You might recognize Felicia Day from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," or from her role of Penny alongside Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion in Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog." But recently, it's her online work that's getting all the attention. Felicia produces and stars in the online series "The Guild." It was so popular that she launched her own YouTube channel called "Geek & Sundry."

"Geek & Sundry"

Geek & Sundry has a weekly line-up that includes both scripted and reality programming. With names like Wil Wheaton and Veronica Belmont on the masthead, you know it's going to be a geek paradise.

The "Geek & Sundry" programming line-up

Monday: Felicia's vblog "The Flog"
Tuesday: "The Guild"
Wednesday: "Dark Horse" Motion Comics
Thursday: Behind the scenes & extras
Friday: (alternating) "Table Top" with Wil Wheaton and "Sword & Laser" with Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont

Geek & Sundry launched in May and already has 6.7 million views. iMedia's Bethany Simpson spent time with Felicia at the Digitas NewFront in New York City.

Conversation highlights

0:00 - Why do viewers connect with Felicia?
0:40 - Geek & Sundry
1:00 - "The Flog," "Table Top" with Wil Wheaton, and "Sword and Laser" with Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt
1:30 - Felicia's unflappable moment
2:00 - What comes next?
2:20 - Felicia's current favorite console game

Run time is 2:43.

You can follow Felicia and Bethany on Twitter.

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Research shows that local search listings are now more important than any other type of listing because they provide the information searchers want quickly (URL, address, phone, coupons, operating hours, reviews, etc.). Local search listings were also found to be trustworthy because they immediately provide the relevant information consumers need to make a purchase decision.

Done in partnership by Localeze and 15miles, the 2012 Local Search Usage Study, conducted by comScore, found that 61 percent of respondents searching for local business information believe local search results are the most relevant, as shown in the chart below. Additionally, 58 percent found local search results to be the most trustworthy when compared to natural search results, paid search results, and paid results. 

Gone are the days of "surfing the web." Today's consumers want to find information quickly, and they search with a purpose. They want to find information in the shortest time possible since many of them search on the go. By 2014, more users will access the web from mobile devices than from desktops and laptops -- a shift that continues to accelerate.

Relevant local search results

With national advertisers dominating paid search, consumers searching the web for a local business near home will often get the closest national chain, which may or may not be the closest option. This leaves consumers dubious about web search because merchants close by are not found at the top.

This is why consumers go to local search, which has business listings and provides the best way for consumers to connect with businesses close to where they live and work. The popularity of location-based apps and social networks make it even more important for search results to produce business listings based on a searcher's location. Needless to say, these listings must be accurate in providing phone numbers, directions, and so forth.

Name, address, and phone number (NAP)

The Local Search Usage Study found that location and contact details are the first thing searchers want and search for when conducting a local search. Yet 60 percent of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) fail to list a phone number on their homepage, according to a recent SMB DigitalScape study that analyzed sites from 14 countries, including over 700,000 sites in the U.S. The next things users want from a listing are: hours of operation, maps, website URL, distance to business, and driving directions.

Most local searchers are looking for quick information -- an address or a phone number to contact, especially on mobile devices. Searchers are increasingly looking for more descriptive content, especially if searching for higher-priced items like electronics, appliances, and business categories like car dealerships.

National brands and local search listings

Brick and mortar national brands are beginning to realize the importance of online local search business listings because they provide consumers with NAP information, supporting their national advertising campaigns. As a result of the way local listings impact how businesses and brands are found on mobile and social websites, national brands are beginning to make local search listings a necessary part of their online marketing strategy.

Category-based searches

Businesses must pay attention to the way their local listings are categorized in web and mobile search. The growth of local-mobile search is driving more category-based searches. According to the Local Search Usage Study, more local business searches are conducted without a specific business in mind.

For example, on-the-go consumers may need businesses in their immediate vicinity while not in their own neighborhood, so they search by category rather than business name. A person on vacation in a city away from home will likely be looking for a restaurant within walking distance from the hotel rather than by company name.

Rapid mobile device adoption

With the increasing adoption of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, as well as the increased use of mobile-local apps, consumers have become very comfortable using local search to their advantage. Whereas 20 percent of web searches are local, 40 percent of mobile searches are local (Google). And, according to Bing, 53 percent of searches have local intent. The combination of higher intent and greater interest in locally relevant information make the need for complete and accurate local search listings a must.

While organic web results still have relevance and trust, they're losing ground to local search because consumers know how and where they can get answers quickly. Not only that, local listings are the search results most unaffected by advertising bias and monetization.

Location-based services come of age

A study from consumer behavior research firm TNS, which surveyed 48,000 consumers in 58 countries, found that 19 percent of consumers currently use GPS-cued services and 62 percent plan to use them.

While it was largely thought that consumers would object if asked by mobile site owners for permission to use their locations to assist with directions or special offers, the overwhelming majority of consumers said they wouldn't object. According to the survey, 12.5 percent share their location in exchange for deals or discounts. Another 33 percent use or would like to use mobile coupons sent to them via apps as they approach a place of business.

Increasing your web and mobile presence

The internet and mobile web play an important role in the way your customers find you. Claim your listings and ensure they are complete and accurate in Google Maps, Bing Business Portal, and Yahoo Local. You also need a presence on local sites like CitySearch, SuperPages, Yellow Pages, Localeze, Yelp, Foursquare, and many more (see Top Local Business Listings for 2012).

Joseph Bruemmer is a managing partner in PB Communications LLC.

On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.

"A search engine browser window with a magnifying glass" image via Shutterstock.

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Ad networks are one of the most confusing areas of the digital industry. Here are the answers to seven of your most pressing questions.

It is important that my brand not be next to certain types of content. Can ad networks provide marketers with full transparency?

An ad network can be fully transparent in the sense that it passes on the exact information it receives from a publisher, but that information is often not complete information. Publishers drive the level of transparency; the ad network does not. If a publisher is selling its premium inventory through a direct sales force at $18 CPMs and that same inventory is available on an exchange or an ad network for $2.00, cannibalization will occur, which is why some publishers choose not to disclose complete information.

But there's more to transparency than just a site URL. Real transparency extends to the frequency and placement of both the user and the ad being acquired. Unlike DSPs and ATDs that focus on exchange and RTB inventory only, high quality networks stand to gain the most as advertisers get more sophisticated with regards to transparency. These networks leverage higher funnel, higher quality inventory acquisition techniques -- focusing on inventory before its gets to the exchanges, SSPs, and RTB marketplaces.

I've heard that ad networks' margins are really high. Is this true?

Networks generate profit margin from the inventory they buy and sell. These margins vary on a macro level from network to network, and on a micro level from impression to impression. Ad networks really can't operate at high margins given the performance standards they are generally held to. If they charge too much, advertisers won't buy; if they charge too little, publishers won't leverage the ad network.

For advertisers, it's important to keep in mind whether the network is passing on this "margin" to them in the form of ROI or not. Do the campaigns they run on the network meet their goals? What kind of data and technology does the network provide to help drive performance? More times than not, buying directly from all the publishers that the network works with would not drive performance on par with the network buy, and would create massive operational costs that are entirely eliminated by working through the network. This is the value that the network passes on to an advertiser.

Are DSPs more cost effective than ad networks?

Because of the many layers of fees that DSPs add on, in addition to the direct cost of an impression (publisher fee, advertiser fee, exchange fee, data fee, etc.), the actual margin generated from these fees can become greater than the "margin" that a network generates from the sale of an impression.

In general, if you are defining metrics and establishing goals (CPA, CTR, engagement, reach, etc.), you should be able to evaluate success based on those metrics. If your programs are not hitting your goals or are less defined in terms of objectives, you may wind up overpaying (and this is not limited to networks, DSPs, or publishers, but all forms of marketing).

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Introduction

SoLoMo. It's not a typo, nor is it an entirely new concept. A mashup of social, mobile, and local, SoLoMo is perhaps best understood as the next evolution in what we used to call hyper-local.

Last January, when the term first began to penetrate the digital lexicon, Opus Reserch senior analyst Greg Sterling told Mashable, "SoLoMo is a more mobile-centric version of the same concept with greater local precision. It's about getting nearby information on demand, wherever you may be."

Stepping back to look at the larger trend, Michael Boland, an analyst and program director of BIA/Kelsey's Mobile Local Media program, observed in the Huffington Post that SoLoMo is really about mobile apps casting off their ancestral links to the desktop and evolving into utilities that are firmly rooted in all three overlapping concepts.

"We're starting to see techno-Darwinism unfold as mobile apps are growing into their own skin," Boland wrote. "The reason SoLoMo matters is that it's unique to the mobile device; it doesn't make sense on the desktop the same way steering columns didn't fit nineteenth century horse-drawn carriages. Deals, suggestions, or events are pushed based on your check-ins or social activity as you wander across different tiles of the earth."

In essence, proponents of SoLoMo see it as nothing short of a revolution -- one that, as this Fast Company video illustrates, may come to transform every aspect of our lives.

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Your measurement department has almost certainly discovered the current religion in digital measurement: Don't overload on numbers. The key to successful dashboarding and reporting is finding a small set of sitewide KPIs that are understandable and immediately actionable.

Chances are, that's exactly what your enterprise has adopted -- a small set of key metrics like site conversion rate, visits trend, site satisfaction, etc. -- all laid out in big numbers with great fonts, pretty colors, big trend arrows, and lots of Tufte-inspired whitespace.

Unfortunately, these reports deliver neither understanding nor actionability.

Suppose the online marketing director walks into your office to tell you that your site conversion rate is up 5 percent. You'll probably be delighted. Next comes your SEO director to tell you that your site search engine traffic is down 20 percent. That's bad, right?

But would you realize that in all probability the two stories are related? As you drive less early-stage traffic to your site via natural search, your conversion rate will go up.

Reports built on KPIs are like having 10 different managers telling you 10 different, entirely unrelated stories and leaving you to figure out what they mean when you put them together. That might be life, but it doesn't have to be reporting.

Understanding the system -- the interrelationship between parts -- is fundamentally different and more important than understanding the state of any single volumetric.

It turns out that a change in any single variable in a complex system can always be explained in a variety of ways -- some of which would be interpreted as positive and some as negative. It doesn't matter if the metric is site satisfaction, revenue, conversion rate, or traffic. The possibility of multiple explanations makes it impossible to extract either meaning or actionability from single KPIs.

Not convinced? How could it be bad that your NetPromoter score is up? Here's a common driver of NetPromoter scores: In general, regular customers will have a higher score than new customers. If your business is losing non-core customers as your product set ages, your NetPromoter score could increase. As business declines and the audience narrows, you'll increasingly serve hardcore advocates. It's like talking to people who still use Myspace. If they still use it, they are probably promoters.

What about revenue? Surely, it's impossible for a revenue increase to be bad! Not only is it possible, it's common. Company A creates a remarketing program that sends a 10 percent discount offer to all cart abandons. Unfortunately, consumers quickly game the system and abandon the cart to get the coupon. Gross revenue increases, but net revenue declines due to reduced margins. Short term revenue gains that sacrifice margin are frequent. Poor reporting systems make this type of system interdependency difficult or impossible to spot or understand.

Still not convinced? What about net revenue? If net revenue is increasing, things have to be getting better! Not so. AOL in its ISP days provides a classic example. AOL was infamously difficult to cancel once you had signed up. The reason? Analysts at AOL had carefully measured the impact of difficult cancellation and could prove that making it hard to cancel improved net revenue. Sadly, they didn't measure the resulting impact on brand and customer satisfaction. The brand eroded under a relentless program of short term net revenue optimization.

Give up? We hope so, because there just is no single metric that can be meaningfully interpreted when viewed in isolation. KPIs are not actionable because KPIs aren't individually meaningful.

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Although gamification can be an excellent tool for engaging consumers, there are a few caveats of which to be wary. A common criticism of gamification is its manipulative nature. It is true that developers are taking advantage of elements of human psychology, and this can be somewhat exploitative. But this is part of what makes games fun, and what we enjoy most about them. If not for the addictive quality of gaming and the way games allow us to be unabashedly competitive, we would not enjoy them so much. Still, it is an issue to keep in mind -- but it's not exactly wise to avoid the very tactics that make engagement so appealing and hard to resist.

The following are seven important downsides of gamification that you should consider.

The motivations might be superficial

Motivations involved in gamification might not be enough to truly draw in users. Points that lead to real-world rewards are great, but often a sort of virtual "badge" is not enough. If the only driving force behind putting in the time is a chance at digital bragging rights, users aren't going to buy it. On top of that, if the incentives aren't worth the effort, not only will you reach fewer users, but the ones that do participate will likely be missing what the brand truly has to offer -- in lieu of simply wanting to be first at something.

You're rewarding them too soon

The achievements you award should build over time to reward a long-term commitment. If rewards are given too early and often, they will seem too easy. These will be perceived as hollow, and therefore not worth the effort. But if achievements mark true progress toward a defined goal, users will feel a sense of accomplishment.

You aren't providing a true game

Another criticism of gamification is that it lacks the essence of a game. When the concept becomes a cut and paste add-on to try to force engagement, no one will want to play. The challenge is to try to incorporate the originality and difficulty of much-loved video games -- without getting in over your head. To put it frankly, if it's a boring game, people won't play it.

It feels like bribery

If participating is clearly just a means to serve a brand, people are going to feel used. Rather than providing an organic experience for one's personal entertainment, gamification always has an agenda, which makes it difficult for users to want in. This is one reason why social programs and services (e.g., health care, online dating, fitness, education, job search, environmental causes, etc.) are having the most success with gamification. If users already feel they are doing good just by getting involved -- good for others, and for themselves -- rather than helping a company profit, they won't feel as dirty.

They are finding ways to cheat

First of all, you need to do your homework. Make sure your gaming elements are sophisticated enough to make cheating difficult. There is no perfect solution, especially since gamification is never as sophisticated as actual video games. If you have a cheating problem, either the rewards must be perceived as less desirable or you must make it harder to cheat the system. (I'd say go with the latter.) But again, if you are truly offering a social good, people are likely to actually want to do the work.

Social elements are forced

The social aspect often associated with gamification can easily fail if it feels disingenuous. Only when there is a strong common goal and a sense of community (alongside friendly competition) will strangers truly want to connect online. If there is nothing to gain from interacting, the opportunity to connect could just foster bad sportsmanship -- in a public way.

It's treated like an easy fix

Gamification companies like Bunchball, Badgeville, and Big Door make it seem easy to attach gamification to your website, but this isn't such a good thing. To reach their full potential, the gaming elements need to be well designed and thought out. This should take a significant amount of time.

With proper design and planning, introducing gaming elements can prove enormously beneficial to companies. But it's all about your level of investment. (And being in the right industries.) Francesco D'Orazio, research director for Face Group, said "Game mechanics have massive potential in the research industry, but low-grade gamification is only going to distort social interaction and skew research outputs."

As with anything, when done cheaply or without proper research and preparation, gamification will not provide value, and can even make your brand lose credibility. If you treat gamification like a passing fad, that is exactly what it will be. Make the decision to gamify only if you plan to go full force and embrace it. You'll have to commit -- hire an expert, do the research, and weigh your options. Success will only come if you make it an intrinsic part of your company's mission.

Jesse Schell said, "In ways it is a fad -- adding points and badges in tacky ways, looking at 'gamification' as an easy way to make boring things seem interesting -- that is a fad. However, the idea of designing business processes so that those who engage in them find them more intrinsically rewarding -- that is a long term trend."

Chloe Della Costa is an editor at iMedia Connection.

On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.

"Isolated green road sign" image via Shutterstock.

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Your career success is part ability, part luck, and part how you behave. No one does everything right every time. But the demands of the day, our own natures, and our environments can cultivate bad habits that ultimately limit personal success.

This piece isn't about the "gimmes" of career limiting moves. Getting sloshed at the Christmas party and coming on to the president's husband -- I assume we don't need to go through that stuff. This is about small bad decisions that become habits that ultimately define our reputations. Sometimes we choose bad behaviors that seem expedient in the moment but work against us over the long haul. Here are seven such harmful short-cuts, and how you can avoid their dangers.

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Every few months, a development company or consultant will come along, full of cutting-edge theoretical ideas for your agency and your clients. They will present technologies that offer theoretical advantages, efficiency, or more fun for your agency team, which presumably is always thirsty for cool new work. This all sounds positive on the surface.

Or, even more frequently, clients themselves will drop some new tech buzzword that is the method a peer used to achieve some goal that the client also has. The client perceives relevancy at a glance -- and inherently trusts the peer. So, pronto -- you are pressured to replicate this method rather than just servicing the goal by the means you would most recommend yourself. And, of course, the quick-fix popular client refrain these days to the agency and to us is often, "We need an app!"

Take a breath, you are not alone

As a production company, we are often called upon to fill the gap or rise to the occasion for agencies like yours -- and your clients. The scenarios are constant. A reminder: We are all in this together. Let's talk about how to manage expectations around the pressure to be "cutting-edge" and to produce the all-mighty app on a whim and on the proverbial dime.

These scenarios and the dynamics they illustrate put incredible ongoing pressure on today's agency or media company seeking to do right by their own competencies and what's best for their clients, all at once. No matter where you sit in the equation, it's a line we all have to walk at one time or another. We offer several words to the wise for agencies or media companies dealing with these and similar high-friction scenarios with their clients -- and then, in turn, when collaborating with production companies to execute. 

Covering the cool stuff: Matching talent to cost parameters

If you decide to go there and bang out that app for your client, you have to be able to find and fund the right talent. Ideally, you are able to not only find the right skill set but also find a team or individual who has done comparable work before. But here's the rub: The costs of finding and staffing resources are proportional to the size of the pool of availability, and when choice is limited, quality is often limited as well. This can defeat the purpose of using the cutting-edge tech or developing that app in the first place. How do you weigh your options and rationally determine your course?

Prioritize the required skill set
When aiming for ultra staffing efficiency, not all skills are created equal. Determine the core skill set, prioritizing downward from there, and hire or retain a production partner based on your leading skills of choice. Be willing to let go of non-critical but nice-to-have attributes in order to get the skills you primarily need covered first. Understand the trade-offs and the weighting, and re-balance your budget accordingly. When under pressure to move, it's important not to move so quickly that you forget to take the time to sort things out and operate strictly according to priorities. And, when it comes to app development, for example, the assignment might be as simple as finding a team that has successfully developed for and launched in the Apple Store, and understands the parameters and cycles involved there. Keep a clear view of what you really need. And choose your partners and people accordingly.

Weigh standard and cutting-edge
Scalability occasionally truly calls for solutions that need to be better or different than what the "standard" tech has to offer. It's case by case. But, you've got to know the difference. How do you understand which case you really have on your hands? Always take the time and do the work to remove the rosy lens and determine the necessary degree of cutting-edge. Make sure you've got a clear view on where cutting-edge fits in -- and what degree of it is needed for your client to differentiate, scale, and compete. Don't get caught up in a client's or another party's external love affair with cutting-edge. You need to first do the assessment, discovery, and spec work to understand what constitutes cutting-edge for your objectives and how far to push the standard to cover what you need with the right, fairly compensated production talent.

Be rational under pressure to clean up after someone else's hasty mistakes

When looking at new technologies, and specifically app development, you must consider the long-term implications of everything proposed. You're placing bets on a "hot" new commodity. In the business of serving our clients, we all are here for them when they have painted themselves into a corner, and those of us on the production side have "plug and play" resources to meet these niches. But, even better, we can help during the concept phase and get ahead of the entire situation -- if we are simply given the end goals early on. This level of collaboration helps us help our clients determine the best long-term solutions.

Does an app appropriately service your business objectives, or will the right sequence of standard development work to tune your environment fit the bill just fine? Ask and answer this question with the client in the room. It's a vital conversation.

Your keys: Timing, phases, and good old fashion QA

While the ideal situation for an agency or media company is to bring in a production company at exactly the right time, early on, with its team of developers -- this is not always the case. A production company may be asked to step in at an awkward juncture -- to what essentially feels like a turnaround scenario. Because there were legacy mistakes, you hand this production company a mess. Our advice to everyone: Don't just move. Take a few steps back and reposition the new partnership in place before you proceed. Timing matters.

You or your potential production partner should not be afraid to think in terms of phases not necessarily proposed by or discussed with the client in the first place. The client has commanded cutting-edge solutions or an app it views as critical to its business. In addition to taking the time to vet all of this in the context of business objectives, properly scope it, and determine the degree of cutting-edge technology entailed, you may need time to build toward the ideal solution. So, phases of development and, of course, appropriate QA will keep the client from rolling out something incongruous to its brand, or not exactly right, too quickly. Encourage phases and instill the importance of testing and QA -- period.

Ultimately, in the business of serving and developing for aspirational, growth-driven clients, we all operate in a highly pressurized environment. As agencies and production companies partner to deliver on technology and the "app" imperative, we do each other a favor by vetting client requests, not being afraid to modulate the pace, and seriously weighing standard, cutting-edge against the reality of business objectives.
 
AJ Vernet is CEO and founder of Rey Interactive.

On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.

"Smart hand press on mobile phone" image via Shutterstock.

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If Robert Scoble was a brand (one might argue that he is), his numbers would rival some of the biggest household names. He has 256 thousand Twitter followers, 245 thousand people have subscribed to his feed on Facebook, and 1.4 million people are following him on Google+.

When Robert speaks, techies takes notice. So when we got five minutes with him behind the scenes at ad:tech San Francisco, we asked what we hoped the digital marketing community wanted to hear: What does he really think of Facebook's Open Graph sharing?

Here's what he had to say about the advertising power of Facebook and Google+, as well as some of the new cool and "freaky" things we'll be seeing soon.

What Robert Scoble really thinks of Facebook's Open Graph sharing

"Facebook is building a new media company. One where the media comes to you."

What's the impact on customer trust?

"Zuckerberg always shoves the audience forward, and always makes the people complain."

What about Google+?

"It's in a weak and a strong place."

What's coming next in social tech?

"It's going to end up with Google Goggles with face detection, and it will say who you are, and then show all your Facebook facts."

As Startup Liaison Officer at Rackspace, Robert Scoble helps small teams have a huge impact with cloud computing technology. He's a geek who grew up in Silicon Valley (his dad was an engineer at Lockheed) and since 1985 he's been building online communities. In 2000 he started my technology blog, http://scobleizer.com, and his life has been on a rocketship ever since. In 2003-2006 he worked at Microsoft as an evangelist and one of the five guys who started Microsoft