Ethan Stock, Zvents CEO and Founder, was recently captured at The Kelsey Group’s “Drilling Down On Local ‘08: Marketplaces” Conference. In his presentation, Ethan discusses Zvents’ business model and how time-based promotions are an essential online marketing tool for all local merchants to get consumers in through their doors.

With the overwhelming and startling growth of local advertising revenue, Ethan Stock explores how Zvents is leading the evolution of local search - showing its impact on the advertising industry and what trends to expect in the future.

Check out the video below!

Online Videos by Veoh.com

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We’ve been cooking up new ways to promote local businesses and events, and we’re thrilled (exhausted and relieved!) to announce that the Enhanced Listings beta period is officially open.

What are Enhanced Listings?
A new way to make your event or venue listings stand out from basic listings, and benefit from enhanced features and design options.

By upgrading your Basic Listing to an Enhanced Listing, you can:

• Tailor your marketing messages with special offers, news and announcements and promo codes
• Appear prominently in search results with a colorful, highlighted listing
• Increase brand awareness by adding your company logo
• Upload a video ad, commercial, or virtual tour
• Stylize your listing with colorful custom graphics
• Enhance your brand experience by removing advertisements or user reviews

We offer two packages - and Enhanced Detail Page package and a Search Results package. You can also add additional upgrades, such as removing ads and user reviews, or adding custom graphics to the border on your listing.

Here’s an example of an Enhanced Detail Page Package for Sibby’s Cupcakery in San Mateo:

The Search Results Package highlights your listing in search results:

For a limited time (a few weeks, most likely), you can create Enhanced Listings for your business, venue or events - for free! Join the beta now.

And remember…every listing created on Zvents is shared with our growing 250+ Zvents Media Network partners too.

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Chuck is an industry guy we’re anxious to meet, not the event marketing industry, internet marketing. Not only can he add some appeal to the (to some) dry topic of online marketing but he is so talented as a musician and rap artist that he has our recommendation as a performer at one of your events. Let’s let him take the stage first while sharing some tips on how to leverage paid search marketing:

Working 9 to 5 with Houston, TX interactive marketing services provider Pop Labs, Chuck moonlights as founder of Mo Serious Entertainment. While he is more likely to appeal to those of you looking for online marketing speakers, his talent seems to shine on stage; he’s worth a look whatever your need.

Chuck, if you are ever in San Mateo, give us a call, we’d love to help.

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Southern California Media Partners In Zvents Network

Yesterday we posted about how Zvents syndicates its listings to over 200 media partners. Following up on our promise to share more regional information (while we update our Media Publishers page!), below is a list of our current media partners in southern California and the greater Los Angeles metro area:

• Orange County Register
• LA.com
• Daily Breeze (Gardena)
• High Desert (Victorville)
• Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario)
• Los Angeles Daily News
• Pasadena Star-News
• Press-Telegram (Long Beach, CA)
• San Bernadino Sun
• San Gabriel Valley Tribune
• Squeeze OC
• Whittier Daily News

If you have a SoCal business or want to promote events happening in southern California, listing on Zvents (or a Zvents’ media partner site) will automatically share your listing with all the media partners in the Zvents network, including the local media outlets listed above.

Ready to list your business or events? Sign up for a free account today!

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Earlier this week, I spoke with an account manager from a local public relations and marketing agency about Zvents, and realized the need to better explain a key benefit of our service. She thought the listings she entered for her client’s business and events showed up only on Zvents. That’s when I realized that we needed a post on the benefits of Zvents’ syndication, pronto.

Did you know that any event or business listing added to Zvents automatically gets syndicated to our 200+ online media partners?

Here’s how it works: if you list your business or event on Zvents or any of our media partner sites, your listing shows up on ALL of them. Enter one listing and it shows up in over 200 places. That’s it.

Three Benefits of Listing on Zvents:

1. Your Listing is Promoted Everywhere. At Once. As a business owner or event promoter, you only need to enter information one time, and it is automatically pushed to over 200 media outlets.
2. Saves You Time. Instead of entering or sending the same event information to multiple media outlets and websites, you can enter it on the Zvents network in one fell swoop. Also, when you edit your listing information, it updates all the listings at the same time.
3. Increases Your Chances Of Getting Promoted In Print. Many of our media partners are newspapers, whose editors use the Zvents database as the starting point for selecting featured events for their print editions.

As an example, let’s look at one of my favorite local ice cream shops: Ici in Berkeley, CA. This tiny shop elevates ice cream to another (heavenly) level, with unusual flavors such as Rose Pistachio, Burnt Caramel, and Malted Vanilla. If you are in Berkeley, make sure to stop by – it’s amazing. And full disclosure: I don’t know the owners or anyone who works there – it’s just GOOD.

Ici is listed on Zvents - but because it’s on Zvents - it is also automatically listed on several other Bay Area media websites:

• Contra Costa Times
• InsideBayArea.com (the online site for several Bay Area newspapers, including The Oakland Tribune, Tri-Valley Herald, San Mateo County Times, The Argus, Daily Review and Alameda Times-Star)
• Marin Independent Journal
• Palo Alto Daily News
• Petaluma360.com
• San Jose Mercury News
• Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Ici listing on Zvents:

Ici listing on InsideBayArea.com:

(Notice the description and the photos are the same on both sites.)

Hopefully, at this point you’re saying to yourself: “Okay, I get it. But my business is already listed on Zvents. How did it get there, and how can I take ownership of it?”
Zvents is a local search engine, and part of what we do is actively search the Web for information that is useful to our users. If your business is already listed, you can get control of it by signing up for an account (it’s free) and sending us a message.

We’ve launched a lot of new partners in the past couple months, and are in the process of updating the list on our ever-growing Media Partners page. In the meantime, we plan to post about the partner networks in various areas of the country. Want to know which media is participating in your area? Leave us a comment, and we’ll let you know!

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What is PodCamp? A place where people set up tents in the woods, roast marshmallows, and listen to iPods? That’s the first image that came to mind. The name is pretty quirky and fun, but what kind of people would go to PodCamp? As I’m sure you’ve observed, there really is something out there for ANYBODY and EVERYBODY…

PodCamps cater towards the interests of podcasters, videocasters (perfect for YouTubers!), event marketers (to reach the masses!), bloggers, social-media (you too - Facebookers!), and new media enthusiasts — beginner or advanced practitioners — who all get together to learn and share their ideas and skills for a couple of days. It’s referred to as an “unconference” — which means that it doesn’t adhere to the conventional formalized, uptight structure, but rather facilitates carefree discussion among all participants. A major plus is that it’s free to attend!

PodCamps have been hosted around the globe and the next one, PodCampMidwest, starts tonight (February 15-16)!

Upcoming PodCamps include:

• PodCampSLC - March 15th, 2008 - Salt Lake City, Utah
• PodcampDC - April 18-20 2008 - Washington D.C.
• PodCamp NYC 2.0 - April 25-April 26, 2008 - Brooklyn, NY

Other PodCamp Locations are in the works - check for updates!

Who knows! You could even end up meeting a cute little redhead who likes to tell good stories

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We announced some big news this week - the launch of federated local search! This unique, blended local search technology combines all facets of local content into one search results page: business listings, movies, restaurants, events, sales, performers/celebrities (in town), sports, etc.

Another feature included in this product release is that we now display images on our SERPs (search engine results pages). Want to make your event or business stand out? Add a picture to your listing. Not only will it make your listing page more attractive, it also increases its attractiveness on SERPs, where your listing is competing with others for attention.

Look at these business listings in San Diego - which look more interesting to you: those with a picture, or those without?

Right, listings with images look better.

To add an image to your event or business listing, follow these steps:

1. Go to your listing page and log in.

2. Click on the “+ Image” link.

3. A pop-up screen like the example below will open. Select “Browse” to find your image on your computer.

Image size: For optimal display, we recommend uploading an image that is 400 pixels wide. We accept images in .jpeg, .png, or .gif formats. Your image may be cropped to fit into the available space, but the full image will be displayed when a user clicks on it. We recommend using photos over graphic images (like logos), because they are more appealing to other users (think about it, would you rather look at Maria Sharapova or a Nike logo?) - plus, they resize better.

3A. Adding the information in Step 2 is optional (Photo Credit, Caption, and Title/alt-text), but we recommend adding it to tell users more about your listing. The most important of the optional fields is the Title/alt-text, because it helps optimize your listing. When other search engines visit Zvents and index your page, some index images separately. This gives people searching on image sites, like Google Images, another way to find your listing (It’s a good idea to add alt-text to images on your own site too, to improve SEO). Currently, if you don’t fill in the Title/alt-text field, we automatically pull in the title of the listing.

4. After you’ve found your image and filled out the relevant fields, select Upload. Your image is now on your listing page!

5. Bonus! If you add multiple images to your listing, you can choose which image to set as the Primary Image by rolling over other images associated with your listing, and clicking on the small “+” symbol. The system will prompt you with the question “Are you sure you want to make this your primary image?”. Click “Ok”, and that image will become the main image on your listing, as well as the image displayed on SERPs.

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