AT&T's business directory reentered the online market Thursday with the launch of its new Web site, complete with geo-location targeting, social services through Facebook and partnerships all with the aim of turning the portal into a community.The focus remains on local businesses and partners. The homepage, stamped with the new "YP" brand and tagline "Click Less. Live More," highlights YP's goal to help consumers easily discover ways to live locally. Data supports the service. Search algorithms and personalization bring the site up to date. The rewritten search technology running in the background identifies the term "restaurant" and location when someone does a query for local places to eat in Los Angeles, for example. Depending on the location of the query, the engine will determine how far the person might want to travel before arriving at their destination. The query takes into consideration ratings, hours of operations, credit card options and more. YP.com launched a mobile app, too. Although preinstalled on about 40 million mobile phones, consumers also can download YP.com Mobile for iPhone, Android, Palm Pre or BlackBerry through online app stores. That's the beauty of being an AT&T subsidiary, boosts Greg Isaacs, VP of product at AT&T Interactive, a wholly owned AT&T subsidiary nearing $1 billion in annual local ad revenue. "We're on a pretty aggressive schedule to continually release new features," he says. The site has been visually redesigned with pleasing graphics that pop, sophisticated one-click search functions and social features, but getting people to come back to a revamped dinosaur may take some work. Isaacs says the team has worked hard on the site's URL structure, perfecting canonicals to rank higher in search engines on sites run by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Yellowpages.com, prior to today's YP.com rebranding, counted 36 million monthly unique visitors to its Web site, but this redesign could catapult that number to so much more. Tighter search options, new partnerships, and social features have been added. YP.com highlights events through geographic location; search functions allow consumers to search by the star ratings, distance, neighborhood, category and more; and Facebook friends can share information found on the directory site. Those on Twitter also can share information to followers. While AT&T has supported local search for more than 100 years with the AT&T Real Yellow Pages, what the company calls "the first search engine," it's only now when Internet giants, along with startups, heavily invest in reaching local consumers. Kelsey Group projects U.S. local online ad spends will triple to $36 billion during the next four years. More than 30 companies like Localeze and City Search send data daily to update information on business listings. YP verified the data by calling the phone number of the businesses. An employee needs to type in a four-digit code to change the information on the site. Several other companies support features on the site. AT&T partners with Fandango for movie tickets, Open Table for restaurants, Hotel.com for hotels, Zvents for events, and Vast for automotive. The site also partners with Microsoft Bing to support the mapping feature, and Everyscape to provide an inside 360-degree 3D photorealistic view of businesses. YP.com will offer the service as a video advertisement for businesses willing to fork out the dough.
Marketing is ubiquitous but not for constituent compounds that make your cell phone buttons soft, your sweater stretch or your office chair just firm enough to discourage sleep. Try counting on one hand the number of molecules that have gotten a brand campaign. Kevlar and Lycra don't count. Industrial giant Cargill's polyols unit is hoping to create consumer recognition and maybe even a little excitement about a component of foam. Not shaving foam, which at least has the benefit of being sexy (judging from the ad clichés), but the soft spongy stuff in your bed, chairs, cushions and couches. One thing Cargill does have going for it is a sustainability message, which in the post-Gulf spill era will count. That's because foam has, until recently, been made with chemicals that are synthesized entirely from fractions of crude oil. Minneapolis-based Cargill's five-year-old BiOH Polyols division makes one of the two components of foam, but from soy, not crude. The company is hoping to get its sustainability message out and also get its own brand name into the minds of consumers with a crowd-sourced social-media contest starting in September. Project UDesign, a collaboration with Century Furniture, Toray's Ultrasuede and Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) developed by The Kaleidoscope Partnership, a Minneapolis-based social media agency, comprises a contest in which a handful of SCAD students enter their designs for sustainable wing chairs. The 25 initial entries will be winnowed to nine finalists by a panel of expert judges, and then a crowd-sourcing element commences. During the summer, the company has posted updates and videos of the students on Experiencebioh.com and on the BiOH YouTube channel. On Sept. 8 six final designs will be posted to BiOH's Facebook page. Consumers have a month to vote for their favorites with three finalists to be announced in October. The final voting after that will happen on Facebook on Oct. 4 and Oct. 20, or in Century Furniture's showrooms. Century will run a Tweetup on Oct. 18, wherein the three SCAD finalists will do a live tweet. The winning chair will be produced by Century Furniture with royalties going to the winning student. In the process, Cargill will use the platform to talk about sustainability, and BiOH's role in foam manufacturer. Leslie Carothers, CEO of Kaleidoscope, says the program is a first-ever such event for the furniture industry. Carothers says that while manufacturers of furniture and bedding foam have their own branding for foam that contains soy-based polyols, BiOH wants to raise awareness first that foam is from crude oil, but that it doesn't have to be entirely crude-based, and it wants to preserve is brand equity so that consumers ultimately think of BiOH when they go looking for sustainable furniture. "The truth is, BiOH wants to protect its market share. We want consumers to demand BiOH but we are also trying to straighten out the differences. Branding BiOH is what we are paid to do but if consumers get that BiOH is a company educating them about sustainability, that's great. On my own Twitter feed, I'm explaining that really latex -- from rubber trees -- is the only really green option." She says while there's an inherent challenge to getting people to care or talk about something as un-sexy as soy polyols, the efforts have garnered results. "There have been some 1,962 blogs about it so far," she says. Nicole Nachazel, assistant marketing manager for BiOH, says the bottom line is that every million pounds of BiOH Polyols used in foam manufacture saves 84,000 barrels of crude. That doesn't make it green, notes Nachazel, but it does make it better than the alternative. She says the company's primary focus will remain social and traditional PR. She says that consumer voting starts Sept. 3 and that, based on results, the company may do another such program. "We are looking at new and original ways of crowd-sourcing, traditional and pr, to get the word out about BiOH."
AT&T's business directory reentered the online market Thursday with the launch of its new Web site, complete with geo-location targeting, social services through Facebook and partnerships all with the aim of turning the portal into a community.The focus remains on local businesses and partners. The homepage, stamped with the new "YP" brand and tagline "Click Less. Live More," highlights YP's goal to help consumers easily discover ways to live locally. Data supports the service. Search algorithms and personalization bring the site up to date. The rewritten search technology running in the background identifies the term "restaurant" and location when someone does a query for local places to eat in Los Angeles, for example. Depending on the location of the query, the engine will determine how far the person might want to travel before arriving at their destination. The query takes into consideration ratings, hours of operations, credit card options and more. YP.com launched a mobile app, too. Although preinstalled on about 40 million mobile phones, consumers also can download YP.com Mobile for iPhone, Android, Palm Pre or BlackBerry through online app stores. That's the beauty of being an AT&T subsidiary, boosts Greg Isaacs, VP of product at AT&T Interactive, a wholly owned AT&T subsidiary nearing $1 billion in annual local ad revenue. "We're on a pretty aggressive schedule to continually release new features," he says. The site has been visually redesigned with pleasing graphics that pop, sophisticated one-click search functions and social features, but getting people to come back to a revamped dinosaur may take some work. Isaacs says the team has worked hard on the site's URL structure, perfecting canonicals to rank higher in search engines on sites run by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Yellowpages.com, prior to today's YP.com rebranding, counted 36 million monthly unique visitors to its Web site, but this redesign could catapult that number to so much more. Tighter search options, new partnerships, and social features have been added. YP.com highlights events through geographic location; search functions allow consumers to search by the star ratings, distance, neighborhood, category and more; and Facebook friends can share information found on the directory site. Those on Twitter also can share information to followers. While AT&T has supported local search for more than 100 years with the AT&T Real Yellow Pages, what the company calls "the first search engine," it's only now when Internet giants, along with startups, heavily invest in reaching local consumers. Kelsey Group projects U.S. local online ad spends will triple to $36 billion during the next four years. More than 30 companies like Localeze and City Search send data daily to update information on business listings. YP verified the data by calling the phone number of the businesses. An employee needs to type in a four-digit code to change the information on the site. Several other companies support features on the site. AT&T partners with Fandango for movie tickets, Open Table for restaurants, Hotel.com for hotels, Zvents for events, and Vast for automotive. The site also partners with Microsoft Bing to support the mapping feature, and Everyscape to provide an inside 360-degree 3D photorealistic view of businesses. YP.com will offer the service as a video advertisement for businesses willing to fork out the dough.
You've joined the conversation. Now what? It's time to start fueling it. We got a unique glimpse into fueling conversation yesterday when Groupon launched its first-ever nationwide deal to the Gap and created a buying frenzy by offering a $50 gift card for $25. At the peak of the day, the site was selling 10 Groupons per second and having trouble keeping up with the traffic. Last month, it was the Old Spice Guy. The highly interactive YouTube video campaign drew audiences in not only because the content was clever, but also because we were all in awe that it was being published in near-real time without sacrificing quality. On the surface, these two examples look nothing alike. One was purely branding, while the other was purely promotional. Old Spice was delivered through video on YouTube. Groupon was delivered through email. But dig deeper and we see that while neither was initiated through Facebook or Twitter, these channels played a critical role in both cases. Old Spice drove awareness through Facebook and Twitter as the Old Spice Guy responded directly to what consumers (and a few celebrities) were posting and Tweeting about him. Groupon's emails are sent to customers based on the time zone they live in so that subscribers will get them all early in the morning, but not too early. Evidence of the social media effect on the campaign was clear when consumers on the West Coast started posting questions online asking why they hadn't received their email yet. They couldn't wait after seeing the deal being shared by people on the East Coast. These examples show us something critical for the modern marketer: social media is about content, not platforms. Facebook has made it easy for consumers to stop brand messages from hitting their walls by allowing users to "remove" it (BTW, I believe this is a good thing). Twitter can be chaotic and consumers may miss your "perfect tweet." Delivering content and messages to your consumers through these channels is only going to get more difficult as Gen Y ages. But great content draws consumers in. They will re-distribute, remix, and engage with it through social networks as they see fit. Consumers drive your success in social media. Brands direct their destiny through content. The Content Challenge Marketing seems to go in cycles, where we bounce back and forth between which is more important. Left-brain marketing focused on analytics, segmentation, etc? Or right-brain marketing, focused on creative? They're both needed. Creative pulls people into your message. Creative gets people talking. But the same creative doesn't appeal to everyone. For example, we recently released the Social Profile Interactive Tool, which provides information on how consumers' personal interests and motivations drive which channels they use, what types of content they create, and which types of content they consume. Among Gen Y consumers, we identified two groups with that use Facebook and Twitter about the same amount. "Enthusiasts" go online in search of information that supports their offline hobbies and interests such as food, sports, travel, music, etc. "Deal Seekers" go online in search of freebies, discounts, and coupons. Each uses Facebook and Twitter about the same amount, but their social media activities beyond these networks differ. Deal Seekers are more likely to spend time in coupon forums and telling others about the great deals they have found. Enthusiasts are more likely to be reading and writing blogs or watching online video about their favorite topic. Deal Seekers drove Groupon's success, while Enthusiasts fueled the Old Spice Guy's rise to fame. The challenge facing us hit home the other day, talking about a client struggling to generate relevant creative across its client base. They know the key criterion for segmentation, they have the tools in place to deliver creative to these segments, they just can't figure out how to get relevant content produced on a regular basis without driving production costs through the roof. Consumers know that brands can develop interesting content suited to their personal interests if they make the investment. Gen Y consumers expect this more than others before them. Both Groupon and the Old Spice Guy serve as examples of what it takes to make relevant content creation possible. Setting the Gap promotion aside, Groupon's daily success is based on delivering highly tailored offers to markets across the country. It has a huge editorial staff dedicated to making this happen. It also took a large team to pull off the Old Spice Guy campaign. Regardless of what social media tools consumers are using, our real job is to give them something worth talking about, which leads me to believe we'll all have plenty of work to do for years to come.
I interrupt the usual stream of tweets, status updates and check-ins to say a thing or two about the brand new geo-location tool Facebook Places, which, if you think about it, actually conflates all three. (Or it could, if I could just get access to it in this, its first morning of existence.) But, though I feel handicapped by not being able to play with it this morning, here's what excites me about Facebook Places: it will finally let us all get a handle on how important -- or maybe even unimportant -- geo-location is. While many of the rest of you natter on and on about the features it has, whether people actually use Facebook Places, and how they use it, is all that will really matter in the end. As readers of this column know, I am not entirely on board with geo-location. Part of it is that I don't go much of anywhere, but part of it is there are a lot of people who find checking in to be too much information. At least, up until this point. Ask yourself, social media intelligentsia, if you were lawyers instead of digital media specialists, would you even know what Foursquare is? And if you did, how much time would you really spend playing around with it? Is telling lot of people where you are a normal human behavior that has just been waiting for technology to enable it? Or isn't it? One thing is for sure: with Facebook in the game, the entire game changes. It's like going from playing checkers to playing Chinese checkers; it takes a fairly limited game and blows it out into one with entirely new dimensions - reaching all the way to a place where, theoretically, 500 million people could start checking in, or at least be exposed to that behavior. (By comparison, Foursquare is at about two million-plus users right now.) Though I don't use Foursquare much, Facebook Places actually piques my interest. Why? Because it will let me, as a social media columnist, get in on the next great social experiment of figuring out whether this will become a real phenomenon. I don't really learn much about checking in as a new human behavior when it's occurring within my Twitter posse. Most of you are somehow involved in social media and marketing; therefore, check-ins are an accepted part of our communal feedback loop. But if I start doing this within Facebook, I start exposing the activity to friends from college and high school, and the mothers I share carpooling duty with. There's very little overlap between those people and most of you. I know what some of you are saying -- it's long been possible to post check-ins from dedicated geo-location services to other social networks with more users. Some exposure has already been happening. But once this starts being a Facebook-centric activity, it becomes easier for those exposed to the behavior to try it. That fact is game-changing. Now that Facebook Places exists, geo-location either goes viral. Or it doesn't. Facebook, the largest focus group the world has ever known, will let us know the answer.
Marketing is ubiquitous but not for constituent compounds that make your cell phone buttons soft, your sweater stretch or your office chair just firm enough to discourage sleep. Try counting on one hand the number of molecules that have gotten a brand campaign. Kevlar and Lycra don't count. Industrial giant Cargill's polyols unit is hoping to create consumer recognition and maybe even a little excitement about a component of foam. Not shaving foam, which at least has the benefit of being sexy (judging from the ad clichés), but the soft spongy stuff in your bed, chairs, cushions and couches. One thing Cargill does have going for it is a sustainability message, which in the post-Gulf spill era will count. That's because foam has, until recently, been made with chemicals that are synthesized entirely from fractions of crude oil. Minneapolis-based Cargill's five-year-old BiOH Polyols division makes one of the two components of foam, but from soy, not crude. The company is hoping to get its sustainability message out and also get its own brand name into the minds of consumers with a crowd-sourced social-media contest starting in September. Project UDesign, a collaboration with Century Furniture, Toray's Ultrasuede and Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) developed by The Kaleidoscope Partnership, a Minneapolis-based social media agency, comprises a contest in which a handful of SCAD students enter their designs for sustainable wing chairs. The 25 initial entries will be winnowed to nine finalists by a panel of expert judges, and then a crowd-sourcing element commences. During the summer, the company has posted updates and videos of the students on Experiencebioh.com and on the BiOH YouTube channel. On Sept. 8 six final designs will be posted to BiOH's Facebook page. Consumers have a month to vote for their favorites with three finalists to be announced in October. The final voting after that will happen on Facebook on Oct. 4 and Oct. 20, or in Century Furniture's showrooms. Century will run a Tweetup on Oct. 18, wherein the three SCAD finalists will do a live tweet. The winning chair will be produced by Century Furniture with royalties going to the winning student. In the process, Cargill will use the platform to talk about sustainability, and BiOH's role in foam manufacturer. Leslie Carothers, CEO of Kaleidoscope, says the program is a first-ever such event for the furniture industry. Carothers says that while manufacturers of furniture and bedding foam have their own branding for foam that contains soy-based polyols, BiOH wants to raise awareness first that foam is from crude oil, but that it doesn't have to be entirely crude-based, and it wants to preserve is brand equity so that consumers ultimately think of BiOH when they go looking for sustainable furniture. "The truth is, BiOH wants to protect its market share. We want consumers to demand BiOH but we are also trying to straighten out the differences. Branding BiOH is what we are paid to do but if consumers get that BiOH is a company educating them about sustainability, that's great. On my own Twitter feed, I'm explaining that really latex -- from rubber trees -- is the only really green option." She says while there's an inherent challenge to getting people to care or talk about something as un-sexy as soy polyols, the efforts have garnered results. "There have been some 1,962 blogs about it so far," she says. Nicole Nachazel, assistant marketing manager for BiOH, says the bottom line is that every million pounds of BiOH Polyols used in foam manufacture saves 84,000 barrels of crude. That doesn't make it green, notes Nachazel, but it does make it better than the alternative. She says the company's primary focus will remain social and traditional PR. She says that consumer voting starts Sept. 3 and that, based on results, the company may do another such program. "We are looking at new and original ways of crowd-sourcing, traditional and pr, to get the word out about BiOH."