Speaking Sensis

David Egan finds speaking first hand with Yellow Pages® advertisers is an important reminder of the real challenges that face Australian businesses every day.

Last week I had the pleasure of talking with 300 passionate business owners in Brisbane as part of two seminars sponsored by Yellow Pages®, the Queensland Government’s Small Business Solutions and TNS Research. The focus of those seminars was online advertising and search engine marketing. The theme of the morning was how to tap into the latest online trends to help promote your business.

I prepared a 30 minute walk through of what I thought were the hottest topics of the moment, social media, mobility, applications and content. While I am sure these topics were interesting and entertaining, I came away with a very clear message from those in attendance.

As much as these business owners are interested in what’s new, many are still coming to terms with what the internet means to their business. They spend hours working in their businesses, from self-storage to pest removal and they are the best at what they do. They all reflect on how advertising their business was once a fairly straight forward activity – and then along came the internet with new opportunities and, of course, challenges.

It’s clear when speaking to the attendees that they strongly believed that in investing in their own website gave them access to new business sales and leads. They also believe that if their websites are constructed correctly, they can get “free advertising” through a presence on search engines. Rightly or wrongly the feel that the more time they invest, the bigger the reward will be.

But many spoke of the challenges they faced in getting their websites right.

Everyone has an opinion on how to manipulate websites. And in essence the way you lay out your physical web pages and the words you use on those pages goes some way to helping you get found. And to complicate things further, there are the paid listings on search engines.

One thing that was clear when I spoke to some of the attendees was that they started online they did it in a small way and things seemed pretty cheap.

But then they got hooked.

One business owner mentioned to me that they now spend as much each month on their online keywords as they do for some of their traditional methods of advertising. Interestingly that doesn’t include all the time they spend managing it each week!

When it came to questions, the one I was asked the most was who to trust.

The question seems to evolve from increasing numbers of people knocking on their door making all kinds of promises. And the best answer came from one of my co-presenters, Peter Baldwin from the Queensland Government-sponsored Small Business Solutions Team.

According to Peter, listen, learn and leave your credit card at home. And I agree. Meeting with people is a good way to develop your understanding while not burning a hole in your pocket.

The other question I was repeatedly asked was is what to stop doing if adding the internet to the marketing mix. You need to do it all.

While it is clear that new forms of online usage mean that there are new ways in which  people will search for and discover your business, not everyone has dropped traditional media. 

Despite the hype around mobile, a recent report from research agency Nielsen suggested that while 43 per cent of all Australians own an internet enabled phone only one third of them regularly use it to access the web.

Reasons provided include bill shock that comes with a fear of how much it will cost and the fact the early generation phone are hard to use.

It’s these sorts of stats that remind you that we need to remind ourselves that not everyone is at the bleeding edge of technology.

To illustrate this point, I’d like to leave you with a comment made by one of the delegates in attendance.

“All these new technologies are complimentary. When email first arrived in my business, I didn’t throw away my fax machine. In fact I still use my fax machine every day. I know that there are alternate ways to communicate now with emails etc, but lots of my customers still fax through orders.”

I was delighted to recently receive our recent Corporate Responsibility Index (CRI) scores.  For Heads of Sustainability across the country, the release of the CRI results is a tense time. Essentially for us, it is a little bit like waiting for your exam results.

Measuring, benchmarking and reporting our sustainability performance and practises is a critical part of being transparent and accountable.  One of the ways Sensis measures its progress in sustainable practises, is through the international Corporate Responsibility Index (CRI) run by St. James Ethics Centre in Australia.

Importantly CRI is independently audited, which provides third party assessment of our performance.

This year, Sensis achieved a score of 92 per cent (a 13 per cent increase on last year) and reached an overall gold star rating. 

Significant achievements in our scores include three judging areas reaching the new “platinum” level, which was established for companies considered to be setting the benchmark (scoring 96 per cent and above). 

Sensis achieved the new platinum level in corporate strategy, integration and assurance and disclosure.  I’m particularly proud of the assurance and disclosure score given the significant increase from a participation ranking last year.  Transparency and assurance, I believe ,are also the foundations for sustainable practises and often more challenging to achieve. 

In addition to these platinum scores, Sensis also received a gold rating for management practise and social impact, alongside a silver rating for environmental impact. 

Last year Sensis participated for first time and were pleased to score 79 per cent, achieving a bronze star and the award for Best New Entry. Our initial submission also identified areas for improvement, which we have focused on.

Already this year we have made significant steps in improving our performance, particularly around environmental impact. Sensis announced its Commitment to Climate Change in February, which included reduction targets for operational greenhouse gas emissions and the carbon neutral certification of the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print and online directories through the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly program. The carbon emissions created through the production of these directory products will be offset through Greehouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia.

For Sensis, other mechanisms we use to measure, benchmark and report our performance are through the London Benchmarking Group (community investment measurement and verification); and through our Sustainability report which meets AA1000 standards and reports against Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines.  Sensis’ Sustainability Report was independently assured last year for the first time and achieved an A+ GRI reporting standard.   It is available for viewing and download on our corporate site (about.sensis.com.au).

Sustainability remains on of Sensis’ five priority business areas and with the ongoing focus and drive for improvement, I hope to see us continuing along the journey and also achieving even higher scores in benchmarking indexes to reflect our progress.

Sensis’ experience of its successful foray into the mobile space was presented at the recent Digitech conference in Sydney – and it proved to be a significant reality check for someone like me.

As a web analyst for Sensis’ mobile websites and Android/iPhone applications, I am a mobile fanatic, but even I was taken aback by the overwhelming interest in the medium, with a flurry of questions throughout my presentation and many fascinating follow-up conversations.

And if the number of Twitter followers and re-tweets of the event is any indication, mobile has become way more interesting to many more people in recent years. 

Why you ask?

Well, it’s no wonder. Reports from the recent Mobile Marketing Association Forum showed that there are six times more mobile devices in Asia compared to PC’s and by 2012, Disney projects that 50% of its engagement will be via mobile devices

Also:

• 40 million in China pay to get news alerts;

• 1 in 3 Google searches are mobile in nature; and

• The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has more than 200 per cent mobile phone penetration. That’s the world’s highest, which means that on average everyone in the UAE has at least two mobile devices. 

And the list goes on!

Mobile’s unique ability to connect businesses with consumers has been expounded upon frequently over the past few years, but it’s really in 2012 that we’re finally seeing the much heralded tipping point in terms of usage. Sensis’ mobile portfolio continues to see outstanding growth and in May it saw 3 million visits during the course of the month.

So what makes mobile so unique?

Firstly, mobile is one of the most personal devices we have. It reaches us in our sleep and wakes us up. It is permanently connected and if there is one thing that we carry with us at all times, it is more than likely to be our mobile phone.

In fact, did you know that half of all Finnair passengers check in via their mobile device? And that in Kenya, there are more mobile banking accounts in than other account type.

Available at the point of creative impulse, mobile measures its audience accurately (by some estimates ten times more accurately than other media). Sophisticated tools allow Sensis to measure all high value usage activities we are delivering to advertisers and functions such as seamless click-to-call provides directions, allows details to be saved to contacts, advertiser photo galleries views and listings sharing with friends to name a few.

Mobile use will continue to grow.  In fact, Mobile usage now makes up 12 per cent of all digital usage, which is double last year’s share.

Yellow Pages® Mobile continues to deliver an outstanding experience for users. For businesses that continue to invest in the mobile space, this is good news for them. And for those business who are sitting on the fence, perhaps it’s time you searched for this, or followed this list.

In his first blog for Speaking Sensis, Sensis Group Manager for Yellow Pages® Online & Mobile Product Simon Betschel announces that the latest release of Yellow Pages® Mobile has gone live.

I am excited to announce that the latest release of Yellow Pages® Mobile has gone live, featuring improvements for our advertisers and users.

The release is the culmination of many months work from the mobile development team and it delivers user and advertiser features.

Premium advertisers will be able to include a business logo, image gallery and a new text descriptor. 

Advertisers will also have access to new online and mobile combined summary reports that will demonstrate any improvements to return on investment resulting from extended customer reach.

For users, the new features are mainly targeted to high end devices and focus on improving search accuracy and aligning the online and mobile user experience.

The changes include:

Auto-suggest Type, Name and Location – reducing the number of keystrokes required to enter a search term on a mobile, and time to task for users.  To support this and the search changes, the team developed Hint Text which can also be reused across other mobile sites;

New Maps for iPhone, iPad and Android – now users can pinch to zoom and swipe to pan.  This now takes maps to a world benchmark position for mobile browser based maps;

Seamless Click to Call – enabling calls on high end devices to be actioned immediately and capturing these metrics to report back to our advertisers; and

We will also be releasing new versions of our iPhone and Android apps, and providing iPad support.

This has without a doubt been the largest release of Yellow Pages® Mobile since its inception three years ago and demonstrates just how far internet on the mobile has come in that time.

You asked for it and now you’ve got it.

From today, you will be able to use White Pages® Online to send Business, Government and Residential listing information to friends on popular social networking sites, blogs and email as the directory expands on its highly successful send to mobile function.

This new functionality is a response to positive user feedback and it lets you tell friends where you saw those great bargains or had the best meal ever.

It also lets us promote our advertiser listings to an even wider audience through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Blogger, Linkedin, Google Bookmarks, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Ping.fm, Wordpress and Friendster as well as email. 

People who list their details with White Pages® Online are already aware that their contact details will be published in the public domain and this sharing of information is something that people can already do via email and SMS etc. However, we are conscious that further sharing of contact information may not always be desired so we have built in some measures to protect privacy, that include:

• phone numbers being shared only when it is sent to your mobile phone;

• only limited contact information being published on social networking sites for residential listings;

• identification of the “from” email address when you send to email and a limit to the number of listings that can be sent to one person each day. There is also a limit to the number of listings one person can send; and

• soon we will enable (next month) the ability to block your mobile number and email address from receiving these messages.

Business confidence among small and medium businesses was just one percentage point higher than it was a year ago according to the latest Sensis® Business Index, released today.

The index recorded the largest single-quarter fall in business confidence among SMEs in the history of the index (which started back in 1993), which was larger than anything measured in a single quarter during the global financial crisis. 

And it’s not hard to see why. 

Businesses are saying that they are seeing business falling and customers not spending. Business confidence rose strongly out of the GFC, but Australia’s SMEs are yet to reap the benefits of economic recovery. They are yet to record a net positive quarter of profitability, that is, one where more businesses record increasing profits than decreasing ones. The last time that happened was back in February 2008.

SMEs are definitely saying that they are doing it tough, with more believing that the economy is slowing rather than growing. And their perceptions of the Federal Government have also fallen sharply in the past quarter.

The Australian economy has done well throughout the economic downturn compared to most other developed economies. We have not had a recession. But to get sustainable growth back into our economy requires business growth and investment to improve.

So, this quarter, seeing the largest single quarter fall in business confidence since the inception of the survey made me recall the last time I reported this, back in November 2007, before the last election and before other economic signals started heading downward – small businesses reported the first signs of the GFC hitting Australia. Hopefully this quarter’s fall will not be replicated in successive quarters as happened throughout the GFC.

That is why this quarter’s results are so important, because they show so starkly that Australia’s small and medium businesses, the backbone of our economy, are finding economic conditions worsening.  It is important that we listen to what small businesses are telling us this time.

Distribution of the 2010 / 2011 White Pages® started recently to around 1.4 million homes and businesses across metropolitan Melbourne. The cover of this year’s residential book features 18 emergency services workers who battled the Black Saturday bushfires.

This year Melbourne’s apartment dwellers will have up to 14 days to collect books from their foyer. After this time, books remaining will be collected for redistribution in other areas.  A postcard explaining the process will be delivered to apartment residents.

This is about Sensis looking at new and better ways of doing things in response to changes in consumer demand and the environment we work in.  We know that people want choice in how they search for contact details of people, organisations and government, depending on what they need, where they are and what they’re doing. That’s why White Pages® is available in print, online, from your mobile and through telephone directory services.

In the last year, mobile phone based searches of White Pages® listings have grown strongly, with a sharp boost in searches since the launch of the White Pages® iPhone app last November which has been downloaded almost 250,000 times. But despite all of the technology available today, Australia wide, 60 per cent of all searches are still using the White Pages® book. On average, there are about one million searches each week of the White Pages® Melbourne book.

People with queries about the delivery of White Pages® should contact Sensis on 1800 810 211. To request not to receive a book in future please call 1800 008 292.

Sensis has struck a new partnership with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.  This extends our existing agreement to deliver Yellow Pages® local business listings to Bing maps, beyond the mapping site and direct to bing.com.au.

 This week Bing announced the launch of new map features such as the option to personalise and share maps as well as the integration of Yellow Pages® listings.  Local business searches on Bing will now result in the display of five business listings with contact information and the location of the business, alongside a local map (known as the 5-pack).

 Bing.com attracts an audience of around 14M+ monthly visits in Australia; from 2.9M unique users (Nielsen NetView April 2010).

More good news for us, is that we have exclusivity in sponsored listings for our Gold Plus, ClickManager and BidSmart customers (that’s those businesses who have bought pay-for-performance search engine marketing) in response to “local business searches” on Bing maps.

And in a world first we will also be receiving monthly advertiser reporting. We understand it is the first time Microsoft has provided this information to a publisher such as Yellow Pages®. Reporting from Bing will be integrated into customer reports from early 2011 which will give us some strong data demonstrating the growing value of the Yellow Pages® search network.

To see the new Bing maps go to bing.com.au, click on the maps tab and try a local business search.

Sensis was the “book-ends” to the Australian newspaper’s Business section on Monday, with a feature interview with Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst (read it here) on the front page and a piece with Chief Operating Officer Gerry Sutton (read it here) in the Media section on the back page.

Both pieces touched on the opportunities digital media was providing Sensis and its Yellow Pages® business, with the focus squarely on the iPad as the latest digital device to take the media industry by storm. As discussed by Bruce and Gerry, the exciting prospect for the iPad is the value Sensis can help deliver to end users and ultimately our small and medium sized business customers.

Add to that the impressive strides Sensis has made with its presence in other digital channels such as online, the iPhone, Android devices and Telstra’s T-Hub, and you can see how technology is opening new worlds and chapters for Yellow Pages® and its users and advertisers.