Yellow Page Rage: The blogosphere fights back
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Recently I started playing with some social media research tools to investigate what people cared about in our industry of directory services vs online services marketplaces. Although I've always considered the Yellow Pages book to be a bit superfluous (usually used to raise up a computer monitor in my experience!) I know that my parents definitely used it as a kid, sometimes specifically looking forward to a new one when all the pages had been ripped out and lost, or the 4 pizza places in our area had received the black mark of shame (permanent marker drawn through the ad in anger).
Still, I wasn't prepared for what the blogosphere showed. I was 100% blown away with the constant appeals for killing the automatic printing of the Yellow Pages book.
Twitter campaigns (Dear yellow pages, We all have a thing called "the Internet". Please stop wasting stuff!), Facebook status updates of a similar line, a cartoon parodying the random adverts you can find in the Yellow Pages, comments like 'makes great kindling' and 'yellow pages are great for ceiling insulation' and media (like the picture below) supporting Yellow Page Rage all around.
For me, it's illogical that the Yellow Pages continues to produce a book for every household. So much of their usage has moved from the book to their other product offering ie online directory services, mobile, and even Twellow (Yellow Pages for Twitter).
Market forces of supply and demand should equal out over time, so if there is little or no demand, then why is there still so much supply? The answer is to remove yourself from the register in the hope that you no longer get a Yellow Pages delivered, but that's what's known as a 'negative offer' where a company assumes that everyone agrees except for the people who disagree. It's like holding an AGM and assuming that everyone who can't make it doesn't want anything to change.
What the blogosphere calls for is a decision by the Yellow Pages to make the books available only to those who request them. Switch the negative offer around and make the Yellow Pages 'opt in'. And for me, this makes sense, but for the Yellow Pages that decision is not as simple as logic, given the commercial impact this may have on their business and brand. I'd argue that the damage being done to it in the social media space is a PR nightmare of equal proportions to BP's oil spill - but just a longer, quieter nightmare.
Read a bit more detail on how consumers are using the internet to find trades and home services rather than traditional directory services.
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I put my name on the 'don't send me one' list but got one anyway.. Maybe next year I won't.
over a year ago by None
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