In 2004 91 percent of Golden Pages’ revenues were from print products and just 9 percent were from digital. Fast forward to 2010 and, through its vertical and digital transformation, revenues have shifted to 70 percent digital and 30 percent from print. Golden Pages identified five consumer needs — reliability, necessity, specialty, affordability and emotional involvement — and created verticals.

The transformation in strategy includes rich content built on its Internet Yellow Pages to deliver a great consumer experience. Lempert offered the example of Zap, Golden Pages’ local shopping and comparison site, which lets consumers shop and then make informed decisions based on local business information and inventory of where to buy the products. Golden Pages took the Zap model and “zapped” its Yellow Pages into verticals.

David Krantz, president and CEO of AT&T Interactive, announced the launch of AT&T’s “Deal of the Day” program this afternoon at the BIA/Kelsey Deals 3D conference. The program is being offered initially in three markets: Atlanta, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Los Angeles.

Krantz emphasized that deals are a natural extension of local advertising. Ergo, a full-line local advertising company needs to be a player in the deals space. (”We think of deals as just another type of advertising.”)

The new AT&T offering appears to be well thought-out, incorporating “best of breed” features and capabilities seen elsewhere in the deals space.

AT&T finds itself well-positioned in terms of the key elements that are needed to succeed in this space, with:

� A strong local sales force (AT&T Interactive has some 5,000 salespeople in the U.S.)
� Access to consumers (through owned and operated sites, as well as partner sites). Here, AT&T has YP.com, which ranks as the No. 35 most visited website with some 74 million monthly uniques. AT&T has 300+ partners online and mobile publisher sites and applications (it just added Foursquare, for instance).

But Krantz doesn’t foresee deals dominating advertising by SMBs (no “dealmageddon”). He explained there are four elements a business needs to advertise (of which deals is just one):

� Awareness (contextually placed ads)
� Directional (online profiles in directories and search engines)
� Presence & Social (an established online presence)
� Promotions (includes several elements, including everyday savings, loyalty programs and daily deals)

While much has been made of how social media is changing consumer behavior, advertisers are struggling to keep up with and make sense of this shiny new toy. Matthew Goldman is the executive director of product management for subscription ad products at ATT Interactive (parent of YellowPages.com). Goldman is ATTi’s point man on social strategies for its advertisers.

What Products Are You Responsible For?
I am responsible for Consumer & Advertiser Products including IYP products, YP 360, websites, mobile websites and social media products.

How Does ATTi Think About Social Media Regarding Its Advertisers?
Social needs to be interwoven into everything. Three years ago there was hardly any focus on social within the organization, and perhaps in the industry. Now it’s everywhere and we’ve bought into that.

We are providing the basics. For example, when we build a website for an advertiser it will have FB like button and Twitter feeds. If you add video there are video sharing tools and virtual tours. In addition you can add a Facebook Fan page to your site.

What Are You Doing for Reputation Monitoring?
In August 2010 we rolled out our Online Presence Manager, which allows a business to review its reviews from a variety of review sites. We are private labeling Marchex’s platform and integrating it with ATT’s single sign-on. Any ATT customer who buys any ad product, including a bold listing in the book, is provided with ability to sign up for a free/lite version. The lite version limits the number of trends you can track and provides a monthly email summary of activity. For businesses that don’t get a lot of reviews, this is a good way to start. The paid version is about $30/month and includes unlimited history and alerts and competitor comparison view, so you can see how the guy across the street is doing. We are seeing pretty strong take rates and now have over 10,000 customers, many of which are paid.

ATTi’s Online Presence Manager Reviews Dashboard

ATTi’s OPM Competitor Dashboard

Once Advertisers Sign Up for Reputation Monitoring, Do They Actually Use the Service?
We are seeing double-digit usage from those who sign up. There are basically two types of behaviors. The plumber who doesn’t get new reviews every day comes in and bounces out because they are not seeing any new data.

But once an advertiser is engaged in the service we are seeing them spend several minutes per visit and coming in more than one time per month. That said, the email reports allow the advertiser to engage with the data without actually using the site. When offered the email reporting, we usually get a good take rate.

One indicator of success is that our YouTube video on how to use the service has almost 10,000 views.

Does the Service Bring In a Lot of New Business?
The service is a good door opener, but for now it’s a marketing service vs. a lead generator. One of the benefits is that it unearths less visible sources of reviews. Not every review happens on Yelp after all. It’s a time-saver for businesses.

What’s the Future of Rep Monitoring Tools?
Our goal is to make it more about meaningful insight. I want them to log in and know what the best thing on their menu is or which employee needs more customer sensitivity training. When we see a change in review behavior we can ask the business if they made any changes on a certain date so they can correlate the two events.

As far as the future goes, we think about things like can we create a wizard that helps you figure out how to make a status update that’s relevant and then provide keys to “social SEO.”

When we amass this kind of data we can educate the business about how to use the data to market themselves.

The Internet Yellow Pages business model has largely refocused on hosting small-business websites, and upselling from that position. At least, it has for Yellowbook.

Yellowbook Chief New Media Officer Pat Marshall, speaking at the recent Borrell conference in New York, said “it used to be about listings. Now it is websites.” Marshall noted that Yellowbook will be hosting 210,000 SMB websites by the end of the month.

The websites act as a foundation for a variety of other bundled offerings, including search engine optimization and social media. Marshall said that one business went from being on the 316th page in his category to page six to page one using Yellowbook SEO.

All this has transformed Yellowbook’s positioning with customers. Ultimately, it is about “trust, simplicity and performance,” said Marshall. “We see ourselves as more of a mutual fund than a pure play.”

As for Facebook, “our job is to tell [advertisers] the dos and don’ts. It is not to tell them to do it. Whether companies actively work with Facebook “is a demographic thing, not a geo thing,” said Marshall.

Mobile now accounts for a third of AT&T’s local search, according to AT&T President and CEO David Krantz, who was speaking at the Borrell show last week in New York. “We truly believe that mobile is bigger than the Web,” said Krantz, noting that AT&T has some significant head starts over rivals as a vertically integrated company. For instance, the YP.com app is preloaded on many of AT&T’s phones.

Krantz also noted that AT&T has made big strides in behavioral targeting. It started with Yahoo’s APT system, and quickly sold tens of millions of dollars worth. “We had been very skeptical selling APT to customers,” he acknowledged.

But the APT product with Yahoo was priced at a high CPM and eventually hit a wall. The company has now developed a lower CPM product, which he calls “Display 2.0.” They are ad networks for targeted display,” said Krantz. “We’ve had an initial runup like we did with Yahoo, but it has kept going.”

One of the bigger questions is how the local portals will fully leverage the emerging social deals platform, with deal a day, coupons, flash sales, et al. Local.com, which reaches 22 million unique visitors via its destination site and network, has been wrestling with the question as well.

Today, the company has announced that it has created a separate social buying business unit. The new unit, which will roll out its first products in mid-2011, is being built on the back of iTwango, a deals service it acquired in late December. The unit will also work with a syndicated offers platform that was unveiled with Local.com’s women-oriented relaunch in November 2010.

Malcolm Lewis, the founder of Premier Guide, an online directory for hundreds of broadcasters and newspapers, has been named to run the unit. Lewis was an executive for Local.com after its purchase of Premier Guide. He then branched off to launch Fablistic, a social recommendations engine.

“Daily Deals are not the end game,” Lewis told us. “That’s too narrow a view of the offer space,” which he notes, also includes coupons, flash sales and other promotions. “We are always looking for ways to connect with customers to add incremental sales.”

Lewis adds that “customers” means both local small businesses and national advertisers seeking to target local consumers. ”Local.com’s core competency is connecting other people’s local advertisers to a huge network of consumers.”

When it was launched in 2004, Gannett’s Planet Discover was a pioneer in local search and later, the development of local online marketplaces. But it has lately had a lower profile, dating to a temporary mid-2007 mandate to focus on Gannett newspaper and broadcast properties. That mandate ended in mid-2008, and the company has since been aggressively going after new accounts both inside and outside of Gannett.

Today, the company, which is headquartered in Cincinnati and also maintains an office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, provides directory, local search, events and marketplaces for nearly 100 Gannett properties. It also provides services for a wide range of non-Gannett properties. These include, most notably, CBS owned- and-operated stations, as well as McClatchy and Dow Jones community newspapers.

CEO David Lenzen tells us that the company’s directory product has especially evolved. In one installation, directory listings pull in content from CityGrid Media, such as ratings and reviews. The highly targeted content really helps “ramp up the sales effort” for Planet Discover’s partners, he says.

The modern directory actually has multiple facets to it, Lenzen notes. “We really don’t focus on it so much as an Internet Yellow Pages as an online local marketplace,” with coupons, etc. The way it has been configured it also works very well with various vertical skins. “We can easily create vertical marketplaces for a local market, including wedding, dining and specialty automotive, for example,” he adds.

The company is now leveraging its development expertise to create native mobile apps, such as a Local News reader for Apple’s iOS and Android. The news reader is based on content that has already been ingested into the company’s seven-year-old Search Publisher.

As my colleague Jed Williams has previously written, Yext’s Tags initiative is a big one, going up against Google Places with a broad (and “open”) network of 20 participating Internet Yellow Pages and online directory sites, including AOL’s MapQuest and Patch, Citysearch, Superpages, Yahoo and Yellowbook.

Yext CEO Howard Lerman describes Tags as “full-time, real listing information” that will eventually go beyond simply updating text promotions. Future versions will also include deals and photos. “You can do a lot of things,” says Lerman.

All these things require businesses to take it into their own hands to update the tags. It won’t be a problem once SMBs see how easy it is to do, says Lerman. “It is a myth that SMBs won’t self-service.”

As for pricing, Lerman explains that the $99 monthly fee has been designed to be split between Yext, as the host, and participating publishers. The fee, of course, is considerably higher than Google Tags, which are priced at $25 a month. Lerman believes they are being deliberately under-priced in order to position an upsell with Google Boost.

But the network reach will be greater, and the ease of adding new publishers easily justifies the fee. If Google wanted to join the Tag network, all the merrier, says Lerman.

Meanwhile, the royalty share for publishers is based on “a complex model of usage,” with three tiers. A well-used Citysearch tag, for instance, might be in the first tier, while some smaller affiliates might be receiving third-tier revenues. Any publisher that brings in the advertiser will also get a chunk of Yext’s host fee, adds Lerman.

For Yext, Lerman emphasizes that the tag initiative is an especially important one. The company’s business today is largely based on pay-per-call services, which remain robust, he says. But revenues from tags should surpass pay per call “within six months.”

ZipLocal, the independent U.S. directory publisher with more than 300 print directories, is bolstering its digital suite through the integration of VendAsta’s StepRep reputation management tool.

VendAsta’s white-label product will be available to ZipLocal’s 110,000 advertising businesses, and soon thereafter, will be opened up across the ImmersiFind local search platform that 15 other North American directory publishers participate in. 

Through StepRep, ZipLocal’s SMBs (and the sales reps handling these accounts) will be able to monitor their online visibility, track comments across social networks and reviews sites, and then engage with customers directly on these platforms. With the continual fragmentation of the Web, a reputation management tool that provides a real-time analytics dashboard encompassing these diffuse platforms is becoming an essential service to local businesses.

As such, noise in the ERPM marketplace is quickly rising. Marchex, Yext Rep, YellowBot, ReachLocal, MerchantCircle and many others offer the service as part of their suite. VendAsta recently made efforts to differentiate its product by partnering with Telmetrics to integrate call-tracking intelligence into StepRep, which begins to connect online presence with offline lead generation.

I am planning to attend an event next month in London called IYP Search Meet 2010, which is aimed at giving those in the Yellow Pages world in charge of making online directory products better an opportunity to share best practices with their peers. This event is meant to bridge the gap between strategic level industry events and tactical workshops that are not sufficiently industry specific.

The event is planned for Nov. 16-17 at Wallacespace in London’s Covent Garden.

The IYP Search Meet event is being organized by Stephanie Lemieux, senior manager for search and content at Canada’s Yellow Pages Group. She tells us that representatives of many leading companies, including Eniro, PagesJaunes, Truvo, European Directories, Yell and Sensis, have committed to attend the event, which carries a nominal GBP 100 fee. The event needs just a few more commitments by Oct. 22 (this Friday) to reach the numbers necessary to move ahead.

The agenda features keynotes by Seb Provencher and Greg Sterling, plus a case study presentation on advances in social search by YPG.