Google Treasure Map of Dallas

I just noticed it late in the day. On the left side is a box for more information about the new beta program:

Even more information may be found at the “Explore Treasure Mode with Google Maps” video Google produced to educate about the program:

Of course, before pursuing treasure hints too far, carefully review and take into account today’s date.

Related posts:

1. Google Maps + Gmail = Snailmail
2. Google Maps Has Fixed The “Escher Effect”
3. Google Maps Adds Clickable Icons in Street View

Homepage of Rovaniemi's tourism website featuring Santa Claus

A number of characteristics of our Santa myths (a.k.a. “Father Christmas”) appear to’ve been adopted from Sápmi (a region of Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia often referred to as “Lapland”) and its indigenous people, the Saami. Rovaniemi is well within the Sápmi lands.

Many of the Saami live in the snowy region of the arctic circle, and their traditional clothing styles include suits which vaguely resemble Santa’s in form, although their color schemes are bright and more varied than mere red-and-white. They’re also traditionally reindeer herders. I’m not sure that there are many more associations with our Christmas myths, however.

Of course, Rovaniemi has constructed a clever marketing concept with its Santa Claus Village and claim as Santa’s home. The association gains them a large amount of attention, press, and likely, increased tourism during the cold winter season. Their associated Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and Pinterest board all seem relatively new to me. I bet they pick up a lot of new followers this season!

Of course, even a clever marketing scheme may not be enough to persuade most potential visitors to come during such a cold month! As I’m writing this, it’s currently negative eight degrees Fahrenheit in Rovaniemi!

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I don’t see myself as an employee of a huge, publicly-traded company since I was with Verizon years ago, so the ad was pretty disturbing to me! I just wasn’t ready to see that! It’s possible that I could be persuaded to work as a large company executive, perhaps, but the incentive would have to be pretty substantial — self employment is just so rewarding in so many ways that it’s hard to beat.

Ads which auto-populate information have been around quite some time, of course — for instance, ads which parse users’ keyword queries into the ad copy and display it on ad search results pages. Those sometimes have funny, unintentional ads in certain cases.

Ads with one’s personal information are becoming more and more common, however. Isn’t there some level of consumer dislike of these ads? Facebook is perhaps the leader at this sort of thing, coopting your face and name into ads which are sent to your own friends to promote stuff. It’s a form of copyright infringement and trademark infringement (in some cases), yet it continues, perhaps it’s even something we unintentionally allowed under Facebook’s terms and conditions?

No related posts.

For some time now, Google Local (originally just referred to as “Google Maps”, then called “Google Local”, then called “Google Places”) has had some problems in how it handles how local businesses can manage their own data. All local data providers struggle with the process of how to verify whether someone has the right to change a business’s information — and Google’s phone call / post card verification process is no exception. So, it’s had that problem from the beginning, although it doesn’t seem to’ve gotten any smoother in the meantime.

Then there’s the changing nomenclature — they just don’t keep consistently using the same brandnames and terminology to refer to the data display, versus the interfaces that businesses use to manage their own data. Google Local Business Center became Google Places — where you could login to manage your Google Place Pages (your business profile pages that would appear in Google).

Now, along comes Google+ (aka “Google Plus”). Which has personal profiles for people to use in interacting socially, and then they allowed companies to set up profile pages for businesses — “Brand Pages”. Then the real sh*t hit the fan when they then smashed Google Places into Google Plus, and started referring to THOSE as “Google Plus Local” or “Google+ Local” pages.

But, what of those companies that had set up “Brand Pages” already?!?  The advent of Google+ Local pages essentially converted all existing Google Place pages into Google+ Local pages — only, when they did that you didn’t automatically have authorization to edit those new pages, even though you might’ve already been verified to do so on the original pages. So, Google eventually rolled out another verification process for these new pages.

The product help forum for this new process, “Verification available for local pages created in Google+” (for those who have managed to figure out what’s going on and what things are called in order to locate the forum), shows just how fraught with confusion and issues the whole thing is. Here’s a posting from a confused business owner from just yesterday which demonstrates how awful the train wreck is:

“I still a bit confused…maybe it’s the terminology.

I just created a Google + account (today 11/29/2012).  In it, I created a business page (using Local Business or Place category).  When I created the business page, there was no information about verifying using postcard option that everyone is talking about.  I thought this is what everyone is referring to as Google+ Local.

Therefore, I figured I was wrong in this assumption and decided to create a Google Places account.  I went through the process and am now waiting for my verification pin to arrive in the mail.

Now that I did this, I have a Google+ Page and a Google Places account.  Will I now have to wait for Google to merge the two into Google+ Local?  Is this the correct process in creating a Google+ Local account?  OR am I just totally lost….”

So, just the nomenclature and Google’s penchant for changing it every couple of years has helped to confuse businesses and make it difficult for them to handle. Every time they begin to understand, the names all change.

But, the even worse problems that Mike points out are where the system simply doesn’t function correctly. That’s where this whole thing becomes a giant wreck. It’s not without irony that we note that parts of Google’s local systems behind the scenes are referred to as a “cluster”.

There are failures in the verification process. There are failures in connecting old Place pages to new Plus pages. There are mystifying issues where changes to business information result in loss of the listing, suspension of the listing, loss of reviews, etc. Naturally, businesses can screw themselves up by doing things that are wrong, but many of these things could be prevented by Google in the first place. As I pointed out in “9 Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings In Google“, some business owners will include their city name in the names of categories (ie “Dallas Plumbers”) and Google allows this and will penalize them for it — unforgivable, actually, since this would be so easy to detect and warn them or bar them from doing it!

But, the most painful thing of all is that there are many processes which are simply malfunctioning in allowing businesses to manage their data, and it’s not clear if/when Google will fix them. There’s little communications around these issues — for instance, what is a system issue, versus if a business simply entered something they shouldn’t have?!? How will they know? And, since a number of the higher-ranking people have departed from the Google Local projects, it leaves us wondering if there isn’t some institutional malaise there which is making it a bad place to work.

Finally, Google+ Local has not been completed. As Mike points out, will businesses expect to manage everything in the old Google Places admin interfaces, or on the pages themselves via the Google Plus integrated management?

From the outside this lack of cohesion and lack of focus make it appear to be the result of internal fighting inside the company on which system should now be dominant.

Please, figure it out Google, and please be so kind as to let us know what to expect.

Update: Andrew Shotland has now also weighed in on this, and while he agrees with Mike’s take (while also coining the fantastic moniker, “Google Plus Place Local Multi Merge for Business Dashboardgate”), he also suggests that Google’s not entirely blame because the difficulties involved in serving SMBs are just “the nature of the beast”.

It’s true that serving local businesses, and providing local biz info admin interfaces is highly challenging. No one has provided the one, perfect means of doing this, yet. There is complexity involved in local directory-style information.

However, I can’t give Google a pass on this one, because their systems are not performing adequately, nor anywhere near how they were intended. There remains an open question for local businesses: How should I go about managing my business listing and Google+ presence? What do I do when it doesn’t work right?

If only we could take Google’s own advice and just login to “bounce” the system into abruptly working right. But, it may require surgery at Google’s end before it’s going to work right for most businesses.

Related posts:

1. Google+ Local Pages Delurk At Last

Sponsored search results associated with Google's Bram Stoker logo. (Click to enlarge.)

The logo presents scenes from Stoker’s Dracula uber-famous vampire book, done up in a woodcut-illustration style very reminiscent of the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, from the same time period. Dracula was published in 1897.

What may be more significant for search marketers, however, is the special search results page the logo is linked-to, which features Bram Stoker-related books, the Sponsored “shop for” sidebar box and the Wikipedia entry highlights box, along with the usual Universal Search items peppered through the search results listings: news search, author-tagged posts, video and image search results.

This logo and associated search results treatment seems to be specifically designed to help propel featured sponsor ad clicks, as well as to promote Google’s robust search results features.

It calls to question — will Google continue to specifically try to monetize their future Google Doodle logos in a similar fashion?

Related posts:

1. Google’s Jack-O’-Lantern Logo Celebrating Halloween
2. Have Google Logos Jumped The Shark? Father’s Day Logo Illegible
3. Google’s Steampunk Logo

Quoted from the Form 8-K filed by Dex One:

In light of the current negotiations, however, Dex One recognizes that the parties may not be able to obtain sufficient approval from the senior secured lenders to any proposed amendments to the parties’ respective credit agreements. Therefore, possible alternatives to the current transaction structure to effect the Merger are under consideration, including a “prepackaged” restructuring of the parties’ senior secured indebtedness through proceedings instituted under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code to implement possible amendments that may garner sufficient, though not unanimous, support from the parties’ respective lenders, while otherwise maintaining the basic economic terms of the Merger Agreement.  However, there can be no assurance that Dex One and SuperMedia can effect a transaction through an alternative structure, that the necessary consents will be obtained, or that the Merger will be consummated.

If you haven’t kept up with recent years’ history, the surreal part of this is that both companies already emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring not that long ago. In June of 2009, R. H. Donnelley Company filed for bankruptcy, and Dex One rose from its ashes in February of 2010. Idearc Media, earlier known as Verizon Information Services, had been spun off from Verizon with an irresponsibly high debt load, and as a result filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March of 2009, later to emerge from the rubble as SuperMedia in December of 2009.

The Triangle Business Journal headline reports that bankruptcy is a possibility for Dex One, perhaps because the filing states that “Dex One recognizes…”. However, the wording is such that it clearly states that possible alternatives include restructuring of the “parties’ senior secured indebtedness” — the plural is used, indicating both companies could restructure!

Clearly, those holding debt instruments over the companies feel that the current valuation for an exchange of some sort would leave them with insufficient value after the fact if a merger were to go through. There’s not enough information to tell whether some of the debt holders are grasping onto an unrealistic/perceived value concept they had for one or both companies in the past, and are insisting they get that expected ROI, or perhaps both companies continue to bleed from print advertising degradation resulting in the companies being increasingly unable to repay on debt.

Either way, this sort of lovers’ spat between the two companies on the way to the altar is not a good sign. One can’t help but imagine that if one or both companies bring a Chapter 11 restructuring proposal before a judge at this point, he or she would have to look upon it with some degree of skepticism — company officers apparently may not have made a realistic projection for restructuring just three short years ago, so are they being properly conservative in a new restructuring, now?

Even more heartbreaking, the outlook for both companies — or a merged Dex One / SuperMedia — is very poor regardless of the outcome. It clearly signals yet further, deep financial cutbacks would be happening either way, and without being able to focus on innovation and future development there will be no longterm viability.

Related posts:

1. What’s Happening In Yellow Pages Land? Perhaps A Trifecta Merger Between AT&T, SuperMedia & Dex One
2. Idearc (Superpages) Trustee Files Lawsuit Against Verizon Over Bankruptcy
3. SuperMedia & Dex One To Cross-Pollinate: Precursor To A Merger?

Let me note upfront that I’m politically a moderate and a non-partisan, so my interest in this article is primarily from the perspective of the business and historical aspects involving the Yellow Pages industry, which I’ve written about from time-to-time.

The article outlines a possible reason why Romney’s trip through Europe didn’t include a stop in Italy, one of the G8 countries: some years back, Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s company, purchased a major stake in Italy’s Yellow Pages, Seat Pagine Gialle, and then they later resold their portion during the height of the Internet bubble for a very hefty profit, in the process circumventing taxes that could have benefited Italy. Subsequent to the Internet bubble, though, the Italian Yellow Pages declined very sharply in value at the expense of company shareholders (many of whom were possibly Italians) and the devaluation probably negatively impacted the service provided in Italy which could be said to affect virtually all Italians, one way or another.

The article does a fair job at reporting that the sequence of events was legal, but that the process probably leaves a very bad taste in the mouths of Italians due to shared cultural experiences they have. Certainly, if government officials benefit from deals with private industry at the expense of the general populace, there’s basis for ill sentiment.

I’m generally moderate/philosophical about the criticism about companies avoiding taxes through various methods, so long as subterfuge isn’t involved. From my perspective, it’s actually part of the fiduciary duty of executives and directors representing shareholders of companies to install the most advantageous methods possible for increasing and retaining profit revenues, so long as all laws are followed in doing so. It’s possible that there could be ethical considerations involved which go beyond the stated laws, but the necessity of representing the company shareholders advantageously is pretty well the top priority of any corporation. In this respect, it may be that most of Italians’ ire should be directed to their own government and laws, if they had wanted to retain some taxes from the sale of the Seat Pagine Gialle. Perhaps there also should have been some longer-range profit remunerations which would be invoked in the contract after the company was sold off.

But, there’s a big element missing from the Bloomberg article which, when left out, makes it seem borderline biased.

According to the article, Bain Capital bought 61.7% of the Yellow Pages in 1997, and then turned around and sold their portion at a significant profit (around 28x higher price) in 2000. Since Y2K, the company has lost most of its value – roughly 90%. The way the sequence of events is presented makes it seem as though something nefarious and intentional was going on which allowed Bain to profit while leaving shareholders with an empty bag and devalued company.

However, during the Internet Bubble, there were many Yellow Pages companies which were valued up to nose-bleed levels, along with many other companies involved with the Internet, ecommerce, local business data, and technology. For Bain Capital to have done something wrong, I think they’d have to have knowingly purchased Seat at a significantly undervalued price, or knowingly sold it off at irresponsibly high valuation.

At around 1997, a lot of people felt Yellow Pages companies were in a prime position to profit from internet expansion. Print Yellow Pages had held something close to a monopoly upon advertising for local businesses for nearly 100 years, allowing them to pump up advertising costs significantly over time, and to allow them to enjoy excellent revenue growth up until the advent of the internet. As the commercial side of the internet began taking off between 1994 to 1997, there wasn’t any reason to think that the Yellow Pages could not maintain their hold upon local market dominance.

So, Bain undoubtedly felt that there was unrealized profitability potential in the state-owned YP company in Italy. During such a speculative period, it’s not clear to me whether they managed to get a sweetheart deal in the purchase, nor whether Seat Pagine Gialle was knowingly undervalued. Without digging deeply into it, I would guess it might have been bought at a reasonable valuation (consider that privatization of government-owned enterprises may be full of unknown risks, and transition pains to commercial ownership might have some hidden costs, too).

When sold off at twenty-eight times the original valuation, Bain Capital almost certainly had to know that this was hyperinflated. But, irresponsibly exuberant valuations were happening with many companies during the Bubble timeframe, and all of the companies involved seemed hyperinflated in value. Analysts and economists were issuing warnings as well about there being a bubble — the only trick was knowing when it might be best to step off the merry-go-round. Bain stepped off at the right time. In investing, there’s a philosophy that one should definitely sell if one’s holdings have grown very significantly in value, in order to lock-in profits. If it looks like you can sell your company for more than twenty times what it was purchased-for only three years back, it would seem foolhardy not to sell. I would suspect this was the strategy that Bain Capital followed at that time.

Now, did Bain Capital know ahead of time that YP companies were all headed for a major decline? In 2000, this still wasn’t entirely clear. While numbers of the YP industry analysts had foretold that the print Yellow Pages books would eventually become obviated, there was still a very widespread belief that YP companies’ ads could evolve into purely electronic products, and that income from these products might replace those of print. The main area where analysts have differed over the years was in terms of timeframe — predicting exactly when phonebooks would jump the shark is difficult to do.

It was around the year 2000 when profits of YP companies began to head towards stagnation, followed by sharp declines. But it wasn’t for a few years more when it started to be clearer that profits from internet YP ads were not going to make up for the loss in print YP ads. Print ads had accrued such high pricing over time, due to the near-stranglehold the incumbent directory held in any given area (the “official” Yellow Pages books in any given locality were partnered/owned by the official local telephone companies, and those primary YP books usually had the greatest usage and thus the most advertisers). Internet ads were/are so much cheaper, and in the online arena there were so many more competitors for local business advertising — other online YPs, directory sites, map sites, and search engines.

So, I think the Bloomberg article should’ve touched upon the fact that multiple major Yellow Pages companies have experienced a downturn since 2000. Leaving that out tends to make it imply that something intentionally diabolical was going on. Again, I’m nonpartisan and not a Romney supporter necessarily — I’m just pointing out that a bigger-picture portion of this story appears to’ve been left out.

The Italians understandably are unhappy that the YP company lost a large chunk of value, and one can see why they’d want to blame Bain Capital, since that company profited out of the transaction. However, Seat Pagine Gialle was headed for a sharp decline in worth along with other major YP companies, worldwide. Bain Capital was clever or lucky or both — in this game of musical chairs, the music stopped and Bain won the game while the new owners of the Yellow Pages were left holding the bag — along with the Italian people.

I’m going to have to read further in-depth about the Seat Pagine Gialle deal, however. The article states that at least three books were written about the deal, and a number of newspaper columns. Interesting!

Related posts:

1. AT&T Lets The Walking Fingers Take a Walk – Selling Stake in Yellow Pages
2. AU Yellow Pages Campaign Provokes Incredulity
3. RHD Suit Settled for $25 Million – Yellow Pages Obsolescence Claimed

Check out Google’s main page about the service. Google’s VP of Product Management, Marissa Mayer, helped promote the new features by going on CBS This Morning, where they referred to it as “a location-based social media search engine available on desktops and mobile devices”, which sounds borderline hyped, if accurate.

Here’s the video:

One interesting element which we couldn’t foresee was how Google would launch this with such a heavy tie-in with ratings from Zagats which they bought not long ago. As the official Google Blog post relates, one of the main aspects of the tie-in with Google Plus is how they’re intending this to push more “recommendations and reviews from people you know and trust”.

For all those who had already set up Google+ pages for their local businesses, the Google and Your Business blog relates that they’ll soon be announcing how to get it connected to your business listing in Google Maps/Local/Places — whatever you call it at this point. I think that not having this already available here at the release is a little disappointing, because I expect it will cause more consternation for businesses who are trying to puzzle out how all of these disparate pieces are supposed to connect.

The resultant Plus Local pages are splashier, more like magazine style layouts, much heavier on graphics. In recent weeks, Google Places pages have been automatically pulling-in photos from businesses’ websites, without those businesses overtly giving permission to do it nor asking for particular images to be pulled-in — I think some of that must have been in preparation for this move. When I just viewed the new Google Plus Local page generated for my new business, Argent Media, the profile had photos pulled in which did not come from me, nor actually have anything to do with my business, as well as some photos pulled from my website. I’m not unhappy about this, but I wonder about the mechanisms involved, since I see a high potential that it will cause problems for some businesses, particularly if images they are not using get sucked into profiles somehow. For instance, attorneys in many states may have restrictions on the types of images they may use in marketing themselves…

Here’s one of the examples of new Plus Local pages for a business in the DFW Metroplex area — I believe the more graphic-intensive layout disappointingly reduces visibility of various other business information which may have been more important for discerning searchers:

Mama Pita Mediterranean Grill, Plano, Tx

I’ve had my nose to the grindstone on a few other projects this week, else I’d provide more conjecture and comments about how the social/local convergence will affect local businesses’ online marketing through Google. I primarily consider it a welcome development, although it will be interesting to take a more in-depth look once the dust has properly settled and we have more of a chance to see how it all connects.

See also Mike Blumenthal’s commentary at: Google Place Pages Are No More – But What Has Changed?

Related posts:

1. Rumored Google Maps Changes Could Involve Google+
2. Google Local Is Now A Train Wreck
3. Google Scaling-Down Local Results? Possible Explanations Abound

I found myself in this situation just this past week. I was half-watching Whitechapel, a crime mystery show set in England on BBCA, and the detectives had been in the home of a batty old woman who suffered from obsessive hoarding. Another character in the show was a sort of consultant for the police about historical crimes, and he’d mentioned a serial killer in America in the late 1800s, H. H. Holmes, who’d murdered potentially considerable quantities of people he’d lured into the hotel he operated, and the rooms were set up in some maze-like arrangement. Since Holmes was entirely unfamiliar to me, and since the whole story sounded so over-the-top, I figured it was fictional. But, not so! When I Googled this on my Android cellphone, I quickly discovered that there was indeed such a killer!

The Wikipedia article for Doctor H. H. Holmes described how he’d built with the help of a carpenter accomplice and other contractors a three-story hotel in Chicago at the time of the World’s Fair in 1893. The street-level floor was for shops and his pharmacy, while the upper two stories were hotel rooms (or boarding house rooms) and his office. However, the upper two stories were layed-out like a maze, with doors that opened into walls, stairways that went nowhere, and gas pipes which he apparently controlled to suffocate people. There were also chutes and a dumbwaiter, purportedly intended to deliver the bodies of his victims to the basement where he might bury them, burn them in his own crematory ovens, or dissect and render them (in acid) in order to convert them to skeletons to sell to medical schools. He apparently lured quite a number of women into these torture chambers / charnel house, as well as a few men, before he was eventually found out.

Later, when information about Holmes’s crimes began emerge, newspaper reporters dubbed the hotel a “murder castle”.

Aside from the astonishingly extreme nature of his crimes, my attention was caught by some other details involved in his story. He also traveled about, committing various fraudulent con jobs on people, and taking murders out in many of the places he visited. And, one of the places he came to was Fort Worth! A couple of the women he’d murdered had apparently been sibling heiresses of a railroad fortune, so he took ownership of one of the sisters’ (Minnie Williams’s) real estate property in downtown Fort Worth.

So it was that Henry Howard Holmes came to Fort Worth (using the alias “O. C. Pratt”) along with another woman he’d duped, and his carpenter from Chicago, Benjamin Pitezel (using the alias “Benton T. Lyman”), and they apparently began construction of another hotel for a brief period before they were run out of town under a cloud (Texans apparently caught on quickly that “Pratt” and “Lyman” were committing fraudulent transactions — particularly one involving absconding with a shipment of horses — and horse theft was so reviled in the Wild West that they risked getting rapidly hanged for such a thing).

So, I was quite curious — did they build yet another “Murder Castle” in Fort Worth? How far could they have gotten in construction? And, most interesting of all — where was this structure located, and does it still stand?

Many of the articles on the subject seem to reiterate information from the Wikipedia article, so most of them are pretty vague on the details around what Holmes and Pitezel specifically did while in Fort Worth, and where they were doing it.

So, while digging into it, I found a book that mentioned a specific location in Fort Worth where Holmes and his accomplice were apparently trying to set up shop all over again. In that reference, it states that “Minnie Williams’s property consisted of a large, vacant lot on the corner of Second and Russell streets, not far from the Tarrant County courthouse.”

Looking at a current map in Google, there is no “Russell St” that crosses 2nd, and 2nd St is relatively short, and the only other Russell St in Fort Worth is out near White Settlement.  Soooo…. 2nd street is near the courthouse and isn’t very long, so I thought that street name was likely correct. However, I thought either a street changed name since the late 1800s, or the author of that book had the wrong cross street name. With further digging, I find that the author got the street name wrong, AND the street changed names.

I found an old copy of the Fort Worth Gazette from 1894 which talks about the Williams sisters likely being murdered (“Fort Worth Girls Murdered“), and refers to Holmes and his accomplice building “the Rusk Street Fire Trap”!

Even better, I located an old 1927 map of downtown which shows that Commerce Street, which crosses 2nd near the courthouse, was earlier named “Rusk St”. (click on map icon above to view)

That Gazette article goes on to say that “a fine three story building and site will go for a few thousand dollars”, indicating that it’s to be auctioned off to repay Holmes’ creditors in Texas, and it would likely be sold cheap.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure which corner of the intersection the building was located on — and if it was poorly constructed, it likely was replaced in the intervening years.

It appears to me that current, much more modern buildings likely entirely replaced the building they constructed, although there could be remnants of it incorporated in one or two of the buildings around that spot.

Considering how there are many historical photos of Ft. Worth, it likely should be possible to locate a pic of what would have become the “Texas Murder Castle”, if H.H. Holmes had not been run off by the good folk of Texas who just don’t put up with that sh*t!

• See also the classifieds notice when creditors took possession of the property of Benton T. Lyman – it outlines which specific lots were involved: http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth109894/m1/5/

No related posts.

While it might seem I was picking on Costco in the article, there wasn’t room in it for the reporter to really include all the information I provided. Costco really isn’t alone in performing less-than-optimal optimization for search engines — a great many online retail catalog sites are in the same boat.

I go into this in more detail over on Argent Media’s blog: Costco.com SEO Lacking, But They’re One Of Many.

No related posts.