The Praized Blog

A deluge of important news in the local social space this morning, all very relevant from a local strategy point of view.

1. Yesterday afternoon, PaidContent detailed AOL’s, Yahoo’s and MSN’s aggressive plans for local. All three are attracted by potential local advertising revenues. The article says “Microsoft could integrate content from local bloggers”. As for Yahoo!, they recently ”rolled out a new service called “Neighbors,” which lets users ask others in their neighborhood questions”.
2. In this interview with Stephan Uhrenbacher, Qype’s founder, he reveals the site now has 17.7m monthly unique visitors. He also says that in Germany, Qype is ” larger than the yellow pages in terms of traffic”. From reading between the lines, Qype is thinking about implementing a game mechanism (or reward system) and a check-in system à la Foursquare, two features I recommended in my “perfect local media company in 2014” presentation.
3. Google just shipped QR code stickers to the 190,000 most popular Google local US businesses. A QR code can be scanned/photographed by a camera phone and links to the Google profile page in Google Maps when activated. The Techcrunch article adds “Local businesses can also set up coupon offers through their Google directory page, which would turn the QR code into a mobile coupon”. Mobile + QR code + coupons = monetization strategy for the real-time Web. Another important data point: “There are now over a million local businesses which have claimed their Google local listing”. Does Google need the Yellow Pages sales forces anymore?
4. Citysearch partners with Twitter to offer tools to small businesses. Citysearch will display “tweets” on merchant pages, offer the opportunity to merchants to create their Twitter account and offer a reputation management service. A Gigaom article says “Citysearch says it has direct relationships with some 200,000 local merchants”. These things will all be required features of any local search site within a few months.
5. Techcrunch reveals this morning that Aardvark, the social Question & Answer service, is considering an $30M+ acquisition offer from Google. The service allows people to ask questions to their friends and to the network using instant messenging and social networks.

What it means: expect these kind of partnerships, acquisitions and features deployment to speed up as industry players try to capture market share of the real-time local/social Web. Expect Facebook to make a lot of noise as well in the next few weeks (the aforementioned Gigaom article asks “who wants to take bets on how many hours till Facebook Local launches?”). They are the 900-pound gorilla. In 12 months, we will already have a good idea who will win and who will lose in that space.

I don’t want to sound like an informercial but my company Praized Media foresaw the rise of social Q&A services like Aardvark and that’s why we introduced our Answers module (currently used by Yellow Pages Group) which enables consumers to ask local questions to their network of friends. Based on market evolution, we’re also developing a white-label reputation management service that will enable social media monitoring and small merchant Twitter sign-ups (like what Citysearch is doing) because we believe it’s going to be needed in every local media company in the future. Our real-time search module also allows any media publisher to display related ”tweets” on merchant profile pages. And we’re also preparing an eCouponing module to monetize all that real-time activity. We’re basically building the whole social media toolkit for local media publishers. End of infomercial.

Saturday’s Globe & Mail’s business section has an in-depth article about Yellow Pages Group (YPG). The article clearly has a negative tone talking about revenue erosion, the rise of social media and the company’s debt-load. They quote Marc Tellier, YPG’s CEO, extensively but they don’t seem to believe him.

Highlights:

Talking about the positive reputation YPG has in the market, the article says “But that halo has now gone the way of carbon paper”

Talking about revenues, the Globe adds: “Yellow Pages’ 2.3-per-cent drop in the first half of this year seems minor by comparison – except for the fact that the company is carrying $2.5-billion in long-term debt, much of it added during the glory years to make acquisitions. While some paper boats are sinking, Mr. Tellier is trying to keep a heavy vessel afloat, managing a century-old company whose main product is a clunky paper directory…”

Talking about the cut in dividend distribution, “There were a lot of people who felt management said one thing and did something else. Investors hate that.”

About online competition, “The Googles of the world, the Yahoos of the world, local search engines, bigger brands branching out, I don’t believe Yellow Pages can sustain itself”

About online revenues, “The online side of Yellow Pages still accounts for less than one-fifth of the business. It could reach 20 per cent by year’s end if management’s guidance is correct. But the question isn’t whether Yellow Pages’ Internet presence is growing; it’s whether it’s growing fast enough to make real money. On the Web, no one holds a monopoly. As is the case with newspapers and magazines, it’s far from certain whether the Web will be enough to compensate for Yellow Pages’ print losses.”

About social media, “And Yellow Pages faces a threat from another dot-com behemoth: Facebook. Social media is chipping away at the directory’s credibility, click by click. (…) That wasn’t bad for Yellow Pages as long as people were just talking to their neighbours over the backyard fence. But now, social media has made it easy for consumers to swap stories and recommendations on public forums. Word of mouth spreads faster than ever before.”

Tellier’s answer on the social media threat, “Marc Tellier argues that’s not enough. “You can’t run a business on word-of-mouth alone,” he says. “In some categories [the shift to online] is going to happen in two or three years. In others it’s going to take 30 years … I would have lost all my hair at the ripe old age of 41 if I believed a lot of what we’d been reading in terms of the pundits – you know, print is dead and so forth. It’s not true.” Many observers disagree. Much as he would like to, Mr. Tellier can’t separate himself from declines in the rest of the print industry.” YPG’s CEO adds later when talking about the last time he used the print directory: “Could I have solved that problem on Facebook? I don’t think so,” he says. “This is a growth industry … The business is remarkably healthy.”

The article concludes by saying: “Now he’ll just have to convince investors of that fact, make them believe his book isn’t a dinosaur on the brink of extinction. That could be the toughest sale of all.”

What it means: Ouch. I think it’s the first time an important Canadian media writes a very negative article on Yellow Pages Group. To be fair to YPG, I believe the Globe’s business section has always been bearish on the company. So, I’m not really surprised the first article of this kind comes from that news source. I also don’t like the comparison to newspapers. We’re definitely not talking about the same business dynamics. I do have to give kudos to the Globe & Mail for mentioning social media as a credible threat to directory publishers. I obviously don’t agree with Tellier when he says he could not have found the business he was looking for using his Facebook friends. Thousands of business references are being shared on social media sites every day and those contribute to market fragmentation in an already very fragmented world. I do agree with Tellier when he says word-of-mouth is not a strategy in itself but directory publishers need to be able to corral all sorts of leads for small merchants including word-of-mouth (social) ones.

I’m very happy to announce the launch of a new real-time local search site with Yellow Pages Group: Calgary.com. This beta site indexes, aggregates, displays and makes searchable all types of local Calgary activities (merchant reviews, local news, advertiser activities, classified ads, municipal news, “tweets” from Calgary, etc.). Consumers landing on the home page can see at a glance what’s going on in Calgary right now. Users can also search in the activity stream to find last five activities around specific keywords/topics. At the same time, when searching, users see YellowPages.ca listing results (when the search is for local merchants) and have the ability to vote and comment on their favorite stores.

For example:

Want to see what restaurants people are talking about?

Want to discover what people are saying at the airport today?

Want to buy a Chevrolet in Calgary? See classified ads and local merchants selling them.

Want to know the results of the recent local by-election? See a mix of tweets and news reports.

As I’ve stated before, I believe the future of local search will be in real-time, showing consumers everything that’s happening in their city, in their neighborhood, about their local merchants. Facebook’s (and Twitter’s) enormous growth in the last two years has seen the emergence of a new usage pattern around real-time activity streams and real-time search but the main issue with those popular social sites is that they’re not local enough. Directory publishers are local and can compete in this new real-time world.

This prototype, a first in the Yellow Pages industry, showcases three of our enterprise modules: local activity stream, real-time local search and social Yellow Pages. Partnering with Praized Media provides Yellow Pages Group access to key social media elements like Yellow Pages Answers, real-time local activity and local search, merchant reviews and user recommendations.  Congrats to the Praized development team for delivering this project and to Yellow Pages Group for trusting us with this project!

Update: Greg Sterling says “Praized appears to be hitting its stride with implementations like this.”

I missed the announcement when it came out a few weeks ago but Yellow Pages Group (YPG), Canada’s largest directory publisher, has introduced what they call a “custom delivery program”. This new program, part of their EcoInitiatives, allows consumers to receive more print Yellow Pages directory copies or to be removed from the distribution list. To do it, people can go online to http://www.ypg.com/delivery or contact YPG’s Distribution Call Centre at 1-800-268-5637.

For the US market, consumers can go to YellowPagesOptOut.com. This new national service, powered by the Yellow Pages Association, was launched two weeks ago.

What it means: smart move by YPG and the Yellow Pages Association. In my personal opinion, consumers that do not want to receive the print version of the local business directory are still a minority (usage of print directories is still very high) but it’s a very vocal minority. Giving those consumers the choice makes complete sense. For my Canadian readers, if you’re thinking of opting out, don’t opt-out completely. Keep at least the delivery of the Yellow Pages Neighborhood directory. In my neighborhood, because of the locally-relevant rich content, I find it is still a very useful product to find merchants.

Canpages Inc., the second-largest directory publisher in Canada, announced Sunday night the acquisition of GigPark, a self-funded social recommendation site from Toronto, Canada. For Canpages, it’s the second local/social acquisition in two months. The first was Ziplocal in June. This acquisition is the latest in a series of “local media” technology/people acquisitions in the last few months. I noted five other ones in a blog post I wrote two weeks ago.

Interestingly enough, this is the kind of white-label enterprise technology Praized Media is proposing to directory publishers and other local media publishers worldwide. Yellow Pages Group, Canada’s largest directory publisher, is using our Answers module at answers.yellowpages.ca. We’re also currently deploying our real-time activity stream and real-time search technology within a major local portal and our technology stack has generated interest from about a dozen players in Canada, in the US and in Europe. Because of that, as co-founder of Praized Media, I was asked by a few people yesterday what I thought of this acquisition.

1) I am very happy for Pema Hegan and Noah Godfrey for this acquisition. Good work guys! I know how much work goes into building a startup. You’ll see, it’s actually fun working in the directory industry!

2) As a crystal-ball gazer, I am delighted to see directory companies fully embracing social media, even though it’s not our technology they end up using. As I’ve been writing about in the last three years, social media is key to the future of traditional local media firms. The “social” trend in the directory space is not a fad.

3) Reviews and recommendations are just the tip of the iceberg in social/local. The next evolution is “real-time”. Google is thinking about it, Twitter announced last week that they would support geo-location in their API which will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet and Facebook is bound to announce something very soon.

4) The acquisition of technology assets & people by local media publishers validate our core business model of working as technology providers to local media publishers. There is a clear need out there for our product offer and the Praized team is a world-class product & development team in the local/social technology space.

So, what to expect in the next 6 to 12 months?

1) Definitely expect more acquisitions and possibly some mergers. As Kelsey Group analyst Matt Booth said last week during a Kelsey webinar, local media publishers should try to put their hands on interesting companies and assets this year before the economy picks up again next year. The idea is to be ready with new, groundbreaking revenue-generating opportunities when good times come rolling again.

2) Also expect more rapid innovation in the space. Robert Scoble is quickly cluing in to the business potential of local recommendations in a post yesterday where he compared Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yelp. He says:

How will Facebook collect the cash? Well, go to Google and let’s do that sushi search for Boulder, Colorado again. Did you see how that list works? Facebook needs that list. Twitter isn’t even close. But what’s missing? PEOPLE! Imagine if this list, when it’s brought to you by Facebook, shows that #1 has been liked by 14 of your friends? Businesses get that for free. But what don’t they get for free? Yelp’s “offers.” Businesses PAY to “offer” things to customers to try to move up the list. So, if you’re the #3 business on the list, you might say “bring your iPhone in and you’ll get free beer.” Doing that will cost you money, both in the free beer and the advertising you’ll pay Facebook or Google or Yelp to try to move up the list. Google has the list. It doesn’t have the humans or the offers. Yelp has the offers but doesn’t have hundreds of millions of people. Facebook has hundreds of millions of people and the “like” system, but not the offers. So, who will get there first? Now you understand the battlefield. Who will win the war?

But he forgets that Yelp’s ”offers” don’t scale. Yelp doesn’t have the ”offers”. They don’t have a large enough sales force to make it a billion dollar business. It’s Yellow Pages, newspapers, coupon and other local media publishers that own the sales force. But then, like Google, local media publishers don’t have the social elements and interactions. It will be a natural one-two punch for any large company that assembles merchants (i.e. advertising) and consumers meshed in social interaction. I’m willing to bet this will come from directory companies if they move fast enough but I venture the window of opportunity is approximately 12 months before Facebook, Twitter or even Google crack the social local nut.

Update: Greg Sterling analyzes the transaction.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau Of Canada released this week their report on 2008 Actual Online Advertising Revenue (.pdf). Some highlights:

• Online advertising revenues in Canada have more than quadrupled over the past five years, and grew to $1.6 billion (net) in 2008, up 29% from the $1.2 billion $1.241 million reported in 2007
• Online is now 11% of all advertising revenue
• French language advertising revenues grew by 22% in 2008 to $317 million (net), and accounted for 20% of total Online ad revenues in Canada during 2008
• 2009 Forecast: Online advertising revenue in Canada will grow to $1.75 billion in 2009 – an estimated 9.2% increase over 2008 actuals
• Search advertising continues to lead in terms of share of dollars booked by Online Publishers ($602 million/38%), followed by Display ($490 million/31%) and Classifieds/Directories ($480 million/30%).

The report also explains what are the perceived industry challenges and opportunities going forward. The following have been identified:

• Coping with the severity of the economic downturn
• Demonstrating Display advertising’s return-on-investment (with or without a click) in response to growing Advertiser emphasis on performance-based (CPC/CPA) pricing models
• Training offline media sales forces to effectively integrate Online into cross-media sales proposals
• The commoditization of Online media by the growing number and increased market share of Advertising Networks.

What it means: very good growth in online advertising in Canada last year with 29%. An interesting particularity of the Canadian market is the large share of Classifieds/Directory online revenue, almost as big as Display ads. That’s definitely due in a large part to Yellow Pages Group who reported revenues of $247 million in 2008 (most of them in Classifieds/Directories I suspect). They officially represent more than 15% of all online revenues in Canada. Impressive results.

Merchant review functionalities and sites are all the rage currently in the Yellow Pages industry. In the last 2 months, amongst others, we have seen:

1. Truvo launch their own social site under the Truvo.com URL
2. Eniro launch a beta social site under the Rejta.se URL
3. AT&T Interactive announce the launch later this year of a social Yellow Pages site under a different brand than YellowPages.com
4. Herold, the Austrian directory publisher, make an investment in Tupalo, a Yelp-like destination site.
5. Canpages, the independent Canadian directory publisher, acquire assets from ZipLocal, a Canadian merchant review site.

Often called Social Yellow Pages sites, the biggest representatives of that category are Yelp (US, UK, Canada) and Qype (most of Western Europe). Both are independent, venture-funded companies. As of June 2009, more than 22 million people had visited Yelp in the past 30 days according to published internal numbers. Yelp users had written over 6 million local reviews. Qype had 9M+ unique users in May 2009 (+350% in 12 months) and 1M+ reviews.

Impressive usage numbers but an important challenge remains for these sites: monetization. For example, even though Yelp has been extremely successful from a user point of view, revenues are still low in proportion. Articles from 16 months ago mentioned Yelp’s revenues were “rumored to be sub $10 million/year” (I discussed Yelp’s monetization strategy here.)

On the other side, directory publishers, even though they’ve had for the longest-time advertiser-focused web sites, have been extremely good at generating revenues out of their web sites. For example, Yellow Pages Group (Canada) generated $C 247 million in online revenues in 2008. Over the same period, Pages Jaunes Groupe (France) achieved 471 million euros in online revenues. In the US, Yellowbook’s online revenues were up a spectacular 97.5% to $US 227 million in the last fiscal year.

Why is that? Yes, we could obviously underline the fact that these publishers represent trusted media brands, that they have large sales forces and that regular merchant contacts all play a big role in their financial success. But I would posit the moment in the consumer purchase decision process when online directories are used plays a bigger role in monetization potential.  Looking at the traditional decision process (see diagram below), online directories are clearly used when consumers are doing information search and evaluation of alternatives. Consumer reviews only happen at the end of the whole decision process, at post-purchase evaluation. Consumers will obviously look at past reviews as a proxy when doing information search but I don’t think it’s as attractive a real estate for advertisers.

Figure: Consumer Purchase Decision Process (source: Tutor2U)

I’m definitely not saying consumer reviews are useless from a strategic point of view. Consumers love to provide feedback and they love to read comments on merchants to make up their mind. I’m saying directory publishers should see reviews as one of the elements on which they build their social media strategy and one that happens at the end of the purchase cycle. It should be integrated within a more complete social media consumer purchase decision process strategy.

The filter of the consumer purchase decision process is very powerful to see who’s competing against you and to identify opportunities. Google, for instance, is clearly used by consumers when they do information search and comparing alternatives. This explains why the search giant from Mountain View is perceived as a serious threat by most directory publishers.

Enter Twitter and Facebook, the new juggernauts of the real-time conversation and real-time search world. Where do they fit in that purchase decision process? They’re definitely used for information search as well. If you search on Twitter for “Can anyone recommend” or “Looking for“, you’ll see that, every day on Twitter, thousands of people are asking for recommendations and advice. That’s why, by the way, we implemented a social media broadcast mechanism in our Praized-powered Local Answers module (used here by Yellow Pages Group in Canada) to send consumer requests to Twitter and Facebook. But I think what’s even more powerful with this new real-time conversation world is the fact that people are now actually expressing needs to the world. More than 100 people per day on Twitter say:

• their car or someone’s car broke down
• their dog is sick (or they’re sick as dog!)
• they’re moving out
• they (or someone they know) is getting married
• someone they know just died (mom, dad, cousin, grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, etc.)
• they (or someone they know) just had a baby
• they (or someone they know) are going to college

All these consumers are facing major life events (or know someone that are facing one) and are amazing advertiser leads for any publishers that can corral them. Consumers now want to express their needs/problems and have people/companies come to them with solutions. As I expressed in my “I have seen the future of local media” blog post, this is a new and important consumer behavior online. That’s why I believe every local media publisher will be introducing locally-relevant real-time conversation and real-time search tools within their Web sites in the next three years. That’s why I believe social media lead generation, customer and reputation management tools will become more prevalent in the next few years. That’s why publishers will introduce social ratings/reviews functionality to allow consumers to close the purchase loop after expressing needs and shopping for options. But be aware that Twitter and Facebook will certainly go after this market. This is probably the biggest opportunity directory publishers have seen since the arrival of the world wide web but it needs to be a complete strategy. Merchant reviews alone do not make a social strategy.

Over on the Praized product blog, learn about Praized Media’s first “enterprise” deployment with Canada’ s Yellow Pages Group. Version française ici.

I’m a bit late writing about this news (Greg Sterling wrote about it here and the Kelsey Group guys here) but RHD has just released a series of DexKnows mobile apps & services.  I recently had the opportunity to connect with Deborah Eldred, Director of Mobile at RHD, to discuss the new offer.

Highlights:

• Developed by MobilePeople
• Covers the whole mobile “value chain”: text messages, mobile browser version, downloadable client applications, iPhone application
• They looked at ComScore data to focus development on the most important phone models/carriers
• They developed a specific search “taxonomy” by looking at top categories in a mobile context. They also regrouped categories in three most-used metacategories called Gettin’ Grub (food & restaurants), Havin’ Fun (entertainment), Goin’ Places (travel)
• Search results are ranked by centroid, currently the center of the city, but eventually the user geo-location

I asked Deborah how the Dexknows offer was differentiated from other offers out there. She mentioned the following:

• Focused on relevant experience for mobile users (as opposed to advertiser-focused)
• Most important mobile categories have been grouped and surfaced on the home page
• People search (data provided by Whitepages.com)
• RHD covers the whole mobile value chain, from text messages to iPhone app
• They have great content in their in-region territory.

You can go to m.dexknows.com to use/download the various versions and a short video shows the various features.

Update: Yellow Pages Group in Canada has also released applications for the iPhone and Blackberry. Canpages had released an iPhone app about two weeks ago.

What it means: happy to see that directory publishers are releasing new mobile apps. Obviously, in the medium/long term, it is a critical component of the distribution mix. But I think, in the short term, it plays an important perceptual role with the sales team and advertisers.

According to CTV’s Chris Abel, CanPages.ca, the local search site of Canpages Inc., the independent Canadian directory publisher, has launched its own Street View feature. CanPages has partnered with San Francisco-based MapJack to deploy this technology in Canada.  Abel says it’s very similar to Google Street View but includes new features such as ”a fullscreen mode and paths that explore pedestrian walkways as much as they do the streets ruled by cars and trucks.”

You can see it in searches in Vancouver, Whistler, or Squamish (all in British Columbia). As for future expansion, “the company plans to expand to include Street Views of Toronto and Montreal next, followed by as much of Canada as possible.”

In the last few days, an ad for a video camera operator has appeared in a Quebec job site, making people think Google was going to capture Quebec City in Street View. It’s possible but I suspect it might be an ad for the first French Canadian street view deployment of CanPages.ca.

What it means: looking at the introduction of new features inside the CanPages.ca site in the last 6-12 months, it’s clear that the exec team there has identified feature gaps inside YellowPages.ca, the main property of Yellow Pages Group (and directory incumbent in Canada) and are trying to differentiate themselves via those new features. It’s a good strategic move. On the other side, YPG has a mapping agreement with Microsoft and I’m fairly certain the Redmond giant is also taking street view pictures (many people on Twitter have reported seeing the Microsoft vehicle taking pictures). This will certainly be easy for YPG to deploy once it’s available in Canada. As I reported a few weeks ago, the new DexKnows.com has a nice integration of Google Maps and Street View.