Yellow Pages Group Canada, the leading YP in Canada, is going deep into social networking via the launch of answers.yellowpages.ca, a new Yelp-like service that relies on the wisdom of the community to ask questions, and provide recommendations and information about local services. All the information is portable to Facebook or Twitter, and can be embedded in user blogs.

The service has advertising from Google AdSense. It is the first implementation of the Praized Media social platform, a Montreal firm cofounded by Sebastien Provencher, a longtime YPG executive.

Soft-launched earlier this month, users have already received recommendations for restaurants, florists, dentists, mechanics, cosmetic surgeons, wedding photographers and DJs. Praized offers quick links to U.S. and Canadian businesses via access to both YPG and Localeze data.

My colleague Mike Boland has previously written about Praized.

Today R.H. Donnelley made an announcement that is unlikely to be much of a surprise. The company said it has

“filed voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware in order to consummate a balance sheet restructuring.”

Today’s announcement also says that RHD has worked out a deal with key creditors to reduce its debt by US$6.4 billion and eliminate about US$500 million in annual interest payments. RHD’s current total debt is about US$9 billion, so the announced deal significantly reduces the company’s leverage.

RHD follows Idearc Media, which announced its own bankruptcy back in March.

This is not surprising in part because of Idearc’s own bankruptcy as well as numerous reports in recent weeks that RHD was working with its creditor on ways to repair its balance sheet. Like Idearc, RHD’s underlying business, while troubled, still has a lot to offer, including the ability to generate cash, a large sales force and relationships with hundred of thousands of small-business advertisers. These are assets envied by media businesses with healthier balance sheets.

While bankruptcies are always painful, it appears to be the best way for both Idearc and RHD to get the fresh starts they need to build sustainable directional media businesses, something that was difficult to impossible with the debt loads the two companies are carrying. In the short run, this may seem like a black eye for the directory industry. In the longer run, it may turn out to be a positive.

The blogosphere and tech media have been abuzz over the past 24 hours about Google’s new communication platform, Wave. It’s essentially a new way to communicate online that Australian creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen (brought us Google Maps) position as e-mail and IM if they were invented today.

To sum it up, Wave is a way of organizing online conversations that mash up e-mail, IM, and Web search. There are neat features that bring these together and document the course and evolution of conversations in terms of what was said and who joined the thread (or wave). This will put a whole new face on group e-mails and social event planning.

In that way, there are local implications for Wave that enter the territory forged by Center’d (though Center’d has recently diversified its product — good move). Like many other areas Google enters, this could be good news (awareness) or bad news (competition) for Center’d or others that more or less “live” in this space, such as evite.

Much more to be said … in due time.

Two very different takes on local news were in evidence at The WSJ’s D7 conference in Carlsbad, California, today, as Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post and Katharine Weymouth of The Washington Post were interviewed by former Post reporter Kara Swisher about their respective directions.

Since the November election, Huffington noted that the Huffington Post has gone deep into vertical coverage, and now only gets 50 percent of its usage from political news. One of those vertical areas, of course, is the new local Web site in Chicago, which will be joined next week by a New York City site.

The local sites are run with a small skeleton crew and rely on local blogs and media outlets for much of their coverage. Huffington hopes to firm up some formal partnerships with the sites in the future, specifically citing the nonprofit Voice of San Diego as the kind of site to which a HuffPo partnership could bring revenues and traffic.

She also expects to ramp up more unique coverage. There were vague indications that a good portion of the $25 million Huffington has raised from venture capital will be used to expand the local sites and for investigative journalism.

Weymouth, who is the niece of Donald Graham and became publisher last year, said she is working to “reorient The Washington Post for the Internet Age” by expanding online video and other features.

She also noted that the paper’s readership has been greatly extended by the Web, with 10 million unique visitors a month. The paper’s daily circulation is less than a million. But 90 percent of the Web traffic is from out of town.

Microsoft made the expected announcement at The Wall Street Journal’s “D” conference today that it will launch a new search brand next week called Bing. Labeled as a “Decision Engine” (jargon alert), it has a dizzying array of new features aimed at redefining the way we search and improving the current state of the art (read: Google).

Bing will focus on four key vertical areas: making purchase decisions, planning trips, researching health conditions and finding local businesses. The explicit focus on local here does differentiate the engine and obviously make it interesting to us.

In general, Microsoft seems to be on a local push with products over the past few years like Live Local (Live Maps) and Virtual Earth 3D. More recently, it has been ramping up its local team and having conversations with newspapers. These include current Yahoo! Newspaper consortium publishers to which it could offer looser terms, according to my colleague Peter Krasilovsky.

It also has a neat local feature that offers blended or “universal” search results within a local search. A search for a city returns an array of weather, events, sports and local video. Now all it has to do is train users to search for cities (not sure how many users are doing this today).

Other features include video search that displays thumbnails (this is similar to Blinkx.tv for those familiar). It also boasts a five-day forecast instead of a single day, which Google has in its blended search results and iGoogle (to this I say “big deal”).

In addition, it will include an answers feature known as Best Match, a site scraping and summary tool called Deep Links, and a mouse-over feature that provides caption info about sites. The rest of the features can be seen in the press release, but many of them are branding. Virtual Earth will now be Bing Maps for Enterprise and Cashback will now be Bing Cashback.

Do We Need Another Search Engine?

Over the past 10 years, Microsoft has had a way of launching products that are arguably necessary (Vista, MS Office versions, etc.) and flirt with the boundaries of the “if it ain’t broke” question.

This is especially true in the world of search, where it has found itself in the unfamiliar position of not being dominant. With many product releases, one gets the sense that it is either trying to differentiate itself from the search mold as we know it (i.e., Google), or that it’s grasping at straws. It’s probably the former.

For example: Cashback, Search & Give, and the Windows Live home page redesign.

Search has been a particularly important stake for Microsoft during all this, given the market’s migration from desktop software to online services and content that resides “in the cloud.” The latter is one of the core tenets of what has become the amorphous and overused term “Web 2.0.”

Some of Microsoft’s search products have been critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful, such as Live Local (bird’s eye) and Virtual Earth 3D (ahead of its time in my opinion). Where Bing falls is simply a matter of how it’s accepted.

To Microsoft’s credit, it’s an uphill battle to create something that is good enough to break users’ addiction to Google. Among all the activities online, search is one of the most habitual, which bodes well for Google and its 63 percent market share.

Taking Shots

Though it wasn’t explicated, of course Bing is a direct shot at Google. Google Cofounder Sergey Brin couldn’t let the moment pass at yesterday’s I/O conference to comment (albeit diplomatically) about Bing.

Steve Ballmer, meanwhile, made a few of his own comments today. In an apparent shot at Google for its recently publicized (and overblown) criticisms for aggregating and profiting from news content on Google News, he claims Bing could go a different direction. This could go beyond the role of simply a search engine to actually form content deals.

“We’re not trying to get in the way of copyright holders,” he said. “If value should be redivided somehow between content providers, advertisers and search engines, let’s have that conversation. … We’re not trying to profit off of anyone else’s work.”

Today Telmetrics released data showing that combining a URL displayed within a print Yellow Pages ad increased the overall leads driven by print Yellow Pages by 78 percent. On average, the company reports, URL visits represented 44 percent of leads while calls generated 56 percent of leads. The data highlight the new extended offering Telmetrics now provides to traditional media players in which it incorporates URL tracking with its standard call measurement solutions.

The data were collected from November 2008 to April 2009 among 1,200 unique advertisers in a variety of headings and market sizes in both the U.S. and Canada. Telmetrics President Bill Dinan told me that the percentage of calls vs. clicks was pretty consistent in both large and small markets, but there were some differences by headings. Service categories, for instance, were much more likely to have a higher percentage of phone calls than clicks. Meanwhile, auto headings such as tires and car dealers had many more clicks. One can assume that car purchases and larger ticket items are likely to require a higher spend and more research, hence, more leads via clicks than calls.

Another interesting data point is that unique URLs had a higher conversion rate than domains that essentially are landing pages from a publisher’s Web site — for instance, iyppublisher.com/joespizza. Dinan said that in interviews, consumers seemed a bit suspicious of the latter mentioned URL and typically preferred the simplified direct domain. Just as the phone numbers are unique for the call tracking program, the URLs are unique to the URL tracking program and all URLs resolve back to the advertisers main phone line or Web site. The incremental cost for adding URL tracking, Dinan said, is nominal and the biggest cost factor is acquiring the URL.

Perhaps what’s most interesting about these data is that they give some real insight into how consumers are using and combining local media to make shopping decisions. Telmetrics data confirm the variety of data in the marketplace, including data from The Kelsey Group’s User View research, that show that many consumers still use traditional media as a starting point and that print and online media are complementary.

Liberty Media head John Malone, the man who conceptualized the “500 channel” universe and led the cable TV revolution in the 1980s, told an audience at The WSJ’s D7 conference in Carlsbad, California, that he sees the need for local news and local advertising, but doesn’t clearly know how to create a successful local product.

”What’s the role of localism?” Malone asked, according to a transcript of his interview.  “Will all advertising go national? Will all content go national? I really don’t have an answer.”

Malone added that “Barry Diller has been trying to build out Citysearch for a long time, and it’s a real struggle for him. He’s about break-even on it.”

Malone, who has been a major investor in IAC, and recently tried to wrestle control of the company away from Diller, emphasized that he didn’t want to provide any inside information about Citysearch. “I don’t want to give away any secrets,” he said.

Conjuring up Twitter’s business model takes a lot of imagination. But founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s D conference in Carlsbad, California, said the name of the game will be “enhanced capabilities” aimed at small- business and professional users — something supported by a WSJ poll showing that 24 percent of Twitter users would pay for it.

“Twitter is information dissemination,” said Williams, on video from the conference. Small businesses use it to connect to their customers and build relationships. Commercial users use it for customer support and marketing communications.

One capability that is being discussed is to show “who is behind the Twitter account,” Williams noted. “Maybe that is something we reveal. Authenticity is important on organizational accounts.”

Williams added that the 45-person company is focused on three things going forward: scaling, beefing up the value proposition, and making it easier to “get at tons and tons of information. We disseminate information and build relationships continually,” he summarized. “Everyone has a use for one or both of these things.”

CBS Outdoor announced that it will offer its advertisers the capability to add SMS calls to action to their outdoor campaigns.

According to the release:

The program, called txt2go, will include a text keyword on advertiser signage that the public can use to access marketing messages from the client, including special offers and promotions. The interactive feature enhances an advertiser’s ability to connect with prospects and deliver messages with more relevance and a measurable ROI, in addition to building a long-term database of interested consumers.

Last week at the Winning Media Strategies conference, Sam Matheny, GM of CBS-owned News Over Wireless, discussed how mobile calls to action are a natural extension to lots of traditional media, including out of home. This is particularly true with digital out of home outlets such as coffee shops or public transit, where there is a captive audience and a higher degree of demographic targeting possible.

Most of the discussion around mobile at WMS related to the opportunities to deliver broadcast content to the mobile device. This opportunity has lots of important implications for broadcasters and the current barriers are mostly regulatory, licensing and technological. Embedded chips are required, for example, for mobile devices to receive a radio broadcast signal.

But beyond delivering broadcast content, the mobile opportunity for broadcasters will involve more mobile tie-ins to existing advertising — akin to what CBS Outdoor is announcing. Generally, SMS can be a way for lots of traditional media (especially broadcast, print, and outdoor) to extend advertiser relationships with consumers.

This can involve promotions, games, or opt-in alerts for future events (sales, movie releases, happy hours, etc.). Not only does it give users different ways to interact with advertisers beyond the initial impression, but it does so in a more trackable way than traditionally possible with the core medium. This could resonate in the current economic environment when advertisers are more closely examining ROI.

So for broadcasters, it can be viewed in one of two ways. 1: a retention tool — a value add for advertisers to get a more measurable component to impression-based campaigns. 2: In higher value lead categories (and in better economic conditions), it can be an additional source of ad revenue that is delivered and valued on a per lead or CPA basis.

CBS Outdoor is pricing it more toward the latter option:

txt2go is a simplified process whereby an advertiser of virtually any size can add a text messaging code to his ad campaign. Designed to enhance not only the outdoor component, the text capability can exist across all of the advertisers’ media outlets — overlaying a measurable direct response element to the campaign In addition to simplifying the process, CBS Outdoor txt2go is very cost-friendly, as little as $225 for up to 500 responses. Clients will be able to see the real time performance of their campaign on the CBS Outdoor Mobile Website. It takes only a few days to have the client’s campaign up and running.

HipCricket, whose CEO Ivan Braiker presented at WMS, has been integrating mobile to broadcast ad campaigns for a few years and is well positioned for an uptick in mobile interest (see case study). NearbyNow is another example of bolting together traditional media and mobile: Readers of the shopping-centric Lucky magazine can find in-stock items through its iPhone app (powered by NearbyNow).

Expect to see many more integrations of traditional media and mobile.

Thought your online searching habits had settled into a predictable routine? Well, think again. We’re on the verge of another big upheaval in search technology and options.

Item: Google has put its new browser, Chrome, on the fast track to commercialization (officially out of beta this month). Among other things, Chrome is designed to run JavaScript applications super efficiently — to facilitate more functional, interactive and even animated Web sites.

Item: Other browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera) have recently upgraded their offerings to be more functionally robust, for example, making it easy to open and manipulate multiple windows simultaneously, autofill forms, etc. Microsoft is about to launch its new browser “Bing” with a huge ad campaign.

Item: The newest entry, Wolfram Alpha is a “computational knowledge engine,” rather than a “search engine.” Instead of providing links to other sites, as a traditional search engine does, Wolfram Alpha collects facts from the Web, performs calculations or operations on them, and returns the results to the user. It is designed for answering questions, rather than locating resources. (In very general terms, this is also the objective of Ask.com.)

Item: All search engines are wrestling with the challenge posed by social networks. Specifically, there is increasingly valuable and relevant content being exchanged on these networks (e.g., product reviews) that for the most part, is not yet crawled or cataloged by traditional search engines.

The meaning of all this for SMBs:

The next generation of search engines (and the like) will be better able to target LOCAL businesses and activities. A wider variety of content will be presented in search results — yet it will be more relevant. Research and comparisons, for shopping purposes, will be easier and more robust. SEM will become even more important, and arguably, challenging. All the more reason for SMBs to build their online skills now, to be ready for the next wave.