If you live in Baltimore, you may know Miss Shirley’s Cafe. This popular brunch spot is particularly hard to get into – on Sundays, the wait often passes 2 hours to get a table.

Miss Shirley’s also shares the honor of having perhaps the best Foursquare Mayor incentive we’ve ever heard: If you’re the mayor at Miss Shirley’s, you get to skip the line.

(In other words, you get automatic rockstar treatment. It’s a great way to impress your friends/girlfriend/whomever, and a great way to tick off the other poor schmoes who’ve been waiting there since 8am).

Since introducing the campaign, Miss Shirley’s has seen a 427% increase in the number of people checking into their 2 locations. This gives them a better chance of showing up in the ‘What’s Hot’ pages of Foursquare, which can have a ripple effect throughout the web (provided their page is well-optimized).

They’ve also heard from several people who say they’ve been coming by more often to check in, just to try and secure a Mayorship. Proving that there’s nothing like adding a little competition to the mix to increase customer loyalty.

Although there’s no good way to correlate an increase in checkins to an increase in business, we see another benefit of being a first mover on Foursquare: the press and awareness Miss Shirley’s has gotten from this campaign has been significant. If their local small business can create this much buzz, yours could, too.

You can read more on the campaign here.

The reason? As reported by Ad Age, after finding that only 4% of U.S. Adults have ever used location-based services, Forrester’s study also revealed that:

Almost 80% of location-based service users are male. Close to 70% of them are between the ages of 19 and 35, and 70% have college degrees or higher. Forrester also found these location-app users to be influential (the report finds they’re 38% more likely to say friends and family ask their opinions before a purchase) and they are especially receptive to mobile coupons and offers. This set is up to 20% more likely to consult their phones before a purchase, and are far more likely to research products and services and read customer reviews.

Their conclusion? That because the current user-base is dominated by one demographic, marketers should steer clear of Foursquare and other location-based services for now (with the exception of certain demographically-targeted verticals such as gaming, sportswear manufacturers, and consumer electronics companies).

Forrester is, of course, a leader in online market research, and tends to know their stuff. That being said, I respectfully disagree.

Forrester’s recommendation that male-oriented marketers should blaze the trail (and that other marketers should wait until location-based services attract more users) is a good one — provided they’re not talking about local businesses. After all, those are the businesses that services like Foursquare and Gowalla are designed for.

If you run a local restaurant, bar, or even a clothing store, it seems to me that a 19-to-35 year-old man who’s an early adopter and whose friends consult him for shopping recommendations is an ideal target market. Sure, if you’re a store that sells mostly to women, it might not be as useful (excepting maybe Victoria’s Secret), but most small local businesses will find this market to be a good fit.

A local business stands a lot to gain, simply by claiming its listing and promoting itself on these services. Even if a company’s location-aware efforts only bring in one customer at first, the long-term effects will likely snowball over time. That customer may become a customer for life, and tell all his/her friends about your business. If you claim your listing early and get involved, you’ll already have recommendations and other user-generated content attached to your listing by the time your competitors take notice.

And all of this for a small bit of work to get yourself set up and regularly maintain your offers.

In short, I think along the lines of the first commenter on the Ad Age article, who said,

This is the equivalent of saying, in 1994, that the internet skews male, so real marketers should avoid it…this is an incredibly short-sighted view.

I couldn’t agree more. For local storefront-style businesses, it can only help to be a first-mover on these platforms.

Sure, the returns might not be huge at first. But the cost of entry is negligible (at least for now), and over time, it’s easy to see that those who adopt early will be the ones who reap the most benefits.

Numerous advertisers have experienced exceptional results after adding ad extensions to their local advertising campaigns. From pizza delivery companies to paint stores, they allow bricks-and-mortar retailers to more effectively compete in the online marketing world.

At the end of last week, Google made a significant change with their location extensions system – you can now show up to 4 locations in your ad. As seen in the screenshot below, clicking on an ad with location extensions now reveals a pull-down menu with a map that has multiple nearby locations targeted.

Locations can be added by hand, but the more effective approach is to simply link your AdWords campaigns to your Google Places account. Doing so makes adding location extensions a one-click process.

For local retailers with multiple bricks-and-mortar locations, this new addition is a huge step forward. By combining this functionality with geotargeted ad campaigns, you can deliver much more relevant ads to potential customers at the exact moment they’re looking for your services. Even better, you can let them see whether the location is close to them before they click through your ad, thus better-qualifying your leads.

For those with multiple locations, we recommend revising your AdWords ad groups to take advantage of this new feature immediately.

Dealmap and Goby are both taking the social out of local internet marketing. In its place, they’re providing something of much more tangible value to the user.

Goby helps its users find things to do in different locations. If you’re looking for an art class in Boulder, CO, for instance, it will offer you a number of related options – from art classes to galleries to lectures at museums, complete with schedules. It does this by searching the web and finding relevant events, then adding them to its database.

Dealmap, on the other hand, is a clearinghouse for local deals. Whereas it’s cool to check in on Foursquare and see a deal that’s nearby for the Mayor of Starbucks, this service gives you an idea of any available sale, promotion or deal near a certain location. It’s a great way for users to save money – and for local businesses to market their products and services.

As Scoble points out, these two services both show you what location-based marketing is capable of. Current services like Foursquare and Gowalla primarily appeal to people’s social nature – they let you check in, find friends nearby, see what’s happening in your circle (and occasionally get a deal). But imagine if Foursquare was to partner with Dealmap – its users would gain a whole lot more than just an occasional free drink or discount at Starbucks. The service would retain its social networking functionality, but gain a HUGE value proposition for its users.

In the meantime, if you’re looking to drive traffic to your local small business, it would be an excellent idea to submit a deal or two to Dealmap.com and see what comes of it.

It’s really kind-of remarkable, when you think about us living in an age where we can broadcast to the entire world…and yet relationships are made and leads are generated primarily by word of mouth. Even in an increasingly-interconnected world, a recommendation still goes a lot further than outright advertising.

This is why services like Twitter and Facebook are so popular – they allow people to be social animals (which we are, by nature), and they allow them to sort through the noise and find what they’re looking for, often largely based on what their friends are sharing.

Social media has become an essential part of local internet marketing – and its influence is growing. This is also why it’s imperative that businesses, small to large, establish a social media presence. But how do you get started?

You’re in luck. Eloqua, a marketing automation company, has just posted their social media playbook for anyone to download and read. It’s an amazingly-detailed reference for how to succeed on various social networks, from Facebook to Twitter to blogs to LinkedIn…and more.

Drop by their blog and pick it up. You’ll be glad you did.

As Jonathan Volk points out, you can even automate the process. By feeding various articles to a locally-targeted Twitter feed, you can direct prospects to a trackable phone number or a local landing page to capture their info.

Granted, you’ll see much better results if you participate on a regular basis, since a 100% automated Twitter feed is fairly easy to spot (even for novice Twitterers). You’ll pick up more followers if you at least give the impression that you’re a real person.

But for the amount of effort required, Twitter can be extremely effective way to drive traffic and leads towards you or a client’s local business.

Facebook is essentially becoming “the internet” for a lot of users, similar (and yet totally different) from the way AOL was “the internet” for many people for years. One way they are doing this is by extending their “Like” button to content outside of Facebook, allowing you to tag content and easily share your opinion of it with your Facebook Friends within your profile.

Why is this a big deal? Facebook users now have a way to “Like” and share anything, and the information is added to their profile.

Why is this a big deal? Because as a marketer, you are now going to have a ton more information to target your advertising towards, as people’s profiles are going to constantly be being updated with more information about personal preferences, likes, and dislikes.

Let’s see how this one shakes out over the coming months, but I suspect it is going to have a big impact.

Mike

Today, Google announced a rebranding of one of its key features: the former Local Business Center is now known simply as Google Places.

One out of every 5 searches is location-based, so naturally Google wants to find ways to improve their local search results and make money off of the space, too. For that reason, along with the new name, Google is rolling out a slew of features including local search and map listings, realtime updates, custom QR codes and coupons, and more.

The three features we’re most excited about are:

1. Service areas. A pizza business, for instance, can now only focus on advertising to customers who are in their delivery area.
2. Local business photo shoots. That’s right – Google will now come to your local business and take photos, then add them to your Place Page.
3. Tags. For $25 a month, local businesses can buy “tags” which will turn their businesses up in local searches, including Google Maps.

Obviously, this new update is a huge deal for local online marketing. Local businesses of all sizes stand to benefit from a well-optimized Google Place Page.

I’ve probably heard 100+ different explanations of this over the last few years, and almost all of them were wrong in some way or another.

How to find good information?  Go straight to the source!  In this video Hal Varian, the Chief Economist at Google, explains how the auction system works in very plain English.

I’d highly recommend that you check out many of the other related videos from Google.

Mike

• Service businesses that work in multiple cities but only have an office in one
• Home-based businesses that don’t want to reveal their home address on their Google Maps listing

The first scenario has been particularly troublesome for us and many of our clients, as our physical office addresses often limited our presence in the Google Local results to  a very limited area, when we actually service and want visibility in a broader selection of markets.

Google seems to have resolved these issues with recent enhancements to the Google Maps features in the Local Business Center.

Businesses now have the option to select service areas outside of where their office is physically located, and also have the option of not showing their address at all, providing the privacy that many home-based businesses were looking for.

Matt McGee provides more details in his post titled Google Maps Finally Welcome to Home-Based and Service-Based Businesses.

This is an important change for anyone offering local SEM services to small businesses, as it makes it easier to provide more value to a wider audience of businesses.  We’ve often struggled with customers being frustrated that their local listings were only getting visibility in the market where their office is located, even if their services are offered primarily in other markets.  Google must have heard enough complaints, as they have rolled out what seems to be a simple and effective solution.

Mike