AT&T Interactive has put up a beta version of its new Buzz.com site dedicated to eliciting positive social recommendations and answers to questions from friends, friends of friends and throughout the Buzz site (which, unfortunately, may get confused with Google Buzz, which was developed after AT&T had announced plans for Buzz.com.)

The site’s main purpose is to zero in on nontraditional categories that aren’t really met by Yellow Pages (such as “romantic hotels”). While no advertising is currently being sold, it will be sold in the future. There is currently no plan to integrate with the reviews that users provide Yellowpages.com, or its new prototype, YP.com. Buzz.com users will have a different intent in mind.

The beta hooks in with Facebook Connect, and will roll out over several weeks after initially being limited to invites only. Project leader Charlie Hornberger notes that Buzz will eventually also be enabled for Twitter, instant messaging platforms, Q&A sites (such as Answers.com), and other social networks as well. “Social search is the future, but not in 2010” he says. As with AlikeList, which we also wrote about this week, the positive nature of a recommendations-only site represents “extremely qualified leads.”

Hornberger notes that the user interface remains a work in progress for the project team, which has less than two-dozen people. Initially, for instance, the site was going to limit its big red heart for favorites to a single choice. It quickly found out that people want to have multiple favorites. The site also currently has a list of favorites for each user. But in the future, that list might take more creative forms, such as tag clouds.

The site will also eventually feature “best recommenders.” Future versions may also have some aspects in sentimental analysis and reputation and presence management. AT&T is investing in these areas. But Buzz.com is actually a fairly simple idea. It just needs strong execution. “You don’t need a Ph.D.” for it, says Hornberger. Current plans are to market it virally, with some advertising on social media likely as well.

AT&Ti Executive Director Greg Isaacs is a featured speaker on the New Directories Panel at Marketplaces 2010, along with execs from Local Matters, SuperMedia and MerchantCircle. r

AT&T released its full-year 2009 earnings today, and its Advertising Solutions unit, which includes print Yellow Pages and Yellowpages.com, posted total revenues of US$4.8 billion, a 12.6 percent decline.

AT&T online directories unit Yellowpages.com grew 12.7 percent in Q4, compared with Q3 growth of 20.7 percent. Total online revenues for the year were US$884 million, which accounts for about 18 percent of total Advertising Solutions revenues. This puts AT&T at the high end of North American publishers in terms of share of revenues from online.

Margins took a hit in 2009, not a surprise given the grim economic environment. BIA/Kelsey calculates the Advertising Solutions 2009 margin at 39.2 percent, compared with 45.5 percent in 2008.

One avenue that AT&T will pursue this year to shore up its position online — increasingly critical to restoring the business to growth — is the launch of social media site Buzz.com, currently in invitation-only “alpha” phase.

This article from Forbes yesterday outlines the new product — widely reported to be in the works for some time. Yellowpages.com President David Krantz is interviewed in the piece. While the site draws immediate comparisons to newly flush Yelp, there are some key differences, notably the choice of a “favorites” option over the use of full user-generated reviews.

Buzz.com will be a critical test case for how traditional directory publishers (a label AT&T Ad Solutions no doubt will increasingly resist) can pivot their approach to business into social media. Other directory publishers actively involved in social media include Eniro, European Directories and Truvo.

Saw this article today – more evidence that residential White Pages are verging on extinction.

AT&T has gotten the nod from Ohio’s utility regulators to eliminate White Pages from co-bound White/Yellow phone books. First, stand-alone residential White Pages books will go (many have already), then co-bound residential listings. White Pages, particularly residential White, is a cost center that very few people use anymore. It’s an easy decisions for telecoms and publishers.

The only barrier is utility commissions, which have in the past balked based on concerns for consumers who can’t look up listings online. But that resistance will fade over time. Before too long, expect residential White Pages to go the way of the IBM Selectric.

The risk to the Yellow Pages industry is that this trend will fuel the view that Yellow Pages is similarly obsolete and its distribution should also be curtailed. The two products are fundamentally different and have different levels of utility for consumers (print Yellow Pages has the higher value in case you were wondering), but the comparison is inevitable. The Yellow Pages Association offers its take on this question here.

Update: I got this article forwarded to me this morning. AT&T is also reviving its proposal to cut stand-alone residential White Pages delivery in several large markets in North Carolina. The company tried this two years ago, but was rebuffed by the local utility regulator.

Local Insight Media announced today that its subsidiary The Berry Co. (formerly an AT&T property) will expand its reseller agreement with AT&T’s Yellowpages.com. Under the new terms, the number of markets in which Berry reps will carry YPC in the sales bag grows from roughly 500 to 820, covering 34 states.

Berry reps will be authorized to sell the full YPC solution, including online video, and gather local content to populate the site. The Berry reps are in contact with roughly 300,000 local advertisers. The combination of Berry’s estimated (ballpark) 2,000 reps and the roughly 5,000 existing AT&T reps gives Yellowpages.com arguably the largest sales force of any Internet Yellow Pages site in the world.

From the press release:

“This expanded agreement creates opportunities to extend the value of YELLOWPAGES.COM to more local businesses in additional markets” said David Krantz, president and CEO of AT&T Interactive. “Collaboration like this allows The Berry Company to offer exposure through one of the industry’s most recognized local search brands, YELLOWPAGES.COM(TM) – and complements the coverage of AT&T’s existing and unparalleled 5,000 plus sales professionals.”

Interactive television once vied with the Internet (and dedicated online services) as the best conduit for interactive content. That fell by the wayside in the mid-1990s.

Today, ITV solutions are largely limited to simpler Internet-like apps like photo collections, Yellow Pages search, customized weather, real estate and auto search, games and electronic program guides. Almost all of it comes via cable TV and broadband video providers (like AT&T U-verse). There is very limited advertising support for these solutions.

Other interactive TV apps are still out there, however. As broadcasters consider their multi-channel futures, there’s been some pickup. This week, Atlanta-based Gray Communications, a 36-station group reaching 7 million homes, said it was launching a remote control driven “Clickable TV” service by Boston-based Backchannelmedia, which already serves 32 stations, including some Media General, Hearst-Argyle and LIN-TV outlets. The service initially launched field trials in May 2008.

Users of Clickable TV use their remotes to activate small “bugs,” or icons, located at the bottom of their TV screen. The icons indicate a “clickable moment” and send bookmarks of the content to users’ Web browsers.

The rub, of course, is it isn’t a fully interactive solution. Users need to access the content on their Web-enabled phone or PC. But it is a new channel for advertising. TV stations can sell advertising on a “per click” basis in addition to impression-based TV commercials. It also provides user data on viewer interaction. Is it more meaningful than flashing URLs? It might be.

In a significant move, AT&T Interactive and Idearc Media announced today that they will extend each other’s reach by allowing business profiles on one site to be distributed on the other.

Here is a quote from the press release:

“Cross distribution of advertisers across YELLOWPAGES.COM and SUPERPAGES.COM creates even greater value for each company’s advertisers,” said David Krantz, president and CEO of AT&T Interactive. “Ad networks and distribution are critical elements for digital advertising. Extending our local search ad network through this agreement helps us to connect advertisers with more consumers.”

We believe this deal is driven by the following expected benefits:

• The deal will help reduce the amount of excess traffic the two publishers are currently buying through existing distribution deals.
• The two can negotiate more effective traffic deals by working together.
• The agreement creates another incentive for advertisers to sign up — if they buy one site, they get access to traffic on the other.

The deal raises some intriguing questions. First, is this agreement the beginning of a deeper relationship between the two entities, such as a shared technology platform? Something of that order could make sense, particularly in a challenging financial environment. Another question is how this deal affects other players in the U.S. IYP arena, notably R.H. Donnelley, which could be left at a disadvantage in acquiring traffic now that AT&T and Idearc are cross-distributing their advertisers.

AT&T Interactive, the new division that’s behind the company’s popular YPMobile iPhone application, has added a voice search app to its roster. Called Speak4It, the application allows users to speak local search commands into the phone to receive map-based search results of nearby businesses.

The app currently doesn’t have much AT&T branding and could therefore be an experimental play that will be folded in as a value-added feature to the flagship YPMobile at some point in the future.

Right now it has standard iPhone features such as location awareness and tap to call, but it could also integrate more functionality such as social networking and saving listings to a personalized list. These are all features of YPMobile, suggesting again that there could be some form of integration between the two in the future (my speculation).

The application joins the handful of similar voice search apps launched recently for the iPhone including Google and Vlingo. We expect more to hit the market, as voice search was called out as a big area of upcoming product development in our recent year-end predictions.

Check out the screen shots below and get the app by clicking the following App Store icon (will launch iTunes).

AT&T Advertising Solutions has announced a partnership with Hispanic publisher Seccion Amarilla to sell Hispanic advertising into select Seccion Amarilla directories.

“AT&T is always focused on enhancing our directories to best serve our business and residential customers in the diverse communities we serve,” Carlos Salinas, executive director of strategy and business development at AT&T Advertising Solutions, said in the release. “This is one more way AT&T strives to connect people everywhere they live and work and do it better than anyone else.”

The agreement allows Seccion Amarilla to carry the AT&T logo on the directory covers in recognition of the partnership.

Earlier this month, The Kelsey Group release an Advisory (“Hispanic Directories a Small but Mighty Growth Segment for Print”) on the growth of the Hispanic directory segment, demonstrating the opportunities within the market. While many local media segments have suffered from decline, the Hispanic segment continues to show strong growth. TKG projects the Hispanic segment will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 5.9 percent to US$218.4 million in 2012 from US$163.7 million in 2007.

The move by AT&T combines two strong brands within the Hispanic community and allows more focused Hispanic revenue development for both parties. The combined effort by AT&T and Seccion Amarilla will continue the trend of more focused sales and strategic efforts in the Hispanic market and may spur additional segment growth.

The Kelsey Group has learned that effective Nov. 1, AT&T Advertising & Publishing will become AT&T Advertising Solutions. But there is more to this than a cosmetic name change. AT&T has also reorganized the company and expanded its portfolio to make AT&T AS the primary channel for ad sales throughout the AT&T enterprise.

Under the new structure, AT&T AS will have its existing print Yellow Pages portfolio, as well as all ad sales responsibility for Yellowpages.com. Previously, YPC was directly in charge of out of territory, or “white space” sales, while the erstwhile A&P ran all in territory online sales. Yellowpages.com will now be known as AT&T Interactive, and will have expanded product responsibility but no sales role. David Krantz, currently head of Yellowpages.com, will remain head of the new AT&T Interactive.

Essentially, the “three screens” sales approach is being consolidated under the Advertising Solutions umbrella, adding mobile search, IP advertising (ad sales on the att.net portal) as well as the AT&T ad-supported DA platform and the U-verse IPTV platform. The advertising products for these platforms will reside under AT&T Interactive.

The consumer facing brands, including Real Yellow Pages and Yellowpages.com, will not change as a result of this new structure.

An AT&T spokesman said the simple way of thinking about it is that AT&T Interactive is the “factory” that produces products for AT&T Advertising Solutions (the “channel”) to sell.

The existing reporting structure, in which Krantz and Jules report to Ray Wilkins, remains unchanged. Greg McCastle, who was SVP of IP Advertising in AT&T’s Converged Services unit, joins AT&T Advertising Solutions as SVP of national direct sales. His job will be to take the newly expanded bundle of services that AT&T AS can offer and sell it directly to national advertisers, as well as pitch it to general ad agencies.

Overall, this new organization is designed to make areas of responsibility more clear-cut. More critically, it consolidates a strong multi-platform bundle of services into a single channel. It certainly represents a significant increase in Jules’ and the directory organization’s role within AT&T.

The Wall Street Journal reports on AT&T’s announced management restructuring today that puts wireless division chief Ralph de la Vega in charge of a broader consumer markets division. This division will encompass television (U-verse), telephone, wireless and broadband services.

This seems in part like a move toward a more unified bundle of products, and the eventual goal of “continuity of services.” This basically means content and advertising that is served across devices (see TKG quad-play report). De la Vega’s position at the top of the heap could make wireless a key differentiator in this bundle.

Indeed, the primary competition is cable, which has an edge in broadband speeds (cable vs. DSL), but doesn’t have the direct wireless assets to build a more holistic product bundle. Telcos also have an underlying architecture advantage when it comes to the IP-based delivery of television (IPTV), and all that will allow. Those advantages will take a while longer to reach the market though.

Read more of de la Vega’s views on bundled services, IPTV and AT&T’s overall product direction in this past post.

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Update: New study from CFI shows consumers prefer telco-delivered triple-play packages over cable by a margin of almost 2 to 1.