The enemy of my enemy is my friend today
May 6, 2008 by wemediaguru
Mike Blinder of The Blinder Group, a consulting firm that helps media companies maximize revenue, said at the Saxotech user conference this morning that Google is doing a fantastic job at killing yellow pages.
The mafia (yellow pages) comes to town every year and steals 18 to 20 percent of the revenue that newspapers should be getting in their local market. Google is doing a great job at killing yellow pages. The enemy of my enemy is my friend today.
You can view Blinder’s entire presentation in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2.
Blinder’s point opened something for me. My friend Tom believes search is overrated and I am still not sold on it either. But Blinder says you cannot ignore the $6 billion gorilla.
Used in this context, I can see a huge benefit for media companies and local advertisers.
You have to accept that Google is a huge player. Web searches are replacing yellow pages. What we have to do is help advertisers show up on the Google map that appears on the search results page.
Blinder’s point was that media companies cannot afford to be arrogant and think people will come solely to newspaper sites for local search.
You can do local search, but if you don’t incorporate Google, it’s a mistake. I like local search. But if you do it with the arrogance that ‘I am the only place people will search’, you will fail.
What do you think, does this theory hold water? If we are looking to build a local business directory, what’s are plan to incorporate the enemy? Should we be?
I’ll end this with some credit to my friend Matt who posted today a good test on this topic. I’m going to replicate the test here. I did a Google search for restaurants in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Here are some things to note, as Matt pointed out:
- My newspaper web site is not on the first page of search results (and I’m stealing the last two word-for-word from Matt)
- The top two sites contain reader reviews and do, in fact, highlight some pretty cool local eateries.
- The search has brought up a couple of local restaurants who have done at least a passable job at SEO. Without an ally in the local media company, locals are taking the Web into their own hands.
How long can we afford to be in that position?
wemediaguru
Your observations are a little flawed. Usage of print Yellow Pages was actually flat year over year, and the number of IYP look ups grew substantially over the prior year.
The other point you are missing is the bulk of that great information that is becoming available on the search engines is coming from the efforts of the local Yellow Pages sales force working day-to-day in the trenches with small to mid-sized businesses, helping them establish a marketing program that works for them.
So Google isn’t “killing” Yellow Pages. Instead, advertisers are moving their budgets around as their business needs it depending on where their client base is. Print still works very well for millions of businesses. A bundle print/online program works better for others.
I’m supposed to be working on other things here, but this is great stuff. So much, in fact, that my response got too long and I had to blog about it.