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Industry News: July 16, 2008
By Libby Waldo | July 16, 2008
The Offline Connection to Online Marketing
YPMobile Enjoying Early Success
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Looking for a way to boost your online marketing results? Take a look at the offline experiences your customers talk about, the experiences that form the basis of what your potential customers consider when evaluating competing options. The experiences you create in the actual delivery of your product or service drive the online conversations that are increasingly a factor in purchase decisions.
Case in point: Last week we flew into Providence, RI, for our annual summer trip to Cape Ann, Massachusetts. We arrived in Providence and headed for the Hertz counter to rent a vehicle. We were promptly given the keys to our car and headed off to throw the bags in and travel to the beach house. Walking over to the car, I noticed a dent in the side. Hmmm. As an ex-insurance guy (I was a product manager at Progressive Insurance for a number of years), I always do the walk-around before putting our luggage in the car. The dent wasn’t bad, but I don’t drive a car with a dent in it at home, so why would I while on vacation? It wasn’t like I’d chosen Rent-A-Wreck. I looked closer. When opening the car door, all I could smell was stale cigarette smoke. With an hour and a half drive coming up, I really didn’t want to start the vacation this way. I’m a pretty easygoing consumer and, to be fair, understand that mistakes happen. No one expects — though we all strive to deliver — perfection at every turn. At the same time, we clearly had a situation here.
I took the keys back to the counter. The gentleman at the counter apologized, gave me an alternate car, and asked me to check it out. The substitute was a clean car but was about the size of a golf cart. This was an airport, we are a family, and families have luggage. Luggage calls for real trunk space. This car didn’t have a trunk. Not wanting to choose between taking my family or our luggage to the beach house, I went back to the counter. No cars in the class we’d rented would be ready anytime soon…
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YPMobile Enjoying Early Success
YellowPages.com’s YPMobile iPhone application (with events content from Zvents) is doing well on the list of free downloads. It’s number 21 out of 100 on the list:
Among “local search” apps, it’s only trumped by Where and Google. Interestingly it’s (so far) beating out local apps from Yelp, Eventful, Loopt and others. There is one other “yellow pages” application currently (not in the top 100), though more are on the way…
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