Speaking Sensis

Remember when switched-on websites were the rage? And then do you remember when a hip and happening mobile site was the business? And up until last week, all the discussion was about smart phone apps and now these damn tablets have come along and guess what? We need to adapt to that space too.

And while the battle of the platforms takes place in one corner of the room, in the other there’s this other epic factor that has become as much a part of our day as brushing our teeth – the phenomenon known as social media. 

I could drone on and on about the latest round of growth stats concerning social media networks but it would pretty much tell the same story as it did last year and the year before that. And that is more and more people all over the world, irrespective of gender, age and cultural background, are choosing social networks as a way of staying connected and engaged with communities of friends and interests.

What’s even more interesting is that recently the battle between search (Google) and social (Facebook) has really gone into overdrive.

The growth is really happening in social networks (27.8% week ending 17 October 2009 compared with week ending 17 October 2008*), with search engines growing at the lesser rate of 4.6%.

In other markets monitored by Hitwise, social has already taken over search. And while its only happening sporadically here (ie over the Christmas period), it’s reasonable to expect the same patterns emerge in Australia.

For Citysearch, this paradigm shift is a good thing. 

Each month I’m going to give you the low down on how Citysearch is travelling on the emerging digital frontier. We’ll talk about some of the things we’re doing in the social space, the software space and how we’re handing the developments on the hardware front, too. Some things we’ll do will work really well,  other things won’t pan out the way we wanted them to – which means working through the experience and seeing if we can do things better. And we’ll use this space to share our journey with you. Who knows – our next big thing might come from one of your ideas!

* The Rise and Rise of the Social Network: An Experian Hitwise Asia Pacific Report, November 2009.

At an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon next week, Sensis CEO, Bruce Akhurst, will be talking about the challenges and opportunities Sensis has faced in evolving the Yellow Pages® from a print directory to a multi-channel, multi-brand network.

Thanks to digital media, we now live in a world of proliferating choice.

And, with their attention, people are telling us they want that choice. They’re demanding ubiquitous access to media – what they want, whenever and wherever they want it.

In this world, the challenge for media companies isn’t “how do I get advertisers online?” It’s “how do I get them everywhere”?

On Tuesday 1 June, Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst will be in Sydney talking at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon about “The Challenge of Choice”.

Bruce will discuss Yellow Pages®’ decade-long journey from a print directory to a multi-channel, multi-brand advertising network:  a journey that has challenged Sensis’ technology, product development and every other part of the business.

If you’d like to attend, you can find more information about the event, together with booking details, at the American Chamber of Commerce web site.

Hi again, and thanks for taking the time to find out more about how Sensis is bringing buyers and sellers together. In today’s update you can read about a tasty new way to demonstrate the value of Yellow® Pages; kicking off the 2010 metro canvass; more new innovations to make life easier for buyers and sellers; the phenomenal growth of mobile; and some more great news about our commitment to sustainability.


8,500 guys and girls and a pizza place
In April, Sensis ran a ground-breaking campaign that really brought the value of Yellow Pages® to life. The campaign worked a bit like this. Team up with well-known Melbourne pizza chef, Tony Fazio. Open a restaurant offering free pizza for two weeks. Don’t tell anyone the address or phone number. Instead tell them to “look it up the way you would any other business”. Then sit back and watch the dough fly.

And fly it did. Over the campaign’s two weeks, over 8,500 calls were made to Hidden Pizza, with over 70% of the callers saying they found Hidden Pizza through the print, online and mobile Yellow Pages®. That’s a lot of pizza… and a great testament to the ability of Yellow Pages® to bring buyers to your door.

Yellow Pages® Metro Canvass is up and running
Our people are now out and about talking to businesses as part of the 2010 Yellow Pages® metropolitan canvass. This must be one of the largest customer engagement programs in Australia, with consultants all over Australia contacting more than half a million businesses over the next few months.

This year, we’ve got some great new products for our customers. These include a Brisbane version of the popular Yellow Pages® In the Car book, Yellow Pages® Online Gold Plus, which is a new advertising solution for businesses without a web site, and enhanced accountability through our metered ad program.

But, perhaps the most exciting new step is a range of bundles that make it even easier for our customers to advertise right across our network. As I’ve talked about before, Yellow Pages® has evolved from a print directory to a diverse and sophisticated advertising network spanning print, online, voice and mobile. These bundles make it easier for businesses to profile themselves to potential buyers right across the network.

From the labs
Of course, we’ve been busy delivering for buyers – the people who use our products – as well.

Firstly, we’ve launched more new features to make our digital services easier to use.

Recently, we reconfigured the Yellow Pages® Online search experience. To begin with, we’ve dropped the ‘business name’ and ‘business type’ radio buttons in favour of a more intuitive search. Now, you can search for a business name, like ‘Sensis’ without having to click a ‘business name’ search button. Instead Yellow Pages® Online will drop down suggested listings relating to Sensis for you to choose from. We’ve also re-built the business profile pages to give buyers easier access to more content. The results of this have been pretty immediate, with a significant reduction in nil result searches and a big rise in interaction: most notably in the number of business profile readers clicking on email links and image galleries.

We’ve also added a series of new features to the White Pages® Online site. White Pages® is all about finding people and businesses you already know, so it’s a fair bet that you’ll be wanting to find your White Pages® contacts over and over again. Recently, we made this easier with the ability to save your contacts to a new ‘My List’ feature on White Pages® Online. We also launched send to mobile, which lets you send your listing from White Pages® Online straight to your mobile to save in your contacts.  In May, we’ll be taking this a step further by launching a new ‘save and share’ feature. With save and share, you’ll be able to save your White Pages® contacts to your pages on Facebook and a wide range of other social networks.

Secondly, we’ve made our services easier to access with new additions to our network.

As you may know, Telstra recently released the home phone of the future, the T-Hub. This is great for buyers and sellers using our services because White Pages®, Yellow Pages® and 1234 (with Whereis® coming soon) are all easily accessible right where your phone is. Just one touch of the console and you’re searching. And when you find the result in Yellow Pages®, you don’t even have to dial… just click to call.

The Yellow Pages® enhanced location search on Whereis.com I mentioned last time is also delivering results. Yellow Pages advertisers are now being profiled on Whereis.com more than 8 million times a month: a number that’s been boosted by about 2 million since we launched the enhanced location feature . This is fantastic for both buyers and sellers. It means Whereis is playing a growing role in bringing buyers and sellers together, while improving the ROI we can offer Yellow Pages® advertisers.

Finally, we’ve also been busy in the mobile space.

We launched a new CitySearch® Mobile site, with an improved look and feel, expanded TV and Movies content, a new ‘Bars’ vertical and improved mapping functionality. And we also launched new Yellow Pages® and White Pages® apps for Android devices to complement the incredibly successful launch of our iPhone apps.

Mobile coming up trumps
On that note, mobile has been an incredible success story for the buyers and sellers who rely on our services. As I’ve mentioned before, mobile usage is growing at a rate of knots. Average monthly Yellow Pages® Mobile visits for the March quarter have doubled YoY yet again. When you look across our entire network, mobile now accounts for over 13% of our total digital (online and mobile) usage.

And smart phone apps are playing an enormous role in this exciting growth. iPhone apps account for something like half of our total Yellow Pages® Mobile and White Pages® Mobile usage and these two apps still sit in the lifestyle category Top 10 in Apple’s App Store … months after they were launched.

More great news on the sustainability front
As I mentioned last month, I’m really proud of the positive contribution being made by our sustainability initiatives; such as our directory recycling program and the decision to offset our carbon emissions through Greenhouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia.

Now, we’ve taken this a step further with the release of a new book: Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth. This free book, which is a complement to our highly successful advertising guide, provides practical information on how businesses can reduce their impact on the environment and save money as well.

Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth has been written by Jon Dee, who is the Founder and Managing Director of the not-for-profit action group, Do Something, and the NSW Australian of the Year 2010. If you’d like to order a copy, just check out the Small Business section on our corporate web site.

And finally, in more good news on the sustainability front, I’m pleased to say that our efforts to support a more sustainable future are being acknowledged. Last year we joined the global Corporate Responsibility Index program for the first time. This program is run in Australia by the St James Ethics Centre and we were incredibly proud to achieve a ‘Bronze’ rating and Best New Entry Award in our first year. Since then, we’ve put a lot more work into our sustainability commitments and, as a result, I’m told we have lifted our result even higher this year. More on that next time, when the results are out.

Until then, all the best,

With the end of the year almost upon us, Sensis’ CEO, Bruce Akhurst, provides his first bi-monthly update.

Hi.

I thought it might be good to end the year by starting something… a regular report that I hope will give you a deeper insight into how Sensis is working to improve the value we offer all Australians.

New ways to help you find, buy and sell
Sensis is committed to helping you find, buy and sell. Our services help you find the suppliers you need right when you need them. In doing this, we help thousands of local businesses find their lifeblood – customers.

Our innovation programs reflect this commitment. How can we make our services simpler and more informative for buyers? And how can we build the value and simplicity of our advertiser services?

On this front, we’ve been particularly busy in the last few weeks. We launched the White Pages® app for iPhone recently. I was very happy to see that it reached the #1 free app in Apple’s App Store very quickly. This caps off an exciting quarter for our mobile sites, with usage growing off the scale. We launched White Pages® Mobile four months ago and it’s already delivering over 400,000 visits a month¹. At about the same time, we also launched the Yellow Pages® iPhone app. Since then, Yellow Pages® Mobile usage has more than doubled to over 650,000 visits a month²… in just a few months!  Clearly, Australians are connecting with these new generation mobile services and that’s great for advertisers. Our network strategy means that Yellow Pages® advertisers – print and online – can be searched through mobile and therefore can benefit from mobile usage growth.

We’ve also recently commenced delivery of the 2009 Yellow Pages®. This year’s book includes a more informative front cover and an expanded information section. Both of these enhancements were specific requests from Australians who participated in research we conducted earlier this year.

In Yellow Pages® Online, we’ve recently launched a new advertiser product – Purely Mobile Business, or PMB. PMB is designed for mobile businesses, like mobile mechanics, looking to reach out to customers in the areas they service.

We also recently launched Category Search, which is a new product that lets advertisers combine Voice, Whereis® and Citysearch® advertising into a single, easy to use product. Response has been strong, with hundreds of customers choosing Category Search in just a few weeks.

The Whereis® team has just released 3D City Maps for GPS to sat nav equipment manufacturers. 3D City Maps bring the Sydney and Melbourne CBD areas to life by providing a real-time 3D city-scape. 3D City Maps should be launched in popular GPS units shortly, and more cities will be ‘3D’d’ in the near future.

Finally, MediaSmart – our online and mobile display advertising business – has released new targeting capabilities. Working closely with Telstra, we’ve developed a segmentation capability that ensures mobile display advertising is more relevant and targeted for both mobile users and advertisers… like helping a major bank deliver specific branch manager contact details to customers mobile phones based on their location. This is a genuinely unique capability and I’m pleased to say the support from marketers has been fantastic.

In the field
Right now, our Yellow Pages® regional and local consultants are out talking to advertisers, as are our White Pages® consultants. We’ve been backing them up with new products, comprehensive training and a much stronger focus on engaging with local communities.

This local focus led to the opening of a new office in Penrith on November 10 (with offices in Ballina and Coffs Harbour also opening soon). We were really pleased to open Penrith by announcing a new community partnership with Great Community Transport. At the same time, we’ve been increasing our support for local businesses by regularly sponsoring and speaking at local events – over 80 in the last few months.

1.5 million calls… and counting
If you ever wanted proof of the value of Yellow Pages®, here it is. As you may know, we’ve been running a metered ad program for two years now. This program helps advertisers track the number of calls they receive from Yellow Pages® print.

In January, we began monitoring the phone calls delivered by Yellow Pages® print to a small cross-section of display ad customers (a sample of less than 1% of our total customer base). By early November, the number of calls delivered to these customers by Yellow Pages® print passed the 1.5 million threshold!

Imagine how many valuable phone calls Yellow Pages® is delivering to all our advertisers. Imagine how many more enquiries there are when you add people who are bypassing the phone and visiting the store or office. And imagine how that number could grow even further if you included all the other Sensis and third party online, mobile and voice services that form the Yellow Pages® network.

Interesting movements in the advertising market
Recently, we’ve seen some interesting movements in the media sector. The September quarter IAB report showed 3.3% growth in the online advertising market compared to the September quarter last year³. While this is a marked slowdown on last year, the results were really buoying for Sensis, as they show we are growing our share of the market.

Another interesting observation comes from our Adstream business. Adstream sits at the centre of the ad industry by helping marketers, agencies and media outlets, like TV, radio and newspaper publishers, manage and distribute their ad content. We’ve seen renewed growth in enquiries to Adstream recently. Could this mean the ad industry’s on its way back?

Our people have spoken
The other day, we received the results of our latest employee opinion survey. This is a global survey undertaken by Towers Perrin and it covers some of Australia’s, and the worlds, largest companies. In the latest survey, Sensis exceeded the Australian norm (the average of all Australian companies) in every category. Our results also benchmarked well among the world’s best employers, with results in a number of categories exceeding global norms. This is fantastic news. We work hard to ensure Sensis is a great place to work for our present and future employees. These results tell us we’re on the right track.

Sensis Sustainability Report
Finally, if you’d like to know more about Sensis’ strategy, operations, performance and impacts, I’d recommend you check out the 2008/9 Sensis Sustainability Report, which has just been launched. You can download it today from our newly upgraded corporate site.

Until next time
So that’s it for now. Have a happy, relaxing and safe Christmas and New Year. I’ll be back to you with a further update in February. In the meantime, thanks for all your support. You can rest assured we’ll be pulling out all stops to keep improving our value to you.

1: Omiture Site Catalyst, November 2009;
2: ibid
3: PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Internet Advertising Bureau Online Advertising Expenditure Report, quarter ended September 2009.

A high-tech, high-powered mapping vehicle will be putting areas surrounding Cunnamulla and St George on the map this week…quite literally.

Little-known Queensland towns in this area will be some of the many new inclusions that Whereis® – Australia’s local mapping expert – will soon be adding to its extensive navigation map database of Australian cities, towns, landmarks and roads.

“The Whereis® four-wheel-drive has a large, round Trimble GPS receiver on the roof. It’s been causing a bit of a stir as it passes through towns in Queensland as people try to work out what’s going on,” Adrian Tout of Whereis® said.

“People get quite excited when they find out we’re mapping most of Queensland’s roads and landmarks so that locals, as well as visitors, have access to the most up-to-date map information on Queensland in their GPS device,” he said.

“While Queensland is one of Australia’s most popular tourist destinations you wouldn’t know how to get to a lot of areas unless you had local knowledge. With Whereis maps in your GPS device, it’s like taking someone who knows the lay-of-the-land with you – with useful details such as the condition of the road.”

“Our team on the road is making a big effort to mark points of interest for travelers – boat ramps, highway rest areas, spectacular look-outs, motels and van parks, public river access points are all detailed for travelers keen to go off the beaten track.”

The Whereis® car has logged more than 245,000 kilometres of mainland Australian roads to date this year, and is on-schedule to log a further 6,500 kilometres in Queensland during the next few months. The Whereis team will then convert the data into digital maps to be used in GPS units, the online mapping site whereis.com, various navigation apps for the iPhone and the Whereis® Navigator application, which is accessible on selected Telstra mobile phones.

Andrew Wood, part of the Whereis mapping team has been assigned to this important mission. He has mapped thousands of kilometers of road for Whereis and has teamed up with a skilled driver to map Queensland. “This is the best job in the world – I get paid to drive around one of Australia’s most beautiful states,” he said.

“Some of the maps people are using to navigate Queensland today are extremely old and many have simply been digitised from older printed maps – and large parts of back roads on maps are also inaccurate. We also taking into account the many changes that have been made over the years with the development of intersection upgrades on main roads and new estates,” Andrew said.

The two-man Whereis team has already mapped more than 30,000km in south-eastern Queensland including Wallangarra, Gatton, Esk, Kingaroy, Chinchilla and Gooniwindi.

Andrew counts seeing two kangaroos going head to head in the middle of the road as one of the most unusual things he’s seen during his travels to date and is looking forward to visiting the Gulf and Cape York to try his hand at Barramundi fishing.

The Whereis car began its Queensland adventure in Stanthorpe, mapping an old road that had been re-opened. Over the next few weeks, the car will be focusing on the areas surrounding Cunnamulla and St George with travelers and locals in mind.

Charles Wright recently wrote in The Age how the benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for one small business provided a far better return on investment (ROI) than advertising in the Yellow Pages®.

It’s easy to find one example of a business that’s been successful with any sort of advertising. The challenge is to find lots of them. Yellow Pages® has hundreds of examples of advertisers who get a majority of their business through Yellow Pages®. We even put some in our TV ad earlier this year.

Charles’ article was based on a simple assessment of ROI: cost of SEM outlay and the return in website traffic compared to the cost of advertising with Yellow Pages® Online and the subsequent website.

Where his case fell down is that it left out a number of costs a small business faces when gearing up for effective SEM and SEO activity.

These include the costs of building, hosting and maintaining a decent website, and possibly the cost of an SEO/SEM consultancy (or a significant time cost if you are able to do it yourself).

Sure there are online businesses that can manage all this and find customers. But there are a lot of businesses that can’t. Which is where the Yellow Pages® network can deliver real value.

Through its network, Yellow Pages® provides an effective multi-channel solution. With one Yellow Pages® ad, a business goes in the Yellow Pages® Book, Yellow Pages® Mobile, and the 1234 and Call Connect phone services.

In addition, Yellow Pages® also gives businesses a significant online presence by putting them in yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com and by making Yellow Pages® listings available to be searched on Google Maps and Bing Maps.

In fact, if you add up all these print, online, voice and mobile services, you find that Yellow Pages® advertiser content can be searched for through services used by almost 65% of Australians every month.

And that doesn’t include search engines. Recognising their significant value, we’ve made Yellow Pages® content not only searchable through the major search sites but we’ve optimised the content for search engines as well. That’s why over 2.5 million referrals come from search engines to Yellow Pages® Online every month.

People searching Yellow Pages® are buyers, not browsers. And they are often serious buyers who are ready to make a major purchase such as buying tyres for their car, booking an appointment with a dentist, booking a function at a restaurant or hiring a tradesman for work on their house.

The Yellow Pages® network helps puts businesses in more places customers are looking – including major online sites – with ease and convenience, leaving them to get on with running their business.

Sometimes the numbers just talk for themselves. Take Yellow Pages® Mobile usage data…

As you all become devoted (hopefully) readers of the Crunch! column, you’ll begin to notice that my articles all take on roughly the same formula.

Obviously, there’ll be stats… a no-brainer considering this column is meant to be about stats.

But those stats will be surrounded by witty (hopefully) witticisms and insightful (hopefully) insights as well.

There’s a simple reason for that. To the vast majority of the world (i.e. the majority of people who aren’t bone fide pen-holder-carrying geeks), staring at a bunch of numbers is like watching grass grow.

But, every now and then, you come across a set of stats that just talk for themselves – no frilly additions necessary.

Here’s an example.

1.    In October, the Yellow Pages® Mobile audience hit half a million unique visitors for the first time¹.

2.    All up, it’s taken Yellow Pages® Mobile a touch over 18 months to reach half a million unique visitors¹. By comparison, it took Yellow Pages® Online more than five years to reach that mark².

Still think mobile marketing’s sitting on the runway?

Think again.

1.  Omniture. July to October 2009
2.  RedSheriff 2004/2005 data

Crunch! is a new column looking at the numbers behind advertising and local search. In today’s Crunch!… Defining what a click is. That’s easy. Defining what a click isn’t. That’s harder… but much more important.

In the 12 years I’ve been working in online media, there’s one thing that’s always befuddled me.

It’s the fact that online marketers cite measurement as the biggest barrier to advertising on what is touted as the world’s most measurable medium.

Go figure!

To highlight this, a 2007 McKinsey Quarterly report* found that over 50% of Internet advertisers saw “insufficient metrics to measure impact” as a barrier to using or considering digital advertising.

And there’ve been similar surveys, with similar results, in Australia.

So, what’s going on here? How the hell can measuring such a measurable medium raise so much angst?

I’ve long thought there’s two reasons.

The first is confusion about how we’re measuring – in other words the different public measurement services and their methodologies. For quite a while now, there’s been concern in Australia about the accuracy of online statistics. Naturally, when there’s a lack of faith in the source, there’s going to be a lack of faith in the data as well.

The second is a lack of clarity around what we’re measuring. Just think about the simple issue of online traffic as an example. Over the years, we’ve been stumped by a blinding array of different metrics – hits, page views, sessions, visits, unique users and unique visitors just to start with.

These metrics all mean slightly different things but, despite that, they’re often quoted interchangeably: a recipe for much pulling-of-hair and gnashing-of-teeth if I ever saw one.

This metric malaise is a really big problem, and I wanted to touch on it today with a focus on one particular metric – the humble click.

WHAT’S A CLICK?

The other day, an interesting question was raised at a customer panel session I attended.

On the surface, the question – “what (in advertising terms) is a click?” – would seem pretty straightforward.

Put simply, it’s when a person clicks from a feeder – like a search engine or banner ad – to a particular advertiser’s web site. It’s the action that gives rise to pricing terms like ‘cost per click’ and ‘pay per click’.

Okay, no biggie there.

CLICKS AIN’T LEADS

But the question becomes a lot murkier when you think about what a click isn’t. In particular, whether a click and a lead are the same thing.

Now, this might seem like nit-picking, but it’s a really important question – especially for the numerically-obsessed, like me. It gets to the heart of how you understand, measure and evaluate the contribution of different media to your business.

To start with, let’s think about this in a traditional media context.

Let’s say you send out a DM piece to 1,000 potential customers. As a result, 100 people take a moment to read it and 10 are so enamoured with what you’ve said that they give you a call.

What have you got there? 1,000 leads? 100 leads? 10 leads?

If you’re a media outlet trying to justify your existence, you might say 100. You might even say 1,000 if you’re feeling particularly hairy-chested (and/or deluded).

But if you’re a manager trying to get a handle on your sales pipeline, the answer is unequivocal… 10.

A lead isn’t a passing ship; it’s a real potential customer who has called, emailed, visited or contacted you in some way expressing a real interest.

A lead is a real sales opportunity that – most critically – you have a real chance to close.

Don’t get me wrong. The fact that 100 people read your DM piece (or clicked through to your web site) is great. They now know you and have you in the back of their minds. They’ve interacted with your brand.

But those people don’t qualify as ‘leads’ until they take that next step and get in touch with you.

BRINGING CONVERSION INTO THE MIX

Clearly, you can’t properly equate clicks to leads (which take the form of calls, visits, emails and other forms of enquiry) in the way some try to do these days.

To properly measure the leads generated by online advertising, you need to bring another ratio into play – conversion.

Conversion measures how many people actually took that next step of contacting you.

Most research suggests that online conversion rates are quite low – in the low single digits. That means the actual leads stemming from your online advertising may only be a relatively small fraction of the number of clicks.

THE BOTTOM LINE

So, what’s the bottom line here?

Firstly, comparing clicks with leads ain’t comparing apples with apples. If you want to compare clicks generated by one form of advertising with calls or visits generated by another, you need to think about the conversion as well. How many people actually visited your site and then contacted you?

Secondly, think about how well your web site converts browsers to buyers. Optimising online lead-generation campaigns means not just getting lots of people to your site, but having a site that efficiently converts them to leads as well.

And finally, if someone comes to you offering a mountain of ‘leads’, ask them precisely what they mean by the word ‘leads’.

How many of them will be real leads – enquiries from potential customers that you have a chance to close?

You might just find they’re leading you up the garden path.

* How companies are marketing online: A McKinsey Global Survey. September 2007

In a bid to connect more advertisers with consumers who are looking for products and services online, Sensis announced a helpful new service last week. The launch of ‘category search’ on www.whereis.com and www.citysearch.com.au means Sensis advertisers can now access priority advertising across these two online sites.

So what does this actually mean for you or I? Well it means when the millions of people who use the Whereis.com or Citysearch.com.au sites each month and they search for a business either on a map or while they’re browsing entertainment information at Citysearch, a list of ‘priority advertisers’ relevant to what they are looking for will appear at the top of the search results. Top advertisers in whereis.com will also open up automatically on the map to create a seamless one-click experience for those looking for a business. Advertisers on citysearch.com.au receive richer profile pages and reviews from the public about their product or service.

If you want to check out an example of this on www.whereis.com search for ‘florist’ in ‘Camberwell’.

To view an example of this on www.citysearch.com.au type ‘restaurant’ in the search box on the home page.

Ok, Citysearch® – Australia’s leading entertainment and lifestyle website- wants your opinion! Be it your favourite place for a Sunday Session or the most romantic restaurant in town, Citysearch® is on a mission to uncover and award Australia’s favourite city hot spots via a campaign called the Citysearch® Best in the City Awards. Check it out at Citysearch.com.au/awards.

The Best in the City Awards has Citysearch® turning the tables on city urbanites and asking them what they think are the best places in town. Unlike countless industry awards that have been done to death, these awards are ‘the people’s choice’ awards – local categories, local picks, voted by local people – people who know and love their city.

So it could be the incredible view from the roof-top bar, the barista who is a master of latte art, the talented street performer in your local strip or the waiter who knows exactly how you like your steak. Citysearch® believes successful city entertainment is built on an ability to offer a unique experience and make it a memorable moment in time. So now it’s time to give Australia’s savvy public a voice and a chance to tell us what they love most about their city.

Until 12 September 2009 nominations are open. Monday 21 September 2009 will see the finalists announced and the public will be invited to vote.

Voting closes 23 October and the inaugural Citysearch® Best in the City Award winners will be announced 2 November 2009.

The awards are running in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. The ten award categories represent the best entertainment options in town, from ‘Best Friday night drinks’ to ‘Best vegie fare’ with the winner in each category taking home the prestigious Eye-Con trophy and the kudos that comes with being voted number one.

So tell us what’s hot in your city and nominate your favourite entertainment options for the title of Citysearch® Best in the City, visit www.Citysearch.com.au/awards.

AWARD CATEGORIES

• Best vegie fare
• Best service to make you smile
• Best Sunday session
• Best place for a first date
• Best Bathroom
• Best Friday night drinks
• Best Place to Watch the Game
• Best Cheap and Cheerful
• Best Street Performance
• Best in the kid-friendly stakes