Newspapers increasingly see an opportunity to sell SEO/SEM solutions to local advertisers. Such efforts probably began in earnest last year with members of the Yahoo! consortium using Yahoo!’s platforms. Others have been working with WebVisible and other resellers on a custom basis. But things seem to have been heating up, prior to the NAA Marketing conference in Orlando at the end of the month.

Some high-profile (and well-respected) industry execs have recently left their posts and are apparently consulting to the newspaper industry on local solutions. Scripps Interactive VP Bob Benz and former Belo Interactive President Wes Jackson have teamed up with former WebVisible employees Chris Tippie and Charity Huff to sell solutions via a recently formed company named Maroon Ventures. Tippie, 36, left WebVisible one-and-a-half years ago to move to Crested Butte, Colorado, a resort town that is now headquarters for the company.

Maroon already claims to provide “daily operational oversight” of the far-flung Yahoo! consortium to 21 of its members, including Hearst, E.W. Scripps, Philadelphia News Holdings, Media General, Lee Enterprises, MediaNews Group, Cox Newspapers, New York Times Regional Group, Belo, McClatchy and Morris Communications. It also claims a relationship with Metrix4Media, a little-known search firm in which Hearst has a financial stake.

In a press release, Maroon is described as “a professional services firm that connects emerging business opportunities with media companies to help them execute in local markets. Its members draw on extensive operational and strategic experience to drive innovation throughout the business lifecycle.”

Looking at the big picture, we’re pondering Yahoo!’s role in newspaper SEO/SEM. If the deal with Microsoft is consummated, is the consortium solid enough to convey? After all, it was mostly founded to partner with HotJobs, which accounts for the bulk of the deal’s revenue. But banner advertising, behavioral targeting and SEO/SEM are also being added on a tiered basis with some of the consortium members.

Basically, the Yahoo! consortium is entirely a pick-and-choose affair. And sometimes it won’t even end up with Yahoo!. Last year, for instance, in real estate, it chose to work with Zillow.

Theoretically, a combination between Yahoo! and Microsoft and its aQuantive properties would aid the display piece, which is highly coveted by newspapers – especially in building creative capabilities. But that will probably be treated separately from the search equation, where newspapers might want a more independent role.

WebVisible head Kirsten Mangers won’t comment on the development of Maroon Ventures. But she tells us her company has had some success with newspapers in selling SEO/SEM solutions, especially for new advertisers that haven’t previously worked with newspapers. WebVisible has ongoing relations with companies such as MediaNews Group, McClatchy and New York Times and some Gannett-owned properties.

Mangers says the company does best when substantial sales and marketing resources are provided to the partnership. Strong results are being recorded in markets such as Minneapolis, where a dedicated salesperson has been allocated to The Star Tribune. Traditional newspaper sales reps tend to have a hard time focusing on the new SEO/SEM opportunities, due to the fact they carry so many products in their bag, she notes.

Mangers adds that newspapers may be working with several different vendors … even at the same company. Freedom Interactive President Michael Mathieu notes that The Orange County Register, for instance, works with both RHDinteractive’s LocalLaunch and WebVisible. “There is no ‘approved’ vendor” for the industry or for the consortium, she says.

Ultimately, Mangers expresses confidence that her 64-person company has the software, know-how and commitment to be a strong contender in the space. Several newspapers and Yellow Pages companies have gone with other solutions only to come back to WebVisible, she notes.

Other newspaper execs have left their companies also to provide consulting, although they have not specified that they’ll zero in on SEO/SEM solutions. These include MediaNews Group VP Teresa Lawler and Maine Today President Joe Michaud. Similarly, longtime Tribune Interactive head Tim Landon has left Tribune — but that probably has more to do with the change in Tribune’s ownership.

Interactive Local Media: 07 is ready to roll Nov. 28-30 in L.A. That’s next Wednesday through Friday!

The show, which is being produced in partnership with SES Local, has attendees from all over the world. One exec told me he is coming on Wednesday, taking the red eye to New York that night due to a prior commitment, and flying back on Thursday night for the final day.

Attendance-wise, we have the biggest sign-up list for a Kelsey event since the mid-1990s. Almost everyone that we have slotted will actually be there. While the agenda has been tight for some time, with 70-plus speakers, here are some last minute adds:

• Christophe Maire, a cofounder of Nokia’s Location-Based Experience Development, is set for Day 3. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: Nokia’s $8.1 Billion purchase of NavTeq.

• Laurel Gilbert, from Microsoft’s Atlas division, is speaking on our localizing national advertising panel. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: How Microsoft will use Aquantative to transform itself into a true Web advertising giant.

• Doug Kilponen from MerchantCircle is speaking on the localized shopping panel. MerchantCircle just received a $10 million cash infusion from IAC and others. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: Best Practices for Signing up Small Businesses.

• Claudia Poepperl from mobilePeople is set to provide a demo of the London-based company’s cutting-edge social mobile technology.

We are also expecting a drop-in from a top executive of a company that’s been in the news, but we can’t say much more about it. And speaking of news, there are lots of interesting news announcements that will drop around the show as well. So, will we see you in L.A.? Here is the registration page.

After 33 years of working in the directory business, Dennis Payne has been a firsthand witness to the changes and evolution in the industry. Denny began working for Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. as a directory sales rep in Kansas City when it was a division of the giant AT&T Corp. He was there in January 1984 when SBC was created after the breakup of the Bell System. By 1990, he was a regional manager, and in 1997 became the vice president - sales for Southwestern Bell Yellow Pages. In January 2000, Denny was named vice president - sales for Ameritech Advertising Services. He became president of SBC Directory Operations in October 2001. With the purchase of AT&T and adoption of its name, Denny was named president and CEO of AT&T Yellow Pages. Finally, with the acquisition of BellSouth and the merger of BAPCO’s business into AT&T’s Yellow Pages operation, Denny became the president and CEO of AT&T Advertising & Publishing, the largest print and online Yellow Pages operation in the world.

Those are the descriptive facts of Denny’s rise, but they only tell part of the story. SBCDO was the last of the RBOCs to embrace new technologies, and Denny led the massive mind-set change that was necessary. The most important piece of that puzzle was the joint purchase of the Yellowpages.com network by BellSouth and AT&T. In listing the top national IYP properties by share of IYP searches, comScore research shows the Yellow Pages network with a market share of 17.6 percent. q1-07-marketshare.ppt

As the keynote speaker at last year’s Directory Driven Commerce conference, Denny told the audience, “If we approach change with a real passion for our business, our products and our customers … the Yellow Pages industry has a long, strong future.” Denny had that passion, twice serving as chairman of the board of the Yellow Pages Association and serving on the board of the Association of Directory Marketing.

Most important, he was one of the many good guys in the business. When I spoke to him last night and asked what advice he would give to someone starting out in the industry, he quickly replied, “I would tell the rookie to master all of the different components of the Yellow Pages solution so you can understand the real potential of the business.”

Replacing Denny will be Frank Jules, AT&T senior vice president - business marketing. For a little bit of insight about Frank, you might find this page one article in The Wall Street Journal (subscription req’d) before the SBC-AT&T merger interesting. We welcome Frank to the industry at this time of change and wish Denny well in retirement.

After four months of ownership, Yellow Pages Group of New Zealand’s owners are moving forward with the creation of a new executive management team. Among the moves, according to New Zealand’s m-net: “Dudley Enoka, who was general manager, will become the ex-Telecom company’s chief executive officer, while former head of marketing, Blair Glubb, will be marketing director.” The article goes on to identify other executive moves including: “Karl Wright will become its chief information officer, while Greg Hurn will be operations director. On the HR front, Marlene Strawson has been made human resources director, and joins the group after 15 years with the Bank of New Zealand where she was recently named outstanding senior manager of the year ahead of 700 of her peers. The group says it will also soon appoint a chief financial officer and sales director, as well as fill a new executive role of new media director. According to Enoka, ‘Our shareholders made it plain from the outset that they purchased Yellow Pages Group because of its strategy, its unique position in New Zealand and for its people. The developments today further underscore this.’ “ 

With a new branding effort under way, an upgraded online product and now a new executive management team in place, YPG-NZ appears ready for aggressive growth with an obvious focus on online product development.    

HM Capital Partners has agreed to acquire Phone Directories Co. operations based in Orem, Utah. PDC publishes directories in 18 states covering 137 titles. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

According to a prepared statement by Peter Brodsky, a partner at HM Capital: “The acquisition of PDC builds on our firm’s long and successful history in the directories sector and the media industry in general. PDC has built a strong leadership position in its markets and is currently engaged in a number of impressive growth initiatives.” 

Leading the new unit will be industry veteran Michael Bynum, who will become CEO of PDC after the close of the deal. Bynum was a founding member of Transwestern where he was the executive vice president of sales. The decision to place Bynum in charge is a wise move given his background in running a successful independent sales organization. 

Brodsky also indicated, “We are looking forward to implementing our proven change capital strategies to support the company’s continued growth, offer quality products to the company’s existing markets and new underserved ones, and deliver value for our investors.” 

HM Capital’s other directory purchases include Yell in 2001, and the acquisition of Phone Directories Canada, now Canpages, from PDC in December 2005. The deal creates a strong U.S./Canadian footprint for HM Capital. It is unclear at this time if the U.S. operations will be blended with the Canpages operation or run as a separate unit. This is an interesting move as U.S. companies have divested themselves from their Canadian operations (Verizon and PDC); now a major investment firm with a Canadian operation is making the move to put the two pieces back together. 

Given HM Capital’s aggressive expansion plans with its Canpages operations, it would not be surprising for PDC to expand its operations either through the opening of new markets or through further acquisitions in the U.S.    

The New York Times reports today on the many directions possible for Yahoo! in the wake of Terry Semel’s resignation as chief executive.

Among this range of options is everything from giving up on paid search (outsourcing Google to place search ads) to staying the course with Panama as well as the developing “amigos” newspaper consortium and the Right Media online ad exchange it recently purchased.

These would represent a multi-pronged strategy to battle Google in its growing ad placement ambitions across a variety of formats and media – a battle Google appears to be winning.

Getting More Social

But the most interesting part is a new rumor originally reported in the U.K.’s The Times yesterday that the company could be in talks with News Corp. to trade MySpace for a 25 percent stake in Yahoo!. This is interesting, even as a rumor, and would value MySpace at about $10 billion.

Rumors have been circulating for some time about a potential Yahoo! merger with Microsoft to combine strengths for a veritable Google-killer, but those have been mostly unsubstantiated. Meanwhile, Yahoo! has shown an interest in Facebook, although the price was rumored to be too low for the wide-eyed intentions of Mark Zuckerberg & co.

But MySpace could be an interesting addition to the Yahoo! network. Yahoo! has long beat the drum of social media with flickr, del.icio.us, MyWeb and a host of socially oriented products and personalization tools such as My Yahoo!.

These, however, have been missing a core – one social networking platform to rule them all, and create a stickiness in a user base that also participates in search and revenue generating activity across Yahoo!’s huge network (Yahoo!’s own 360 social network largely failed to do this).

The Missing Link?

If these rumors are true, MySpace could be that missing piece. It’s unclear how the social network would operate if owned by Yahoo!, but there are possibilities to integrate it in interesting ways that could be an important “glue” for some of Yahoo!’s social media products and initiatives, which have floundered for direction, most recently seen in the company’s December reorganization. The challenge here would be to not dilute MySpace’s existing value and user appeal.

If Yahoo! indeed stays the course of its ad placement product developments (newspaper consortium, Right Media, Panama), MySpace could also eventually represent a new venue for these ad networks, by extension of the Yahoo! network. MySpace partnered with Google last August to have exclusive text ad placement throughout the social network, but the deal expires in August 2009.

The strength and staying power of MySpace should also be called into question here, given the notion that it could be losing popularity, its average user age is rising, questions of a social networking bubble and the sizable competitive threat from the red-hot Facebook. The coming weeks will in fact be important ones for Yahoo! as Jerry Yang takes the helm, transition growing pains set in, and the company decides upon several possible directions.

Yahoo! was first to search marketing in its acquisition and development of Overture, and it was first to Local with Yahoo! Local. But Google has usurped its leading position in both areas. So Yahoo! needs to decide what it is and execute on that identity. Local in particular will be an important battleground that it will not give up on soon.

_______

Related: MySpace has also announced the launch of its long-anticipated instant messaging service, MySpaceIM.

Today’s news is that Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel is stepping down from his position, which will be filled by founder Jerry Yang. Meanwhile, CFO Sue Decker will become president.

It should be anticipated that Yahoo!’s executive change, which isn’t particularly surprising, will set in motion some other big changes. The company has recently been demoralized by the widening gap with Google and a sense of drift. One of the reasons Semel was initially brought on board at Yahoo! was to grab the big deals. He made some (i.e., Flickr), but many big deals obviously were missed (i.e., Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook).

If big changes are going to happen now, however, it isn’t clear they will come from the “local” side of Yahoo!’s business. From our local-oriented point of view, Decker shouldn’t feel a need to inflict change for the sake of change, since she was already overseeing things. She has been seen as a major supporter of Hilary Schneider’s team with the newspaper consortium, which is pumping up HotJobs and also expected to work on used autos. Other local-tinged efforts, such as Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Local and Yahoo! Yellow Pages, and geotargeted search, should also hold steady. (I always like to remind people that Yahoo! Yellow Pages is still the No. 1 IYP.)

Early on in his tenure, Semel himself pushed hard to get Yahoo! deeper into the classified business, with the acquisition of HotJobs. In analyst calls, classifieds were often cited as a major source of growth, at least for several quarters. In recent years, it has received less of an emphasis – at least from the CEO’s office.

Semel should be credited for bringing a more disciplined, businesslike, post dot-com boom approach to the company. This was an approach that led to Yahoo! making huge gains in national advertising (including geotargeting). It sure beat the previous team’s emphasis on those advertisers who “got it” and those who did not.

We’ve got several meaty personnel moves to report in the global Yellow Pages business this morning, most of them involving Australia’s Sensis.

The big news is that Sensis has hired U.S. industry veteran Carol Johnson as chief operating officer, directory solutions. Johnson was a longtime sales executive at US West Direct (later Dex Media and now part of R.H. Donnelley) and more recently served in a brief turnaround role at Singapore Yellow Pages.

Johnson is a former colleague of Sol Trujillo, now CEO of Telstra, Sensis’ parent company. Trujillo was once CEO of US West Direct. Johnson will be given end-to-end operating control of Sensis’ White and Yellow Pages operations, both print and online. Johnson will assume the duties of Cam Rojo, the longtime Sensis sales chief. Rojo spoke at TKG Directory Driven Commerce event last year.

John Coates, Sensis’ CFO, has also left the company, along with John King, head of the classified business.

Sensis has recently been troubled by softening results in its print operations, in particular the larger markets, a challenge faced by most incumbent publishers in developed markets. Johnson is a seasoned sales executive with a recent turnaround success in Singapore. We suspect that this experience, as well as her connection to Trujillo, contributed to the decision to hire her.

Sensis has also hired Jeff Avard, currently of European Directories, to become general manager, Sensis strategy. Avard is currently group director, strategy and operations, European Directories. He will leave that post in June to return to his native Melbourne. He begins work at Sensis in July.

Avard’s role as head of Sensis strategy means Gerry Sutton, the current occupant of the strategy post, will move over to concentrate on his role as Sensis’ chief information officer.

And finally, our old friend Simon Greenman, recently departed from RHD, has joined European Directories as its new managing director, online. Greenman held a similar post at RHD and before that with Dex.

Eric Grilly, president of MediaNews Group Interactive and a major driver of the Yahoo! consortium for HotJobs, has left his position to take a new job as head of Philly.com, the Web site for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News  and incidentally a Monster affiliate.

As a leader of the newspaper consortium, Grilly centralized all the negotiation among newspapers with Yahoo!, handling West Coast titles, while Hearst’s Lincoln Millstein handled East Coast titles. The loss of Grilly could cause momentum for the consortium to stall (although some newspapers had rankled at the centralized negotiations and could conceivably come in).

Grilly had recently been promoted to Senior VP of MediaNews Group, which has recently expanded with the acquisition of Knight Ridder's Northern California properties (The San Jose Mercury News, The Contra Costa Times and The Monterey County Herald). At the same time Eric Grilly was promoted, however, his father, Gerry Grilly, MediaNews Group's COO and head of Los Angeles News Group, left the company. He was replaced by Steven Rossi, who was senior VP of Knight Ridder.

It is not clear there is any connection between the two. (But maybe there was). A source who knows Eric Grilly says he wasn't pushed out and that it was simply “a great opportunity.” Philly.com was the first major newspaper site to break the newspaper industry’s cold war with Monster and is said to have “a first rate team” for recruitment.

BackFence CEO and cofounder Susan DeFife has resigned from the company, amid a major downsizing. Co-founder Mark Potts will serve as the company’s interim leader as the company looks to solve what he calls “BackFence 2.0.” Potts initially said that “roughly” 12 of 18 employees were let go, but now says that his estimate — made after 3 months away from the company — was inaccurate. He said the company won’t be revealing specific employee information.

DeFife says she will join VPs Amanda Graham and Bob Kelly to form a consulting team that will focus on reach, engagement and “getting high CPMs” from local businesses. She notes that Backfence has built 13 sites in three metro area (D.C., Chicago and Bay Area), sold 550 ads to local businesses since April 2006, and got 2 percent of community members to register in its most mature communities (i.e., Reston, McLean and Bethesda).

“Ultimately, we did not share the same strategic vision for the company as the board of directors,” says DeFife. BackFence had received $3 million in funding from SAS Investors, the Omidyar Network and several D.C.-area investors back in October 2005.