Today we’re releasing research from the CityGrid Media 2011 Online Consumer Research Study, conducted by Harris Interactive, and we wanted to give you a look into how consumers are finding local business from their computers and mobile devices.

Survey results say…

People are searching across the Web so make sure your business is represented: Perhaps not surprisingly, when it comes to people researching and finding local businesses at the desktop,  the majority of people (two-thirds) reported that search engines and review sites are their first stop when looking for local information online. Less than one in ten (8%) head for the merchant’s website first.

Because consumers are consuming local information more on the local review sites and search results pages, you need to take an active role in how your establishment is being presented online. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and just focus on SEO for your website. Focus more attention on your business profile content on local review sites, such as Citysearch, Yelp, Local.com, Insider Pages and Urbanspoon and search sites, including Ask. Or look at advertising on a network, such as CityGrid, which will place your advertising message across hundreds of search engines, local sites and mobile apps. The more content you and your customers put out, the richer the experience will be for people searching online.

Folks on the go check out reviews MORE than those at the desktop: Consumer behavior changes when people are on the go and need to make a timely decision about where to head. When researching a local business on their mobile phone, people are nearly as likely to base their decisions on a review site as they are a search engine. 17% of survey respondents say they are most likely to base their decision on a search engine when researching a local business or restaurant from their mobile phone, and a similar proportion of adults (15%) base their decisions on review site.

Consumers willing to travel (just not that far) to check out new business: When it comes to trying out a new business, people won’t travel more than 30 miles to try someplace new (a whopping 80% won’t make the trek over 30 miles), but many are willing to exceed the 15 mile mark (three out of every five adults (39%) are willing to travel between 15 and 30 miles to try a new local business).
So what should merchants take away from this?

1. Pay attention to your business profile across the web, not just your own website; Claim your profile on all review sites, and/or advertising on a network which will help consumers find you. Remember whatever is unearthed by search is most likely to influence your patrons

2. Since reviews sites are important to those mobile users looking to make a timely decision about where to head, make sure you are checking out where people are giving you thumbs up or down, and proactively managing your reputation on those sites

3. Keep your marketing within a 30 mile radius of where you are located—some people may travel to uncover the next best thing, but they aren’t likely to really pile on those miles…

Have more questions about the study, and how you can improve your online business presence? Click here to learn how.

According to a 2011 National Consumer Spending Habits study released today by Citysearch and conducted by Harris Interactive®, certain business sectors are on the rebound post-recession, with bars and clubs making the fastest comeback among consumers over last year. And, while folks have continued to primp at the hairdresser, nail salon and local barber, keeping the personal services category fairly steady, restaurants, retail and entertainment are still trying to increase the stream of people coming through their front doors.

Restaurants remain the most frequented local businesses, with 80% of people saying they go out to eat at least once every three months. 37% say they are dining out less often now than a year ago and only 15% say they are eating out more this year than last. However, bars saw the biggest jump in patrons returning over the previous year.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Hit Happy Hour

Bars and clubs have been the business sector to rebound most quickly over the year prior. Millennials are leading this trend, with young men in particular the first to say they’re patronizing their local watering hole more this year than last.

• Almost one in four survey respondents (23%) say they are going to bars and clubs more this year than last
• Nearly half (47%) of respondents under 35 say they are patronizing bars and clubs more than last year
• 49% of males in the 18-34 age range are going out to bars more this year, compared with only 6% of men in the 35-54 age group

Lookin’ Good…for a Night In

Shopping and eating out don’t seem to have the same draw as a well-mixed cocktail, with over a third of people saying they visit restaurants and retail businesses less than the year before. But, despite more time spent at home, hairdressers, spas and other personal services merchants were the most likely to have seen their stream of customers remain steady throughout the calendar year.

• Only 15% of people say they’re eating out more this year than last; 37% say they are going to restaurants less often than they were a year ago
• Over one-third of people (34%) say they are visiting retail businesses less
• Seven in ten respondents (70%) say they patronize personal services the same amount as this time last year

Generation Spendthrift

Younger people seem to be the age group most responsible for local economic recovery overall. Whether taking in the latest blockbluster, getting a mani-pedi or hitting a new hotspot for date night, people under 35 were the most likely to let their cash flow freely. Among adults under 35:

• Over half (51%) go to the movies at least once a month while only three in ten (30%) of those over 55 can say the same
• More than one in four (28%) are going to restaurants more this year than last
  • This number jumps to 43% among 18-24 year olds
  • A quarter (25%) are visiting personal service businesses more than a year ago
  • 28% are doing more than window shopping, saying they go to retail stores more than the previous year, as compared with 11% of adults 35-54

The National Consumer Spending Habits study is a precursor to an upcoming CityGrid Local Intelligence Report scheduled to be released in the next few months.

Infographic Citysearch Consumer Spending (3)

Today, we announced an extended licensing agreement with the leading local data provider, Infogroup. Under the agreement, we will now bundle Infogroup’s core business data from more than 15 million locations, together with our own enhanced places content and a growing list of third-party premium content providers.  All of this content is paired with CityGrid’s built-in advertiser base and delivered via our new overhauled API suite – live today at http://developer.citygridmedia.com/. By combining data, content and advertising, the CityGrid developer platform gives developers the only comprehensive local dataset and monetization platform in one product for free.

CityGrid’s goal for developers of all sizes is to leverage its new developer platform and thrive in local. To achieve this, the platform includes:

• Accurate places data for over 15 million local business listings
• Best-of-breed aggregated, managed and enhanced local content
• Nearly a million advertisers across 75,000 cities nationwide
• Targeted web and mobile formats to drive engagement with merchant advertisers
• iOS and Android SDKs for streamlined integration
• Ultimate flexibility to use vertical slices or the entire dataset
• Increased daily and monthly query volume
• Reliable performance at top speed and granular tracking

This announcement kicks off our presence at this weekend’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. At Disrupt, our CityGrid developer team will be leading an API workshop at the conference’s Hackathon. Any developer that builds using our platform will be eligible to win $2K. Click here for more details on how to enter.

PanelPicker voting for SXSW 2012 opened yesterday afternoon and we have several panels that we’d love to get picked.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/12842?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F10%2Fcompany%3Aurbanspoon

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/13138?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F10%2Fcompany%3Aurbanspoon

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/12449?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F10%2Fcompany%3Adotted+line

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/11227

While voting isn’t the only way to be selected for the show (it makes up about 30% of chosen submissions), getting a lot of votes for our submission does increase our chances and can get us noticed by the judges, who editorially select the remainder of the speakers. Therefore, please vote early and often!

Voting closes on September 2^nd and the first programming announcement will be made on October 24^th.

Today, Foursquare announced the launch of their Merchant API, enabling partners to integrate Foursquare data into their platforms. We’re excited to be one of their launch partners, and are integrating Foursquare check-in reporting into our advertiser tool, MyAccount. This feature is available to both advertisers and businesses that “claimed their page” and is another way of us connecting businesses and consumers, everywhere local happens.

Summer is a good midpoint in the year to pause and reflect upon what we’ve accomplished so far when it comes to new products and programs. As we continue to build out our rapidly expanding network of local publishers and advertisers, I wanted to share my top 5. In the first half of 2011 we:

1. Unveiled CityGrid’s developer platform complete with places, content and ads APIs, mobile SDKs and a refreshed developer center. This will support the continued growth of our publisher network with special focus on mobile providers

2. Announced our receipt of a patent, which covers our method and technology for monetizing local business advertising via our now familiar place page unit which our publishers have been replicating for years

3. Launched CBS Local Media as a private label CityGrid reseller

4. Acquired Seattle-based BuzzLabs, a leading social media monitoring and sentiment analysis platform, and quickly rolled out their first product http://www.citygridmedia.com/blog/introducing-find-my-buzz/’ to our Restaurant, Spa & Beauty and Hotel merchant advertisers

5. Rolled out Insider Pages’s MyAutismTeam beta community; launched Deals by Citysearch, an aggregated deals product for web and mobile; and onboarded almost 1,000 restaurants on Urbanspoon’s reservation platform, Rezbook

We have a number of new initiatives in the works for the second half of this year, including overhauling and improving our content feeds and announcing new reseller partners as we continue to connect businesses to consumers, everywhere local happens.

A few weeks ago, we announced our acquisition of Seattle-based BuzzLabs, a leading social media monitoring and sentiment analysis platform. We’re excited to introduce our first product from BuzzLabds, Find My Buzz, a free service we’re offering to our merchant advertisers. Find My Buzz gathers business reviews, ratings and comments from around the Web, and displays the data in a concise and digestible report. Find My Buzz is initially available to advertisers in the Restaurant, Spa & Beauty and Hotel verticals. This is just the first of many, exciting new products coming from our new BuzzLabs team this year.

As many of you know, as a CityGrid partner you can get paid by displaying CityGrid’s advertising on your sites and applications. Today we are launching a new set of APIs that generate ad images that can be rendered directly in your applications so you don’t have to worry about parsing long XMLs or formatting ads. Use the Web Ads API for applications running on a desktop web browser, or the Mobile Ads API for your native or mobile web applications. Just browse the styles currently available for the Web or Mobile, pick the one you like and pass that ID in the API call to get ads directly rendered in your apps. We will be constantly improving and adding new styles so be on the look out for new styles to come.

If you are currently not approved to use our Ad APIs, send us an email at
citygridsupport@citygridmedia.com to enroll in our Places that Pay program and begin monetizing your applications! Also, if you have any suggestions for improvements, feedback or new features for these or any of our APIs, please let us know using the dev talk forum.

Hello,

Today we are launching a refresh of our V2 Reviews API. The version number and the previous endpoints do not change, but we are adding new ones:

The new endpoints allow you to get reviews by Places Ids, but you need to have the place ids ahead of time. You can obtain places ids via the Places API. You can still filter by days, location, category etc.

If you are using the protocol buffers format, make sure to use the new .proto file.

We are deprecating the previous endpoint http://api.citygridmedia.com/content/reviews/v2/search. Do not worry, the endpoint will remain active well after the next major release launch, so you have plenty of time to switch to the new ones.

Today, we are excited to announce the acquisition of Seattle-based BuzzLabs, a leading social media monitoring and sentiment analysis platform that creates valuable content for publishers and consumers, and helps local businesses monitor their presence across the web.

The deal gives us the immediate ability to aggregate and analyze millions of pieces of content across CityGrid—including reviews, articles, blog posts, check-ins, Likes and countless other real time streams of user generated content–producing an enormous repository of business sentiment, consumer insight and trending data for our publishers and merchants. The BuzzLabs acquisition also rounds out our merchant product offering with a reputation management product.

Click here to see the full press release.