The French directory publishers PagesJaunes has made a significant move by acquiring 100 percent of the Austrian people search site 123People, which has a global audience of more than 40 million unique visitors in 11 countries, according to the PagesJaunes announcement. Terms were not disclosed.

Here is how Pages Jaunes CEO Jean-Pierre Remy describes the deal.

“We are delighted to have acquired 123people, which fits perfectly with our growth strategy and reinforces our leadership in people search on the Internet. 123people is a genuine Internet success story and will enable us to accelerate the growth of our audiences and offer advertisers additional visibility and traffic. With this acquisition, PagesJaunes Groupe will significantly increase its total audience, strengthen its expertise in natural listing and benefit from new synergies between 123people and the Group’s sites in France and Spain.”

123People acts like a personal reputation management tool. It aggregates all the places where an individual appears online. I did a search on myself and found various photos of me, as well as of others who share my name, links to blogs I’ve written, videos I’ve posted, pages online where my name appears and so on.  It’s a useful site to find and learn about other people, and to track the various ways in which you appear online.

Quietly, SuperMedia is rolling out a new approach to online search. If you look on Swtichboard.com today, you’ll notice that search results are presented differently than before. Now, Switchboard’s top results based on relevancy are plotted on a map (this might look familiar), with the remaining results pushed further down the page.

This represents the beginning of a shift from inclusion-based results to relevancy results across SuperMedia’s properties.

SuperMedia’s Robyn Rose told us earlier this week that Switchboard and LocalSearch.com often act as test beds for the SuperPages IYP mothership, so we won’t see SuperMedia switch over to relevancy until any kinks are worked out on the secondary properties. Rose didn’t commit to a timetable for launching the new approach on SuperPages.

Here is how results used to look.

And here is how they appear now.

Just six months after it launched its SP411 Twitter integration, Superpages is at it again with an offer to Tweet any coupon that businesses upload to an online profile.

To do this it has created 72 city-specific Twitter accounts, which users in those cities can follow to get daily tweets for coupons and promotions happening around them. Businesses interested in taking part can register on Superpages and go through a process to create or upload coupons.

According to the press release, this includes:

• create up to three different coupons,
• set a start date and expiration date,
• add a disclaimer,
• apply coupons to multiple store locations,
• include a promotion code to track specific offers; and
• update coupons at any time.

Coupons are then automatically tweeted out by the geographically appropriate Twitter handle. Of course this is only as good as the number of followers of each of these city-specific accounts, but they should build followers quickly.

The growing interest for coupons on Twitter combined with Superpages ability to cross promote this, will make it happen. Meanwhile you can check out the aggregated feed of all of the 72 city promotions on Twitter (and link directly to your city’s account) at @superpages/superpages-cities.

Like SP411, this is a clever integration, utilizing only a standard Twitter account to communicate and create additional touch points with users looking for local business information. The coupon angle makes it that much more enticing.

As we said at the SP411 launch, media is fragmenting and Superpages is meeting users where they are going. This is an important paradigm that traditional media need to take to heart, as a once siloed world becomes more about presence across platforms and less about owning destinations.

It’s nearing the end of earnings season for the global Yellow Pages industry, and my program, The Kelsey Report, will soon issue a detailed roundup of 2009 results across all the companies that report publicly.

In general, the news has been grim for print Yellow Pages, though some publishers have given faint glimmers of hope that print will stabilize this year, meaning a slowing rate of decline. Others are projecting an accelerating decline.

A recent (unscientific) Kelsey Report online survey of global YP industry insiders suggests that most in the industry see a strong secular component in recent revenue performance. Probably the most telling messages that has come out of some recent conversations I have had with leaders in the industry is that the continuing, if waning, effectiveness of print is an increasingly irrelevant point. The energy it takes to overcome objections to print can be more effectively directed to selling digital or a product bundle that emphasizes digital.

Ironically, I am hearing more and more that print may be necessary to making the bundle effective because it still drives leads, but it is poisonous to the messaging because no one believes it works. I am hearing more and more about strategies that essentially engineer a faster print-to-online shift because the investment story for a company focused on the local online opportunity is so much more compelling than a traditional media story.

So the big question is, does the industry have a viable plan to become a growing, profitable business in a post-print world? And how will organizations need to change to make economic sense in a world where the product mix is substantially different from what it is today?

These are some of the questions we’ll take a whack at in a workshop we’ll be conducting at the Yellow Pages Association’s conference next month in Las Vegas, and in much greater depth at BIA/Kelsey’s Directional Media Strategies conference in Dallas, Sept. 14-16. The workshop at the YPA event is titled, perhaps hopefully, “Built to Last: The new Yellow Pages Organization.”

My colleague Mike Boland will also have a prominent role at the YPA event, moderating a panel on “Monetizing Mobile Yellow Pages,” which is also the topic of an upcoming joint report from BIA/Kelsey’s Mobile Local Media and Kelsey Report advisory services. Mobile is increasingly seen as key to the future of the business, and arguably, because of its inherent emphasis on calls over clicks as the currency of leads, a place where directories have a more level playing field.

Next week I will be traveling to the Association of Directory Publishers meeting in Houston, where I’ll be very interested in talking to smaller market publishers about the environment they are experiencing. At the last ADP event I attended, it was clear the economy had taken a toll on many publishers, but there wasn’t much talk of a secular decline. I’ll be interested in hearing how the mood and message have changed since the last gathering.

SuperMedia has announced a new program that extends its SuperGuarantee idea into the autos vertical. The SuperGuarantee Autos program gives anyone who buys a car on SuperMedia’s EveryCarListed.com automotive vertical a free limited powertrain warranty good for up to $3,000.

SuperMedia acquired EveryCarListed last February and has since made its comprehensive video inventory a key point of difference from other car sites.

SuperMedia seems to be making a huge bet that it can clearly differentiate its brands by making its SuperGuarantee concept central to everything it does. The SuperGuarantee was introduced last year originally as a program that stands behind the work of contractors sourced through the SuperMedia (previously Idearc) Yellow Pages. The idea behind the guarantee is to instill consumer confidence in the SuperPages brand.

In an interview with BIA/Kelsey at the end of 2009, SuperMedia CEO Scott Klein made it very clear that the guarantee will be at the heart of SuperMedia efforts to revive itself in 2010. The company went into bankruptcy in March 2009 as Idearc Media, and exited court protection on New Year’s Eve with $7 billion in debt gone from its balance sheet.

In that conversation, Klein said the SuperGuarantee provides SuperMedia with a much needed point of differentiation.That insight appears to be guiding SuperMedia’s initiatives in 2010.

Last week the Australian directory publisher Sensis released its half-year financial results, ended Dec. 31, 2009, which showed pretty strong resilience but nonetheless a meaningful decline in print revenues. For the half-year period, combined print and online Yellow Pages results were down 4.3 percent. Print Yellow Pages declined 8.7 percent. Including White Pages, the print drop was 7 percent. White Pages (print and online) declined 3 percent.

These are declines that would be the envy of most global incumbent publishers, and in fact they are far better than what other traditional media peers have experienced in Australia. Newspapers, for example, declined 18 percent in the same period. But over the past few years, Sensis has been an industry beacon for sustaining print growth while so many other companies were seeing declines ranging well into double digits. The latest results raise the obvious question of whether Sensis is facing the same fate as its peers, albeit delayed a year.

We spoke yesterday with Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst, who doesn’t believe the declines reflect a sudden secular shift, and he expects to see “a more stable selling environment” in 2010 than in 2009. Akhurst offered several explanations for the 1H 2009-10 drop, and for why he is confident that print will rebound.

Akhurst noted that the first half of Sensis’ July-June financial year features all its largest markets (including Sydney and Melbourne), which as in other global markets have often substantially weaker print performances than small town and rural directories. Second, Akhurst pointed out that sales canvasses for these books took place in the early part of 2009, when worry over the global financial crisis was at its peak.

Akhurst also cited cause for hope. “Our customer base has remained intact,” he said, adding that most of the decline came from advertisers pulling back, or failing to expand into new books and categories as in the past. In general, customers did not abandon the category. Akhust says Sensis has 600,000 advertisers.

Also, Akhurst said that while the financial crisis created an overhang of fear, the actual economy has not suffered very much, with unemployment around 4 percent. He believes an improving economy plus loyal customers suggests a rebound in White and Yellow print.

“The next canvasses will be very important to us,” Akhurst says.

Still, the company is making changes. First it is moving significantly this year from a product based to a “network based” sales approach, meaning Sensis will focus its sales messaging around lead-generation and ROI metrics, across channels. The company will still sell on a pay for inclusion basis. Akhurst does not see pay for performance or performance guarantees anytime soon.

“It’s a continuation of a journey we’ve been on,” he said, noting for example the company’s dramatic increase in its commitment to call measurement a few years ago. The completion of the journey to the “network” approach depended on launching a new generation Amdocs publishing system, which went live in October.

Gannett has always seemed to be a likely directory player. In fact, the world’s largest newspaper publisher owns a small group of print directories. It also provides a white-labeled online directory product to its media properties.

But as directories, search and user-generated content have become more commingled, Gannett has gone a step further with the launch of FindItNow.com, a new directory product from its Planet Discover division.

FindItNow.com is national, but has been localized for specific markets.  It is currently live in three markets: Rochester, Nashville and Burlington, Vermont. Only local information and content is featured. Key categories include Auto, Dining & Entertainment, Health & Medicine, Pets & Animals and Shopping.

The site is integrated with Facebook Connect, and users can add reviews, photos and business details if they register. In Rochester, 883 people have registered to contribute information; in Nashville, 828 people have registered; and in Burlington, 218 people have registered.

The site, in fact, is a lot like other search-driven directories, such as MerchantCircle, ShopCity, SMBLive’s Cloud Profile and others. As with other sites, local businesses have the option of free or paid tiers. The paid tiers are set at $49 or $99 per month. Depending on which tier they choose, businesses can have preferred search result placement, company logo and dominant photo, extended business description, additional photos and unlimited coupons.

The Berry Co. announced today new alliances with Yodle and Web.com that will add to the portfolio of online product and services Berry will offer its small-business customers. The deals are part of a new branded offering called Berry Leads that the company will roll out market by market in 2010.

The deals fit into Berry’s broader strategy of becoming less print centric and more about selling a wide array of local media solutions, supported by performance measurement. To achieve this, Berry is collecting a growing list of partners to deliver components of this strategy, Yodle and Web.com being the latest two. Berry already resells Yellowpages.com and Google, and it has formed a deep partnership with 3L Systems and Salesforce.com to create the systems to enable the company to sell and provision media across multiple products and platforms.

“Our goal is to ensure that our small and medium-sized business clients are generating local leads from the multiple sources and platforms that today’s consumers use,” said Scott Pomeroy, president and CEO of Berry, in the announcement today. “We believe that Web.com and Yodle will bring best-in-class products, fulfillment and digital expertise to our clients, complementing our client-focused approach.”

A year ago, we talked with Yodle after it raised a US$10 million round. At that time, the company reported 5,000 advertisers and 250 employees. Yodle, like rival ReachLocal (which recently filed for an IPO), deploys a direct sales force.

As we learned recently, SuperMedia CEO Scott Klein is open to the idea of companies like ReachLocal reselling its inventory. The Berry-Yodle deal has Berry reselling Yodle’s products. However, we wonder if the Berry-Yodle deal couldn’t be a two-way street, given Yodle’s direct contact with SMBs?

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.

Here’s a question: How long would directory publishers sit back and let new companies such as RedBeacon, AlikeList and others disrupt the leads economy for SMBs with search and socially driven features such as Twitter and Facebook? Or Google, with Place Pages? That’s a question that Local Matters and other Yellow Pages  vendors have obviously asked themselves.

Now Local Matters has come out with “Destination Search,” a new social platform that seeks to level the search and social playing field for its U.S. and international clients, which so far includes  Dex B2B in the U.S;  Truvo, European Directories and Pagini Aurii in Europe;  and Yellow Pages Group in New Zealand.

Playing off a feature set originally developed for real estate multiple listings services, Local Matters’ platform includes state of the art social and search features. It also seeks to leverage existing strengths, such as business profile information.

Key features of the white label solution include enhanced profile listings; search optimization; integration (and easy sharing) with Facebook and Twitter; blog enablement; ratings and reviews ported from Yelp and other sources; and the addition of social media feeds on assorted online advertising.

Kris Skavish, Vice President of Products and Marketing, told us that Local Matters started planning Destination Search last September, with the specific intent of focusing on building rich local context. “A problem with online directories has been search relevancy,” she noted.

Another challenge has been to reconcile Yellow Pages headings with most searched categories, which are typically microheadings. “’Plumbers’ is too broad. You need to get to the correct root,” said Skavish, noting that Local Matters has also created custom microheadings for categories such as hotels and attorneys.

For instance, “romantic hotels” might be sought out in user generated content but not generally included as a category. Users can also rate pictures included in romantic hotels.  Publishers can also insert content at the top of the page, or refine results. They can also create brand oriented categories, such as “Toyota.”

While Destination Search leveraged Local Matters’ work with real estate Multiple Listing Services,  important differences revealed themselves, added Skavish. “With the MLS,  you prove your value with a lead ” she notes. “It isn’t a ranking model.  And in real estate, the default view is maps. But with Yellow Pages, it is an ad model. You want users to make an action.”

Local Matters CEO Mat Stover is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010 March 22-24 in San Diego.