sites have been around for awhile. Should people continue with this or abandon them to design by response?

First, this post has nothing to do with the American Express Small Business Saturday promotion. I have nothing against them. To me, their promo looks less about caring for local, small businesses and more about getting people to register for a CITI card that they may not want or need.

What I did get to do was shop locally, learn more about Northfield, and view how both people and local businesses use local search portals like Google Places and social media outlets like Foursquare and others.

I arrived in downtown Northfield on Division Street and wanted to say Hello. No one responded which is fine. Every place I visited simply made me feel at home.

The first business I visited was Antiques of Northfield. From the link you may notice there isn’t much of a Google Places presence. They didn’t show up in Foursquare when I attempted to check in as well. One may think it’s probably no big deal as an average antique shopper may not often use the Internet. Today, there were plenty of shoppers inside and the average age may have been 30. There’s certainly potential.

The next place to visit was the Monkey Read book store. From the link you may notice that (as of this writing) their Google Places page has not been claimed, although there are photos listed. This is one example of not just claiming your page, but filling out every detail is a must.

In this example, Google has algorithmically associated images from their own website to their Google Places page which may not be relevant. Yours truly has been on the losing end of this.

On the lighter side, I did receive a ‘nerd alert’ once checking in on Foursquare.

So, I did leave a nice tip about this place.

I did then learn something interesting about downtown Northfield. Most of the older brick buildings were built so sturdy that it’s often hard to receive cell phone reception.

Why do I know this?

I asked the owner if there were any restaurants nearby that had wifi. He then mentioned that the HideAway Cafe two doors down had excellent wifi to the point that he actually gets wifi access through them even though he rarely gets cell phone reception.

He was right about the wifi.

Why was I at the HideAway CoffeeHouse and Wine Bar?

Each year siblings, in-laws and parents draw names for gifts. I drew my brother-in-law who lives and grew up in Iowa City, die-hard Hawkeyes territory, thus Hawkeye-related gifts. Nearby Champion Sports is a really nice place but they’re obviously going to have gear instead from the two Northfield Colleges, Carleton and St. Olaf.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t buy his gift in true Small Business Saturday fashion so I went to the HideAway a couple stores down, made a coffee (Powerade, actually) purchase and used their wifi to buy his gift online.

With that said, notice anything about the above HideAway and Champion Sports text links? They both go to respective unclaimed Google Places pages. Also, just like the Monkey Read store, The HideAway Google Places page algorithmically includes outdated images from their own website/blog.

Since we draw names, my gifting was now done. Off to try a beer and appetizer at J. Grundy’s Rueb ‘n’ Stein down the street. From that link you may again notice that (as of this writing) their listing is unclaimed. This place is decent, has a few reviews, so I put out a quick Foursquare tip. Sorry for the small font.

Rueb ‘n’ Stein is also the place where I heard more than one group of people talk about Small Business Saturday with hopes people come to shop in Northfield.

Strangely, Rueb ‘n’ Stein has been socially engaged on Google Picasa as early as 2004. It looks like they’ve stopped it a couple years ago and it would be neat to see them start it up again.

All of the above examples could go right to Google Places to gain additional business exposure for free. I highly encourage this for any Northfield business owner, manager or employee. For more info, check out the source itself on the Google Places blog.

In all, thank you Northfield for welcoming me into your city. I always enjoy it whether it’s for particular destinations or even if I’m just driving through. Family members will indirectly be thanking you as well when they open up their gifts.

Other notes:

• I did make a really small Flickr set for the day
• Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak made clever use of the #rtlocallist hashtag on Twitter
• Barb Prindle who contributes so much to Localmn graduated from Carleton College
• Northfield has a really nice Patch presence. I’m a fan of Patch
• I saw some overall social media presence from businesses, yet was surprised to not see more considering all the college students who make Northfield home

Did you have any fun Small Business Saturday experiences? If so, let us know as we’d love to hear about it.

In late 2007, ThinkSEM opened up shop offering pay-per-click (PPC) and other search marketing services. Since, owner Clint Danks has grown the business working with higher education, legal, hair salon and other industries. A big piece of their growth is the hire of Creative Director, Dave Dechant. Together, they make the big decisions. I’ve known them for years and wanted to pick their brains for an interview. They happily accepted.

Q1: First, in October you launched ThinkCRE8IVE to add web design and development solutions. How did that come about?
A1: We did have a design section in the ThinkSEM site but it was just buried given the other services that we offer. The name and site ThinkCRE8IVE came about to highlight the design services while keeping it under the ThinkSEM umbrella.

Q2: The spin and correlation with your 8 services and the infinity symbol is pretty slick. Can you describe this for our readers?
A2: It was actually accidental. The ThinkCRE8IVE URL was available and we just happen to offer eight design/development services. Then we noticed that when you place an “8” horizontally, it becomes the infinity symbol. This works great in the design.

Even though we have eight main services, our tagline is “Limitless Ideas, Endless Opportunity”, hence giving reason for the infinity symbol. It all just worked out and made sense on how the right-and-left brain clicks with each other.

Q3: So, what exactly is responsive design and why is it important?
A3: Technically, the three main components to good responsive design is a flexible layout that includes flexible image and media, and the use of media queries. For us, responsive design is creating a design that reacts instantly to every resolution in the wild. It’s important because it’s a great way to combat the plethora of new devices that come out every week.

Q4: In two years, do you think responsive design will be relevant?
A4: Not only will it be relevant, it’s going to boom in use and popularity. In fact, in two years if designers aren’t using this, they will be considered outdated.

Q5: Does responsive design make your day-to-day job easier or harder?
A5: Overall, it makes my day-to-day job much easier. Essentially, you’re creating one website that reacts differently depending on the user’s resolution rather than multiple websites.

Q6: Clint and Dave, you two are the decision makers for the overall ThinkSEM team. I’ve known Clint for close to seven years and Dave for two. You’re both tall and that’s about where the similarities end. With that said, how do you make things tick?
A6: Dave – I think we actually riff off each other really well because of our different ways of thinking. I might be working on something and Clint can see the same thing and provide a different point of view. Clint – I try to separate myself from the design aspect to give Dave the freedom to work as he wants. Dave’s in charge of all things creative to pursue ideas that may help benefit the growth of the company. His only downfall is that he’s a Packers fan. Dave – It’s not my fault that I like to follow winners.

There you have it! Thank you both for taking your time to answer these questions. We’re excited for a local company making big strides. Best of luck down the road.

Recently, I picked up a local/social/search client in the St. Paul-area pediatrics niche. Right now, it’s in the planning stages and have not yet implemented any on-page or off-page optimization. Pediatrics happens to be very competitive, even in a hyper-local area such as St. Paul neighborhoods and suburbs. So far, I’ve learned a few things from their CFO/my contact:

1. They’re web savvy
2. They understand that SEO takes awhile and Google Places/Maps (+ other local search engine sites) helps out in the meantime
3. They understand the importance of integrating social elements
4. They want to get into detail regarding Google Analytics

This is a nice client to have. They’re savvy enough to where I can be both part grunt and part consultant. In fact, I’m hoping that there will be little maintenance involved to the point that they won’t need me anymore. To the numbered list:

1. They are indeed web savvy. They know enough about search that they wanted to outsource, simply because they need to focus on what they do best, which is pediatrics.
2. We had a meeting in St. Paul last Saturday and my contact claimed and filled in their own Google Places profile. It’s not complete yet, but it’s up and we have a nice start before the SEO kicks in for their site. Their Google Places/Maps profile does include two five-star InsiderPages reviews from happy customers. This only helps.
3. Social elements – they do have a nice Facebook Page which is already sending them their most referral traffic, and have started a Twitter presence as well. We hope to enhance this with LinkedIn, Flickr, Foursquare, etc. This may be a phase-two project depending on our results in phase-one.
4. Google Analytics – I already made sure my contact has access to GA. It brings transparency to show what’s working and what can be improved.

Regarding Google Places (Maps), here is a screenshot of the InsiderPages reviews mentioned above:

Just a couple of many other niche sites we hope to take advantage of is UBL (Universal Business Listings) and Avvo. I’ve been happy with UBL in the past as they do a decent job at providing a consistent N.A.P. (Name, Address, Phone) across numerous local sites. I’m also a longtime fan of Avvo. Here is Jennifer’s listing and we hope to enhance her profile and others. My client contact is currently working on this.

This is definitely a local/social/search world. With this pediatrics practice and industry, it’s going to include all to be successful and big thanks to my contact Mark for his collaboration.

There are a few things I hope to accomplish:

• See a great show
• Meet people in person via new Twitter connections
• Give Google Places reviews to businesses I frequent
• Engage with local business owners/managers
• Not bug any potential celebrities who stay at my hotel

The first will be a given. I grew up listening to the Crue, love Public Enemy and hear great things about many of the other 70+ bands performing.

As I may be going solo, I hope to enjoy this block party with new Twitter connections. If you’re going to the show, hit me up at @paulj on Twitter. I want to hang out with you! Sometimes I’m a lump, but I promise to be fun.

A hobby of mine is to give local businesses honest Google Places reviews. WeHo businesses, encourage me to visit you via this tweet:

I’d also like to engage with local business owners/managers. The purpose of this trip isn’t to attract clients, but I’d love to talk local search shop with those interested.

Finally, I’ll be staying at the Le Montrose Hotel Suites. Apparently, it’s a celebrity getaway. I have no plans to bug them. I’m here for the show.

Speaking of the show, here’s an example of what Tommy Lee will be doing (if you’re at work, headphones are recommended):

Maybe I will see you there? Hit me up.

The biggest thing everyone came back with was to really engage, be social and be transparent. They all stressed that search engines are going to be using social more in their data and factors – not huge news and there’s a lot more, but not for this post.

So, Google is indeed partially doing this. Yesterday, their Places team announced they are now using descriptive terms in local search results. I really like the hyper-local potential. More on that below.

This means they are now including terms that appear to be words others use to describe businesses on different local and social sites.

Here’s a Google Places screenshot for the standard “pizza” keyword. The area was for north downtown/St. Anthony Main/UofM in Minneapolis.

Here’s the hyper-local and conversion potential that I love. If you’re in the area, you already know that Pizza Nea uses unique ingredients like sea salt and prosciutto, Mesa Pizza has popular vegetarian and mac and cheese options and Punch is known for their wood fired ovens and basil for their Margherita pies.

Visitors to the area can now see this before they get there. and this is hyper-local at its finest.

There are many more examples. This one is for the phrase “music school” near downtown Minneapolis.

If you’re in music education, you know that Suzuki is a method of musical training for kids as young as preschool age. If someone is specifically looking for this, this is a great chance for a conversion.

Loosely related, here’s an example of what shows up for a south Minneapolis search for “piano lessons”.

Guess what type of music classes they specialize in? Early childhood.

How about a bike rental in Minneapolis?

It’s well-known that for a couple years, Minneapolis has had a slick public bicycle rental system that you can use with a credit card. Bixi is the bicycle solution behind the system. Visitors can now know this.

How about a diner? There’s a well-known one in St. Paul.

Mickey’s Diner happens to be known for their Mulligan Stew and Potatoes O’Brien. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and was used in scenes from the movie “Mighty Ducks”.

Here’s a diner in Rochester and it’s my favorite example.

See the “hole in the wall” description? This place is indeed a hole in the wall and in the very best way possible. Locals already know this and visitors can read their ratings and reviews. This place is really hard to beat!

These descriptive terms aren’t always as relevant as the above. Here’s one for a St. Paul attorney.

Gonzaga University? Seems like an irrelevant descriptive term. Although, according to Avvo he graduated from the Gonzaga University School of Law in 1978.

Side note, Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA is pretty.

I tried a slightly longer search in “personal injury lawyer”. It didn’t show any descriptive terms. It did show the category of “personal injury attorney”. Note, your category and descriptive terms can both show. It just doesn’t in this example and many long-tail searches.

This new feature is brand new and I really hope it stays. I’ve read a couple posts that have showed flaws in these descriptions. I hope these are the extreme exceptions. Google has something really good here.

Enough about my thoughts. What are yours? Are you a local business owner or manager? If so, Google your company name and see how accurate these descriptions are for you. Let us know what you think.

I really hope the following is an example:

Enter Heather. I’ve known her since around 2003 – first as a snowboarding comrade, then as the president of a Minneapolis IT consulting firm, and now for a side project she created. It’s pretty awesome. Here it is:

It’s tasty. More on that below.

For local, there’s no Google Places page because she doesn’t have a store front. The only Places page is for her IT firm in uptown Minneapolis.

Instead, she got local and social by contacting upscale grocers like Kowalski’s Markets who decided to distribute her seasoning.

After a huge amount of creating, tasting, testing, a slick design by her boyfriend Rhett, Dirty Good landed on Kowalski’s shelves May 28th.

So, she did put together a Yahoo website and started doing the local/social thing we’re all supposed to do like starting small Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Every once in a while she’ll even send out a tweet from her ODG account:

These social outlets will most likely grow to speak for themselves. She is a social person by nature and wants you to be as well via her packaging by sharing Dirty Good recipes. What do I mean by this?

That’s what I mean.

Since this is supposed to be good on anything, I thought I’d try my own recipe using deviled eggs. Being a Minnesotan, I did want to somehow infuse bacon flavor. I’ve tried the Baconnaise thing before and it’s definitely tasty, but a bit overkill for this.

Luckily, Kowalski’s sells an alternative. It is absolutely perfect.

As a result, here is my visual deviled eggs recipe by using Dirty Good. Season to taste.

These are easily the best deviled eggs I have ever tasted. Tell me Heather, does this rock or suck? I vote for rock.

As marketers, sometimes we may focus a bit heavy on Google Places pages and how many Twitter followers we have. Does it really have to be that way? Maybe we should just create something awesome.

A year from now, I hope to look back at this and see success from both a local and social level. Everything above has nothing to do with being an expert in local/social, it’s about making something awesome and letting the local (and hopefully regional/national) and social search naturally kick in.

If you’re not in the Twin Cities area and want to buy some dirty goodness, you can easily purchase online.

Any similar success stories you want to share? We want to hear them.