MetroSEEQ

SmallTown.com plans to grows its national presence by partnering up with webcards.com, an advertising platform that enables small and medium size businesses to manage their online presence across the internet without having to reproduce multiple campaigns in different formats on different platforms.

Attracted by the strategy, Nick Ordon, formally CEO of the venture-backed firm Grayboxx and Infotone joins as CEO and President.  Robert Goldberg, board member and investor of local companies including insiderpages (sold to Citysearch recently) joins Smalltown’s board to capitalize on the opportunity.

Here’s my question, have these local companies actually stepped into a mom and pop place whose owners or managers are skeptical of online advertising?  Over 80% of local businesses are small operations across the country and I can assure you, most do not know about online advertising management that webcards wants to accomplish.  Also, keep in mind local shops in the Silicon Valley should not be used as a benchmark for the rest of the country.  I grew up in the Bay Area and now living in Portland, OR, the gap between technology familiarity is just too obvious.  I will give you several reasons why it’s not realistic to expect small business in the rest of the country to hop on the Webcards bandwagon:

1. - They still don’t know how to run a google adwords campaign
2. - They cannot see where their digital advertising go.  (when they can’t see it, it doesn’t really count)
3. - Keyword bidding can get expensive per click.  (forget about asking them to keep track of ROI online, they don’t have time or the know how to set it up)
4. - They know about click fraud and review fraud but rather go with tangible methods they are familiar with such as yellowpages (its sad), direct mailers, and couopon books even though the audience in print is waning.

Yes, consolidating and managing in a single platform is good, but only in select metros where technology penetration is deep.  To win the rest of the county, the barrier has to be even lower… to FREE.  Having worked in the restaurant industry, FREE is their favorite word.  They will do anything that’s free.  Craiglist is free to post, and now metroseeq is free to post - just click on “Add Deal” upon finding your store.

Bottom line - we ought to create technology that adapts to people, not the other way around if you’re thinking big.