Paging Mom and Pop

Big Internet businesses are discovering what Main Street already knew: what mom and pop lack in size they make up in quantity. Here are some online tools courting local business customers.

According to MediaPost, Google renamed its tool for local businesses Google Places. Local business owners can submit data about their businesses for free, to be displayed on Google.com and Google Maps. For $25 a month, owners can tag their listing with offers such as coupons. 

Meanwhile, Milo.com is also going after independent retailers. The company has signed 100 mom-and-pop retailers to help consumers find merchandise from small local businesses. Milo helps the businesses pull inventory data out of their POS and access it in real time from the Web. Next week, Milo will release a mobile product that lets people search by location with help from the GPS technology in their phones. (Milo already indexes product availability and real-time prices from nearly 50,000 national big-box and regional retailers.) 

Foursquare, that location tracker that Twitters use to let the world know they’re at the pizza place, is going after local advertisers. Every unclaimed business venue has a link asking, “Are you the manager of this business?” The link takes managers to a page asking for proof so Foursquare’s sales team can set them up with tools for claiming their venue and managing offers. There is also a new Businesses page explaining the different tools available to local merchants. Businesses get a dashboard with realtime stats on number of check-ins, times of day people check in, most recent visitors, and most frequent visitors. They can also manage the offers and badges people get when they check in.