My good friend Steve Goldberg is an attorney in Woodland Hills, CA that specializes in matters of wrongful death, serious injury, medical and legal malpractice and insurance bad faith. He wasn't sure he needed a website, and was somewhat dubious of the ROI.

But Steve and I have been friends for almost 17 years (he introduced me to the Sushi Spot on Ventura Blvd. back when I thought raw fish was bait - now that's true friendship) and I told him I would put a basic site together for him to help get his cyber-feet wet.

Less than 4 days after the site went live I got a frantic email from Steve saying that he couldn't find himself in Google and asking me what I was going to do about it. He had done a search for "Steve Goldberg Attorney" and wasn't showing up in the top 100 results.

"Patience Grasshopper," I replied, and sure enough the next day he showed up in the top 10 results.

Moral of the story: Top search engine results don't happen overnight. They are the result of careful planning, content, quality inbound links and frequent updates to your site.

Steve and I are now targeting additional keywords and phrases to help improve his ranking, and who knows, I may even get him to take me to the Sushi Spot again!

I read an interesting article by Saul Hansel in the New York Times this morning. Google is getting into the local coupon business and tying it to their Google Maps service.

Starting today, Google will let any business offer discount coupons to people who use its Google Maps service, which also acts as an online yellow pages. A business will be able to upload information for coupons, including images, and Google will display a link to those coupons when the business name is displayed. Users can then print the coupons and take them to the merchant.

You can read the full article here.

The most popular commercial on YouTube is for the Sony Bravia LCD television. Almost 3.5 million people have watched it, and while it doesn't have the same verve as Volkswagen's Un-pimp Your Ride, it reaffirms the power of video as a viral marketing tool.

As impressive as the numbers are for Sony and VW, they don't hold a candle to Judd Laipply's, Evolution of Dance. This video has been viewed over 29,000,000 times according to YouTube. No fancy effects, just a guy on stage who was videotaped by someone in the audience.

Revver is one company taking advantage of amateur Internet video by allowing people to monetize the clips they upload by tagging a commercial weblink at the end of the video. It remains to be seen whether or not this model will work. There will be all kinds of copyright issues, and the fact that tagging a commercial at the end of a video will reduce the "cool" factor that gives these videos such legs.

Can viral video help companies capture local search traffic? With the right web infrastructure (great website, professional hosting, and the ability to handle large spikes of traffic) my answer would be a resounding yes.

It was 122 degrees in North Hills this weekend. Now imagine 2 people walking down the street with a squirt gun and a video camera asking people if they want to "cool down." Let's say these two people were employees of a local bar that served "the coldest beer in town." They post the video on their website, they play it in their bar, and, well, you get the idea. I'm no Spielberg, but a short video that involves the community and that can be easily distributed could help promote your business to a local market and drive traffic to your site.

And finally, if you haven't seen what you can do with Diet Coke and Mentos, check this out.

The North Valley Chamber of Commerce has a lot of things going for it. In the past 3 years they have gone from less than 200 members to over 600. And while they perform many of the same functions that most Chambers do (mixers, business expos & breakfasts,) they also hold a series of special meetings called clusters.

The clusters are essentially a group of non-competing business men and women who meet once a week to discuss issues affecting them, share and pass leads, and most importantly...build trust. This format is similar in nature to BNI (Business Network International) and LeTip, but wrapped under the umbrella of the Chamber of Commerce.

Some of the clusters have grown to well over 30 members and have progressed to the point of developing their own websites and eNewsletters. These are hardcore Chamber members. They don't use the Yellow Pages. They call their fellow cluster members and get personal recommendations for the products and services they need.

Now, what would an online Chamber of Commerce directory look like if you were able to take the "trust factor" from the clusters (real-world experiences, recommendations, stories) and combine it with a simple, easy-to-use web front end?

Of course you would have a very specialized, local social search engine. And depending on how a Chamber of Commerce is viewed by the community it serves, this could be a very powerful tool to promote local businesses and encourage new membership.

How is your local Chamber of Commerce positioning themselves with regards to local search? Post your comments below!

My best friend Matt bought a house and moved to Seattle last year. We talked on the phone quite a bit as he was getting settled and invariably we would end up talking about projects he was working on at the house, what restaurants he was going to, and where he was watching the Seahawks every Sunday.

When I finally came to visit him about 8 months after he moved in, Matt was a West Seattle expert. Unfortunately most of that expertise came through the expense of trial, trial and many errors. It's too bad he didn't know about Judy's Book. It may have saved him from what we now quietly refer to as "The Chicken Wing Incident." Let's just say, I'm glad I wasn't there.

Judy's Book is one of a new breed social local search engines. Judy's Book combines first person reviews of local businesses (both good and bad) with a unique TrustScore^SM that allows visitors to "evaluate the quality and trustworthiness of reviews written by real people on the site."

As more and more small businesses eschew traditional yellow page and newspaper ads in favor of local search, there will be great opportunities for them to take advantage of social local search engines like Yelp and Judy's Book - as long as they remember that word of mouth can bring both praise and pallor to their enterprise.