The Yellow Pages Association (YPA) stepped up its efforts to inform and educate by today introducing the “Think Green Column” on its “Yellow is Green” Environmental Web site.

YPA indicates the Think Green Columns will appear monthly to share opinions, ideas and even historical perspectives on the environment and the yellow pages.

In its press release, Neg Norton, president of YPA said:

“As Yellow Pages are the lifeline for many small businesses trying to reach ready-to-buy consumers, it’s imperative for our organization to provide a forum where yellow pages and environmental industry influencers can share their views and break new ground,”

The inaugural issue features John Howell from Nippon Paper Industries’ Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Drawing on his nearly 30 years of working in the yellow pages paper industry, he discusses the paper supply challenges facing the Yellow Pages industry today including increased demand from China for fiber; low fiber availability due to the housing market decline; and environmental pressures from proposed Yellow Pages legislation. John was instrumental in helping YP Talk with its extensive article on “How Paper is Made”.

Kudo’s to YPA for adding this effort. The more positive conversation we can generate, the better it will be for the industry overall. There are still plenty of uninformed advertisers and users that need to hear the real story behind what the industry provides.

Sure, everything you see, read, and hear is about “going green”, being “eco-friendly”, “environmental consensus”, etc. etc. etc. But the bad news is that the average consumer doesn’t have a clue what that really means.

The Shelton Group, a Knoxville, TN based ad agency that is suppose to specialize in energy efficiency and sustainability (now there’s a new twist), recently conducted a national study, the “Eco Pulse”, which asked consumers open-ended and multiple-choice questions about green issues. The findings suggest there is a whole lot of confusion out there.

Some of the major findings:

• Name which features a home would need to have before they would consider it green? 42% said they didn’t know.
• While 49% of respondents said a company’s environmental record is important in their purchasing decisions, only 21% used that information when making a product decision. Even worse, only 7% could name the product they purchased.
• “Given a choice between your comfort, your convenience or the environment, which do you most often choose?” Surprise (NOT). Most Americans put their personal comfort ahead of the environment – 46% chose comfort and 31% chose the environment.
• We love the media — 40% admitted to negative or ambivalent responses (”skeptical,” “irritated,” “guilty” or “unaffected”) to increased media attention regarding our impact on the environment
• We only do it to make us look better — when asked why most companies that adopt environmentally friendly practices do so, the most common response (47%) was “to make their company look better to the public.”

The message from this study is it is still early in the development of what “green” is or should be. It does offer all Yellow Page publishers an opportunity to make their print and IYP products a source for the valuable information consumers will need.

Kudo’s to AT&T for a new partnership with Hutchinson, KS’s “Green Team” (link to full story). A proposal will go before the Hutchinson City Council for final approval next week for a four-page insert listing area recyclers, educational information about recycling, Web links and more in the upcoming December edition of the Reno County (KS) area directory .

The Green Team is a group of city staff and citizens who are working on recycling issues in the town, and the Green Pages project was born out of the Team’s desire to update a Reno County recycling brochure that was distributed by the health department nearly a decade ago.

Because they “didn’t want to print a bunch of material that would end up in trashcans” (Meryl Dye, Green Team member) the group approached the AT&T yellow pages about having green pages. In exchange for the green pages inclusion on the AT&T phone book, the Green Team will promote the AT&T’s sponsorship of the project.

Because the book is provided to every house hold in the area, the local government can be assured that residents have ready access to the recycling information they need.

And all this in a printed Yellow Pages.

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…

One of the arguments that the industry makes to the anti-print Yellow Pages crowd who get so twisted that they receive 6, 7, or more directories a year at their doorstep, is that the marketplace will ultimately decided which products survive and prosper, and which exit the business.

With the unprecedented growth in book publishing over the past few years, outside of a few very small, somewhat dubious publishers, there really haven’t been many cases we could definitively point to where that was true, until yesterday.

Reports from various sources (Kelsey Group, others) indicate that Idearc will cease production of some 28 independent directory titles which amounts to some 7.6 million copies (or about 6% of their total distribution). This will also result in about 200 people being laid-off and several offices being closed.

What brought this about? Current economic conditions certainly where a contributor but the growing volume of Yellow Pages in some markets will just not support the level of small business leads needed to provide the ROI required by advertisers. In effect, too much competition diluted what every publisher could offer to its advertisers.

As a result, the marketplace decided which products should continue and which should leave.

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).

In a recent YP Talk article titled “Now We Are “Paper Fetishists”, I cover just how far some of these anti-Yellow Pages people will go. I even quoted this jem:

“…Recycling isn’t the answer. Rather, phone books, like gas-guzzling cars and cheap air fares, are so last year. Now that over two-thirds of the country has access to the internet, people are surely using their paper directories less and less. I reckon that phone books are on the way out — so let them fade away gradually, and provide small numbers for the elderly, the unconnected and the paper fetishists. The rest of us are done….”

But what really set off some people was this list I presented which followed. The print Yellow Pages:

• Uses no additional energy all year long unlike the computer you are probably reading this on, which does use electricity continuously.
• It requires no batteries or power or connectivity to make it work
• It is made with recycled paper, is fully recyclable, and in the .3% of the landfill space it takes up, it does not pollute the landfill with the many toxins that all the electronic junk and batteries does.
• It is not made with plastics which requires petroleum (at some $135.00 or more per barrel) like the computers, PDA’s, IPODs, fantastically equipped cell phones, switching equipment, cable shielding, and all the related hardware does
• Is quicker in nearly every case I have seen to find the information you need
• Is often more complete and accurate than many electronic products
• Isn’t biased because of your age – with tattoos, sushi, and skateboards being some of the fastest growing headings, I doubt it is only being used by “the elderly”

Ok, we all acknowledge that the Internet will someday be the preferred source for information. But currently, it is far from perfect. And please don’t ask me to click away on my cell phone using some 2” screen to find what I need.

So next time you see comments like this in another post: “Of course, this doesn’t take the environmental costs of delivery, recycling transportation, recycling, or the 85% dumped-in-landfill costs into consideration.” be sure to ask them how their PC arrived — since I assume there was no environmental costs to produce, delivery, and landfill their machine.

It’s all in how you define the real “truth”.

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…

You’ve seen them — bloggers who by virtue of the fact that they have a keyboard, an Internet connection, and half a brain can start spewing all kinds of inaccuracies across hyperspace. Among those I have seen:

• Yellow Pages kills trees — Not true — see article on how paper is made (click here)
• No one uses them — Not true, unless you consider nearly 14 BILLION look-ups last year to be “no one:
• the Industry makes up the usage numbers — Not true unless you believe that all the research organizations that do research for a range of media have some compelling reason to ONLY bake the number for Yellow Pages
• I don’t want one, I don’t use, I am offended you deliver one to my doorstep, — me, me, me. Please people, get a life. It’s just a phone book. It takes them longer to write their rants and complaints than it does to just recycle what they don’t want.

And so on and on. Usually I find the vast majority of these people are well intentioned but totally uninformed. Usually when presented with the facts, they will at least take the time to reconsider their position.

But now it’s getting personal. Case in point — this captain of commerce ignored all the facts presented and still ran this charming write-up: click here, but don’t do so on an empty stomach. He even went as far as to suggest everyone send me books they don’t want. Well, if they want to waste the postage and be even less eco-friendly, fine, I will gladly recycle any that show up. But you should note that the writer also closed his blog to further comments — hence, you now see the ugly side of the Internet, and it’s personal. Of course the other thing to note is the writer is hiding behind his site — you don’t know anything about who this, they don’t even have a formal mailing address, and it appears they are some local search engine marketing group (so of course there is no agenda there).

I hope all of you that read this have this key takeaway — these efforts are not going to go away, this industry in under siege, you livelihood will soon be under attack –> it’s time to start pushing back. All of us. Now. Because it’s starting to get personal….