Yesterday Marilyn Neal of Local Insight Media gave a talk about how the Yellow Pages industry has changed over 40 years and how there is still a lot of innovation to come. She then proceeded to give an amazingly detailed prescription for how to manage your print yellow pages salesforce (note if you are looking for somone to run a large salesforce you need to hear how she does it, it’s pretty impressive). The thing I didn’t hear was anything…
Just ran into Anupam Gupta, CEO of Mixpo. I had caught a demo of Mixpo earlier today and was fairly impressed with what they have created. Basically Mixpo is a simple online video creation tool for SMBs, or more precisely for companies that sell to SMBs. Mixpo has set up several reseller relationships that are starting to sell their service. Every day it seems like there is another SMB video player (it’s starting to remind me of the IYP space),…
According to Frank Jules of AT&T at the Kelsey Conference. Pretty impressive. Frank has walked us through a number of digital initiatives that AT&T is attacking and it’s pretty impressive. There’s nothing here that has a wow factor and they are doing everything you would expect them to do (e.g. call tracking, TV on demand YP, ad supported 411, mobile, etc.), but the fact that they are doing all of it is wow factor enough. “Search, Discover, Transact” is their…
I got here a bit late so here are Sebastien‘s thoughts on Charles Laughlin’s opening presentation on the state of the yellow pages industry. Here are some of Charles’ yellow pages predictions for 2013. US print titles circulation will decline by 30% At least one global publisher divests its print Yellow Pages business Professional services advertisers will have largely shifted from print to online Self-provisioning will account for 25% of directional media sales See the entire post here
For those of you who care I will be there. And I may even blog about it.
I have received a bunch of requests for the presentation I gave at Friday’s morning session at the Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local Conference so I thought I would post it here. Thanks again to Peter, Mike, Matt, Neal, John, Pam, Bobbi and the rest of the Kelsey gang for putting on a great conference and for including me in their party. Check out their blog for more on the conference.
Just wanted to finish off the week by thanking the Kelsey Group for putting on another great local search show. I took away four big points: SMB video is hot and while it’s still in its infancy a lot of people think it’s going to be a big winner Search marketing is still a huge pain in the ass for SMBs but demand is still growing like crazy. A number of big media companies are starting to get local on…
I just gave a talk on top SEO tricks and now Erik Jorgensen of Microsoft Local is going to blow our minds with some great mapping tricks. Here’s the stream of consciousness: One size does not fit all when it comes to local. 3 modes of website use: Find – looking for quick answers Research – specific search intent but exploring to find answers. Long time investment and emotional investment. Explore – Having fun. Seeing where information takes you. Search…
Just walked in on the tail end of Paul Levine’s presentation at the Kelsey Conference on Adbrite and its local targeting capabilities. Apparently Adbrite has a lot more local inventory than the last time I checked, which was about a year or so ago. And they have a lot more media options and there are some bargain CPMs so you may want to check it out.
Like most other SMBs, spas could give a flying $@!%$* (did I spell that right?) about technology, SEO, search engine advertising, anything with the word “click”, SERPs, etc. “Sticky” is never a good term in the spa industry. 1/3 of avg. spa revenue from gift certificates. SpaBoom’s pay for performance private labeled online gift certificate model enabled them to pick up 10% of the market in 2 years. About 2300 active clients. New clients add 20-30% to total sales 40%…