Easing Shoppers’ Woes

That was good advice for Motown legend Smokey Robinson (no, he’s not my cousin), and it’s good advice for any Valleyite hoping to snag the hottest toy or brightest trinket this holiday season.

But with an estimated 20,000 retail outlets in the San Fernando Valley region, and only so much room under your kitchen counter for the voluminous telephone directories needed to canvass the entire area, what’s a shopper to do?

This year, a number of entrepreneurs have launched efforts to help local residents connect with local merchants.

Several Web sites, and one printed guide that may eventually become a Web site, have been created specifically to give Valley businesses a greater shot at reaching cyber-surfing locals. And though none effectively covers the entire 290 square miles of the Valley region, each offers Valley-centric information--from store locations to local weather--that goes beyond the Yellow Pages.

The moves are seen by analysts as part of the continuing effort to take the “world” out of the World Wide Web by making it more usable at the local level. They also represent an effort by some to help traditional retailers fight cyber interlopers.

“Frankly, to me it makes a ton of sense,” said Richard Giss, a retailing analyst and partner with the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche. “There is increasing noise out in the traditional distribution [sales] channels. The traditional retailers are increasingly finding themselves in competition with dot-coms. . . . So I see this as being effective marketing for the traditional stores, if it can be pulled off.”

And that is a big if.

As the backers of some of the defunct Valley-centered sites can tell you, there’s no guarantee that if you build it, they will come.

GoValley.com, an attractive Valley-centric Web site that launched with great promise and an impressive advertising campaign in late July, is already on hiatus.

But Ron Arnone, publisher at Tarzana-based Marketek Communications, is undaunted.

Shopping Guide to Be Distributed

The new kid on the block, Arnone will begin shipping his hot-off-the-presses shopping guide on Friday; it is devoted exclusively to the merchants and businesses along Ventura Boulevard. Currently, the guide is 17 feet long and lists more than 2,400 antiques dealers, gift basket vendors, jewelers and other retailers. The accordion-folded, color-coded guide map spans the boulevard from Studio City to Woodland Hills, giving a block-by-block catalog of merchants. (The list does not include office buildings).

A searchable CD-ROM is due out in the spring, and at some point Arnone plans to put the entire database up on the Web. (For information on Marketek products, the company can be reached at (818) 883-0656.)

“I was awe-struck by Ventura Boulevard,” said Arnone, explaining his motivation for the mammoth undertaking. “It kept striking me as ‘Wow, what a marketplace!”’

The merchant listings on the guide map are free.

Arnone, whose researchers began knocking on doors along the boulevard in August to collect data on who’s where, hopes to recoup his $40,000 investment through sales of the maps (list is $11.95), through logo ads from some merchants and--mostly--through use of the completed guide to market to other cities with popular shopping strips.

He sees the Valley endeavor as the beginning of an enterprise that he hopes will eventually include shopping guide maps stretching from Las Vegas to the Champs-Elysees.

“So we’ve used the Ventura project as a model to create other areas,” said Arnone, who also publishes the AmericanKaraoke trade magazine. “It’s our intent to go forward and build this into a multinational,” he said.

So far, back at the home front, Arnone hasn’t exactly been doing a land-office business. Fewer merchants than he anticipated were willing to pay for logo ads and only a few retail outlets have been willing to stock his guide.

But Arnone is undisturbed.

“It’s more than just Ventura Boulevard,” he said, looking down the road. “I’m not independently wealthy by any means. Coughing up $40,000 was a very major decision on my part. But I’m terribly excited about this.”

While Arnone anticipates launching a Web site at some point, his primary focus now is on the print product.

Meanwhile, much of the ground in Arnone’s publication already is covered by www.venturablvd.com/, one of the oldest and most stable Valley-focused Web sites. The site was launched in 1996 by Bill Malin, president of Ventura Blvd. on the Web.

Arnone said he planned to approach Malin about working together.

Nontraditional Ads Attract Few Merchants

Like Arnone, Malin has run into some resistance getting local merchants to part with funds to pay for nontraditional advertising.

Of the nearly 10,000 listings on his site (he includes areas beyond the actual boulevard), only about 450 have actually paid to have a Web site developed. The rest have free business-card type, non-interactive ads.

This year though, with more attention being paid to E-shoppping, Malin has noticed that he’s getting more notice from local retailers.

“There has been a measurable increase in the number of people, local merchants, interested in some kind of E-commerce solution,” said Malin. “Especially with the holiday time, there’s been a real jump.

“This is the first time there has been a holiday rush at Ventura Blvd.com,” he said.

Next year, Malin plans to overhaul his site, acknowledging that the main page, launched in 1996, now looks a tad dated.

He is rather sanguine about the potential arrival of a new rival.

“I’m not terribly concerned,” he said. “I don’t mind that someone else is doing this. But I don’t expect him to succeed. No one else did.”

While it may be true that a handful of Valley-oriented sites are no longer with us, there are others, launched this year or coming early next, that do give Valley residents more home-based information than they can find elsewhere.

Still in development is a site--www.valleyquest.com--that has about 1,000 local links, including about 500 local merchants. The site is the brainchild of Sean Fleck, who heads Mindsnare Encoding, a live Internet broadcasting company based in Van Nuys.

Fleck said that by February he hopes to have completed work on the site, which will offer free ads to local merchants.

“I did it out of frustration of doing a search [for Valley companies on existing] search engines and coming up with nothing,” he said.

Nor does Fleck mind that the site helps generate leads for his broadcasting company.

“We’re not looking to be competitive,” he said. “This is just more of a free service.”

One Site Focuses on Burbank Area

Another locally focused site is www.burbank.com. Launched last summer by entrepreneur Jim Hetherman, this site lists about 100 merchants in the East Valley, mostly around Burbank. The site also has a wide variety of resident-friendly links to sites like Southern California Gas and Burbank City Hall.

Then there are the local versions of the global sites, like Yahoo Get Local and Microsoft’s Citysearch.com. But those can be confusing for the novice.

For any cyber surfers who have found other Valley-ful sites, please E-mail me. I still have quite a bit of shopping left to do.

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Valley @ Work runs each Tuesday. Karen Robinson-Jacobs can be reached at Karen.Robinson@latimes.com.