As much as I hate to admit it, it seems we’re in or entering a recession.  And that can spell bad news for small businesses.  I recall hearing anecdotes along the following lines from various people throughout my life:

“ah, but it’s the best time to advertise”
“if you can make it now, think how you’ll do when the boom returns”
“it’s the best time to start a business”
Etc, etc.

(You know the sorts of things, and you can even picture the people that say them, right?)

But someone actually sent me more than just anecdotal advice just yesterday, and here it is, research that backs up the claim that businesses that maintain or increase the ad expenditure during recession have significantly higher sales during and for three years following.

Now that sounds like common sense, right? But let me add another twist.  How about if its nothing to do with how MUCH you spend, just HOW you spend it?  The ‘how much you spend’ model is very traditional and in simpler times when all advertising was created equal maybe it WAS just a case of spend more and get more.  BUT, today we have more choice, and more ways to promote our businesses.

You can see where I’m heading right? What if you didn’t spend more, but you just took advantage of new ways to find customers and promote your business online?

I’m constantly amazed at how few of the ‘regular’ local businesses are really taking advantage of the many opportunities to attract customers online.  If only I had a magic wand that I could wave to make them all aware of Brownbook.net.  Seriously, I meet with a bunch of local business men and business women in my home town for breakfast once a week and I am amazed at how web-unaware they generally are.  Up ’til now they’ve had it good, but what about when times get tight?

What this means of course is that its not necessarily the businesses that spend more on advertising in a recession that will win, but its also those that spend wisely AND embrace new methods of attracting customers.  And you know, over time I actually think it’s the latter that will overtake the former.

Its a bit like the old adage, work smarter not harder – perhaps I can coin it “Advertise smarter, not harder”

Hooray, we just got the Brownbook.com domain name.

(but we still go by the name of Brownbook.net, we’ve become quite attached to it )

www.brownbook.com

Want to get inside my head?  You can follow me on Twitter, my profile is here http://twitter.com/daveingram and click “follow” (if you don’t have a Twitter account you’ll need to register first).

Dave Ingram, CEO Brownbook.net

I had an interesting chat by email with one of our business users yesterday and today, the main subject of which was how best to list his business which operates statewide in Florida, USA.  The recommendation I gave him and will give any business that covers a wide area is use one listing, and then use the Business Tags to denote towns or areas.  Our search uses the business name AND the tags amongst other things, and the SEO on Brownbook.net puts a lot of emphasis on the tags too.  This means your one listing gets you exposure against searches (in Brownbook.net and on the major search engines) across many areas, plus you only need maintain and update one listing.

We’re also noticing that recently updated businesses are benefitting from mopre frequent crawling by search engines, so do come back and keep your page fresh, either by ading or updating a detailed business description, photos, videos, or getting customers to add reviews.

I’ll leave the last word in our conversation to Marcus, owner of Singing Telegrams based in Clearwater Florida but serving the entire state:

“You have no idea how this helps my business, I had an advertising catastrophe and now I have to make up for lost revenue – I can use all the free advertising I can get.  So, once again, THANK YOU!!!!!”

Do check our Marcus’s business listing right here

(http://www.brownbook.net/business/31006505/all-occasion-singing-telegram-entertainment-statewide)

and if you need anything from a dancing gorilla in pink tights and a tutu, to a Marylin Monroe celebrity lookalike, drop them a line.

I was privileged to be invited to speak on a panel at The Kelsey Group’s annual conference last week in Atlanta (Directional Media Strategies).  Since Kelsey Group is the number 1 worldwide ‘yellow pages’ analyst firm and this event is a barometer of the market it was a real treat to go along, to listen and participate.

With participants from all over the world from both ‘traditional’ yellow pages type companies and from newer competitors it was sure to be an interesting event, and it did not disappoint.  There was a lot of talk about how the traditional companies needed to change their sales model to compete with the new competitors, indeed one presenter saw it as a need to ‘change the conversation’ during the sales process, from one of cost to return on investment – sounds like sales-speak to me.

Another spoke proudly of how their sales reps were now called Media Executives (wow, that’s going to make a BIG change to my small business – not).

As might be expected the subject of user contributions (like reviews, and the wiki approach that Brownbook.net has adopted) also came up, and you might imagine my surprise when a senior figure of one large very successful established company stated that user generated content and user contribution just were not important to them. Wow, that seemed very closed-minded.

If all that didn’t surprise me enough I was stunned by another speaker’s dismissive attitude to the newer online competitors, when he described the “10 to 15% of people who are self provisioning” – in normal-speak that means small business owners like you or me who are self-servicing our marketing campaigns online, without the pain of a face to face sales presentation from some jazzed up sales person – as “the lunatic fringe”.  What??? Is he joking, talk about not seeing the wood for the trees, does he not realise that as successive generations get more and more web savvy we’ll all go that route.

In the panel on which I was involved I spoke about one piece of research that was presented – the result of some Kelsey research into what consumers wanted from IYPs.  They’d run a workshop with a number of consumers who’d used several of the leading websites to complete a number of search-based tasks, then they compared this with the results of a survey which was directed at their advisory services clients – basically search and YP industry execs – then they compared those with the conclusions of nine of their own analysts.  When I looked at the comparison between user feedback and industry execs feedback I saw a very interesting mismatch:

Factors rated as important by industry execs
#1 Ability to get additional info on businesses
#2 Access to useful maps and directions
#3 Depth of information provided
#4 Relevance of advertising
#5 Availability of additional information
#6 Usefulness of ratings and reviews
#7 Quantity of ratings/reviews
#8 Ability to tell which results are sponsored

Factors rated as important by a user panel
#1 Ease of starting search
#2 Ease of navigating site
#3 Accuracy of results
#4 Overall layout/organization
#5 Ability to refine search
*** none of the above even featured in the industry list ***
#6 Ability to get additional info on businesses (rated #1 by industry figures)
#7 Access to useful maps and directions (rated #2 by industry figures)
#8 Ability to sort search results (did not feature in industry list)
#9 Depth of information provided (#3 for industry figures)
#10 Ability to tell which results are sponsored (#8 for industry figures)
#11 Quality of help function (did not feature in industry list)
#12 Availability of additional information (#5 for industry figures)
#13 Usefulness of ratings and reviews (#6 for industry figures)
#14 Relevance of advertising (#4 for industry figures)

Funny how not one the users’ top 5 wants even featured in the industry execs list.

Highlights for me were meeting some great people from the industry, many very forward thinking despite the stunners I have noted above.  Catching up face to face with some people I’d only spoken to by phone, email or Skype.  Also meeting the chaps at Kelsey, all extremely knowledgeable about their sector, seeing the great presentations from Kelsey and following some very well moderated panels.

All in all a GREAT event, informative, surprising in some ways, well attended and well put together.

I was asked the other day why we don’t do radiating search, and its a good question the answer to which is not immediately obvious.  I figured it may be useful to share the reasons why?

When we first designed Brownbook.net we set out to challenge all the established rules of how local business directories ’should’ work (coming from a big directory background as we do this was not always easy, but an exercise we def wanted to do).

#Evolution of tag-style searches in other web behaviors:
The use of tags to replace traditional ‘more scientific’ methods (tags versus hierarchical taxonomies/classification structures, and geo tags versus radiating search) is becoming more prevalent on the web and an accepted behavior that allows consumers and publishers (businesses in the case of business listings) to naturally reach a equilibrium of self regulation.  What I mean by this is that instead of maintaining a complex (and by definition rigid) taxonomy you use tags to allow that taxonomy to evolve naturally over time (some people may be familiar with the term folksonomy).  We see the same rules that apply to a hierarchical category taxonomy applying to a radiating geo search.

It’s not a short answer, but as with all simple concepts the wiring under the board is often more complex than you’d imagine.  But in short geo tags let users and busineses define what works best for them, without the arbitrary rules that the traditional directories had to enforce.

Its always so rewarding when we get messages from people telling us how Brownbook.net has helped them out, and I wanted to share this one with everyone else.  This came in today from a new member.  Thanks ‘Chedders’ for the note, and for allowing us to pass it on here:

Would just like to congratulate your web site.  I posted my daughter’s site on there yesterday as you know.  Before close of play yesterday google had spidered her and if you search for nikcoll she is now in no. 1 slot on google.  Also if you search for beauty in bromsgrove she is on the first page.  That is totally down to [Brownbook.net] as I have done nothing to promote the site so far as I only wrote it this week.

The Brownbook.net listing is here: http://www.brownbook.net/business/30996431/nikcoll-beauty-therapy

There seems to be some bad feeling about local review sites like Yelp that don’t let business owners respond to bad reviews.

Here’s something I saw on techcrunch about this.

I think its bad that businesses can’t respond to reviews, don’t you.  Yelp responded to this with a feature to let businesses respond privately to reviewers, but I wonder if that is not just making the problem worse?  Brownbook.net doesn’t prevent business owners from joining the discussion about their business and responding to reviews, in fact we let them do it openly.  A business owner is clearly identified as such, so why not just let them speak.

I’d say its a bit like comments on blogs, the comments/discussion adds value to the whole, it would be dull if responses were all private – we’ve had that for years, its called email.

A lot of people (I have found most) seem to use the term “Yellow Pages” when they talk about consumer-facing business directories, I guess its something that my generation grew up with.  But few people realise that the term is, in some countries, a registered trademark.

In the UK Yell Group owns the trademark and they guard it fiercely, indeed The Brownbook received several letters when we started out cautioning us, in no uncertain terms, about the use of the term.

I can’t help but wonder how long the term will remain an enforcable trademark?  How long before it becomes genericised?

Let me ask you this – and before you answer just spend a few minutes with Google News – do today’s up-coming consumer generations assign the same meaning to the term “yellow pages”?  Are Yell’s actions likely to stop people using the term in a generic context?

Well, for companies like us, yes.  One of the common complaints from trademark owners is that of ‘passing off’ – that the alledged infringer will somehow be confused with the TM owner and all us dumb consumers will somehow thing that the upstart is the TM owner.  Well, Brownbook.net is proud NOT to be associated with ‘Yellow Pages’ or the owner of that trademark, maybe I need to make that even clearer, just in case you missed that .

We’re moving ahead, creating a new path, clearing out the old and welcoming the new, why would we want to be associated with the stalwarts :).  Come the revolution…

Yell, the UK-based Yellow Pages provider has suffered two precipitous falls in its share price over the last few days, falling 15% yesterday, and taking a whopping 26% dive the day before (the biggest drop since its shares first went public in 2003). Bloomberg.com reports here. It lost more than a quarter of its value in a single day… Read the rest of this entry »