Yesterday at the Borrell, LSA, LMA Social + Mobile event at a Chicago airport hotel, Google executives made the case for Google+ as the centerpiece of an effective SMB digital presence before a roomful of current and potential resellers. The…
Seat Pagine Gialle, the troubled Italian search and directory company, placed its UK subsidiary Thomson Local into "administration" yesterday (the UK equivalent of receivership). Thomson immediately dismissed its field sales team in summary fashion. The company appeared poised for liquidation,…
Last week, outgoing Yellow Media CEO Marc Tellier presided over his final earnings call and ended the call with a recitation of his accomplishments during his 12 years at the company's helm. Tellier leaves his post this week, with no…
Deluxe Corp. took a significant step in developing its interactive marketing services for SMBs capability with its recent $27 million acquisition of Vertical Response, an email and social media marketing provider. Deluxe's origins are in providing business checking services. The…
Much of the social media conversations we have at BIA/Kelsey deal with progress in the monetization of social, building social media solutions for small-business advertisers, or how social is being infused throughout local media. We are beginning yet another conversation…
Members of Generation Y, defined as those born since the early 1980s, have earned a very specific workplace reputation. Some characteristics associated with Gen Y include a need for ongoing recognition and positive reinforcement (the result no doubt of coddling…
Lenders are taking control of the UK-based directory company Hibu and converting much of its GBP2.3 billion in debt into equity. This action wasn't unexpected. A series of debt restructurings failed to buy Hibu enough runway to transform the business…
A quick scan through a summary of BIA/Kelsey's Media Ad View Plus unearthed a number of fun, interesting factoids about the local media ecosystem. Media Ad View is BIA/Kelsey's research product that offers a market by market view of the…
Yesterday, BIA/Kelsey issued its annual Global Yellow Pages Forecast, which predicts the industry worldwide would erode at a 4.1% CAGR through 2017. While this forecast may seem bleak, this pace of erosion marks an improvement over the prior five year.…
Digital media services provider vSplash has made inroads with both newspaper and directory/local search organizations with its BuzzBoard sales productivity tool. vSplash is widely known for its website production capabilities, as well as its voluminous data on small-business digital presence,…
Wanderful Media will use Goodzer's local retail inventory data to support its recently relaunched Find&Save localized shopping platform. Goodzer's data includes more than 2.5 billion inventory items from more than 500,000 U.S. retail stores. The newspaper consortium-owned Wanderful Media recently…
Making the rounds last week in London's burgeoning digital media community, we met Footfall123, a London-based company offering a loyalty marketing solution with a strong social marketing component. Footfall123 white labels its solution through partners and also works directly with merchants.…
Dex Media, the newly minted company that was once SuperMedia and Dex One, is counting on a strategy of serving as the "outsourced marketing partner for small-businesses" as they wade into the complex and confusing world of digital media. That…
Companies that are successfully transforming their sales teams to serve a fast changing local and SMB marketplace tend to follow a common set of best practices. These include a focus on customer-driven key performance indicators, a heavy reliance on data…
SuperMedia and Dex One completed their merger today, creating Dex Media, a company with annual revenues of approximately $2.6 billion (based on combined 2012 revenues), with about $500 million in digital revenue. The combined company also has 2,700 sales reps…
BIA/Kelsey recently rolled out the first in a series of reports offering very specific cuts of data from our Local Commerce Monitor research. LCM is BIA/Kelsey's long-running study of how U.S. small business advertisers are evolving their use of media…
Solocal Group CEO Jean-Pierre Remy offered directory publishers a vision for print to digital transformation built on a strong focus on building content, vertical segmentation and a relentless focus on execution. Remy was the keynote speaker at the Local Search…
This morning at the Local Search Association conference in Las Vegas, incoming chair Bill Dinan and association president Neg Norton outlined how a changing marketplace in Yellow Pages and local search are driving the need for changes in the association.…
Over the past few months, BIA/Kelsey has been looking at various SMB-focused sales approaches among both traditional media players and digital pure plays. Our objective was to establish a common set of best practices. We discovered early on that the…
I am personally looking forward to Solocal CEO Jean-Pierre Remy's presentation later this month at the Local Search Association's annual conference in Las Vegas. Solocal, which recently changed its name from PagesJaunes, is the leading search and directory company in…
