Darby Sieben - » Social

How Social is Yellow Pages Group in Canada?

Darby Sieben — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 04:51:53 +0000

It was one of those amazing days of incredible meetings, finalizing a new deal (wait for this one) and introductions to some incredible technologies and start-ups in the social media space. During one of those meetings, I was asked the question; “How Social is Yellow Pages Group?”.

This was one of those questions that I had to pause to give some thought. I answered by outlining some of the initiatives and realized we do a lot. So I figured this would make a good blog post.

Here are just some of the things that we are doing in the social space.

YellowPages.ca

Introduced this year, you can now login into YellowPages.ca using your Facebook Username and ID which will automatically set you up with a Yellow Pages Account. Login in the top right hand corner of the site. This initiative is lead by YPG’s social media guru, @martyboy008 and his incredible team of social media experts.

This sign-in allows you to rate and review businesses and share your discoveries with your social graph. For example, here is screenshot of a recent review that I wrote on the Red House Thai & Malaysia in Pickering (this is the place that started my love affair with Thai food and anybody that knows me, knows I love Pad Thai).

Finally when you connect using your Facebook Account, you can actually see what businesses your friends like.

YellowPages.ca Facebook Application

The first of its kind in Canada, released in 2008 – the complete YellowPages.ca experience within the Facebook environment complete with ratings and reviews.

This one even got press coverage by CTV in June 2008 – check out the video,


Get the Flash Player to see this player.

RedFlagDeals.com

Without a doubt, RedFlagDeals.com is Canada’s most active shopping network featuring one of the most active forums discussing all the best places in Canada to find deals.

For everybody looking for free stuff, one of their popular areas is Canadian Freebies & Free Stuff,

Coming Soon … the RedFlagDeals.com Daily Deal,

Urbanizer iPhone Application

Urbanizer is Canada’s first “mood-based” application for the iPhone (here is the link the iTunes Store) that works in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.

One the web you can see moods of current cities. Here is a screenshot of Calgary.

LesPac.com and BuySell.com Classified Sites

In the province of Quebec, LesPac.com has established itself as the leader in the classified space. In English speaking Canada there is BuySell.com, another top classified destination for Canadians.

Restaurantica.com

One of Canada’s most engaged communities, Restaurantica.com features over 200,000 reviews on restaurants.

New Additions to the Social Family of Yellow Pages Group

Urban Pill

One of the leading blog destinations for what is happening in Vancouver, UrbanPill.com is pretty cool to follow if you live or plan on visiting Vancouver.

GigPark

GigPark is a social recommendation engine that was built by @pema and @noahgodfrey (these guys kick-ass in the Canadian tech space) – who sold this platform to CanPages in 2009.

Quick Links to the Social Destinations for the Above

YellowPages.ca on Facebook
YellowPages.ca on Twitter (managed by @zelia, YPG’s super crazy social media communicator)
PagesJaunes.ca on Twitter
Yellow Pages Group Local Video Channel on YouTube
Yellow Pages Group Ad Campaigns on YouTube
Yellow Pages Group on LinkedIn
YellowPages Mobile on Twitter
Urbanizer on Twitter
RedFlagDeals.com on Twitter
RedFlagDeals.com on Facebook
Restaurantica.com on Facebook

Funny thing, on the phone this took all about 2-minutes, this blog post took a little bit longer. Perhaps I should have done just a video.

Tell me what you think – did you enjoy this post? Any feedback?

Hierarchy of Social Media Influence

Darby Sieben — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 18:42:41 +0000

Here is the hierarchy of social influence according to the new report from Harris Data.

Interesting to see professional sources so highly rated.

1) Friends and Family

2) Reviews from newspapers and magazines

3) One’s broader social network

4) Other blogs and forums

5) Celebrity review ( most influential on 18-34 years old )

Read the full post on Greg Sterling’s blog

PS – I on the runway in Toronto leaving to New York for the CM Summit and using Wordpress for the iPad to post this, works not too bad except for the fact that it won’t let me paste in the post.

If you use word press for the iPad and have a solution to the paste option in a post let me know.

Follow-Up – never did get the links working in the WordPress App. Had to switch to safari to add the reference links. This was a little frustrating as well as editing was more difficult than I thought in the editor window.

Blippy.com – Will You Share What You Buy?

Darby Sieben — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:49:03 +0000

Through Facebook.com (my profile) we decided to share who we were, where we went school, our personal photos and more. Using LinkedIn.com (my profile) we decided to share everything about our business life and business connections. Twitter (my profile) allows us to share our 140 character thoughts. With FourSquare (my profile) we now check-in everywhere and share our location with our friends.

Now there is Blippy.com – the service that allows you to share your purchases. On the Blippy.com website the tagline is simple : Blippy is a fun and easy way to see and discuss what everyone is buying.

Here is a screenshot from my Blippy.com Feed:

At this point I am only sharing my purchased from iTunes. But if you want to share more of your purchases you have the following options:

Most of these services are not available in Canada but you have the option of sharing your credit card or banking transactions. As a Canadian you have the following financial institution support on Blippy.com – American Express, ING Bank, and Capital One (although it does not explicitly say Canada). Here is a screenshot of the financial institutions supported by Blippy.com:

This past week I was forwarded this site to my colleagues and friends asking for their feedback. Some of them thought it was quite innovative in terms of asking your friends for feedback on whether they liked or disliked a movie or song. Others thought it was inappropriate to share this information on the web and flat-out told me they never would post their purchases online. Other thought it was completely stupid that somebody who post this info and that others would actually want to read it. One thing for sure is that Blippy.com evoked a reaction.

I actually think this concept is interesting. Think about it – everybody shares with their friends and family what they like and dislike. Did you see that movie? What did you think of it? When people come over to my house, they ask us how do you like your massage chair or your 4-door fridge (these are 2 common questions we get from most people). You can read about my Inada Massage Chair purchase.

Does Blippy.com allow people from long distances participate in those discussions?

Could Blippy.com help you make better decisions by asking people in your network about a product or service?

What about asking a total stranger on Blippy.com what he thought of a restaurant you have not been to before?

Is this so different than facebook, twitter, foursquare or linkedin?

Could Blippy.com be the next social phenomena?

Will You Share What You Buy?

Join the Conversation, Your Business Needs It. A Social Media Presentation

Darby Sieben — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 03:59:50 +0000

Here is a great presentation by Marta Kagan and is a follow-up to the original What the F**K is Social Media.

I wanted to post this to my site as social media has become a bigger part of my personal and professional career in the past 18-months. The slides in this presentation do a very good job of highlighting how important social media is becoming in the mainstream. Couple this with a book written by Don Tapscott called “grown up digital” and you get an appreciation for the “conversation revolution” that we are currently in and the importance of having a strategy to deal with in. For this post, I will not be providing any of my insights. I will do this in a follow-up article. For now, I hope that you enjoy this presentation:

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later
View more documents from Marta Kagan.

$100 in Free Gas Every Day For Sharing Your Opinion

Darby Sieben — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:15:16 +0000

Do you like to share your opinion? If so – launched today is the $100 a day free gas card giveaway from the YellowPages.ca Facebook Application – see full contest details.

Since the launch of this application, we have seen a growing numbers of users from across Canada share their opinions on restaurants, bars, dentists, health spas and this is a way to say thanks for those users to keep sharing their opinion with friends and family.

On a personal note, I appreciate that my blog has been very quiet in the last couple of months and for everybody who emailed me asking me what’s up – thanks for emails and your concern.

Besides being extremely busy in my position of Director of Online Services for Yellow Pages Group, I also made a move from Toronto to Calgary. Although the transition went extremely smooth, it is quite a ride to pick up your life and move over 3000 km’s.

Anyway, I will be regularly contributing again, with more of a focus on what is being launched by the YellowPages.ca Labs Development Team as we continue to produce some great work in helping Canadians buyers connect with sellers.

No related posts.

Update on Facebook and Local Search

Darby Sieben — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 12:28:09 +0000

As many of you know – my YP Labs team launched the YellowPages.ca Facebook Application back in May. I did a post on the television coverage by CTV – check it out.

So what is the determining success in developing a facebook application? In the facebook world it really comes down to the number of installs of the application and more importantly the number of daily active users. At the bottom of this post, I will share some numbers on local search applications in facebook.

Before I get into small application numbers, I want to highlight a feature about the YellowPages.ca application – building your own lists to share with friends and then map your lists. This application allows a user to create lists for private, semi-public and public on pretty much any topic. Here are some public user created lists:

Favorite Restaurants in Calgary – Map List.
Favorite Sports Stores in Montreal – Map List.
Favorite Toronto Restaurants – Map List.
Great Restaurants in Port Perry – Map List.
Places to Eat in Ottawa – Map List.

Some interesting lists, including one for my favorite places to eat in Ottawa.

Back to numbers of successful application usage. I grabbed these numbers from Adonomics.com, which aggregates usage on facebook applications. Here are some stats regarding application usage on facebook. Numbers are as of today.

The most successful application, in terms of installs is SuperWall with just under 43M installs and a daily active usage of 2%.

Funwall has the most active users at 1.8M from a total install base of 36.5M and a daily active usage of 5%.

Scrabulous (now being sued by Hasbro) has 3.9M installs and daily active usage of 506K or 13%.

So what about local search applications? First, from an expectation perspective, they are not even close to the above numbers. Facebook is still, at its core, a platform of entertainment. However, it is interesting to see how some of the local search player applications fair-out:

Yell Socialiser (UK) – 500 installs, 2 daily active users (0%)
Praize’n'raze (CDN and US) – 950 installs, 57 daily active users (6%)
YellowPages.ca (CDN) – 667 installs, 40 daily active users (6%)
Local Picks (Global) – 1.1M installs, 3349 daily active users (0%)
Lolodex (US) – 2800 installs, 15 daily active users (0%)

Praized Media Launched Yesterday

Darby Sieben — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:17:44 +0000

I was stuck in all day meetings yesterday so did not have a chance to post this when it happened, but the team at Praized Media has fully launched it Distributed Platform yesterday. Congrats to Sebastien, Harry and Sylvain. I first posted about them in September after they received their initial round of funding – you can see that post here. You can check out the site here as well as all a blog post about all the press coverage they are receiving.

Over the past number of months, I worked with the Praized Team on the data distribution and traffic agreements for Yellow Pages Group Canada. Many people kept asking me what Sebastien was up to (I use to work with Sebastien at Yellow Pages Group and he is one person with whom I regard very highly) but had to keep quite out of respect as well as contractual obligations.

Now that it is launched, what I think you are going to see two things; 1) a user focused platform that I would bet is going to be very successful and 2) a model that demonstrates how publishers and new ventures can work together. For the start-ups they get the necessary data to ensure they can fully deploy their concept and a revenue model. For publishers they get exposure in the social space and targeted traffic to their online networks. This is a very exciting time and I am excited to be working with such innovative organizations such as Praized Media.

Add Save and Share Functionality To Your Website – For Free – Thanks to YellowPages.ca

Darby Sieben — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:13:23 +0000

Just launched this weekend on YellowPages.ca is the ability for merchants in Canada to add Save and Share Functionality to their website. The company providing the service is Agendize. For information on the specific service from Agendize – visit their widget product page. You can also read a full article from a strategic perspective on this initiative on the Kelsey Blog titled “Agendize Brings Contact Widgets to Local Listings“.

So how does it work and what does it look like?

First thing a business owner should do is go to YellowPages.ca and do a search for their business listing. Once again – I am using my mom’s business, The Bra Lady as an example. Once you are on your business listing click on the ? beside the Add These Tools To your Website.

When you click on the ? mark – this will launch a new window with some Javascript code that you can copy.

Take the Javascript code and add it to your website. In the case of TheBraLady.ca – we decided to add this code into the header of the website so that it is available on every page.

Finally – when a user selects this new button on your website – it launched a window that gives a user a multitude of ways in which they can share your business information.

And that’s it. Now your business contact information can be shared via email, address book, desktop, social media, print and instant messenger.

Pretty cool eh.

Interview with Jeff Quipp the CEO of Search Engine People

Darby Sieben — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 02:41:39 +0000

Today Paul Steven at NorthSouthMedia posted their interview with Jeff Quipp, CEO of Search Engine People. Here is the link to entire interview.

I have had the pleasure and opportunity of working with Jeff and his company since I started working at Yellow Pages Group as an employee in 2006. He is one of the most intelligent, level headed, and forward thinking experts in the field. I suggest checking out his corporate blog for insights from field.

There was a question in the interview that was asked of Jeff specifically about Social Marketing.

“I have recently become addicted to social bookmarking, esp. StumbleUpon. What words of advice can you give to anyone looking to become a power user in any of the social guises?”

To that Jeff answered:

Jeff: Don’t lose perspective, and always track results against objectives. Social media can become all consuming, but the actual traffic is very difficult to convert. Its very easy to have spent a great deal of time and effort, with no real returns. So, begin by setting objectives (Benefits to Engaging in Social Media Marketing). Its not for every business … its merely a tool in our toolkit. So make sure the effort can satisfy specific goals.

2) Then; focus on getting really really good at blogging and content generation that people love. This content is the foundation! The key to making it work for clients is their content, and you’ll likely have to help create it.

3) Network … participate in these communities. Vote, comment, submit … in that order. Establish friendships in various social media, and migrate them to other platforms. Be loyal to your friends … follow their submissions religiously. Tip … use RSS to follow their submissions pages, and check every few hours. THIS WILL TAKE TIME … and continue to take time! If you really want to be a power social media user … its takes a lot of time and effort.

Could not have answered that question any better.

Jeff answered many more questions from Paul – so make sure that you check out the entire interview.

Can “OpenSocial” Bring Friendster Back into the Canadian Mainstream

Darby Sieben — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 02:03:00 +0000

Remember Friendster? One of those early social networking sites. Well as of this week, they have made a couple of key announcements that could help bring friendster.com from the depths of the Canadian Internet space to – perhaps a competitor to facebook? Well – let’s not get carried away, but they have announced opening up a developer network as well as integrating with OpenSocial – both positive steps in the right direction, however, probably a little late – at least in the Canadian market. For the full story please read, Friendster developer platform goes live with over 180 apps.

From a local business perspective – your best bet is still facebook.com as a vehicle to communicate with your customers and friends. With the launch of facebook’s business solutions – there is a very viable solution for local businesses to get involved in the social space.

However, what about friendster? You know, at one point, they had a great service but what they are doing now is reactive not proactive. They, like myspace, are in reactionary mode to facebook and this is a touch position for any business to be in.

Anyway, as a FYI – here is a 12-month media trend comparing facebook.com, myspace.com and friendster.com in Canada – the graph speaks for itself as to what Canadians are using and where local businesses in Canada need to be.