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Alot of people have been asking me for the a copy of the presentation. I have added the presentation to SlideShare, which you can flip through below. I also have an audio recording of the presentation and the Q&A with Matt Booth after the presentation about our API Strategy.

The event itself was probably one of the best Kelsey’s that I have attended. The quality of the speakers was quite good. Typically the DMS conference at Kelsey tends to be more focused on the Yellow Pages industry with a slant towards the print side of the business. This conference really had a very good blend of the traditional side of local along with a strong digital focus. The next Kelsey event in December, in San Francisco (Interactive Local Media West) will be even better as this is the key event for anybody in the local digital space to attend. I will be attending if you are interested in meeting.

The best presentation of the show was the SuperForum: The Social-Driven SMB: Part IV: Social Advertising Case Studies. This was a panel with Will Scott, President, Search Influence and Marty Weintraub, CEO, aimClear. The description of this panel is, “There is no shortage of platitudes about how SMBs are embracing social media. Here, we’ll share real case studies of how small-business advertisers have mastered the art of turning fans and friends into paying customers”. This panel was incredibly dynamic, Marty had an energy level that is contagious and the content of the presentation and the case studies they shared are absolutely incredible. If you really want to understand social marketing you need to check this out.

Now you can download the presentations of this event at the Kelsey Site. If you want to see all the presentations in video format you can purchase access for $199 at the VueTorial.

Below are 2 presentation links. First is the audio portion of the presentation and underneath it is the slideshare slides.

In the audio portion it starts off with Matt Booth giving some details on the state of the market and the challenge for publishers. You can download his slides here.

At the 2 min mark of the audio is when my presentation starts that corresponds to the SlideShare presetnation below.

Here is the SlideShare version of my presentation at Kelsey DMS11.

Why is this important for YPG advertisers? In a nutshell, it means more leads and more business. How is this you might ask? Two things – 1) with the synchronization of venue IDs, you have a scalable way to push future enhanced content to multiple external sources and 2) by adding more value to YellowAPI.com, ie) making developers lives easier, we will see more innovation in the local space which means as more and more applications are created to fulfill user needs, more and more leads will be delivered to local advertisers. In this scenario, the user wins (they have more choices of how they want to interact with local), the developer wins (they can focus on innovative apps), the local advertiser wins (they are getting more business to their location) and YPG wins (as we fulfill our commitment to drive more leads to our advertisers).

In April, I posted the Eco-System in Canada of YellowPages.ca which garnered alot of attention and mostly people commenting to me that they did not realize YPG was involved with so many partners. Here is the updated Eco-System slide, now with FourSquare:

To conclude, the past 48-hours is bring more attention to YPG’s data initiatives. Here is a round-up of the stories covering this announcement.

AboutFourSquare.com – YellowAPI becomes first Canadian partner for foursquare’s venue harmonization project

TechCrunch – Yellow Pages Teams Up With Foursquare For “Venue Harmonization Project”

Kin Lane – Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Joins Foursquare to Harmonize Data

Scribbal – Foursquare, Canada’s Yellow Pages Announce Strategic Partnership

Techplz – Yellow Pages and Foursquare team up in mutually beneficial deal

WashingtonPost – Yellow Pages Teams Up With Foursquare For “Venue Harmonization Project”

Direction Informatique – Groupe Pages Jaunes placera votre entreprise sur foursquare

Next Montreal – Yellow Pages Teams Up With Foursquare to Share Data

Kelsey Group – YPG Canada and Foursquare Team Up for Venue Harmonization

Tech Vibes – Yellow Pages Group announces Strategic Agreement with Foursquare

TD Waterhouse – Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Announces Strategic Agreement With foursquare

If you know of other locations, please post a comment and I will add to the list.

Another piece of news today is that the new YellowPages.ca application is a featured application in the iTunes store – this is pretty big news as you can’t buy your way to this placement, your application has to be deemed pretty good for the Apple editorial team to pick up.

For this blog post I thought it would be great to take a look back.

Having been with YPG since 2006, as an employee (actually been working with the company since 2001), I managed the team that launched YPG into the world of iPhone applications. Back in 2009 there was not a lot of focus on mobile, but since then the mobile team has expanded and is now under the leadership of Matthieu Houle, a colleague and friend of mine who as we say at YPG, is “rocking da house”. Under his leadership there have been 2 more releases of the YellowPages.ca iPhone application with the most recent only 1 month old.

Here is the evolution of the home page of the iPhone Application for YellowPages.ca

2009 (features included basic search for business, people and reverse, display ads, photos and videos)  

2010 (features included hot links to popular categories, streamlined and more intuitive interface, all YP.ca content including videos and photos)

2011 (features include ratings and reviews, type ahead for categories and locations and customizable popular buttons)

Download the latest application here in the iTunes store.

On November 8, 2009, I did a blog post, “Canada’s Yellow Pages(TM) Mobile App, over 1/2 Million Downloads and 3 Reasons for its Success” which in terms of the number of downloads is no longer accurate (we are over a couple of million) but the 3 reasons why I believe Canadians love this application hold.

If you don’t want to read the full article, let me summarize the 3 reasons why back then Canadians loved this app and why it holds true today –

1) Simplicity,
2) Content (even more so today) and
3) Usability (which gets better with every release).

How important is it for a local business to ensure that its basic listing data (name, phone number and address) is included in the YellowPages.ca database?

How important is it for a local business to ensure that its enhanced content (hours of operations, products, services, etc) are also included in the YellowPages.ca database?

Ultimately the above questions boil down to, “what’s in in for the SMB”. To help answer this, I have created the following eco-system slide that shows how/who the data from yellowpages.ca gets distributed across the consumer eco-system in Canada. NOTE: This is a representative sample of partnerships of companies that use portions or all of the yellowpages.ca database to offer a local connection to its audience.

For an SMB this boils down to two main reasons why this is important:

1) Time Saving – by having a central distribution of basic + enhanced listing data a SMB does not have to spend time to manage their data in multiple locations.

2) Consistency of Information – having the same information appear in a consistent manner across this eco-system allows a SMB to manage and control their message in a more manageable way.

If it is true that the users will continue to splinter into more consumer platforms it will become more and more critical for a centralized hub that can distribute that information.

In Canada, YellowPages.ca is a very important hub for the SMB market.

What do you think?

I will be around all day Monday through to all day Wednesday. Many time slots already booked, however, I will be making rounds during the conference as well as breaks/reception. If we are not scheduled to meet already and you want to connect to intro your company, please feel free to email me at darby.sieben AT ypg.com with a brief intro.

Here is a walk through:

If you have not already, check out Yahoo on your iPhone. You can do this by typing in Yahoo.com or Yahoo.ca or going directly to m.Yahoo.com. You will land at the following home page:

If this is the first time you visit this page, Yahoo will ask you to use your location. If you select yes, it will use your current default location. Now you have two search options –

1) type in any local query, such as Dentists or
2) type in Dentists, Location if you want to search outside of your location.

Next you will be presented with the local results. Note: yahoo did a great job of detecting local intent queries, meaning, that in the above example for Dentists – the local results are at the top of the page, whereas if you searches for Britney Spears, you would not see any local results provided by YellowPages.ca.

At the search results level you have 3 options. First option is to click on the company name to get more details (see screenshot below), second option is to call the business directly or third option is to see more results.

If you select the first option you are automatically redirected to mobile.yp.ca (which is the mobile enhanced version of yellowpages.ca) where all the content, ad, video, pictures, maps, etc. are mobile optimized.

So what do you think of this integration?

Although I can’t share specific numbers, I often like to ask people’s opinions as to what integrations they like or dislike. Many times the correlation between what people perceive as the best type of integration is consistent with the performance of an integration. Other times, what people believe is the best integration may not be the one that produces the best numbers.

So for today’s poll, I have 3 integrations of YellowPages.ca on major players in Canada, CBC.ca, GlobeandMail.com and TheWeatherNetwork.com. My question, which integration do you prefer?

The poll is located below the examples with the associated links.

CBC.ca on the My Region Page

Contained within CBC.ca is a section called MY REGION. This is an aggregated view of all the news, weather and information about your particular market. At the bottom of each of the MY REGION pages is a “What’s Nearby” section. If a user types in a search query, they are redirected to the “What’s Nearby” page on CBC (powered by YellowAPI.com) or if they click on any of the hotlinks, they are redirected to YellowPages.ca.

Check out the Montreal My Region to play with it yourself. Here is a snapshot of the integration:

Globe and Mail

For the Globe and Mail there are 2 integrations. One integration is part of their main search navigation, options there for Globe users include search for NEWS, QUOTE (this is stock quote), WEB, BUSINESS (this is yellowpages.ca) and PEOPLE (this is canada411.ca). The second integration is located on their content pages, on the right hand side, where a user has access to mini-search brick that contains, BUSINESS, PEOPLE and DEAL search.

To see a working example, check out the REPORT on BUSINESS Section on Globe and Mail to test both of the integrations above. I have also included a screenshot.

NOTE: there is also a mobile integration on the Globe and Mail iPhone Application, you can see screenshots here.

The Weather Network

Contained on every city page on TheWeatherNetwork.com is a YellowPages.ca search with links to popular categories. Of course everything is geographically relevant to the user so all clicks go to the appropriate place. The brick is located towards the bottom of the page under long-term forecast.

You can see a working example on the Toronto Weather page details. Here is a screenshot.

Now to the poll question, which integration of YellowPages.ca do you prefer?

Out of this group 9 of these properties existed back in 2001. Facebook was the only one that did not exist, so for Facebook, we go back to 2006.

Here is the visual of Canada’s Top 10 Web Properties from 10-years ago:

MSN

Google

Facebook – Note 2006 is the first image

Yahoo

Wikipedia

eBay

Ask

Sympatico

Apple

YellowPages.ca

Finally, some very popular Canadian websites that are due an honorable mention:

Canada.com

AutoTrader.ca

The Weather Network

Images are screencaps taken from WayBack Machine.

I recently did a post, December 2, titled, Groupon Twice the Size of Living Social in Canada … In Terms of Revenue which was on the heels of the post done by Mashable, By Traffic, Groupon Is Ten Times Bigger Than Its Nearest Competitor that compared the revenue up to November of these two players. As you can see from the graph below, both players were showing pretty good signs of growth.

However, now that December is behind us, how did Groupon and LivingSocial finish the year off in Canada? This graph pretty much says it all:

What the above does not include, at least for LivingSocial are two pieces of data – 1) is data from ESCAPES, their travel service and 2) LivingSocial, through their site does not breakdown multiple deals in terms of what % of people buy a larger valued deal segment. That said, even at 100% of users who may purchase the larger amount, this would only account for an additional 10%. Considering that December should be one of the best months, it is surprising to me to see LivingSocial stall like this.

DISCLAIMER: these are estimates based on tracking the URLs of these companies. They are not provided by either company.

2010 saw alot of new players entering the space. My current count is that there are 43 players in the group buying space in Canada. As reported today on the YIPIT blog, one of their predictions (2011 Daily Deal Predictions: Thousands of Sites, A Super Bowl Ad, Credit Cards and More) is that Groupon is going to face competition from existing publishers. Here is what they said:

Prediction: Existing Publishers will become Groupon’s biggest threat.
Verdict: Mostly true. Travelzoo, OpenTable and Yelp regularly outsell Groupon in their markets. Thrillist and DailyCandy look to be serious up and comers. Dozens of traditional print media companies have rolled out deal offerings, to varying degrees of success.
source: YIPIT

Players to watch in 2011 in the Canadian Group Buying Space:

Yellow Pages Group
- Under the RedFlagDeals and LesPac in Quebec market. Look for them to continue to expand their offering across the country. This is one player who could bring group buying to ever market in Canada.

TorStar
- Under the WAGJAG brand they are showing innovation in their approach and leveraging their strength inside the Ontario market. Outside of Toronto or the southern Ontario market, they don’t have nearly the strength

PostMedia
- Recently they launched SwarmJam and have presence in the major markets across Canada. If leveraged properly, PostMedia could have success in this space, but so far, results are mixed. Curious business model here as to whether PostMedia would have made more money selling ad space to the Deal of the Day providers as opposed to making the investment in the platform themselves – time will tell.

Kijiji
- although not considered a publisher (in the traditional sense) they are large enough to be included here as a player to watch. Launched under KijijiDeals.com (nice brand extension) so far they seem more like they are in testing mode as opposed to full blown launch. They have user reach, but without a sales force, they might be limited.

Outside of major publishers 2 other players that are getting some traction include DealFind.com (from the guys that brought you menupalace.com) and TeamBuy.ca. Both of these players have done decent jobs of expanding and filling deals across the county. In my view, the 2 biggest challenges they face – 1) they don’t have alternative revenue streams, although teambuy.ca is licensing its platform and dealfind still generated revenues from MenuPalace and they run a lean operation, and 2) their acquisition costs will continue to rise as more players come in, so remaining profitable will be a challenge.

All in all, this will be an exciting 2011 in the group buying space. At the end of the deal, the ultimate winner is the consumer.