The Analyst Perspective

I always like speaking with industry leading analysts about what we do. Partners and clients will skew things their way, team members and investors tend to be over-zealous with the product, but leading analysts and journalists will usually give you the cold truth in the right market context.

In the last few weeks I had several interesting talks and meetings with some of the best Local Search analysts and journalists in the field, including:

• Greg Sterling (Screenwerk)
• David Utter (WebProNews)
• Peter Krasilovsky (LocalOnliner)

What helped us the most was their way of crystalizing the value proposition for site owners. For example, Greg Sterling wrote:

“…On the latter point, imagine that your site is being lost in a sea of generic search results. Now imagine you could add a logo or icon to call out your results from the others. This is branding in the context of search results, which is right now not otherwise possible. It presents a range of interesting opportunities to publishers who have been struggling with how to deal with search engines’ hold on consumer attention. If you’re the New York Times, for example, and you’re just one of dozens of publisher sources that come up when news-related searches are performed, this permits you to add your logo and call users’ attention to your content (vs. others) on Google or Yahoo search results.”

There’s always a risk of being criticized by these folks and hearing things you don’t want to hear. But at the end of the day, it’s important to get an objective opinion by people who know what they’re talking about. Thanks for helping out.