Yellow Pages Environmental Forum

Technology is wonderful and has positively impacted so many things in our life. But we also know it’s far from perfect (especially if you have Microsoft’s Vista on your PC like I do).

Noticed this recent blog by Russell in his blog on “5 Ways to Stay Smarter Than Your Computer”. In particular this part of his post:

“…So. When you catch yourself being hooked . . . stop what you are doing,
step AWAY from the computer . . . and go get the yellow pages! Yeah. You
heard me . . . the PRINT yellow pages…”

What a revolutionary thought — an “old” media that actually has the information you need, uses no power, requires no special connections, doesn’t need to be rebooted because it whacks out every now and then, has a clear structure to help find things, and it totally mobile.

Yes, there are a lot of people that worhship technology, which is fine. It just isn’t the solution to all of your needs, especially your shopping needs, like the original search - the print Yellow Pages is…

If you believe what some bloggers are telling you that only the elderly and the great technologically unwashed are the only ones using the print Yellow Pages, than why do some businesses get so upset if their listing is incorrectly published in the print books??

Latest example is the A-American Self Storage, a Carson Valley, California-based family-run self storage company, who is demanding an apology from phone book publishers who listed the Gardnerville location as the first listing under the Entertainment-Adult category, right before the Bunny Ranch brothel.

While errors in the printed books are rare (i.e. less than one omitted ad per 1000), they do happen. And you had better believe that not only the advertisers that pay for those ads notice it when a mistake occurs, but also the users who generated those 14 billion annual look-ups (even if bloggers think it is a bogus number).

Who says Yellow Pages/phone books can’t be a valuable item to be recycled??

Here’s an interesting result from a recent Sustanible Packaging Leadership Awards held in Toronto on Earth Day, April 22nd.  At the event, Jim Downham, the President and CEO of the Packaging Association of Canada welcomed over 400 leaders in the packaging industry to recognize the very best in Sustainable Packaging.

A Bronze award went to Cascades which has been using recycled fibers from newsprint and Yellow Pages to create recyclable mushroom packaging. From their web site:

In this weeks edition of YP Talk we asked people in the industry to send us stories about how the printed Yellow Pages made a real life impact on them. We are using a separate site for these stories and other information about the value of the Yellow Pages – the site is www.askmeaboutyp.com.

The stories have started to come in.  Here’s a new one from CS:

I asked my 23 year old daughter if she thought the yellow pages or internet helped her make buying decisions more frequently….

Katie’s response was the PRINT YELLOW PAGES!!! She had just returned from a vacation in Texas, an area she had never visited, she said they grabbed the yellow pages out of the motel and took it with them to tour the area and find restaurants and use the maps etc.  When staying in a hotel, most vacationers find it inconvenient to go to the lobby and use the guest computer.  Katie also said “when I use the internet I never know what I’m going to get for a search result, but when I look in the yellow pages, I KNOW I will find just what I am looking for.”

Now that is one intelligent girl……

Keep those stories coming…

On my YP Talk newsletter, I received the following email the other day from a “Dominic”:

Ken:  In the condo complex where I live, I estimate that 30% of the print directories delivered end up in the collective trash bins on the day of delivery. I see it with my own eyes when I dump my directory. I understand your vested interest in print YPA, but I fail to see where your bullish position about print directories has merit. They are dying.

Dying???  Here is my response back:

Dominc:

Thank you for your comments.  Couple of points:

How many people in your complex??  Let’s say 2,000.  And you say 30% of directories end up in recycling??  How exactly did you come up with the 30% number??  Could those be older books, books from last year that people are replacing and recycling??  That still leaves 70% (by your count) of books still being used regularly.

My “bullish” position on print comes from some very real facts:

1.    Many print publishers use tracking numbers in the ads.  That phone number only appears in that that ad, in that book, and in no other forms of advertising.  Hence the only way that an advertiser can receive a call on that number is from an ad in the book.  The overwhelming majority of publishers I have talked to big and small indicate that those call volumes are UP in the past year.  So if “no one” is using the book, how can that be?

2.    The printing presses for phone books are full.  There is virtually no excess capacity anywhere.  Publishers are not dumb people who just want an excuse to print more than they need, so again, someone must be using these books are the publishers wouldn’t be printing them.

3.    The formal research the industry has conducts annually just showed the print usage as flat from the prior year.  This research is conducted by a viable, highly respected research group who does research for a number of media industries, so it is not plausible, as some have suggested, that they are cooking the result just to give the industry the numbers they want.

4.    Print gives you something the Internet doesn’t – a sense of a company’s size and worthiness based on the size and information in their print ad with others in that heading.  When a Google type search brings me back a zillion plus hits, you still need to cull through all the results to find what your looking for, and even then there is no way to differentiate between possible suppliers

Are there more options out there for consumers to find information – heck, yes.  But that old print book still is the most mobile product available, requires no special connections or technology, and is available in every home and business – it people would just take a minute to keep it.  They might discover as billions did last year that it is a pretty poerfull, but low tech informaiton source..

Eco-friendly, environmental. “green” — its all main stream business now.  If you need further verification just pick up today’s Wall Street Journal — go to the last section, section R, labeled Energy - The Journal Report (link, subscription required) where you can find 16 pages of articles ( and of course advertising) on subjects such as cutting energy usage, oil/gas production in Arctic, venture capital money pouring into clean-energy companies, etc. etc. etc.

And I didn’t find anything pro or con about Yellow pages anywhere in the articles.