Local business information - rags to riches?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Local business information seems to have been a bit of a Cinderella up to now. But all sorts of signs currently indicate that that’s changing.

First, there’s a new service from Dun & Bradstreet to help local businesses work out whether they’ll get paid on time. DNBi Professional offers small and medium sized enterprises access to tools that enable them to interpret credit scores, monitor payment trends and set smarter terms for customers – including green, yellow and red dashboard scores to spot the warning signs of delinquent payments.

D&B claims that its new service will be a boon to entrepreneurs who have to manage without the benefit of a credit department. Meanwhile, a raft of other players is also starting to offer help – to small businesses that have no marketing department and precious little online presence either, so face challenges reaching local markets.

Microsoft has just revamped its local business listings offering, changing its name from the rather dull Local Listing Center to the more upbeat Bing Business Portal. Exploiting a number of existing data sources, Bing has worked hard to create polished entries for a lot of businesses, frequently featuring photos and user reviews – but it also invites those businesses to further enhance their own entries.

As IDG points out, Bing is competing with similar offerings from other big players, including Google Places (which pinpoints local businesses on Google Maps) and Yahoo! Local (whose United Kingdom classified listings are subcontracted to local listings specialist InfoServe). Whatever their benefits to consumers, IDG explains that such services are seen as essential tools for search engines – enabling them to establish potential advertising relationships with small local businesses.

Trailing unhappily at present is one of the longest established local business search providers Yell, which is heavily indebted and continues to face severe financial difficulties. Nevertheless, its chief executive Michael Pocock sees reasons for hope; general search is consolidated, local search is not, he says – and Yell is already the source of many of the local listings produced by general search engines.

Focusing the minds of everyone involved in local business promotion, though, is the meteoric rise of Groupon. Launched in November 2008 in Chicago, it has since expanded to 35 countries and raised close to $1 billion last January to finance its further growth.

Groupon works by negotiating big discounts with local businesses which it then promotes to its subscribers, encouraging them to share them on social networks. It clearly has scale and first mover advantage on its side.

But the model is already being replicated by Bing Deals, for one. So could local business information services be poised for an upgrade from rags to glass slippers (discounted of course)?

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