Zoodango: It’s Mostly about the Interface

TechFlash has a nice report on new local community/search competitor Zoodango:

Here’s the most interesting paragraph:

Zoodango has a 4-pronged revenue model. It plans to charge consumers a monthly fee to gain access to premium coupons, 2-for-1 dinners and the like. It also plans to charge merchants to submit coupons and other promotions to the site. Later this year, it also will unleash what Sun calls “geo classifieds” — essentially helping people find products for sale from those who live close by. Finally, it has a licensing deal in place with an undisclosed partner, a deal that Sun vaguely described as a “virtually untapped market.”

I was skeptical of Yelp’s chances when it entered the market so I won’t dismiss this site. However, there’s nothing right now (see the above paragraph) to differentiate it — except an interface that looks slightly different. There will apparently soon be an iPhone app and mobile site (now must-haves for local destinations).

The “local” market is very large on paper and endlessly tempts entrepreneurs who feel that the existing sites are deficient in some way. And angels/VCs keep funding them for the same reason. Few people when they get into the segment understand fully what they’re up against.

I wish Zoodango luck — they’ll need it.

Topix & Krillion in Local Product Deals Deal

News and local community site Topix and Krillion have announced a partnership that shows Krillion partner product inventory data on various Topix pages and in forums. Inventory will be generated from retailers such as Home Depot, Sears, Target , Wal-Mart, among others, that Krillion works with.

The intention is that the ads/inventory presented will be geographically and potentially contextually relevant to the specific areas of the site in which they’re shown. All the data reflect inventory actually in stores in those local markets.

Here’s an example of the way this is presented in the Tech section:

And in one of the forums (scroll right column):

Clicking on the product link takes users directly to the retailer’s product page, in this case Sears:

Although the implementation isn’t great in this particular case (Sears), at the top of the page Search offers “buy online pick up in store”:

My memory is that Topix and Krillion split part of the CPA revenue that Krillion gets from its partners when an actual transaction occurs. These aren’t “search” ads, there’s more of a  newspaper circular analogy in this particular presentation of the data. However, they should be fairly effective for all involved, given their local-contextual matching.

This is another syndication deal that Krillion has done. Others include Superpages, Yellowpages.com, PriceGrabber/ConsumerReports and a range of others that haven’t been announced.

In addition to Krillion, NearbyNow, Shaptron, Where2GetIt, Channel Intelligence and ShopLocal are all (to varying degrees) bringing local product inventory data quickly online and to mobile devices by extension.

Google Upgrades Local Biz Ads

Matt McGee (at SEL) has a nice write up of some of the changes and upgrades Google is introducing for Local Business Ads. Here’s the Inside AdWords Blog explaining the improvements:

Beginning today, your ad’s information window in Google Maps will feature new interactive links that are designed to connect users to your business quickly. The info window is the window that opens when a user clicks on an organic search listing or a sponsored result on Google Maps.

Previously, a click on your ad’s info window could only take the user to your website. Now, users will be able to interact with the info window to get the information they’re looking for about your business, right away. The new links include “Get Directions,” “Street View” (where available), and “Save to My Maps.” Shortly after we implement these links, we’ll also add a “Send” link, allowing the user to send your business info to their phone or email. Users will still be able to click through to your site if they wish — the info window simply offers additional free functionality.

Google is also going to add reporting capabilities to the info window as well:

If one opens the “more info” link there’s additional information, including “photos and video” (which can be uploaded from YouTube):

I’m guessing that video will become much more prominent in the future. We might even see Google make it possible (for advertisers) to feature video where the logo is on the “home screen.”

Effectively Local Business Ads are a rich landing page and could even be used (if they had their own URLs) as a website substitute. Indeed, Google is shutting down its simple website “Page Creator” in favor of Google Sites, which probably has less utility for many SMBs. Instead Google might consider a modified version of its info window/Local Biz Ads as a substitute for Page Creator (a la Smalltown’s Webcards).

Genesis of Internet2Go Summit

In my guise as program director of Local Mobile Search, I and Opus Research are putting on a one-day event called Internet2Go. It’s happening on 1/29 in SF at a club (not a hotel): Mezzanine.

I’ve been going to or speaking at lots of mobile events over the past 18 months. Many of them have been good but highly “tech” focused. Many of them have also featured “the industry talking to itself.”

My colleague Pete Headrick and I over lunch about five months ago were discussing this problem. Pete’s quite connected to the SF agency community and suggested we to do a more informal, “conversational” and, most of all, practical event that presented real case studies and candid discussion about what was working and what wasn’t in mobile to the people who need the education and examples most — agencies and marketers.

Much of the discussion at broad industry conferences that sprinkle in mobile content give only the most abstract overview: 50 million people in the US are using the mobile Internet and the ratio of mobile phones to PCs is 3:1, and so on. There’s little discussion of the “nuts and bolts” issues that hold mobile advertising and marketing back (the MMA has had some excellent sessions along the lines I’m discussing). Most agencies and marketers are on the sidelines. They haven’t really engaged with mobile.

The thing is: mobile advertising is already working and already highly compelling. And mobile will eventually become the primary Internet access point for millions of people. In China today there are more than 100 million people who go online through their mobile phones.

We thus wanted to do an event that exposed agencies, marketers and others to the full range of mobile marketing possibilities in a very concrete way: what’s working today and delivering a great ROI for marketers. We also wanted to have a direct conversation about the issues that need to be changed or addressed before mobile could really draw in more advertisers.

This is going to be a great event and we’ve got great companies presenting: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, AOL, JumpTap, NearbyNow, Quattro, AdMob, NearbyNow, HipCricket, Greystripe, Agent-M, 4Info, MoVoxx . . .

In fact, it’s going to be the best one-day “crash course” in mobile marketing available — and it’s very cheap as such events go. We’re really trying to evangelize mobile and present a high-quality discussion. We’re not making money off the event.

The target audience is agencies and marketers. But anyone who wants to become much more sophisticated about mobile very quickly should attend. Let me know if you’re interested and I can even get you a deal.

There’s also going to be a “kick ass” reception ending the day with a “mobile ad creative showcase.”

Why We Don’t Have Good Local Business Content

The following is a guest post from Long Hill Consulting’s Marty Himmelstein: 

Local search’s most significant failure is its inability to provide an accurate stratum of content about neighborhood businesses. The necessity for this base layer arises from the defining characteristic of local search, which is that it is model-based. Local search’s first job is to create an accurate depiction of places in the real world. Being found trumps being reviewed. Being found also trumps search engine optimization. When local search is running on all cylinders it will not make qualitative decisions; if there is a shop on Main Street people will find it. There will be no jousting for position, because the demarcation between fact and advertising will be clear.

To address the failure, a number of Internet companies have either been formed or have started initiatives to aggregate content about brick and mortar stores and services, either as their core service or to improve their core service (e.g., user reviews).These initiatives solicit content directly from businesses, and often, following a wiki-type model, from individuals who have no direct relationship with the businesses for which they create content. In the latter case, the contributors might receive a small financial incentive if the information they submit can be verified, usually by being ‘claimed’ by a submitted business, or when a claimed business buys additional services from the aggregator. To create an initial layer of content, most companies purchase some form of Internet Yellow Pages content from one of several compiled-list vendors. The main content sources for these lists still derive from phone directories, which the list vendors improve through varying degrees of quality control and enhancement.

Because these efforts proceed from one or more incorrect assumptions about the nature of local search, it is unlikely they will be successful. Most adhere to an erroneous ‘walled garden’ view that business content gathered on the Internet is a defensible asset. But information flows freely on the Internet, and since these services don’t control the information sources they require to assemble and maintain a data asset, no data they aggregate can be defended. (The information sources are businesses themselves, and ultimately they control their own information.) It will also be hard for any one of these initiatives to gather a critical mass of content. That local content is both valuable and not defensible is an apparent, not a real, contradiction. Local content is hard to create, but once created is a common data resource: it is best to think of the information about a business as nothing more than a structured web page. Another problem is that Google has already created the technical infrastructure to aggregate and distribute structured business content, and other initiatives have nothing to offer that improves on Google’s technology. Lastly, these initiatives assume the Internet can be used to short circuit real-world notions of community, but it can’t. Unmediated user contributed content, so successful for expressing creativity and points of view, is the low-hanging fruit of local search. It is not the organizing principle upon which local search will be built.

From the perspective of a service that requires better business information than that which is available to them, the justification for a walled garden seems simple: “We know people are willing to contribute content. We’ll create tools to make it easy for businesses, or, following a wiki model, anybody, to supply us with business information. These tools have a development cost and it takes effort to solicit and verify content, but having done so, the content we gather will be much better than standard listings data. This content has value, and there is no reason for us to give it away to others. Further, our users are precisely the ones these businesses want to reach. We’ll try a freemium model, and charge businesses for enhanced representation.”

Too many of these services are vying for businesses’ and users’ attention for any of their individual efforts to succeed. Businesses won’t contribute and maintain the same content at multiple services and pay for redundant capabilities at each. Moreover, once a business creates its digital profile, the marginal effort to distribute it to multiple services is (or could be) small. The ‘business content is a defensible asset’ model erroneously conflates business content with the value-added services that rely on that content to be successful. Business content is indeed valuable, at least as much to the services that need it to build compelling sites and capture advertising revenues as to anybody else. The demand for this content will drive the price to the businesses that supply it to zero. It’s not even hard to imagine scenarios in which businesses derive revenue from syndicating their content to downstream services. One way to ensure that Google doesn’t become the sole depository of business content is to give businesses the incentive to distribute theirs widely.

From an Internet ecosystem and data modeling perspective, multiple walled gardens of duplicated and separately maintained business content makes no sense at all.  Popular services might get a continual stream of updates, but new or struggling services won’t, making it even harder for them to gain traction. This ‘each to his own’ approach will perpetuate a morass of inconsistent and obsolete content, much as we have now, to the continuing dismay of consumers.

The adherents to the flawed garden analysis are either unfamiliar with a basic data modeling tenet, or think it doesn’t apply on the Internet. Data can be distributed, copied, and duplicated but each occurrence must be traceable to a known provenance that has an unique identity. For the purposes of data modeling, the Internet is nothing more than a very big disk drive. The storage medium has changed, the requirement for sound data engineering has not.

Unique identity is not a new concept on the web. Web pages and blog posts and comments have at least an informal notion of identity, and second generation content syndication formats support stronger notions still. These formats also support structured content, a requirement for business information on the web. Google Base, a notable example, specifies Atom and RSS 2.0 formats to allow data providers to specify and upload structured content to, well, the Google Universe. Google also provides a query language API so developers can retrieve content from the Google database. Google’s walls are permeable: their interests are served by good content, not its ownership.

Unfortunately, the quality of local business content lags well behind the Internet’s technical capabilities to create, aggregate and distribute it. An important reason for this quality deficiency is that we have relied almost exclusively on the technology that enables the next generation of local search, while underestimating the need to create online representations of the real neighborhoods and relationships within which businesses exist. As I noted in a previous post:

The fundamental role of a community in local search is to establish an environment of trust so that users can rely on the information they obtain from the system. Businesses exist in a network of customers, suppliers, municipal agencies, local media, hobbyists, and others with either a professional or avocational interest in establishing the trustworthiness of local information.

Businesses are responsible for their physical storefronts, and, ultimately, their digital storefronts. But businesses don’t exist in a vacuum, either physically or online. They require the services of the community to which they belong – when online, especially in the formative stages of local search. To create accurate digital storefronts, then, we need to enable the participation of the various constituencies that are part of a community. It is within this framework that a reliable stratum of local content will be created and maintained.

Individuals who contribute content because of a small financial incentive, who are most of the time trustworthy and altruistic but will occasionally be neither, and who have no intrinsic connection with the neighborhoods in which the businesses they describe reside, do not constitute a community. It’s not that their contributions aren’t valuable or even necessary, it’s that they are not sufficient for ensuring an accurate depiction of the local environment. Pick your own war story about how local search failed you in a time of need (everybody has one), assume your need was urgent, and then consider the assurances you would require from the system to trust the information you get from it.

The only way local search can meet these assurances is to build them into its basic fabric. The basic fabric of local search is the community, because the community provides the means to establish the network of trust that is essential to local search. The purely user-contributed content model that works so well for YouTube has shortcomings when applied to local search. The preeminent virtue for YouTube is creativity, for local search veracity. YouTube is whimsical, local search mundane. People use YouTube to pass time, local search to save time.

In an immeasurably weightier circumstance, Winston Churchill remarked “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” And so it is with local search. Its eventual shape, though tortuously arrived at, seems to me easy to discern. Each business will have its own digital identity and a core of factual information, kept in a standardized format, which it or its designees will maintain. These designees will aggregate content at the community level, as defined above. Designees will include entities, some new, but certainly some that already exist, which are trusted by both consumers and merchants. This core content will feed downstream services. To provide subjective or more detailed information, the basic content will be augmented at various points with user contributed and third party sources of information. Revenue models built around helping businesses and their designees create, maintain, verify, augment and distribute their content make sense; those built around cordoning it off do not.

_____

Marty Himmelstein is the principal of Long Hill Consulting, which he founded in 1989. Marty’s interests include databases, Internet search, and web-based information systems.

For the last eleven years, Marty has been active in location-based searching on the web, a field often called Local Search. Marty was an early member of the Vicinity engineering team. Vicinity was a premium provider of Internet Yellow Pages (Vicinity provided Yahoo!s IYP service from 1996-8), business locators, and mapping and geocoding services.

MC: ‘We Have 10K Advertisers’

I stand corrected. In a post yesterday about Yodle’s funding I said “Merchant Circle said previously it had around 5K advertisers.” Apparently that number has doubled.

According to a post by CEO Ben Smith yesterday, MerchantCircle “has over 10,000 advertisers.”

Hearst to Potentially Shutter Seattle PI

Seattle still has two newspapers, which may not be true for much longer. Hearst Corp., which owns the Seattle Post Intelligencer, a paper founded in the mid-19th Century, is up for sale. If no buyer is found it may be closed. According to the PI’s own report:

The Seattle P-I’s parent company, The Hearst Corp., said Friday that it has put the paper up for sale and will stop publishing unless someone buys it in 60 days. If no buyer emerges, the paper would either become a Web-only publication or cease all operations.

Economic reasons have forced the state’s oldest morning newspaper into a sale, Steven Swartz, president of The Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division, told employees Friday.

“One thing is clear: At the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print,” Swartz told employees gathered in the newsroom overlooking Elliott Bay. “Since 2000, the P-I has lost money each year, and the losses have escalated and continue to escalate in 2009. We have had to make a very tough decision.”

Hearst said the P-I lost about $14 million in 2008.

If the P-I became an online-only operation, it would employ far fewer than the current 170 staffers, Swartz said.

There are several other papers in the same predicament (discussed in MediaPost).

But to become online only is to become just another website among many in my opinion. It’s really a grim situation.

Some would call it an “industry correction,” I would call it very disheartening.

Maroon Ventures Forms Radiant Markets

Maroon Ventures is a local media/interactive media consulting firm formed a year ago by mostly former newspaper executives. Now the firm has launched own venture  – Radiant Markets. Here’s how the new company is described:

Small to medium business owners don’t have time to wade through complicated ad delivery programs to buy advertising. They have businesses to run. Radiant Markets does the work for them. And while we produce incredible results on search advertising, we know that an effective campaign involves several products, not just search. That’s why we feature easy-to-understand packages that combine search, video, mobile, email and other interactive products to deliver optimal results. All at prices that SMBs can afford.

How it works

Radiant Markets uses its proprietary technology to adjust advertising campaigns for maximum results across a number of products. Once we know whom the advertiser wants to reach and what results the advertiser wants to achieve, we fine-tune our advertising campaigns to deliver those customers. If an SMB prefers phone calls instead of emails or website visits, that’s what we deliver. We can cater each campaign to the advertiser’s specific needs at a reasonable cost. And our reporting tool makes it simple to understand how your campaign is performing.

By way of additional context, the new CEO and COO of Radiant Markets, Wes Jackson and Bob Benz, were among the newspaper executives who negotiated and helped create the Yahoo! newspaper consortium.  

If you read the quoted blurbs above there are two main points (beyond “reasonable cost”) are the following:

• The company is seeking to bundle a range of products broadly — “not just search” — for SMBs
• It’s also going to offer some degree of customization: calls vs. emails vs. visits to a website

I spoke to COO Bob Benz at a high level about this in December. There’s some very interesting material about the genesis of Radiant Markets that’s off the record. But Benz clearly understands the challenges SMB advertisers face and feels that most of the current “local SEM” products in the market are deficient in many respects. As I understand it the company right now is part platform, part sales channel (I’m speculating here). 

There are a number of companies that, to varying degrees, are trying to be a “one stop shop” for SMB/local advertising. But Radiant Markets is conceptually trying to be more comprehensive in its approach.

Free Shipping and Online vs. Offline Shopping

Research firm, ForeSee Results, which tracks online consumer satisfaction, put out some additional findings from its holiday shopping survey of “more than 9,000 responses collected from December 1, 2008 through December 18, 2008 from shoppers who had visited the Top 40 retail websites at any point within the prior 14 days.” Here’s the part of interest to me:

According to the data, “when they choose to shop on a retailer’s website instead of in the store, 33% said that the availability of free shipping encouraged them to decide to buy online.”

In order of preference then:

1. Convenience
2. Price
3. Free shipping 

 . . .  motivated people to buy online vs. in stores. What this means is that free shipping and lower margins will be required for most “e-tailers” to remain competitive. Amazon and trusted retail brands may be the exception.

How to Rank in Several Cities on Google

Chris Smith, always a valuable source of practical local SEO info, has penned another helpful article at SEL:

How To Appear In Multiple City Searches With One Website

Yodle Gets More Funding, SMBs Still Elusive

Yodle announced a $10 million C round this morning (funding details covered on Techmeme and related articles). Yodle has a technology platform but is positioned more as a direct sales channel, like ReachLocal. Marchex and WebVisible are local SEM platforms that offer fulfillment and management for other sales channels (i.e., YP, newspapers).

Yodle CEO Court Cunningham is one of the most forthcoming of the executives in this segment. He had previously told me that he thought the company was on track to be profitable by Q1 2009 but the economy has set that back apparently. TechCrunch reports that the company will be profitable “within six months.” It also says the company has roughly 5,000 advertisers.

Five thousand is some kind of magic number it would appear: StepUp had about 5k advertisers when it sold to Intuit and Merchant Circle said previously it had around 5K advertisers. However ReachLocal had roughly 12K advertisers, as of Q3 last year. By contrast, YP publishers have hundreds of thousands of SMB advertisers. Google may also.

None of the SMB/local search marketing firms has broken out of the pack, partly because no one has done much visible marketing for themselves — not even YouTube videos.

Over at SEL I’ve written up some data from WebVisible-Nielsen on the gap between online consumer behavior and SMB ad spending. This is something I’ve written about many times in the past, but the data do a nice job of showcasing that gap.

Specifically: 26% of SMB survey respondents have used paid search while 82% of consumers use search engines (the #1 method) to find local businesses.

Consumer usage trends over the past two years

Source: Nielsen-WebVisible (1/08), n=4,000

Slate: Newspapers not Late, Just Wrong

This Slate column chonicles newspapers electronic publishing efforts from way back and argues that newspapers weren’t late to the Internet, their strategy and approach were wrong:

Newspapers deserve bragging rights for having homesteaded the Web long before most government agencies and major corporations knew what a URL was. Given the industry’s early tenancy, deep pockets, and history of paranoid experimentation with new communication forms, one would expect to find plenty in the way of innovations and spinoffs.

But that’s not the case, and I think I know why: From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.

Agree or disagree? Is this a “culture” issue and what, if anything, does it imply about the directory/YP industry?

Perhaps the other question to ask is: even if newspapers had gotten the strategy right and created a range of online sites different from their print editions, would the current impact on print of online news distribution be any different?

Review Defamation Suit Settled

Just like that the “Yelp Defamation Lawsuit” (Yelp wasn’t a defendant) was settled according to Elinor Mills at CNET:

“This case was settled with the mutual satisfaction of both parties,” said Michael Blacksburg, who represented patient Christopher Norberg. The terms of the settlement agreement are confidential and the March trial date will be canceled, he said.

Shortly after the court-required mediation hearing was completed Friday afternoon, Norberg replaced an earlier Yelp posting in which he said he had been sued by chiropractor Steven Biegel with a short posting that reads:

“A misunderstanding between both parties led us to act out of hand. I chose to ignore Dr. Biegel’s initial request to discuss my posting. In hindsight, I should have remained open to his concerns. Both Dr. Biegel and I strongly believe in a person’s right to express their opinions in a public forum. We both encourage the Internet community to act responsibly.”

Cooler heads prevailed. The defendant realized that he was rash and failed to recognize the potential impact of his review on the plaintiff’s business and reputation and the plaintiff probably realized that the publicity surrounding the litigation was hurting him more than the defendant’s negative review.

Accordingly the controversy will have little if no impact on the “culture” of reviews that now prevails at Yelp or other sites. That’s both good and bad.

User reviews are helpful to consumers and clearly they value them. However, as the “segment” matures, reviewers need to have a sense that the businesses they’re writing about are seeing real consequences (positive and negative) from their reviews. SMBs need to recognize that this phenomenon is here to stay and find a way to engage with it ethically and use it as an opportunity to gain feedback and creatively cultivate word of mouth.

___

If you want to listen to the NPR discussion on defamation, online reviews and Yelp, which I was a part of on Friday, you can hear the podcast here.

Internet2Go Sneak Preview

Now that CES is done we’re going to formally put out a release on Monday about the event, which is Jan 29. I’ll explain more later. 

But it’s a small, focused one-day event designed to showcase all the various forms of mobile advertising. It’s intended to offer case studies and practical information for the “mobile curious.” 

Here’s more information for those interested.

SMBs to Increase Online Ad Spending?

There are several SMB surveys out in the market that show varying degrees of intention to move more ad dollars online. The latest comes from Ad-ology, which conducted an online survey of 863 SMBs in October. Here are the findings:

Re the general economy:

• 25% stated they are fearful about the current economic situation
• 58% are concerned
• 83% expect 2009 sales to be up or about the same as 2008

The survey found that “more than half of small business advertisers plan to spend the same or more on the following”:

1. Online advertising (69%)
2. Yellow Pages (54%)
3. Newspapers (51%)
4. Direct mail (51%)

What these respondents say they don’t currently use:

• 77% do not use online video
• 83% do not podcasting
• 82% do not use mobile advertising

Caution: surveys are attitudinal and often aspirational. But this survey was conducted after the economic turmoil began so it’s interesting that some of these advertisers are going to spend more not only on online but also on traditional media as well.

Google Advertiser Count: Well Over 1 Million

This item appeared in the NY Times, based on an SEC filing:

In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google said it had 1 million advertisers as of 2007. If history is any guide, we can expect the number to be much higher now. The number of advertisers on Google has grown at a steady clip, from 89,000 in 2003, to 201,000 in 2004, 360,000 in 2005 and 600,000 in 2006.

Ben Schachter, an analyst with UBS, said he expects the current number is likely to be between 1.3 million and 1.5 million. Google declined to comment on the current size of its advertising base.

Amazingly most of Google’s advertisers will technically qualify as SMBs (<100 headcount); however they’re far from typical.

Another Local Services Directory

I stumbled across a TechCrunch discussion of Trusty‘s, which is analogous to InsiderPages when it launched. It’s a services directory seeking community reviews. The article’s headline is “Yelp Meets LinkedIn For Blue-Collar Workers.”

I was unaware of the site. The headline promises something more interesting that what the site delivers, however. And the site’s stated mission and blog posts imply that there aren’t already scores of sites operating directly or indirectly in the segment: IYP directories, local search engines, Citysearch, Yelp, ServiceMagic, specific vertical directories and a host of others. The lone difference, from what I can tell, is that the site is trying to cultivate a numerical score for the business (a la Avvo).

Success or failure is going to be all about SEO in the near term. It also doesn’t appear they’ve bought one of the standard databases so their content is very thin. I would recommend that they focus on a single market and not try and go national for some time, especially if they don’t have a national database. They simply won’t be able to gain the critical mass of content they need otherwise.

We won’t even talk about the challenges of selling ads to SMBs . . .

‘Anyone Adv with Yellow Pages?’

This is a question asked on a Merchant Circle forum. Here’s the question verbatim, spelling errors and all:

I own a construction co and I’d like to hear from anyone who advertises with the yellow pages.  One thing I already know is that it’s rather expensive, but is it worth the money for a small biz just getting started? How is it campared to word of mouth

I’m talking about the actuall book, not the net.

The question prompted 75 answers and responses. The discussion is quite interesting and contains some specific information about ad performance. It may or may not be a good snapshot of the state of broader SMB advertiser attitudes toward print YP and the directory industry.

Read them for yourself, but here are, generally, how the responses shake out:

• Print YP is valuable for certain categories of businesses but reduce the spend
• Print YP isn’t performing like it used to
• There are also very vocal critics who call it a waste of time

YPA’s Neg Norton on HuffPo

In a moment of “worlds collide,” (for me) YPA Chief Neg Norton pens a column on the Huffington Post. Here it is:

Anyone who hasn’t taken new media seriously just got a rude wake up call. Obama’s campaign used new media as a major tool to recruit and activate volunteers, raise millions of dollars, and respond to attacks from opponents.

Meanwhile, many businesses have become adept at using new media to advertise their products and services, but many aren’t keeping pace – especially small businesses, who often struggle to grasp search engine basics, much less social networking.

But in 2009, a growing number of consumers will have access to information right in their pockets. And small businesses cannot overlook digital media if they want to be competitive with larger chains and national brands.

From a PR standpoint you have to say “That’s what I’m talking about.”

Google Not Buying Any Newspapers

In something of a “no-duh” moment, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Fortune that Google wouldn’t be buying any newspapers to save them from financial ruin. 

How about just buying them?

The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don’t think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we’re in this uncomfortable conversation.

I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I’ve been using is ‘merge without merging.’ The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don’t have to do it on exclusive basis.

This question, about Google buying a newspaper publisher or directory company, comes around every few months. Google won’t do it — despite Schmidt’s personal affinity for newspapers — because it makes no sense financially, technologically or culturally. The story’s “deck” or lead-in paragraph accuses Google of contributing to the decline of newspapers: 

Metaphorically speaking, Google is killing the newspaper industry. Online news is quickly hollowing out the traditional paper – the Christian Science Monitor eliminates its print edition, Tribune Co. declares bankruptcy, Detroit’s two dailies slash home delivery to three days a week – while Google rakes in advertising profits.

Turns out that Google CEO Eric Schmidt professes a passionate desire to lend a hand. 

I’m not sure what “metaphorically speaking . . .” means in this particular context. Google isn’t killing the newspapers. Google is merely the “personification” of the Internet era. The newspapers have failed to recognize what’s happening, overcome their own bureaucracy and ACT in sufficient time. Hopefully, they will survive this recession . . . hopefully.