AgendiZe Turns Yellow Pages into Social Media

I was briefed this morning by Alexandre Rambaud, CEO of AgendiZe, who is presenting at DEMO07. I had not spoken to Alexandre in a couple of years and I had only been vaguely aware of what the company was doing. I thought it was about allowing people to yellow pages listings to Outlook essentially.

But the company is up to much more. It has created a very interesting and valuable suite of tools and capabilities that essentially turn the yellow pages into social media. Current customers include YellowBook, Yellowpages.ca (Yellow Pages Group) and France’s 118218 (InfoNXX).

Very briefly, Agendize can put buttons or links on a local search site that enable users to save, share and send listings to personal address books, IM, mobile phones and social bookmarking sites. These capabilities extend distribution and reach for the publisher and advertisers, as well as being valuable for the end-user.

Here’s an example from the YellowBook implementation (click to enlarge):

Send to Facebook:

You can immediately see how this turns a relatively static product that relies on destination traffic, SEM and SEO into something that has much more “viral potential.” Most yellow pages and local search sites have “send to phone” but this tool set goes well beyond that, as the Facebook example suggests.

This “leverages” Facebook traffic in a different way than, for example, the Superpages Facebook application the company announced a couple of weeks ago.

AgendiZe can also do click to call (which allows for tracking and potentially PPCall).

But all this is already in the market. What the company is announcing at the DEMO conference is an “AgendiZe Me” button for SMBs to place directly on their sites, which carriers the same range of capabilities:

This can either be purchased by the SMB directly from AgendiZe or sold (as a “white label” product) by the publisher as a way to extend the reach of the advertiser and create additional value for consumers.