Though announced several weeks ago, today, finally (for me) the search box and trending topics appeared on Twitter:
If I search, for example, on “JetBlue” I see real-time results displayed on my page:
We should start to see some search volume and, if/when, a search monetization partner is announced, revenue being generated from these results.
As some of the people who read this blog or follow me on Twitter know, I was at the Yellow Pages Association conference on Tuesday speaking on panel about blogging. Then I took the red eye and went straight into OMMA Mobile in NY on Wednesday and spoke on mobile search. It was exhausting but also very interesting to see two conferences and two industries back-to-back like this.
I was struck by how radically different the two cultures are: yellow pages publishers and their vendors and mobile marketing companies and ad agencies. Both sets of attendees would probably have profited from attending the other conference just to see how different the world looks from the other’s point of view. To some degree Malcolm Gladwell was talking about the same issues, when he discussed the problems with “silos” and isolation in his YPA keynote.
It seems to me that too infrequently do companies see the world from other perspectives; they’re often mired in group think or the limitations of their officially sanctioned point of view.
During my remarks on the blogging panel at YPA I cryptically alluded to some “innovative things” that Idearc was working on. The individuals I met with who are developing them are outsiders. They work for Idearc but they’re not traditional YP people. This is not to say anything negative about “YP people.” It’s merely to point out that outside perspectives and fresh approaches are typically required to reinvigorate a company.
Deep grooves get established culturally making it difficult to do things differently or make needed changes, even at times of intense external pressure to change.
I have no background in organizational psychology or training. So in a way I have no standing here. But I think YP publishers should aggressively try to “open up” their organizations to enable ideas to come forward (from any source) and to tap the creativity of their own people more deeply. I’m sure there’s a ton of creative thinking and ideas that aren’t making their way into discussions about product or process.
An interesting exercise would be to pretend that a YP were a startup. What would you do? What products or services would you build? Who would you do deals with? How would you get buzz and attention? I bet many of the ideas that would come out of such a discussion would be beneficial and perhaps different than what’s coming out of existing channels.
What do you think?
Sebastien P. was the first to discover this but I also stumbled upon it this morning: Canada’s Yellow Pages Group becomes the first North American publisher on Twitter.
Other publishers and YPA take note.
I spoke at some length to Telmetrics‘ Bill Dinan yesterday, at the YPA event. We talked about a range of topics tied to the state of yellow pages. One of the most interesting things that Dinan told me about was Telmetrics placement of unique URLs in YP print ads as well as call-tracking numbers.
Bill said that they were seeing the print directory drive a lot of online lookups, tracking the unique URLs. He expressed some degree of surprise about the volume.
But this behavior, traditional media –> search/online –> phone/store, is the pattern reflected in consumer behavior and interaction with media at large. Rather than playing various media or platforms off against each other, people need to see how they complement one another or work together at different points in the consumer research process.
I’m at OMMA Mobile in NY today. But I’m posting over at LMS:
Nielsen posts about the “quitter” phenomenon:
Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.
I would guess most of the “quitters” don’t understand how to use Twitter or where the value is (this is an ironic statement given my former criticism of Twitter).
What do you think about this Nielsen data and its implications for Twitter?
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Update: These data apparently don’t account for third party Twitter apps like Tweetie or TweetDeck. There’s some reason to believe accordingly that these data are incomplete or inaccurate accordingly.
When Center’d (formerly Fatdoor) launched last year it was effectively creating a novel category that hadn’t really existed in the local space or elsewhere for that matter: local planning. Tools allowed individuals and groups to plan events, travel and evenings out. The tag line was “people, places, plans.” I wrote at the time (10/08):
Center’d emerged from the flames of the somewhat ill-conceived Fatdoor. (Here’s my original post from April.) I had several conversations with Dulski before launch but haven’t talked to her much since then. The site essentially created a new category: local planning. The tag line is: people, places, plans.
Initially many analysts and tech bloggers didn’t know how to think about the site because it didn’t fit neatly into an established segment; it was a bit of this and a bit of that. But tech bloggers don’t matter as it turns out. Dulski told me that since launch and especially following a back to school campaign that Center’d did, it has seen great traction with 111% growth in September.
The “local search” content was present but was subordinated in a way to the planning tools. Now with the relaunch, the tag line has changed somewhat to: “Center’d helps you plan life’s activities.” Local search content is now much more squarely in front of users. The planning tools are still very much a part of the site experience. Events (from Eventful) are also a compliment to the business listings content.
The new site is directed toward 12 major markets at the outset:
At the heart of the new site is a visually rich, user-friendly interface that sits on top of a sophisticated algorithm and classification scheme. Rather than plug queries into a search “box,” users:
Icons representative of these choices are carried through the site to provide visual cues and aids to search results:
Underlying “semantic” technology and machine learning allow incoming listings data to be classified into these various categories and sub-categories on an automated basis. They allow for non-standard “queries” like “kid-friendly shopping” or “recession busters.” Users may also do direct business name searches through the standard search box at the top of the page.
Center’d has also enlisted local bloggers to provide content to the site:
The “gestalt” of all this is the “branded experience” that Center’d is creating for its audience of adults and parents. The visual appeal, demographic focus, planning angle, non-standard categories and underlying technology make the new Center’d a very interesting place indeed.
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Related: Here’s the release.
Tipping Point and Blink author Malcolm Gladwell just delivered the morning keynote at the Yellow Pages Association conference in San Diego. It was a terrific speech and, unlike many keynotes from noted authors and celebrities in similar situations, it actually contained valuable insights and “takeaways” for the people he was addressing.
Gladwell is a compelling storyteller. And he opened the talk with the story of David Sarnoff, an early RCA employee (and later founder of NBC) whose scrappy and industrious determination to promote a live boxing match on the radio in 1921, against his bosses’ indifference and even opposition, helped popularize the insurgent medium. Gladwell said that part of Sarnoff’s genius was that he “re-framed” the way people understood radio. Previously it had been a medium for news and classical music. But Sarnoff introduced the possibility of bringing live sports and real-time events “right into the living room.” This was a repositioning of the medium and illustration of what was unique and possible with radio vs. newspapers, for example.
Later in the speech, as he brought an entertaining and at times far flung discussion back to the yellow pages audience, he sought to distill the essence of what the industry does and the functions it performs for consumers and advertisers. This would be part of a potential “re-framing” of the understanding of what yellow pages are. An arguably more direct version of this point came in the Q&A discussion when he was asked how to reframe magazines and The New Yorker, where he works, in particular. Gladwell said that it was a “community” that offered certain kinds of “observations and insights about culture and ideas” and was delivered through a print magazine but could and should also be delivered in other forums as well.
During the talk, Gladwell introduced three “lessons” inherent in what he described as “successful business creation” — here it would arguably be reinvention. Those lessons formed the skeleton for the various stories and anecdotes he used to illustrate them:
On the first point: Connectors are important social entrepreneurs and critical figures within organizations, according to Gladwell. He says they help bridge isolation across groups and silos. Mavens are experts or trusted authorities who help consumers navigate the complex world of too much choice in the marketplace. And then re-framing, as discussed, helps sell or refresh a product or idea that might have been otherwise unappealing or inaccessible to consumers.
As those lessons and ideas apply to the yellow pages industry, Gladwell argued that connectors within the organizations could help promote better communication among groups within the publisher organizations. He added that the industry and yellow pages product(s) play “maven” roles with consumers, providing a trusted or expert source of local business information. We can certainly debate the merits of that point. While it was true at one time, there are others online that probably make a stronger claim on that role today. My reaction was that the industry plays or can play that role more on the SMB advertiser side. However it can redouble its effort to reclaim the mantle of trust among consumers, along the lines of some of what Scott Klein is trying to do at Idearc (e.g., SuperGuarantee).
After the session was over I had a chance to speak to Gladwell for a few minutes. We talked about the execution and culture challenges that the YP industry faces. He agreed that on the consumer side there were challenges and obstacles to be surmounted.
Gladwell had also said that the difference between Google and yellow pages is that Google didn’t have the same degree of “trust.” This was another point I challenged to a degree, arguing that while Google wasn’t trusted as a human might be it was seen as the most reliable and comprehensive source of many types of information online.
People in the room listening to Gladwell were very enthusiastic. The concepts he laid out and applied were quite relevant and, it seems to me, offer a jumping off point for further discussion and exploration within the industry. But the question always is whether this sort of enthusiasm can translate into action and execution.
Local search data and content provider Localeze has introduced what it’s calling the “Localeze Confidence Score.” The confidence score is the company’s statement to third party search engines and local directory partners about the accuracy of its local data and business records. The company is associating a confidence score with each of the millions of records it provides to those partners.
The rest of this post is at SEL.
Microsoft has created a very intriguing product in Vine, a kind of “unified communications” tool for emergency situations. The map-based, IM-like offering enables people to communicate during or about an emergency or public safety situation using multiple methods including mobile. Here’s what Microsoft says about it:
The Microsoft Vine beta connects you to the people and places you care about most, when it matters. Stay in touch with family and friends, be informed when someone you care about needs help. Get involved to create great neighborhoods, communities or causes. You select the people and places you care about most. Use alerts, reports and your personal dashboard to stay in touch, informed and involved.
I don’t have time to write more this morning but others have. It apparently can pull in feeds from Facebook and Twitter, as well as incorporate SMS and email. It has obvious, potential application in many situations other than emergencies. But it’s not clear to me what Microsoft intends with Vine. Is it limited to emergencies or is that the way to introduce it, with broader ambitions in mind?
In a vague way, it’s not unlike broader, map-based social net IRL Connect. But I haven’t been inside Vine or used IRL Connect much at this point.
More later . . . off to the YPA event.
Clickable wants a piece of the local SEM spend and thinks it has a good shot at becoming a major player and platform provider. Today the company formally announced its platform, which can be white labeled for partners and vendors. (Clickable says it doesn’t want to be a direct sales channel.)
The claim that Clickable makes is that it brings greater efficiency and automation to SEM and “Apple like simplicity” to the experience of managing these campaigns. It also offers professional services to help sales channels and marketers optimize their campaigns.
From the press release:
Clickable Platform includes a variety of integrated white-label components tailored to the needs of each partner company:
- Client Center – A centralized administrative dashboard, enabling display, management and reporting of individual and groups of clients.
- Business Systems – Central infrastructure that powers customer support, billing and operations for thousands of customers.
- Platform API – The ability to leverage Clickable Platform in partners’ own Web sites and client interfaces.
- Leads – A “set-and-forget” lead-generation solution that is both click and call based, and delivers local-business customers simple tracking of their investment.
- Pro – The award-winning Clickable Pro dashboard can be white-labeled to empower businesses to self-manage online advertising, with simplicity and transformational return on investment.
- Assist – A managed service for businesses that delivers just the right amount of professional services to ensure success, often in conjunction with Clickable Pro.
- Support & Community – World-class customer support via live chat and phone, as well as community learning resources.
- Marketing & Sales – Pre-built and perfected marketing assets so partners can promote and sell local advertising services most effectively.
The company will be going head-to-head with Marchex, MatchCraft, WebVisible and others for sales channel deals. But interestingly it says will also work with anyone who wants to white label its platform. So a Yodel for example or, presumably, a WebVisible could adopt Clickable’s platform. As proof of its greater efficiency and capacity to reduce churn the company points to successful relationships with Lexis-Nexis and Franchise Company Solutions.
I am unable to evaluate the accuracy of many of the claims in the segment because I’m not managing campaigns in a hands-on way. I saw an early demo of Clickable roughly two years ago and was impressed by it. But the proof will be in the actual on-the-ground campaign management experience. No doubt Clickable will be a top-tier competitor, however.
Anyone who has used the platform please let me know your experience.
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Related: Here’s a blog post on the platform release from Clickable CEO David Kidder. Here’s a “day two” piece on MediaPost.
Until now, I have consciously avoided writing anything about the recently filed WPP lawsuit (fraud, breach of contract alleged) against Spot Runner or the outlook for “the embattled company.” But there are enough stories piling up to justify comment.
Today, AdWeek covers the suit from the WPP angle and asks whether it was wise for WPP to invest in Spot Runner in the first place.
Here’s the complaint itself if you’re inclined to read it:
AdAge summarizes the alleged facts in the complaint and its potential impact on the company:
Earlier this month, after nearly three years as an investor, WPP dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Spot Runner that could well vaporize any potential it has left. WPP filed a lawsuit claiming Spot Runner founders and venture-capital backers perpetrated a “pump-and-dump” scheme in which the founders used WPP’s prestige to bring on additional investors while they took $54 million out of a company that managed to lose $80 million in 2007 and 2008, bringing in just $14 million in revenue.
In suing for $13.2 million, WPP is attempting to recoup only its initial investment — $11.8 million from two rounds of funding — but by attempting to do so in court, WPP certainly prevents Spot Runner from raising additional funds and threatens what appears to be Spot Runner’s last shot at the kind of game-changing product its investors initially hoped for: an automated TV- and video-ad-buying platform and exchange dubbed “Project Malibu.”
I had contact with Spot Runner from before the company’s initial launch. Spot Runner was full of smart people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing. But they did not; they gravely underestimated the challenges of cracking the SMB market, had no custom production capability (a la TurnHere) and took too long to offer online video, among other things. Reportedly the company has now bet the farm (what’s left) on TV-video buying platform “Project Malibu.”
However the distractions of the litigation will sap the company’s momentum to the extent it has any left. If there’s a settlement, it will siphon needed cash. But if the case continues through trial, it will represent an ongoing dark cloud over the company that will scare almost everyone away — including any potential suitors. In addition, key employees who sense that the company is foundering may depart, further weakening Spot Runner.
It will require something just short of a miracle, it would appear, for Spot Runner to recover.
The origins of these animal-to-human diseases remain for me shrouded in “I don’t want to know.” But like others I’ve watched the Swine Flu story develop over the past few days. This evening Om Malik pointed out a Google Map showing global sites with confirmed and suspected outbreaks.
This is extremely useful and includes discussion of the reported cases in each location.
This week I head to two disease sites: San Diego and NYC. Joy.
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Related: Swine Flu is the top discussion on Twitter today. And there’s this related story about pandemic-onium being spread via Twitter.
A search for “Swine Flu” on Google doesn’t show ads, while the query “pandemic” leads to:
Recent LMS posts:
Crafty local businesses know or will soon discover that they can build a pretty healthy marketing list on Twitter (and Facebook) without spending a dime on other kinds of online advertising. Of course you have to get people to your Twitter feed (other media, in store).
Perry Evans (@perryevans) points to a TechCrunch post about a New Orleans Pizza place asking people to follow it on Twitter for discounts and deals:
Once enough examples get out there in the mainstream we’re going to see a “groundswell” of adoption, especially among very small businesses. According to an Opus Research/AllBusiness online survey (8/08, n=966) here were the most effective marketing methods for these respondents (based on perception):
Why do I show this? Because Twitter is as conceptually simple as email and faster/more effective. No code; no real learning curve. Indeed, it could become one of the top local biz marketing methods in a few years.
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As an aside: when someone comes out with business bestsellers entiled “The Twitter Effect” or “Living on Twitter Time,” you can say you saw those titles here first. 
Here are the most interesting paragraphs from an opinion piece in The Nation about the fate and future of newspapers:
But so long as we continue to think of the business of providing our society with news as a “business” in the traditional sense, we will keep feeding it the poison that is hastening its death. A recent Princeton University study on the consequences of the 2007 shutdown of the Cincinnati Post found a decline in the number of people voting in local elections as well as the number of candidates willing to challenge incumbents. “If voter turnout, a broad choice of candidates and accountability for incumbents are important to democracy,” say its authors, economist Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and researcher Miguel Garrido, then this indicates that the loss of local newspapers implies an immediate and measurable decline in the quality of local democracy.
Rumblings in the Senate–including a bill introduced by Benjamin Cardin of Maryland to allow newspapers to become nonprofit entities and a set of hearings, recently announced by John Kerry, directly related to the Globe‘s troubles–indicate some awareness of the crisis. But the notion that Congress is likely to act in time, and with sufficient creativity, to help save a business that cannot save itself is one more fairy tale I cannot bring myself to believe. It’s painful to admit, but admit it we must: we have no more hope today of saving the “newspaper business” than we do the “telegraph business.” What is needed–pronto–is a plan to save the collection and dissemination of the news itself.
Emphasis added.
What then is the new model (implied by the article), specifically as it pertains to local markets, that will succeed print and enable reporters to buy houses and send kids to college?
Most bloggers don’t do investigative work and “micropayments” ain’t gonna pay anybody’s mortgage.
Many moons after this was conceptually discussed at Google and long after Loki (Skyhook Wireless’ toolbar and now larger location initiative) the company has brought MyLocation into its toolbar for IE. Google’s browser Chrome has the same capabilities as the new toolbar with MyLocation. Both use Google’s database of cell towers and WiFi hotspots to calculate location with much greater accuracy than can a reverse IP lookup.
On laptops, netbooks or mobile phones, location can be identified with great precision. Now those capabilities are making their way online in various forms. Firefox’s next browser release will have location awareness (from Skyhook) embedded in it. And Windows 7 is supposed to use a range of strategies to ascertain location. Yahoo Fire Eagle is a manual version of these location detection strategies; a similar approach is employed by Google’s Latitude although it can also automatically set a location.
What improved location in the browser and toolbar can do is provide better local organic results and more locally tailored content or ads. There’s lots more on the horizon however, which I’ve written about several times and won’t reproduce here. I’ve seen what’s coming, let’s just say.
As the “location infrastructure” is fully built out (say within the next 18-24 months) the range of things that will be possible from a publisher, ad network and advertiser standpoint will be much more sophisticated than is available today.
Just got the word that the business talkback feature is live:
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman posts about it.
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Update: I have a longer post at SEL.
I spent a bunch of time with ReachLocal co-founder Rob Wright on the Ad:Tech exhibit hall floor (in a blood-sugar deprived state) getting a demo of the new ReachLocal Xchange product. Rob took me through the sales/advertiser facing screens as well as the publisher side of the exchange. A few things are now much more clear than when I was just looking at an press release and exchanging emails with Reach.
Reach has built an impressive platform (from my lay perspective). It can accommodate virtually any type of ad unit on any publisher site (online or mobile), where publishers do their own ad serving. Reach doesn’t (yet) have ad serving capabilities for smaller publishers.
Reach is carefully managing who gets to plug into this. All publishers are approved on a case-by-case basis. By the same token, Reach is doing some outbound sales to selected publishers. On the advertiser side, Reach is not currently going to allow other sales channels to plug into this exchange. For example: a YP publisher could receive ads but not use the system for additional traffic for its advertisers. No other sales entity or channel (except the company’s reseller partners) can use the platform. That could change down the line but for the time being that’s the policy.
Here are Reach’s answers to the reader questions that arose in the wake of my previous post:
Q: Banner exchanges worked (right media) because there were standard ad units, ad tags and measurement. How will this work in local where you have search, display, and mobile? No one has figured this out for national why would local be first? The Xchange provides a standard way for local businesses to provide campaign information, including creative, to media publishers so that they may traffic these campaigns in their systems as they do today. Where necessary (for instance, where a media publisher is not set up to provision hundreds of IOs at smaller dollar values, as is typical for the SMB market), ReachLocal will be providing a standardized IOs to the publisher and, possibly, providing ad serving directly. The ReachLocal Xchange will support multiple ad types and pricing formats that can be integrated into 3rd party publishing systems.
Q: What is the point of the app exchange? If SMBs do not want to self serve, who will be using these apps?
The ReachLocal Xchange for Solutions is inclusive of products and services. As an example, web and banner design would be considered a service, while online chat and online scheduling would be considered a product. Products and services can be purchased by our sales force (Internet Marketing Consultants) in the ReachLocal Xchange on behalf of the SMBs, because it is our experience that small businesses will not self-service.
Q: Why is fox the anchor tenant. Social networking inventory is proven to be the lowest value ad inventory on the web?
Social networking is just a portion of the Fox Audience network (Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox local O&O sites and other premium local inventory) that is available through their network. In addition, we will be leveraging remarketing and other behavioral targeting capabilities afforded by the network. The Fox Audience Network is a great complement to the existing network of display publishers we are currently working with.
Q: Will the exchange be open to all buyers; e.g., can WebVisible advertisers buy ads through WebVisible on the exchange?
ReachLocal currently provides online marketing solutions to hundreds of partner resellers, including advertising agencies and vertically-focused online marketing companies. They will have access to the ReachLocal Xchange for their advertiser clients. WebVisible is not currently a ReachLocal partner reseller.
Q: How are all of the SEM campaigns set up if the advertiser comes from outside the reach network?
We’re not quite sure we understand this question, but if this is referring to the hundreds of partner resellers with whom we work today to provide SEM services, those partner resellers have access to the ReachLocal platform to provision and view reports on their SEM campaigns.
Q: What is the exchange fee?
There are no fees associated with joining the ReachLocal Xchange.
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