I attended and participated in a panel at Search Engines Strategies’ inaugural Local conference last week in Denver.  The conference had every making of success, as Chris Sherman told me it sold out, and there was clearly a buzz about how much attention local is getting these days.  The many leaders of the online marketing world were there, discussing the latest strategies, technologies and sites for marrying consumers and local merchants – facilitating community, commerce and advertising opportunities.

I found that the majority of the participants and discussions were focused around technology and tactics, versus truly discussing what issues face local merchants.  During my panel, very little attention was paid to how local merchants view the Internet, and what they are willing to do (or not do) to make the Internet help their businesses.  While we are innovating and finding the new platforms and media outlets, most local merchants are left with their small, traditional businesses and basic problems.  While we see slow adoption of online advertising and technology by small businesses, we spend less time learning from small merchants and educating them, than we do talking about keyword auto-generators, meta tags, click-through rates, and XML data feeds.

Consumers have moved to the web in a massive way, and they’re asking for their merchants to be there.  Most merchants have not made that leap in their mind, and it’s our job (and opportunity) to educate them.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Strategies | small business | local | search marketing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Business of Local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.