Last year I was asked to address an annual meeting of senior executives in the yellow pages business (I ended up doing two more after that, in fact). They were a bit concerned about Google, Yahoo, and Web 2 in general. Was their business imperiled? Ummm….yeah, I told them….
Last year I was asked to
address an annual meeting of senior executives in the yellow pages business (I ended up doing two more after that, in fact). They were a bit concerned about Google, Yahoo, and Web 2 in general. Was their business imperiled?
Ummm….yeah, I told them. But they had the resources to address it. Among the recommendations I made to them was one I thought deeply obvious – let your readers/users on your online services rate the merchants, and use those ratings to start a conversation with your merchants that helped them turn all their businesses into conversations – I argued that with search, all business is a conversation, and only those who could engage would win in the end. They had thousands of sales reps on the street – train them to help merchants engage with audiences online.
I was struck by the response – one exec raised his hand and said, and I paraphrase – “You’re asking me to tell my advertisers to invite criticism? You’re asking me to actually create a platform that lets that criticism happen? Are you nuts?”
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