Bing, Yahoo! ads on Michael Jackson results on Google. Click to see full version.

Seen over the weekend: ads for bing and Yahoo! on Google search results for “Michael Jackson”.

The bing ad led to bing’s xRank page for Michael Jackson. The Yahoo! ad bizarrely led to a Yahoo! shopping results page for Michael posters, most of which had nothing to do with Jackson.

The bing ad appeared every time I reloaded the page. The other ads were much less frequent.

Update: AOL has joined the fray with ads for AOL Music, including a pitch to download a “Michael Jackson tribute toolbar” on the landing page.

An ad from my Facebook profile page.

At least Facebook hasn’t shown me an ad for a gay dating site in a while. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Someone should teach the advertiser proper capitalization.

Most major markets have an industry specialization or two. In Detroit it’s the auto industry. Minneapolis has retail and medical devices. Charlotte has banking. Each of those industries has a number of companies in it.

Because I work on automotive products, I frequently end up on the Detroit Free Press’ site. Usually it’s because someone sent me a link or I found the story through an aggregator. Freep.com has a business front page, but often those stories there aren’t relevant to me. There should be an easier way: I should be able to subscribe to feeds about the auto industry and the companies I follow. A halfway decent publishing system should make this a very simple process.

A few newspapers are doing this already. The Seattle Times has feeds for Boeing and Microsoft. The Houston Chronicle has a feed for the energy industry.

But they don’t seem to be capitalizing on the advertising opportunity. Having a highly targeted business audience makes that traffic much more valuable. A conference that is targeting decisionmakers in the auto industry can spend a lot more than the spam ad inventory that is classmates.com. (Which is what currently appears on the Freep page.)

Newspapers can also serve other niches depending on the local market. The most obvious is out-of-town fans of local sports teams.

A number of large companies, including Zappos, Comcast and jetBlue are already using Twitter to engage with their customers. As Twitter’s popularity grows, it will cease to be a tenable channel for customer service.

But for local businesses, it’ll be a great opportunity. Witness this exchange between Twitter developer Alex Payne and 21st Amendment Brewery.

Twitter exchange between Alex Payne and 21st Amendment brewery

Three of the big challenges in getting local business online are that it’s too expensive, too complicated and too hard to prove the return. A Twitter presence can address all three:

• It’s free.
• It’s easy. You don’t have to create a Web site to reach your customers. If you don’t have one, your Web presence can be your Twitter page. Not ideal, but better than nothing — at least it’ll get you into search engines. If you do have one, you can autoflow Twitter updates to your Web page making it easy to keep your Web presence fresh.
• It’s easier to prove return on investment. Twitter can improve both the “R” and the “I”. You can see who’s following your business, showing return. Because there is no cost and the effort is lower, the investment is lower.

There are a number of ways businesses can use Twitter:

• Specials of the day. “Soup of the day: tomato basil”
• Special events. “Windsor Cooley book signing Friday night” “Closed for private party”
• New products. “Transcontinental IPA on tap at the 21A”
• Problems. “Closed due to broken water pipe”
  

The immediacy of Twitter also offers a way to do real-time inventory management. Have an especially slow night and food going to waste? Send out a tweet with a special discount.

More on: Twitter

John makes a burrito with his goose sauce

Back in the mid 90s, I frequented The Weinery, a total dive of a hot dog place in the Cedar/Riverside area of Minneapolis. Jerry, the then owner, collected email addresses and would occasionally send out specials. Say the password when you placed your order and you got a discount.

The other day, I received an email from John at Pedro & Vinny’s. John ran a burrito cart in downtown DC. (I wrote about John’s honor system earlier.) He moved away a while back. Friday’s email announced that his burritos will be hitting the DC streets soon.

But John and Jerry are rare among small business owners. In the last 13 years, Internet use has exploded and tools have gotten easier and easier. Yet few local businesses do a good job of communicating with their existing customers and reaching out to new customers.

To be fair, they haven’t been in the habit of advertising. Before the Internet, the key local outlets were newspapers, television, radio and the yellow pages. You essentially had to buy the entire DMA for thousands of dollars. Direct mail (Valpak etc.) and Entertainment coupon books were among the few options that made economic sense.

The Internet has drastically changed the economics. Publishers can slice and dice virtually infinite inventory into smaller and smaller buckets and make advertising affordable for small businesses.

So why aren’t small businesses advertising online?

• No one is asking them.  Publishers (by and large) haven’t changed their compensation systems for sales reps. If I were a sales rep, I’d much rather work on selling the full page ad for $10,000 than an online presence for $100.
• It’s too complicated. Search advertising seems like a prime opportunity for local businesses because it can be highly targeted. But the interfaces and the structures are well beyond the skills or interests of small business owners. They’re too busy running their businesses to run keyword campaigns.
• They’ve been burned. Most restaurant sites look like they were built solely to show off the Flash skills of the design firm. The restaurateur spent hundreds or thousands of dollars for a site that doesn’t drive any foot traffic because it’s unusable and doesn’t show up in search results (because everything is Flash or an image).
• It’s hard to see the return. Online advertising is a slam dunk for businesses that can complete the transaction online. They can see what they’re getting for their money. It’s harder to show that value to businesses that rely on foot traffic.
• No need #1. In a town of 500 people, there’s no need to advertise. Everyone knows who you are.
• No need #2. If you’re the hot new restaurant in town and there’s always a wait to get a table, why spend money on ads?

The beautiful ad is in stark contrast with the product being advertised. We all expect exaggeration in advertising, but for the most part the product doesn’t even exist. I’m not talking about cramped seats or the fees for everything but using the toilet; the ad is one of several new commercials for United’s new international first and business class.

United’s premium products have significantly lagged their competitors, especially when compared with foreign competitors. Virgin’s and British’s business classes are much nicer than United’s first. United’s new product is a significant step forward.

The problem is that most of United’s international fleet hasn’t been reconfigured for the new product. If you buy the advertised product, chances are you’ll get the older, vastly inferior product. According to the FlyerGuide Wiki, only 11% of the fleet has been reconfigured:

Completed aircraft: 11 out of 96
Completed B747-400s: 4 out of 29
Completed B767-300s: 7 out of 21
Completed B777-200s: 0 out of 46

Good luck getting the 180-degree flat bed seats they talk about in the Butterfly and Moondust ads. There is no way to ensure that you’ll get the new product. Veteran frequent fliers play guessing games on FlyerTalk’s United forums. While you can improve your odds based on picking the routes or studying United.com seatmaps you’ll only know for sure when you step on the plane. There is a way to ensure that you don’t get the new product: buy a business class seat on a 777. None of those have been converted.

United deserves credit for making the ads easily available online, something more companies should do. The clip of the Heart commercial includes a “making of” commentary by Dennis Cary, United’s SVP of Marketing and behind the scenes interviews with the artists.

As art, the ads are some of the most creative and visually engaging ads I’ve seen; they’re downright stunning when viewed in HD. If they do their job and gets people on United’s planes, there’s a really good chance they won’t be crossing the oceans on United again.

Desi shoutout: According to United’s description, Moondust was animated by an Indian. “Ishu Patel, an Indian-born and Canadian-based animator, used his world-renowned back-lit technique in which a thin layer of plastic modeling clay is applied to a glass plate that has a 1000-watt light positioned beneath it and an animation camera above it.”

See also:

• Ad Age’s Bob Garfield reviews the ad.

• Some thoughts on pricing (Redeye VC) – First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman examines pricing strategies. He starts with pricing of soda in a hotel and found a range of $1 to $4.50. The overall range is incredible — you can get the same amount of soda for 35c to $6. Even airfares don’t vary this much on a percentage basis. How do you pick among various choices if the only thing you know is the name of the company and the price? When it involves child care, he goes with the most expensive.
• Ad Houses Will Need to Be More Nimble (WSJ) – The Journal takes a look at the challenges facing ad agencies as clients demand more accountability and integrated campaigns. Agencies have largely been slow to adopt to the rapidly changing media environment and audience fragmentation.
• Looking at Data Through a DVR (WSJ) – The advertising business continues its slow march from relationship-based buying to data-based buying. As DVRs and settop boxes proliferate, they increase the amount of real data advertisers have to work with. Services like Tivo’s StopWatch allow advertisers to get second-by-second response data.
  The right way to do TV advertising is to insert commercials dynamically at playback instead of a static recording at the time of transmission. Unfortunately, there are many structural barriers to this happening. This is likely to happen first in Web-based playback and will migrate to the TV.

• RSS feeds. You can subscribe to feeds of all reviews near you. If you find a reviewer you like, you can stay up-to-date on his or her reviews.
• A “first reviewed by” designation to highlight contributors who are the first to review a place.
• Attribute drill down. You can narrow your search using filters such as “family friendly,” “casual” or “elegant.”

It’s been a few months since I last checked in on Yahoo! Local. Overall, it’s a huge improvement. It has a ways to go before catching category leader Yelp. (The metric being by my subjective opinion of product quality.)

Yelp has had the first two features for at least a year.

Among the local players, Yelp has had the best incentive system for contributors. Its “First to Review” designation is one of many things that Yelp does to encourage frequent participation. An “Elite” system rewards frequent contributors with a badge on their profile and invitations to parties. The front page of the site highlights a review of the day. Featured Yelpers also appear on the home page.

It may sound corny, but such incentives are important to keeping people engaged. Most social systems have some sort of perk system, including ODP’s edit-alls and metas and the Wikipedia cabal.

Although Yahoo’s design is more visually appealing than it used to be, it’s still cluttered.

Unlike Yelp, the map scrolls off the search results page, making it hard to see where results 3-10 are located unless you have a very large screen.

Getting reviews is more work than it should be. Yahoo! breaks its 69 reviews for The Italian Store across 29 pages, 3 at a time. Yelp shows all 42 of its reviews on one page, making it very easy to scan.

Then there’s the ads. I’m all for ads — I work in the Web space and like to get paid — when they’re relevant. The ads on Yahoo! Local are anything but. Here is an example of the ads that appeared above the listings for restaurants:

The top two ads are for services that compete with Yahoo! Local. Ads on the side (not shown) pitched “Watch mouth-watering videos of Oklahoma’s best restaurants” and one from Target offered “Find restaurant online. Shop & Save at Target.com Today.” (I’ll admit to clicking through on the Oklahoma ad just to see what would constitute a mouth-watering video of Okahoma restaurants. Unfortunately, they linked it to a video of a bad rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.)

I understand that local advertisers are scarce, especially outside the Bay Area. But Yelp takes the right approach.

More on: local search, yahoo, yelp

Disclosure: I used to work on local products for AOL.

Yup, that’s an Ethernet jack above the urinal. I saw this at my friend Kieran’s pub, The Local in Minneapolis.

No, I didn’t try plugging in.

Here’s what the jack is really used for.