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So what sets our Top 3 choices — Local.com, Yodle and Yellowbook.com — apart from the pack in terms of revenue growth this year?

These companies have defied gravity by focusing on selling the fastest growing ad categories:  search advertising, online directory listings, and streaming video. They also act as marketing consultants and can help small businesses with all the online marketing tools and advice they might need. They’ll put together a Web site for your business, offer complete analytics, online upgrades through a dashboard or if the advertiser gets stuck — they can just pick up the phone and talk to someone.

Setting sights on Google

These companies are poised to beat the pants off traditional media because they see the gap that very few legacy outlets have been willing to commit to — the service gap. I mean, at most newspaper sites if a small business says to the account executive, “I need a way to collect e-mail,” the AE will probably send them to Constant Contact.  The right response should be, “Let’s set up a promotion to collect e-mails then we start mailing your list with specials.”

But, how can a traditional media outlet even compete, when according to our research, barely 60% of them have an online-only AE? That other 40% are trudging into advertisers’ offices with worries about cannibalization of the traditional product.

Back to the Top 3 — these company’s models are very similar and focus on soup-to-nuts interactive marketing for the small business. They have an actual phone number posted on their Web site. (Just try and find a phone number for Google.) In fact, this service-oriented model could disrupt Google, because small businesses need a figurative hand-holding. There is no face of Google and if I were them I’d begin to worry about that. They become vulnerable as advertisers begin to find other companies willing to lend a hand to pull them out of the service gap.

When I go into a market for a local media site and make an online marketing presentation to their potential advertisers, the small businesses are packing in and they are craving to have their questions about online marketing answered. They want to know what their business peers are spending, they want to know why their display ad doesn’t get clicked through and they want to know about the ROI. It is clear that you have to show a small business the whole online marketing picture and that’s exactly what these Top 3 are doing.

Plus these three are going after the most lucrative online ad spending business categories. Our own research data has identified that in most local markets these are lawyers, healthcare providers and home improvement, to name a few. But too many traditional media outlets in local markets are still calling on their traditional advertisers, which are not usually in these categories.

The Top 3 have been doing their research and now are methodically going out to hunt and to plug the service gap in local online advertising. They may have Google in their crosshairs.