| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Nov | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
There she sits, looking very much like, well, a sitting duck. Man, can we relate - perhaps we’ve found our mascot!
Some fun facts about the short-tailed albatross:
The head of interactive and innovation at P&G, Ted McConnell, added to the downbeat buzz on the monetization of social networks. Here’s a pretty biting, yet insightful comment, captured in a recent AdAge article:
“I think when we call it ‘consumer-generated media,’ we’re being predatory,” he said. “Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”
While I personally take exception to his perspective, I’ll restrict my comments to the local social space.
The business of social media is morphing, which is no surprise. What is interesting to note is the growing importance of what I’d label “filtration and curation” (not just because of the Jesse Jackson ring it brings to the title!).
In the “early days” of social media, we focused on aggregation - picking up the crumbs of commentary wherever it can be found and blending it to amass some scale of commentary. As the world gets more and more conversant, aggregation hatches a new problem, in its quest to solve an old one. Every day, the problem of scale is being solved naturally, via the sheer volume of user participation. Context and interaction form the mantra, replacing more.
There has been a very interesting dialog recently in a couple of leading blogs surrounding the question “who owns comments?”.
In the blog universe, the most interesting content often comes from the dialog that a blog post triggers. The interaction drives both engagement and content value.
So, what are the thought leaders saying about the balance of rights between the blogger/publisher and commenter?
I’ve long believed that neighborhoods represent a key ingredient in how local search and media evolves. Back around 1995, Brad Inman held a brainstorming retreat for online real estate people at his redwood forest home. I still remember Brad’s passion about the importance of neighborhoods in the fabric of online real estate - and community in general; as a former real estate newspaper writer Brad used to love doing neighborhood profiles. While the concept has stuck with me, the content gap made it an impractical pipe dream.
It’s encouraging to see Kelsey Group take a lead role in sponsoring the industry dialog on the verticalization of local search.
We all have our own definitions of vertical search - most commonly we align around large shopping niches such as automotive, real estate and A&E. However, of late, we’re seeing this expand beyond “classified verticals” into key life event or considered purchase segments such as attorneys (avvo), weddings (wedding channel) and new homes (zillow).
why are YP’s vertically challenged?
Why are publishers watching the development of local vertical search from the wrong side of the podium?
The NY Times does an interesting piece on (yet) another enhancement to the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). The article, entitled “A New Tool from Google Alarms Sites” profiles a new “search within a site” box that has begun appearing, unannounced, into the SERP.
Add another emerging example to the growing list of “third page / second click” creep.
It’s important to think geographically when you assess the current state of YP industry turmoil. A few observations might be useful when trying to align the conflicting signs of growth in some geographies with an incredibly bearish financial profile of US publishers. “Exporting” the US stock market behavior really needs some navigational aid.
I debated using an image from the infamous Monty Python scene of “I’m not dead yet”, instead of Foucault’s Pendulum. The pendulum won, not just because it’s more umm, tasteful, but because I think the message of “swinging pendulums over a moving earth” is a great illustration for what’s happening in YP right now.
Swinging against the momentum of a grim stock market reaction to mounting evidence of print YP usage decline, comes two timely industry news items that squeeze in between the toughest ever financial reporting season and the upcoming YPA annual convention.
(more…)
It is staggering to see the stock value deflation that happened among directory publishers this week. On the backs of a quarterly print decline announced by Yell and Idearc, these stocks have witnessed deflation of over 40% of their stock value in one week, driving prices down by as much as 80% off the 12-month high. Sobering stuff. (more…)