Back in 2008, Trevor Nadeau went to the board of the company he was running, Yellow Medya, and told them that no one was buying the product they were selling, an online Yellow Pages directory.

Nadeau had to come up with a new business model, and quickly. “I knew we were toast if we didn’t change,” he told us last week.

What Yellow Medya decided to do was focus on the data opportunity in Turkey, a country that lacked a basic, functioning database of businesses. Turkey also lacked a positive history of Yellow Pages, with multiple Yellow Pages operators coming and going over the past two decades.

The company went to work on building up content on small and large businesses in Turkey, a national of 81 million people and about 2.3 million businesses. Yellow Medya’s decision to fill the data void created a sizable licensing and distribution opportunity. This strategic decision has led to revenue generating partnerships with Yandex (kind of the Russian Google), TripAdvisor, Foursquare, TomTom, Nokia Location and Commerce, among others. The company has an API for others that want to develop on their data.

The bigger picture, and opportunity, is that building this rich, geocoded database, with brand and point-of-sale data, is a great enabler for social-local-mobile marketing in Turkey. The lesson for other directory organizations is that focusing on data can be a powerful differentiator in a Google-dominated local search environment.

Nadeau will give a presentation outlining Yellow Medya’s transformation from directory failure to successful SoLoMo facilitator on Sept. 21 at the EASDP annual congress in Toledo, Spain. Nadeau’s presentation comes on the second day of the congress, which is being produced by BIA/Kelsey. The day will focus on the emerging opportunity for European publishers to help small-businesses engage in social, local and mobile media and commerce.

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So where should a European local media company place its bets when looking across the spectrum of opportunities in social media, mobile and local online commerce? BIA/Kelsey announced today that it has joined forces with the European Association of Search and Database Publishers to try to answer this question.

BIA/Kelsey will produce the second day of the EASDP’s Annual Congress in Toledo, Spain. The day-long session will take place on Friday, Sept. 21, led by BIA/Kelsey analysts and featuring speakers with a hands-on appreciation for the risk and opportunity involved in transforming local media companies into dynamic digital players. 

Among the featured speakers at this daylong session:

Trevor Nadeau, Managing Director, Yellow Medya, Turkey. Nadeau has been leading a true top to bottom transformation at Yellow Medya, from its traditional Yellow Pages heritage into a business that is all about enabling SMBs to participate in SoLoMo. He will offer a primer on how to turn a traditional business around, successfully and in short order. (Look here for an interview with Trevor later this week.)

 Paul Reich, Director of Sales — Europe, Yelp. Reich will walk through the experience of building a stand-alone social-local-mobile sales organization in Europe, and will offer insight into the highly competitive market opportunity Yelp is pursuing — engaging consumers with rich social content.

In addition, BIA/Kelsey analysts Matt Booth and myself will offer our own grounded observations on the European local opportunity in a session titled, “A View Into Europe’s Digital Future — Outlook and Forecast From BIA/Kelsey.”  

Check here for more information on the congress and BIA/Kelsey’s participation, and to register for the event. Toledo, Spain, is a historic city easily accessible from Madrid’s Barajas Airport.

The EASDP congress follows BIA/Kelsey’s SMB Digital Marketing event in Chicago, which runs Sept. 17-19 at the Hyatt McCormick Place in Chicago (my home town). Look here for details soon on speakers at SMB, which will focus on opportunities for organizations selling digital media and marketing solutions to SMBs.

The post Coming in September: BIA/Kelsey SoLoMo Event at EASDP — Toledo, Spain appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.