A Citibank survey revealed an interesting fact, local businesses do not profit from social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and over time stop their engagement of those channels, as they are not turning in the results they expected.

Not a big surprise, local businesses are run by people who have a lot on their hands, they (sometimes) need to manage and work at the same time, they need to make the most of their time, and learning how to interact with (leads) strangers over the internet might not be something they have the time or the energy to do. Even once the business owners or their employees go through the effort of learning the ropes and engaging a social media channel they have to maintain an effort and keep on posting, answering and asking question and coming up with new information for their channel, which is difficult to do while running a business.

As Maria Veltre, Executive Vice President of Citi’s Small Business Segment says – “While social media can provide additional channels to network and help grow a business, many small businesses may not have the manpower or the time required take advantage of them.” And that is the whole thing in a nugget.

Local businesses online should do what they do best, and that is not communicating on the internet, if they have the manpower and resources to start engaging a new line of communication they should try that effort for a good few weeks, or hire an expert to do this job for them, report back to them and establish reachable goals and milestones for decisions.

This is the task of local SEO experts, Search engine optimization for local businesses could perform all of this socail media work and maintain a steady and solid channel that would answer the needs of the communities as well as the public profile of the local businesses, in certain cases a specific person working for the local business can follow the SEO expert work and in a few months take over the task, leaving the local SEO expert with only the task of reporting and development tasks.

Youtube has a new logo, and it kind of reminds me of another logo, the McDonalds “Billions & Billions served”. The analogy is really simple, both became household names and took over a slice of their industry early on, both are early adapters to cultural changes in the global society (although some might argue that McDonald’s actually encouraged it) and both face serious challenges in the present and probably the near future.

YouTube - 1 Billion Views per Day (the new logo)

While YouTube is challenged daily by new video sites, the whole on line television concept starts to flex and change, as with all other things in our modern times each channel of communication seeks the subject affiliation so users will prefer it to the compeitition thus creating video sites that are better for uploads and some that are better for watching (quality wise), other are simply better for finding stuff (search) and Google’s YouTube wins that category hands down.

The Old YouTube Logo

The old logo just called out to people to engage in video communication, this new one shows off an unbelievable statistic, and brings a new subject to the discussion table, how long can TV survive with this kind of flexible and fast adapting competitor, and what will keep the internet from producing its own high quality shows for display online. At this moment this is all a little sci fi talk, but as we know, things happen much faster than we think they will.

Last thing, seems funny that both Google and YouTube hold this market share and are becoming synonymous with search (web, images, video) and at the same time that increasing stats are clearly an indication that the growing markets will have demand for personalized and specialized internet services.

They had Billions before YouTube

As with anything else in the internet marketing world, the promotional effort of pushing a site forward is a mixture of work on the actual pages and site that sells the service and a promotional work on the world wide web in forms of social networks, links and content advertising.

Not all small businesses are in need of an expert search engine optimization expert, some can do just fine by implementing a few simple but effective SEO processes to their site construction and on line pages, read more about this in the website optimization tips artilce that was published ealier this month.

Working with different clients offers some insight into the understanding of search engine optimization on the high street and what are the expectations from SEO companies.

In many cases people do not understand that SEO takes a lot of time, in other cases people think that SEO’s can grab people and force them to visit a site (or buy something on it), it is rather surprising to find out that even CEO’s and managers have unrealistic expectations of their SEO campaigns and the services that come with them.

The idea of defining search engine optimization will lead people to realistic expectation and will allow internet marketing companies to work with the time and patience needed to promote websites, in this case understanding will lead to a win-win scenario, clients will have a clear idea of the deliverable and service providers will have the much needed time and patience from the clients.

A short post today, just looking into the future of search and of local search.

One of the main reasons I believe it is crucial for (almost) every business to have a web site that makes some effort at ranking at its local arena is that it looks logical to me that in the near future search engines will try and offer better service and user experience through local search.

10 Years ago writing down the term “New York City Plumber” would have astonished its searcher, simply because no one really expected to get a full list of dozens of candidates for the job, today it is almost the opposite, everyone expects the results to be there, and the next step is giving it to them, without any effort.

Even today Google asks you if you want your local search engine or the global one, the next step is not to ask, and to go even deeper (from country to state, from state to county, from county to a block?), and once this happens its going to be war of the pixels for exposure, because in that tiny space above the fold all of your potential web clients will live.

Not surprisingly, local search is the next big thing for all the search engines, and there are a few things every (and any) business owner should think about in that reference.

If you are selling or providing any service locally, you should have (at least) one page up on he net, describing your services or product, this becomes even more important for business that provide local products or services exclusively, since they stand to lose considerable potential earnings and clients to fast moving internet competition.

Local Search for NYC Lawyer - Looks Crowded

Your page does not need to be anything fancy or complicated, it is optimal if this could be your own registered domain, but even if you set up a free web page on one of the many sites that gives that (free) service it will be OK. Set your page name to the product (or service) you provide and the area, city, state or country in which you provide it (for example dog trainer from Chicago should do something like dog-trainer-chicago for his page or domain name).

Get something up TODAY, this is not something you need to plan or produce over months, your page needs time in order to rank and get into the search engines, do not wait another second, take 2 hours off and do this right now, in time you will see this was a clever move.

More on local search in a few days.