Dex One Chief Strategy Officer David Sharman shared with us today some of the key challenges the longtime traditional directory publisher is facing as it evolves its business into the digital world. The primary challenge that he sees in the space is the overwhelming choice and complexity of marketing options for the local business.
Specifically for …

Nir Lempert, CEO of Israel-based Golden Pages, discussed his company’s transformation from print to a vertically focused media player. The key to transforming, Lempert said, has been about empowering consumers. And thus the advertisers and revenues have followed.
In 2004 91 percent of Golden Pages’ revenues were from print products and just 9 percent …

Only 1.25 percent of the 240 million websites online are mobile friendly. That statistic kicked off the DMS ’11 Mobile Tools for SMBs panel. Provided by DudaMobile, the company’s CEO and cofounder, Itai Sadan, looks at the statistic and sees a huge opportunity in building mobile websites.
In particular, he sees opportunity in converting clicks to …

Capping off the first day of DMS ’11 and the Performance Media SuperForum was a one-on-one session with David Read, director of Pay for Performance of AT&T Advertising Solutions, and BIA/Kelsey moderator Charles Laughlin. Read talked specifically about how AT&T has integrated pay-per-call into the local sales channel. While it has been successful, Read said …

Steve Marshall moderated an ILM East panel today that focused on the local retail space with panelists that included Jack Abraham, CEO of Milo.com (eBay); David Courtney, CEO of JWire; and Tyler Bosemy, vice president, products of PaperG.
Milo’s goal is to work with businesses to bring their product inventory online. Abraham reports that roughly 40 …

As is usual when we have SMBs on stage, our SMB advertiser panel was one of the highlights of the first day of ILM East. The local Boston area businesses provided attendees with the down-low on what’s working and what’s not working quite as well in local media choices. With the assistance of AT&T Interactive …

Panelists on the Home and Trade Revolution panel this afternoon echoed the sentiments BIA/Kelsey CEO Neal Polachek expressed during his opening presentation yesterday about the importance of trust. Increasingly, this level of trust is achieved through the process of service provider or SMB verification. In other words, the small business is what it says it …

In the second half of the mobile local SuperForm run by BIA/Kelsey’s own Mike Boland, the ILM:10 audience got to hear some key messages and metrics from leaders in the mobile local space including Where, xAD, Verve Wireless and Chitika.
Let’s get straight to some of the metrics and sound bytes from the session…
Dipanshu “D” …

Community is key to building self-serve and upsell opportunities, believes MerchantCircle’s Darren Waddell. Waddell along with Agendize’s Alexandre Rambaud spoke on the “Self-Service — It’s Closer Than You Think” panel at the DMS ‘10 conference yesterday.
MerchantCircle works with 1.3 million businesses (half of which use it for their Web presence), and self-serve is at …

The reputation management space will be yet another hot topic at DMS ’10 next week. It’s garnered a lot of press and new competitors in the past year, and as BIA/Kelsey anticipates this area to grow to roughly $3.1B in revenues by 2013, it warrants the attention.
The conference will kick off on Tuesday, Sept. 14, …

With just a few days remaining before the start of our DMS ’10 conference in Dallas, we wanted to preview a couple of hot topics that will likely receive a lot of buzz at the show. I will be co-moderating a session on Leads-Based Selling, about as hot a topic as there is in the …

In a general session at YPA 2010 this morning, BIA/Kelsey’s Charles Laughlin moderated an advertiser panel that featured two advertisers as well as two publisher representatives. The advertiser representatives were local Las Vegas personal injury attorney, George Bochanis, and Shannon Rodman, Director, YPMG Marketing Operations at ServiceMaster. Publisher representatives were Chris Heilbock, regional vice president …

BIA/Kelsey’s Charles Laughlin moderated a fascinating panel this morning featuring four CEOs from the interactive local media space. Laughlin was joined by Kimberli Lewis, CEO, Mediatel (Czech Republic); Scott Pomeroy, CEO of Berry, a Local Insight Media company; Mat Stover, CEO, Local Matters; and Bruce Akhurst, CEO, Sensis.
To kick off the panel, Laughlin presented some …

This morning at the Yellow Pages Association 2010 conference, association President Neg Norton presented a lifetime achievement award to John Kelsey, founder of The Kelsey Group, now BIA/Kelsey.
John founded The Kelsey Group in 1986 with his wife Pam Kelsey, a fixture at The Kelsey Group’s 80 industry conferences over the years. Norton and BIA/Kelsey President …

Yellow Pages Group Canada announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Canpages for an estimated C$225 million. In addition, YPG has secured a deal with ZipLocal to essentially combine its U.S.-based Your Community Phone Book property with ZipLocal.
“The acquisition of Canpages will accelerate our business transformation to the digital world,” Marc Tellier, chief executive …

ServiceMagic CEO Craig Smith started off his keynote address this morning stating that the current recession has been a good thing for the industry. His controversial point was that prior recessions have spawned innovation. “I think we’ll see more innovation in the next two years than we’ve seen in the last 10 years,” said Smith.
Smith …

Jon Brod, executive vice president of AOL Ventures, Local & Mapping, gave attendees at Marketplaces 2010 a glimpse into the direction that AOL is moving in its local strategy, specifically with Patch.com, MapQuest, its content management system Seed, its LocalFund investment arm, the relaunch of CitysBest and the forthcoming launch of Patch.org.

Earlier this year Brod …

Being in the local media space, each New Year I reflect on my buying habits of the past 12 months and how I found local businesses. This year I realized that I used a wider variety of media than in the past to find local service providers including the following: Angie’s List for a housecleaning …

Aaron Finn of AdReady and Michael Barr of iPromote discussed the opportunity to serve advertisers interested in display advertising particularly in the self-serve environment. Finn noted that there are roughly 1.4 million businesses participating in search whereas there are only 44,000 businesses participating in display. He believes that there is scale for display and that …

Andy Sims of Skype shed some light on its new partnership with European Directories in which European Directories sells advertisers in its seven European countries a subscriptions package to deliver calls to that advertiser. Anywhere the advertiser’s phone number shows up on the Web it will be highlighted in blue and will indicate that by …