1. The books are delivered to households who actually plan to use them.

2. The medium is promoted to small businesses in an honest manner.

When the yellow pages industry fails either of those two tests, they prove that they don’t care about the communities they work within or their customers.

Would you be willing to agree that that’s a fair test?

It really does get your knickers all twisted in a knot doesn’t it Mr. Ed when anyone associated with the print Yellow Pages industry does anything creative to promote their products.

You just can’t accept the fact the people still do use the print products.

So who is misleading who?

If Stephanie wanted to write a more respectable piece, she could have mentioned that Sensis went out of their way to achieve the 70% YP sourced traffic she cited. They wouldn’t take walk-in customers at the restaurant. Weren’t in Urbanspoon, on Foursquare, etc.

When faced with the task of finding the information in common 2010 restaurant directories, many people jumped through the hoops, which goes to those the power of free pizza. People will even step away from Facebook for free pizza.

Stephanie brings a lot of knowledge about the YP industry to SEL, which is appreciated, but, to me, this story by Stephanie went beyond providing an insider’s perspective to something misleading to local businesses trying to determine an appropriate advertising mix in 2010.