Thursday, January 28, 2010 1:01 PM

Sometimes when you’re searching for a local business on your mobile device, you’re not looking for their website, but rather to connect by phone. After searching for a restaurant, you might want to call and make a reservation. Or, after searching for a video store, you might want to find out if they have the video you want. Calling the business is now easier thanks to a feature that allows advertisers to add a clickable local phone number to their mobile ads. If you’re using an iPhone, Android, or other smartphone, you just click the number to call the business.

What’s more, the ads and phone numbers you see are based on your location. So, if a store or restaurant has multiple locations, you’ll be calling the nearest one, and not making reservations in some other city. You can use My Location to make sure you get search results that are tailored to your location.

Of course, if you’re going to be in another city next week and you want to call ahead to make your reservation, include the city in your search query to get the most relevant results.

via Official Google Mobile Blog: New Click to Call Phone Numbers in Mobile Ads.

Want to learn the best ways to do that? Come to the February, 2010 JoomlaChicago Meeting and find out! For the JoomlaChicago February meeting, Kendall Cabe will lead a session on how to customize your Joomla! template.

February: Customize Your Joomla! Template | Upcoming Meetings

In the past, people used to open the print edition of local Yellow Pages to find a restaurant, a doctor, an attorney or a bakery. Today they go to a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing or AOL to find products and services they need. Once they find what they searched for, they open any specific business’s website to get more information: prices, menus, special offers, benefits of any product or service, address, phone numbers or electronic forms to make an appointment or a reservation. Furthermore, they search for driving directions to your brick and mortar office or store.

If you don’t have a company website, you may be missing a lot of sales. In fact, you are allowing your competitors to beat you to a sale just because your business doesn’t have a website.

A company website has become an important marketing tool to attract new customers and to keep the existing ones informed of what your business is doing.

The point is not that your business needs a website, the point is that your customers expect your company to have it.

Why a Website Is Important for Your Company

TOC Conference: Tools of Change for Publishing

I often hear executives struggling to understand the power and promise of mobile devices as it relates to their business. “I would never want to receive an ad on my phone for nearby pizza,” they say. Or, “The iPhone is a small percentage of the phone market. What does it have to do with my business?” This is a bit like looking at the emergence of the railroads in the 1800s and saying, “I have no interest in going to Chicago. What’s the big deal?”

Here are a few ways in which mobility matters:

With mobility, coordination replaces planning. As communications protocols accelerate to real-time (think Twitter) we are seeing more work processes move to approaches that favor just-in-time coordination over advanced planning. It is more efficient and more flexible. In software development, this is called the Agile approach where developers code in short, iterative loops, constantly processing the feedback to refine the end product. In product development, this is Fast Cycle Time. In organizational design, this is real-time collaboration and the flattened organization. In the Army, mobile communications are reconfiguring the traditional command-and-control hierarchy, pushing decision-making to the soldier in the field who has the most information about the situation at hand. The implications go beyond military maneuvers. With a workforce able to remain in real-time contact anywhere, possibilities emerge for new management techniques and an increased role for employees.

via Mobility Matters – Forbes.com.

Web 2.0 refers to the generation of companies and services built on the wreckage of Web 1.0.

In the 1990s, hundreds of billions of dollars were spent building the physical (fiber-optic cable, server farms, payment systems, software) and mental (marketing, hype, promotion) infrastructure of online business. Many of the companies that created the broadband ecosystem wound up going bankrupt. But they left behind a platform and user base that could be tapped into by new companies, which could gain scale without having to make massive investments. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Salesforce.com, blogging software, and, above all, Google.

The first generation of dot-coms burned through cash rapidly because they had to spend a lot of money building and running their businesses—marketing and advertising to get the word out, not to mention software, consultants, and programmers to run online systems and analyze the results. Thanks to Web 2.0, many of these costs have plummeted. Many of the basics are now essentially free, which means a business built on the infrastructure laid down by the first two generations of Web companies can gain scale on a shoestring budget, all while giving away its products and services for free. Call it Web 2.5.

Mint.com: The Future of Web-Based Business? | Newsweek Voices – Daniel Gross | Newsweek.com

Content Is King–An Interview with Mark Roma

WHEN
August 18, 2009
Doors open at 6:15 pm; panel begins at 7pm
Meet the panelists at our cash bar reception, 8:30pm

WHERE
The ComedySportz Theatre
929 W Belmont Street
Chicago, IL 60657

Tonight: LIVE Event in Chgo: Social Media and Journalism – Liz Strauss at Successful Blog – Thinking, writing, business ideas … You’re only a stranger once.

Wouldn’t you like to get some free advertising for your business? And not just any advertising — but advertising that’s in front of people exactly when they’re looking for what you have to offer?

Then it’s time for you to check out Google’s Local Business Center. Just about every business will want to take advantage of this free advertising opportunity. Even if you don’t have a Web site. Even if you aren’t Web savvy.

Let me make this clear: I’m not referring to Google’s “AdWords.” Those are ads appearing next to listings when someone types in a keyword. You definitely pay for those. Google’s Local Business Center listings are the information that appears when someone searches Google Maps, mobile, or Google 411. And that information — which serves the same purpose of an ad — is absolutely free.

Google Business Center Worth Checking Out | Hartford Business.

• The Yellow Pages App Store: Product Demos
• Vertical Case Studies: Lessons for Yellow Pages Publishers
• Dissecting the Yellow Pages Business Model
• SEO Strategies for IYPs
• The Kelsey Group Debate: Is Yellow Pages a Victim of False Perception?
• Print Yellow Pages 2013: Critical Changes to the Core Product

Link