How did you find your last plumber? Where did you locate the person to fix your air conditioner last summer? I’ll be the limo for your daughter’s prom came from the same place.

The Yellow Pages

If you’re anything like the 25% of Americans that wish they could have found that information online (maybe because you’re one of the 21.5 million households on broadband), you’re not alone. A recent Kelsey Group/BizRate.com study queried more than 5,500 online shoppers and found that 25 percent of their searches were for merchants located near their homes or workplaces.

Local search is also on the brains of Google and Overture (Yahoo) who both plan to launch services allow allowing advertisers to aim their ads at users in specific geographical areas either by checking the Internet Protocol address assigned to the user's compute local search service would identify potentially local search queries, like "dentist," then ask users if they would like to type in a ZIP code or other location modifier to get geographically targeted results.

Marketing Myopia at the Phone Company

The phone companies have complained for some time that the Internet is taking away their business. I disagree, and if you look at one of the founding articles of the practice of marketing, Marketing Myopia by Ted Levitt, you’ll see why. The yellow page advertisers were not viewing themselves as “resource locators” but rather as ad space sellers for offline printed material. If they had seen themselves as a service to customers, rather than as a “product” of sorts, they’d have had this figured out long ago.

Fun and Profits with Micro Sites

Taking a new approach, users who type the phrase "Green Bay HVAC or air conditioner repair 54303" will see advertisers within 15 miles of Green Bay. For advertisers that have no Web page to link to, clicking on the ad would send users to a "landing page" or “micro site”, which could be sold and created by the phone companies, and reside on their server, along with additional advertising from the HVAC company, including information like hours of operation, phone numbers, maps and directions.

No company is better positioned to capitalize on this offering than the local directory company selling you your yellow pages space!

The search engines have the Web traffic, they lack the ability to attract and sell ad space to small business owners. Verizon, SBC and other Yellow Pages publishers have millions of small advertisers already buying their services - and have sales forces to help those businesses with their online advertising - but their Web divisions may lack the infrastructure to support this initiative. I say – hire people!

Verizon "is moving in that direction”, so to speak, with their SuperPages.com site. Starting March 1, users of SuperPages will be able to perform general searches by typing in any keyword or phrase, rather than being limited to the precise business categories created by SuperPages.

Yellow pages publishers have good reason to be scared, and even more reason to rejoice in the potential for profits selling custom micro site landing pages to compliment an advertisers offline ad.

You are right about the potential that the directory publishers have...but here's betting that they won't be the winners in this space. these are mostly large, bureaucratic, self-satisfied organizations, and they won't move fast enough until it's too late.