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.

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Last week BIA/Kelsey attended the EASDP congress in Brussels, a two-day event focused on the emerging social local mobile ecosystem, and how directory publishers might fit into this new landscape. The association, which represents both B2B and B2C publishers in Europe, recently re-branded itself by adding an S (for “Search”) to its name.

BIA/Kelsey is excited to be partnering with the EASDP to produce the second day of its Annual Congress, Sept. 20-21 in Toledo, Spain (near Madrid). We’ve put together a preliminary agenda that focuses heavily on the strategic and tactical decision points that media companies face as they transition to fully digital businesses. These include transforming the sales organization, making social media core to the business, building a compelling SME services bundle and finding the right business model for mobile media. In addition, BIA/Kelsey will share fresh research and analysis with a global perspective. Expect some announcements on speakers very soon.

The newly renamed European Association of Search and Database Publishing is trying to reposition itself to attract a wider range of companies as members (think local guides, social platforms, mobile ad networks and so on) while bringing back to the fold large directory organizations that have left the association in recent years and that now see themselves more as digital media companies than directory publishers.

The EASDP name change is reminiscent of the Yellow Pages Association’s decision to change its name to the Local Search Association. The lesson in any such name change is that it has to be coupled with a change in the fundamental value proposition to members and conference attendees.

It’s a tall order to change more than just its name, but the association’s recent conference in Brussels was a clear step in the right direction. The agenda, with few exceptions, seemed more like an event about SoLoMo than the directories business, with presentations on topics ranging from monetizing social interactions to building mobile shopping apps. The event also featured a start-up forum where the audience voted for their favorite among a series of European-based start-ups that gave very brief “elevator pitch” presentations.

Some highlights from the Brussels conference included:

* Closely’s Perry Evans said the idea that publishers can’t succeed in deals because they can’t deliver an audience is outdated. Today there are plenty of avenues for distributing deals and offers to consumers.

*Kelly Winters, Facebook’s product marketing manager, talked about the critical importance of authenticity in social media. She was very direct in saying that mass production of Facebook fan pages is not something the social media giant encourages, since it leads to a glut of disengaged pages.

* Koen van der Vort, of the social marketing firm Jalt in the Netherlands, shared a case study of how it mined the Twitter stream to generate review content for DeTelefoongids, the Dutch publisher (part of European Directories).

* No conference of directory publishers would be complete without at least one speaker insulting the audience. This time the culprit was Joost de Valk, founder of the Dutch SEO firm Yoast. His message, “Most of you are already dead.” A more helpful message from de Walk: In order to be a successful Web presence provider, something many publishers aspire to be, quality matters. “You are not going to be my website provider unless you are really putting forth an effort.”

* In a somewhat contrarian presentation at an event focused almost entirely on digital, Steve Sitton of the research and consulting firm Market Authority, told the audience it should invest more in its print business. Sitton, citing Market Authority’s telephone surveys conducted in the U.S. and U.K., insisted that actual print usage is far stronger than the general perception would suggest.

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