Colorado Springs Yellow Page Concept Paper

From a businessmans' point of view, placing a business ad on the internet (read World Wide Web) is not likely to generate many sales unless there is a public interested in, and capable of, finding you. You know there is interest because the public continues to use the phone book yellow pages to find you. The phone companies go to a lot of "profitable" trouble to make sure every telephone owner receives a phone book with yellow pages in it. So the interest is clearly there. But, how can they find you on the internet?

As you may know, people in cyber space "browse" in approximately the same way they look through yellow pages to search out information. They use keywords (i.e., auto repair) to narrow the search. Cyber shoppers input keywords to "search engines" that return thousands of choices. The more specific the keywords they input, the more efficient the results. Today, however, people are not necessarily browsing to buy, to see. The keywords they match are likely to yield a company in some where-else-town, and maybe not even in the same country! There is nowhere to go in cyber space to find a shoe repair shop on the west side of Colorado Springs.
The internet is not like a phone book where business ads are neatly, alphabetically bound in the back on yellow paper. It is, thus far, more like a poorly organized public library using out-of-date and/or misleading index cards. To the public, the internet is clearly an interesting place to browse (given time and money), but it can be a real pain if ones objective is to find something specific, quickly.
What is missing between the motivated buying public and private business, is a little organization and cooperation, sometimes referred to as a de facto standard. Today’s' businesses who place ads in cyber space are only hoping they have selected the correct keywords that will lead the interested, buying public to their door. They are also doing so without any real agreement with the public on what the keywords should be. This trial and error approach is yielding less than astonishing results. So, what does a little organization and cooperation have to do with it?
The idea of creating a city (area) wide yellow pages in cyber space, such as the Colorado Springs yellow pages, is centered around everyone using the same set of keywords...keywords which identify the Colorado Springs businesses as a unique virtual shopping mall. Businesses will need to assure their ads contain the Colorado Springs keywords, and the public will need to use the same Colorado Springs keywords, as well, to find them. Organization and cooperation around a de facto standard is at the heart of the solution. Since access in this case is provided by web browsers (Alta Vista, Web Crawler, Yahoo, etc.) all we have to do as a community is agree upon what the common keywords should be.
One obvious choice of common keywords is colorado, springs, yellow, and pages. If each business would at least include "Colorado Springs yellow pages" in their ads (along with their business specific keywords) and if the public would use "Colorado Springs yellow pages" to access the Colorado Springs yellow pages, then, for the first time, the business and the public would be using the same virtual yellow pages. This notion easily expands. Use of the words "yellow pages", along with the city name is probably not going to take the public very long to catch on to. For example, the businesses in Denver could use "Denver yellow pages" as their virtual yellow pages, Pueblo could use "Pueblo yellow pages", Salt Lake City could use Salt Lake City Yellow Pages, etc. So goes Colorado Springs, so goes the world, maybe, but the near term objective, for us as a community, is to come to an agreement. This community could set the defacto standard by accepting colorado, springs, yellow, and pages as our community standard to identify the name of our virtual yellow pages.
Why agree on only these few keywords? Why not develop a universal list of "business product and service" key words? The short answer is, they already exist, and there are too many of them. Checkout your own phone book yellow page table of contents and you will see what I mean. Every business in the yellow pages is organized with respect to keywords. In cyber space, not only are businesses organized by them, but everything on the net, i.e., personal pages, articles, newspapers, every book in the library, etc.. The approved list of key words is literally the dictionary. What is missing in cyber space is an agreement between sellers and buyers on how to reduce this vast set of keywords to a couple of words that enable the two parties to find each other in the maze, a defacto standard. Without this standard, one cannot help but observe internet "shopping malls" springing up all over the place, promising business to bring in lots of "visitors" willing to buy and at the same time promising customers the best businesses to buy from. And, charging the businesses and, often times, the customers for mall access privileges. These approaches are, in a word, bunk! Trying to force commerce and the American public into a physical world "model" of cyber space is like trying to get us all to move to Cleveland. The internet is, and should remain, free and open.
So, who would benefit from the Colorado Springs yellow pages? The business community, because they will be able to develop cyber space yellow page ads that the local (and interested non-local) public can and will find. For the first time, business owners would have faith that the public knows where to look for their ads. As time goes on and the number of internet users increases, more and more of the local public will be using the internet for commerce. Another worthwhile point is the cost. By comparison to the phone book yellow pages (thousands per year), it is dirt cheap (hundreds per year). Also, the ads are changeable with short notice as business needs and rates change. (You’re not stuck with the same ad all year!) Competition will keep costs reasonable. Creative advertising (something this nation is really, really good at) will improve the productivity. However, at least for the near term, businesses will need to place ads in both mediums.
The buying public will benefit because they will know where to look for information that has a much higher probability of being of specific and immediate value - just like they can in the phone book yellow pages today. As time goes on, more and more businesses will be advertised in cyber space, representing more choices. You can bet that businesses will be creative and go beyond boring, static ads. Expect ads to become more multi media (like TV commercials with motion and sound) while they offer specials such as where to get the best price for car gas, today, right now! Having the Colorado Springs yellow pages available to the shopping public will open up an incredible breadth of opportunity to save money for the cost conscious shopper.
What does the future hold? Good question, but you can bet that shopper services will spring up that interrelate businesses with each other. One example might be an auto body repair shop that recommends a particular auto mechanic business. Another might be a wedding cake business that recommends a bridal dress company. It is also likely that performance, quality, quantity, and/or customer satisfaction information will be related to business such as Better Business Bureau records on number of unresolved customer complaints, testimonials from past customers, relative costs of services/products, etc.. Information of this nature will certainly allow the public to make more informed decisions. Instead of your fingers doing the walking (including the coin flip after you have found 150 car dealers), your mouse and brain will get engage in a most constructive and beneficial way. You will probably be able to determine not only who provides the product or service, but how well they provide it, and at what price, at this moment. One would also have a public forum to express appreciation or "wrath" about the company's product/service.
The public will ultimately be able to review the cyber based shopping mall on their televisions or connect through personal cellular communicators. Business approaches agreed to today (such as mergers of phone, cable, etc. companies) will facilitate this growth in communication technology. And, if the idea of using common keywords for the yellow pages does catch on (and I predict it will) one will be able to look for products and services in cities around the world, deliberately, with intent to buy. That, in itself, will begin to transform the internet from a look-e-loo browsers paradise into an economical and cost effective medium for the purchase of goods and services.
What actions should be taken? Businesses who are already on-line can update their existing home pages with the Colorado Springs yellow page keywords. Businesses not on-line, can place ads on the internet and tell the home page designers to include the Colorado Springs yellow page keywords in the design. The Chamber of Commerce can advertise the concept in their meetings and publications. On-line services can place the idea in their newsletters and on-line bulletin boards, and, discuss it in various user groups. The local newspapers, television stations and radio stations can spread the word in a variety of ways.

But, most importantly, we can all

just do it!

J. R. Hill, President
Information SuperHighway Tech-U-Naut (ISNAUT)

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