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Ah, the Yellow Pages. A term that brings up memories of the plastic wrapped goodness that graced our front porches every year. As a yout I remember coming home and seeing the unwrapped yellow book on the counter. My mom would leave it for me to open knowing I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The difficulty in breaking through the iron like wrapping was entertainment enough. After an hour or so (And finally resorting to scissors) I would have it fully removed from its plastic cocoon. We received two books every year. One for the larger part of Massachusetts we lived in and a smaller refined regional version for the Metro West area which covered Concord, Acton, Carlisle, Sudbury, Boxboro, Bedford, Lexington and a few others. It was enjoyable to learn about the different zip codes in the area and dive through different phone exchanges as well as the other basic local information it provided (I was a geek). In reality though it wasn’t really local. When I looked up a sporting goods store I would find a tawdry list in small type that was barely readable (My mom actually went out and bought a pair of magnifying glasses at CVS for the sole purpose of reading the Yellow Pages. She still wears them to this day but now she needs them all the time. I guess she can officially blame the Yellow Pages for her loss of vision). Business listings were in alphabetical order based on business name so I was finding sporting goods stores in Framingham and Boxboro when I actually lived in Concord. Yeah, they were nearby and it was good to know they existed but it didn’t provide me the relevant result I was looking for. Plus it provided me no detailed information about these sporting goods stores other than their phone number and address. Of course there were the display ads which allowed local business to brand themsleves a bit but still nothing all that gripping.

Let’s jump to today. We all know what’s happening to the print Yellow Pages. They are floundering. This is old news. Technology has paved the way to more dynamic methods for search. People use the Internet as their main source to discover information and print media has become, for the most part, passe.  We refer to “The Google” (As I once heard it called) when we need to find something. The Yellow Pages have taken their game online as well. For some time now they have been a big player in IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) listings. They are a destination website that functions similarly to their print predecessor. The real issue here is that technology evolves, very rapidly, and to keep up you need to be nimble and lean. The Yellow Pages are not. The print Yellow Pages began in 1886 and it ran on a similar model for almost 100 years before the Internet was born. Today it seems as if they took a digital snapshot of their print version and put it online. With all the moves in social media and innovative technology the Yellow Pages are surprisingly mimicking their old ways. Other IYP’s are doing the same (Yellow Book and Super Pages). Neither are evolving and because of this I feel the IYP days are numbered now as well. What’s compelling about YellowPages.com? Nothing. For sh%ts and giggles I did the same search for sporting goods in Concord, MA like the one I did when I was a kid. Here are my results.

The first three are national retailers that have online stores. They obviously paid the most money for those spots. The problem is I am in Concord and want to find a sporting goods store locally. The results after the first three are more advertisers (Including four more Sports Authority links!) and the listings that are in nearby towns are not relevant. One being a country club and the other being a filtration pump company. The one sporting goods store that I do know of in Concord is Brine’s but their Belmont, MA location was the one listed, not the one in Concord. This example along with the various others I experimented with go to show the lack of accuracy and neglect that Yellow Pages have toward their consumers. Yellow Pages and other IYP’s need to shift their focus fast. Hyper local and social media mixed together will create new technology that will drive users. New products and apps will revolutionize a market that has the potential to be a 20 billion dollar marketplace by 2012. It’s not just local business information either. It’s events, news, classifieds, community and any other relevant information about a locale. It’s creating a place for users to interact with their neighbors and know everything that’s going on in and about their city, town or neighborhood. Most of this information is disaggregated with some players doing well in each vertical but not one being able to tie it together. With API’s, partnerships and open source this is very possible with the right plan of attack and approach. I see this as being the aggregation of local, social and IYPs. The ability for advertisers to target consumers on a geographic, demographic and psychographic scale while consumers can actually do the same with their lifestyles through businesses, communities, events, news, what have you. LSP’s (Local Social Pages) Are somewhere in the future and I think they are needed.

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