The Local Service Pages is not your ordinary book; it focuses on service-based companies, a category that continues to have solid usage. CEO Derrick Bliss has a strong belief that the print product will endure and continues to innovate on this idea with the Staten Island edition. The book has a new interactive ad form called “Actable Pages”. According to Bliss it “extends the brand of companies and gives consumers a reason to hold on to the book”.
The ad works by downloading the Free Actable App to an Android or iOS device, opening the app and scanning the entire page or ad that is set up as an Actable experience. The entire ad is then scanned  and by holding the phone or tablet over the ad that is set up you view whatever experience is embedded. It may be a video or slideshow appears on the page on your device or it may be a 3D experience that happens between your phone and the page. According to Bliss this is a great example of how publishers will use interactive print to attract and retain users while generating additional revenue from advertisers wanting to extend their content.
Even better the ad is portable, the image can be emailed, posted and shared. To see the ad in action, download the Actable app and use your phone to scan the image of the cover.

Local Service Pages new fully interactive book

Bliss says that their next book, Brooklyn will also carry this ad format for advertisers.

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ZipLocal, the independent U.S. directory publisher with more than 300 print directories, is bolstering its digital suite through the integration of VendAsta’s StepRep reputation management tool.

VendAsta’s white-label product will be available to ZipLocal’s 110,000 advertising businesses, and soon thereafter, will be opened up across the ImmersiFind local search platform that 15 other North American directory publishers participate in.

Through StepRep, ZipLocal’s SMBs (and the sales reps handling these accounts) will be able to monitor their online visibility, track comments across social networks and reviews sites, and then engage with customers directly on these platforms. With the continual fragmentation of the Web, a reputation management tool that provides a real-time analytics dashboard encompassing these diffuse platforms is becoming an essential service to local businesses.

As such, noise in the ERPM marketplace is quickly rising. Marchex, Yext Rep, YellowBot, ReachLocal, MerchantCircle and many others offer the service as part of their suite. VendAsta recently made efforts to differentiate its product by partnering with Telmetrics to integrate call-tracking intelligence into StepRep, which begins to connect online presence with offline lead generation.

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Today, Yellowbook is launching a group buying/deal-a-day product called Weforia.com in three of its markets — Boston, Phoenix and Ft. Myers, Florida. This makes Yellowbook the first U.S. Yellow Pages publishers to enter this space, which has become a local phenomenon thanks to the success of Groupon.

Yellowbook’s Mike Wilson told us this morning that the company is confident that the trial will be successful and will roll it out across the country, reaching at least a dozen markets by the end of the year. Wilson tells us adding markets will be relatively easy, since Yellowbook will already have sales and customer support assets in place in markets where it expands.

“All we will need to do is flip a switch,” he says

Read the rest of this post on our Global Yellow Pages blog.

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Yellowbook had signed on to a new local ad exchange launched today by Chitika, an ad network established in 2003 that serves more than 2 billion monthly impressions across 80,000 Web sites. The core idea is to apply the ad exchange model to the local and mobile space.

For Yellowbook, the exchange offers a way to better monetize its own local traffic while offering its existing advertisers broader reach. Yellowbook has half a million advertisers and generates more than 100 million searches per month, according to Mike Wilson, GM and vice president of digital media at Yellowbook.

Read the rest of this post.

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Today, Yellowbook is rolling out a partnership with European mobile app developer Adaffix similar to deals Adaffix has been launching in recent months across Europe. The app presents a clear monetization opportunity by suggesting three alternative businesses when the callers first choice merchant doesn’t answer the phone.

Under the partnership, Yellowbook will be the data provider for the Adaffix app in the United States. The app is available on all smartphone platforms except for Apple because the iPhone currently doesn’t enable multitasking. The Adaffix app runs in the background, and provides three basic services: the auto suggest feature noted above; caller lookup, in which it accesses its partners’ data to match phone numbers from outside the user’s address book; and Facebook ID, basically displaying the Facebook photo of callers whose app is linked to their Facebook profile.

Read the rest of this post.

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I recently attended a webinar hosted by SalesBlogcast that featured social media company BizBrag. My reason for attending was to learn how small and medium sized-businesses can take advantage of social media. Based on our Local Commerce Monitor research, 32 percent of SMBs said they plan to use a social site, while 31 percent indicated they plan to place links or ads on social media sites. What previous waves of LCM data have shown is a high desire for social media but lower actual spending, indicating a pent-up demand to spend in this category. My theory has always been that social media is often intimidating to those less familiar with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging and posting news features. All these activities take time and a certain level of technical expertise to manage them while also running a business.

Enter BizBrag. CEO Brian Smith made it his mission to try to develop a single platform where SMBs can manage all their social media activities including e-mail marketing. “With so many social media outlets, with varying ways of inputting data and broadcasting information, BizBrag’s goal was to create an easy to use all-in-one platform. The goal is to help small businesses create ways to draw activity to their Web sites by creating more ways to be found on search engines via blogs, news articles, and social media posts.” Small businesses create a BizFolio that shows all their activity and provides a simple description of the company. The dashboard feature allows the company to create news articles and posts about their company showing them where they can post their information. Enter a news story (Called a Braggit), check a few boxes on where it can be posted, upload an e-mail list, and then hit submit.

BizBrag is two months out of beta and now gaining speed with 1,000 advertisers signed on since going live. Leveraging its social media expertise, BizBrag has been active in working its social media network to get the word out to SMBs. Smith pointed out, “if the pace of inquiries and new advertisers signed on in the last two months is any indication, we seem to have hit the mark with small businesses trying to figure out an easy way to start and manage a social media campaign.”

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One of the recommendations we have been supporting and talking about over the past year is the need to look at the print directory differently. For the past 100-plus years, the directory has been viewed as a distribution media vehicle — “we deliver to every resident in a city.” In recent years, with distribution declining and local media fragmenting, people in our industry are still hung up on getting more books to more people rather than trying to view a directory as a series of verticals that reach different audiences, with different needs and varying levels of spending power.

Enter Larry Small, research director for the Yellow Pages Association, who supports one of our major views that demographics are an often ignored factor when considering the value of a print directory. While the industry has been concerned with the 18-25 crowd and how directories will adapt to attract and meet the needs of this group, Small points out that the real factor is not only age but disposable income.

He goes on to say: “One other metric to keep in mind is disposable income. The Yellow Pages industry has positioned itself as the best source for generating qualified leads. By definition, a qualified lead is one where people are ready to make a purchase — in other words, they have the need AND the resources to complete the sale.”

Small also shares this chart from CNNMoney.com that shows median net worth of individuals by age group:

With higher usage rates in the 35-65 age groups, the print directory has the capacity to reach more affluent spenders who have high discretionary spending in categories that are meaningful to a directory because of the life stages these age groups are in. Users in these age groups are spending on home renovation, financial services, house wares, cleaning services — all key directory headings. According to BIA/Kelsey’s research and U.S. Census data, those in the 35-65 age groups control nearly 80 percent of spending power in the US.

CRM Trends, which tracks changes in demographic trends points out: “Compared with the big-spending Baby Boom generation, these new spenders (18-30) will be less attractive as fewer will have reached their big-spending life stages. They will not only have less buying power, they will also be more fragmented into niche interest markets and will demand more personalization and be harder to reach with conventional marketing.”

Because a directory is essentially made up of a series of verticals, directory publishers would be well advised to look at these categories to determine if they have the appropriate content, editorial support and navigation for the age demographic the category attracts. Taking this approach might signal the need to redevelop different sections of the book rather than the entire directory, integrating more print to mobile or online products like SMS codes or QR Codes, rethinking distribution, or adding more unique/relevant content not generally found elsewhere or found in one location.

Freeing up the minds of print product managers to think in new ways about the directory and its varying target markets may indeed create greater innovation and product reconfigurations rather than simply offering more cosmetic changes.

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Leaders of the U.S. independent directory publishing industry were passionate in their defense of print media at this morning’s opening session of the Association of Directory Publishers meeting outside Houston, Texas. Jim Hail, the outgoing chair and head of Idaho-based Hagadone Directories, declared “Print is not dead!” He argued that the industry has become too apologetic about print and should take a much bolder posture in defending it in the media, where it continues to take a pretty vicious beating.

To bolster his point, Hail held up a recent Wall Street Journal article that details an effort by the magazine industry to embrace the “power of print.” Rather than accept its demise to digital, the magazine industry decided to run a campaign that basically says, at least where magazines are concerned, the print experience is superior. One tagline example, “The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive.”

Hail was not impressed so much by the “esoteric” messaging but by the gumption the magazine industry has shown by saying, in effect, our old product is awesome, so deal with it. He wants the Yellow Pages industry to do the same thing.

“We need a consortium of publishers for an ad campaign … to tout the inherent strength of our medium,” Hail said.

Of course, Hail is aware that this call has been made many times before and never executed successfully. Joe Walsh, speaking after Hail, offered a somewhat different take. He said that while he has always favored a Yellow Pages version of the “Got Milk” campaign, he thinks it is “too late now” for any such effort to be effective.

He says the sense of print Yellow Pages as a passe medium has been fully baked into the public consciousness, “and we may not be able to reverse it.” Plus, he says there is no appetite among the major publishers to fund any such effort.

That said, Walsh sees some modest signs of improvement in the performance of Yellow Pages. He says his internal metrics show growing print usage, which he ascribes to an improving economy.

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It’s nearing the end of earnings season for the global Yellow Pages industry, and my program, The Kelsey Report, will soon issue a detailed roundup of 2009 results across all the companies that report publicly.

In general, the news has been grim for print Yellow Pages, though some publishers have given faint glimmers of hope that print will stabilize this year, meaning a slowing rate of decline. Others are projecting an accelerating decline.

A recent (unscientific) Kelsey Report online survey of global YP industry insiders suggests that most in the industry see a strong secular component in recent revenue performance. Probably the most telling messages that has come out of some recent conversations I have had with leaders in the industry is that the continuing, if waning, effectiveness of print is an increasingly irrelevant point. The energy it takes to overcome objections to print can be more effectively directed to selling digital or a product bundle that emphasizes digital.

Ironically, I am hearing more and more that print may be necessary to making the bundle effective because it still drives leads, but it is poisonous to the messaging because no one believes it works. I am hearing more and more about strategies that essentially engineer a faster print-to-online shift because the investment story for a company focused on the local online opportunity is so much more compelling than a traditional media story.

So the big question is, does the industry have a viable plan to become a growing, profitable business in a post-print world? And how will organizations need to change to make economic sense in a world where the product mix is substantially different from what it is today?

These are some of the questions we’ll take a whack at in a workshop we’ll be conducting at the Yellow Pages Association’s conference next month in Las Vegas, and in much greater depth at BIA/Kelsey’s Directional Media Strategies conference in Dallas, Sept. 14-16. The workshop at the YPA event is titled, perhaps hopefully, “Built to Last: The new Yellow Pages Organization.”

My colleague Mike Boland will also have a prominent role at the YPA event, moderating a panel on “Monetizing Mobile Yellow Pages,” which is also the topic of an upcoming joint report from BIA/Kelsey’s Mobile Local Media and Kelsey Report advisory services. Mobile is increasingly seen as key to the future of the business, and arguably, because of its inherent emphasis on calls over clicks as the currency of leads, a place where directories have a more level playing field.

Next week I will be traveling to the Association of Directory Publishers meeting in Houston, where I’ll be very interested in talking to smaller market publishers about the environment they are experiencing. At the last ADP event I attended, it was clear the economy had taken a toll on many publishers, but there wasn’t much talk of a secular decline. I’ll be interested in hearing how the mood and message have changed since the last gathering.

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Philadelphia-based 7Mainstreet cofounder Andy Leff got the idea for his company about four years ago while driving to the grocery store. “I was listening to something on the radio about the success MySpace was having with helping rock bands promote themselves, and I thought no company is doing anything like that for small businesses.”

Leff and his father, Ron, have since worked together to build 7Mainstreet into a platform for small businesses to establish a presence online that doesn’t just present listings content but enables them to sell inventory, interact with customers via social tools like blogs, post video, visual images and so on.

It’s kind of like the old storefront concept married with the modern Internet Yellow Pages. Rather than a business listing or info page, the standard offering for a small-business advertising is a commerce-enabled micro site. Andy Leff says one point to emphasize is that advertisers using a microsite can have total control over their environment, where on some sites, their presence can be cluttered by banner ads for competing or even conflicting messages.

The Leffs are currently trying to convince directory publishers, newspapers, catalogs and business-to-business publishers, among others, to white label their solution as a platform for selling online advertising and services to their small-business customers. In particular they’ve focused on the independent publisher space and to date have announced one client, Illinois-based Eagle Publications.

This is a crowded space, but the Leffs believe they have a key point of difference in their emphasis on enabling commerce, rather than just establishing presence.

We asked how 7Mainstreet drives traffic, which is the main challenge facing any independent publisher trying to build an online presence. The answer is a combination of things — all the sites are listed in a common database so all customers benefit from wider exposure than just the publishers that sold them the microsite. Plus 7Mainstreet is active in link building and other efforts to drive traffic.

Andy Leff also says it’s important to level with small businesses about the role they play in the performance of the site.

“You can buy a gym membership, but to get the muscles you need to show up and do bench presses,” Andy says. “If [SMBs] do not use [the microsites], they will not get full benefit. They need to put as much information in there as possible in order to improve their search ranking.”

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