Yelp is heading down under to Australia via a partnership with the directory company Sensis where it will integrate Sensis’ local business listing data into its site. In turn, Sensis’ local sales force will sell Yelp.com.au to Australian SMBs.
Neither company has revealed the financial details of the partnership, but Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst did discuss …

If you’re a publisher, Yext CEO Howard Lerman wants to share his plumbing with you. Not literally, but in the “presence product” marketplace, where Yext will soon open up its Tags platform to enable participating publishers to create their own to-market tags offering. This is done by leveraging Yext’s API (i.e., “the plumbing”).
Lerman’s enthusiasm for …

In the diverse yet confusing local advertising ecosystem, the new mandate calls for media companies to engage local business clients with holistic solutions that engage their customers in new ways. Deals and mobile optimization have received the lion’s share of attention, but targeted lead generation is another vehicle through which publishers can connect with local …

Last week, the latest spree of entrants forayed into the deal-a-day arena, with AT&T and The New York Times announcing group buying platforms that appear to be almost identical to those popularized by Groupon and LivingSocial. The most interesting of the newcomers, however, could be Microsoft Bing, which opted for an aggregated approach through The Dealmap’s …

With destination sites, white-label providers and aggregators all crowding into the deal-a-day space, the struggle to differentiate and scale is complex. DealOn, which operates its own group buying sites in 16 markets and also offers white-label branding, thinks it has uncovered two ways to rise above the noise: verticalization and an offer network.
CEO Rich Razgaitis …

Google galvanized a lot of mainstream attention for the online-research-for-offline-purchases market with its recent rollout of Product Search. But with the total sales pie expected to eclipse $1 trillion in 2011, it’s a big enough playground for more than just the big G to stock store inventory online. Milo, which jumped into online-to-offline product search …

Chicago, the original home base of deal a day, courtesy of Groupon’s Windy City headquarters, has its latest DOD offering through the partnership of a prominent local publisher and white-label provider. Wantsa, a group buying platform that teams with newspapers, online publishers and social networks, is launching a Chicago division across the Sun-Times’ portfolio of properties. 
Sun-Times Media is …

American Express has recently been leveraging its powerful relationship with SMBs on the Web, including a tie to search engine marketing and lead generation via a deal between American Express Open and Clickable.
Now Amex is going deep with social media, specifically Facebook. It is giving up to 10,000 SMBs up to $100 of customizable Facebook …

If getting customers to pick up the phone is the first priority for SMBs, the second is vetting caller traffic to distill quality leads from noise … and to understand the drivers behind each activity. “Bridging the online-offline gap” is emerging as a critical component of SMB reputation management. VendAsta is now incorporating call tracking intelligence …

If getting customers to pick up the phone is the first priority for SMBs, the second is vetting caller traffic to distill quality leads from noise … and to understand the drivers behind each activity. “Bridging the online-offline gap” is emerging as a critical component of SMB reputation management. VendAsta is now incorporating call tracking intelligence …

Media General is the latest traditional media franchise to partner with a deal-a-day provider, launching a partnership with Groupon to open a new revenue stream in the much-hyped group buying space.
Media General owns both local television stations (18 total) and newspapers (21 daily and more than 200 specialty publications), and the partnership covers both markets. …

Groups have been using the Web since the mid-1980s for a wide range of activities, such as scheduling, discussions, photo sharing, referrals etc. Groups have been a special strength for Yahoo.
BigTent, a group software company based in San Francisco, has recently been vying with Yahoo for the same market, focusing largely on women. It now …

SMBs are looking for their phones to ring and their doors to open, pure and simple. These cash register-related activities largely sway their perceptions of online marketing campaign effectiveness. Kenshoo Local, a division of SEM provider Kenshoo, aims to specifically meet these needs via an integration with Mongoose Metrics call-tracking platform. Using the platform, agencies and …

Pretty big news from Dex One today. The company announced this morning that it has a deal with rival SuperMedia that allows advertisers from each site to have their business profiles appear on the other publisher’s online directory. The obvious benefit to advertisers is an immediate boost in their business’ exposure online.
Each company would continue …

In case you didn’t see these, here are links to some of the more important posts from the past week on our Global Yellow Pages blog. Be sure to submit your e-mail address to “Subscribe to Our Blog.” You will then be updated whenever we post something new about the rapidly changing directory industry.
Dex One, …

Dex One and Yahoo have extended and expanded their long-term partnership to roughly double the geographic coverage of the existing distribution partnership. The arrangement essentially involves business profile pages sold by Dex being served up in Yahoo Local search results, now in all 28 states where Dex One operates. The original partnership, formed in 2007, …

American Express Open is making a series of moves to extend its massive list of SMB credit card customers into broad marketing relationships that will fully leverage Amex’s powerful brand and relationships. The potential for Amex to be a marketing one stop has always been there. As InfoSpace Founder Naveen Jain noted in 2000, Amex …

As my colleague Mike Boland has reported, OpenTable has opened its network a bit, allowing registered Yelp users to directly make reservations from Yelp — whether they have registered with OpenTable or not. Users who have registered with both services will automatically get the benefits that OpenTable provides (i.e., dining credits). But they don’t have …

MerchantCircle, which has established some expertise in launching markets on the cheap, says it is going international with new sites for Canada, the U.K. and Australia. It had previously announced that it is opening up its API to allow sites to use its reviews, ratings and enhanced profiles on an a la carte basis. HelloMetro, …

Monster Worldwide has bought HotJobs from Yahoo for $225 million. It will also be in charge of Yahoo’s recruitment content in North America for the next three years, bringing in perhaps another $100 million for the life of the deal from home page traffic, etc. As part of the deal, which closes in 3Q 2010, …