Author Archives: John Lusk

Viral overkill…or not

The term ‘viral’ marketing has led to much debate at WP.com over the past few months. What does it mean, how do you make it happen, when is it successful, does it actually exist, etc., etc. Seems like every other marketing conversation includes a ‘viral’ marketing comment and I’m not so sure that any of us actually knows how to define it. So, in the spirit of ‘finding and connecting’ people, we decided to spend most of our marketing efforts actually finding someobdy who could help educate us all on viral marketing.

On Monday, February 11th, 9am, Konstantin Guericke will speak to WhitePages.com employees on his experiences with Viral marketing, what’s worked for him in the past, what hasn’t and how we can incorporate viral marketing components into our products. Call it an extension/crash course in alternative marketing by somebody in the know.

As for Konstantin, his successes speak for themselves. As co-founder of LinkedIn, he was able to cut his teeth on bleeding edge marketing tactics and is experiencing some of the same succeses as CEO of Jaxtr. The guy knows what he’s talking about.

Given that we’re holding this event in a ballroom of sorts in downtown Seattle, we felt it worthwhile to open up attendance to any of our friends in the area who might have an interest in hearing what Konstantin has to say. Just shoot me an email at jlusk@whitepages.com if you have an interest in attending and I’ll send you all the deets.

John

Posted by John Lusk on February 4, 2008 – 6:22 pm in News, Marketing | 3 Comments

Throwing in the towel

Last week I spoke to a group of students who were taking an entrepreneurship course at Middlebury College. Most of the discussion was centered around my book and all of the different boneheaded moves that my business partner and I made during our first start-up experience. I’m usually pretty good at rifling through questions, providing detailed answers and gleaming over the fact that I typically come off as some entrepreneurial guru, when in fact, my experience is really no different than any other entrepreneur out there.

However, one student asked a question that’s been bothering me for the past week, especially given some of the strategic decisions that we’re making here at WhitePages.com.

The question: “Before starting, did you and Kyle (the biz partner) agree on a bailing out point? That is, did you define when you might choose not to keep running the business.”

The answer: “I don’t think Kyle and I ever even considered when, or if, we’d ever bail. We were so confident that our product would sell that the thought of failure never crossed our minds. I guess we probably should have asked that question.”

In that past couple of weeks, we’ve been discussing the future direction of WhitePages.com, how we’re going to continue growing the company and what we believe our users truly want to see out of our product. For the most part, we’re talking about entering some pretty cool new areas and markets and that means driving incredible innovation. The student’s question has been playing on my mind since he asked it last week, primarily because it’s a question that we need to ask ourselves at WhitePages.com.

When you embark on new initiatives or new businesses, how do you make sure that you’re not afraid to walk away if things aren’t going so well? I’m a big believer that you’ve got to manage the costs of a new initiative vs. managing for failure. If you try to manage failure, you’ll over analyze and never actually pull the trigger…or worse, you’ll walk away way too early. If you manage the costs, then you won’t be afraid of walking away even if costs are sunk and you’ve already spent countless dollars and resources. Easier said than done though. Lots of emotion, personal attachment, persistence and pride goes into starting new companies and launching new products. But you honestly have to ask yourself when enough may be enough.

My quandary is that had Kyle and I actually managed the costs, we would have probably walked away too soon and never experienced the successes that we did. Failure just wasn’t an option for us. So, do we take the same approach with our innovation efforts at WhitePages.com?

Thoughts, concerns, questions? Feel free to comment.

John
VP, Marketing

Posted by John Lusk on January 28, 2008 – 5:23 pm in New Products, Marketing | 0 Comments

Building loyal customers

I found an interesting post on the Church of the Customer Blog this morning that provides an example of how playing ‘nice’ is the best form of customer relationship management (CRM). In the post, Ben McConnell references a friend of his who received a personalized thank-you email after making a purchase at a pseudo-pizza restaurant. An ensuing positive email conversation occurred between the customer and executives at the company, thus leading us to believe that this level of personalization is warranted

When we were manufacturing our MouseDriver product, we took the same approach to CRM. Our feeling was that any positive experience that we could provide to an actual or potential customer would lead to customer evangelism, and ultimately, increased sales of our product. For the most part, our efforts paid off in droves. Customers subscribed to our Insider newsletter (you actually had to send me an email to my personal account claiming that you were ‘In’), the media started picking up on the company and ultimately our story made headlines in numerous major publications. Could we measure what our efforts actually drove? No. But we were pretty sure that the time spent personally responding to each and every customer was well worth it as our sales increased dramatically without spending a dime on marketing.

At WhitePages.com, we have roughly 40MM unique users who utilize our product and services. I don’t know the exact number, but I’m guessing we receive at least 1000 comments a week from customers addressing all sorts of things….what they don’t like about the site, what they love about our company, anecdotes on how WhitePages.com helped to find a long lost friend, comments around privacy, etc., etc. So, with that kind of volume, is it worthwhile, or even feasible, to respond to every customer personally? Is there a measurable benefit that we can track to ensure that our efforts are rewarded? My personal belief is that it’s worth it, but at what cost?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

John
VP, Marketing

Posted by John Lusk on January 14, 2008 – 12:26 pm in Customer Service, Marketing | 0 Comments

Why I joined WhitePages.com?

People change jobs all the time. For me, it’s happened four times in my illustrious 15 year business career. Now that I’ve been at WhitePages.com for 3 months, I feel like I can provide a bit of insight as to why I would leave the Microsoft mothership and reenter the small business world.

Top three reasons why I joined WhitePages.com:

1) Impact and Influence: The opportunity to impact and influence the strategic direction of a rapidly growing company. WhitePages.com only has ~130 employees and that leaves robust opportunities for every single employee to contribute in ways that have meaningful impact. The accountability for results, the opportunities to impact big change and the potential to see ideas come to fruition was a big attractor. Plus, you don’t need multiple levels of approval to act on decisions.

2) Industry Growth: The online ad space continues to kick some serious ass….and it doesn’t look like the growth opportunities are going to stop. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), internet advertising revenue grew 26% in the first nine months of 2007 and is expected to finish up at $20B for all of 2007. As more $$$ continue to shift from traditional media (TV, print ads) to online, we’ll continue to see the IAB numbers skyrocket.

3) Business Fundamentals: WhitePages.com has crushed it over the past five years. Part of this growth is due to industry dynamics and part is due to leadership and execution. Our latest press release show us growing revenues by 23% in 2007 with even bigger growth numbers in 2008. More importantly, we have two critical components that make for a healthy business: Customers (22M unique visitors according to comScore) and Revenue (~$64M in 2007). We’ve also got a well established, seasoned Ad Sales Team with tons of online experience. And at the end of the day, business is all about making and selling.

Of course the people, the culture, and the brand-building opportunities were also big influencers of my decision…but we’ll leave further discussion on those topics to future blog posts.

Comments, questions, criticisms? Just leave a comment.

John
VP, Marketing

Posted by John Lusk on January 7, 2008 – 5:10 pm in News | 0 Comments

WhitePages.com Blog - Part Deaux

Ok, it’s a New Year and we’d like to officially welcome you to the WhitePages.com (WP) blog. Can’t say that we’ve been overly diligent in maintaining our blog over the past year, but with each new year comes new resolutions…and firing up this thing is at the top of our list (behind growing our user base, increasing revenue, driving engagement, releasing new products, etc., etc.).

So why the renewed interest in a WP blog…haven’t blogs hit the proverbial media hype already? Well…yeah, they have. I can’t tell you how many times in the last year I’ve heard panelists and speakers exclaim that a good blog strategy is the key to business success. Yeah, right! And being the cool kid in high school always leads to a prosperous business career. Anyway, while we don’t see blogging as the driver of our overall biz success, we do see it as a great tool for communicating, networking and sharing ideas with employees, customers, partners, analysts, press and anybody else interested in engaging in thought-provoking conversations…or not.

What are we going to share in this blog? Well…the sky’s the limit…so to speak. I’d like to be able to tell you exactly what we’re going to discuss in this blog, but truth of the matter is that I really have no idea. I do know that we’ll be blogging regularly, that we’ll be highlighting some of the different issues and opportunities in the People Search space and that we’ll be giving our readers some pretty extraordinary insights on how we’re taking this company to the next level of growth. Beyond those general ideas, we’re looking to our readers to help us define our content moving forward.

Contributors to this blog will come from all over the company. In fact, we may actually have a guest blogger or two depending on the topic. We’ll definitely facilitate ideas and content from clients, analysts, gurus, readers and wherever else we find interesting ideas…just no telling what we may end up talking aobut.

And if you’ve made it this far, you can check out some of my ‘blog’ work that focused on MouseDriver and get a feel for how the WP blog will read. Can’t say that this blog will lead to the same success as The MouseDriver Insider, but you never know. We’ve got some pretty big aspirations for the WhitePages.com blog

Hope to see you joining the ride.

John Lusk
VP, Marketing

Posted by John Lusk on January 2, 2008 – 5:02 pm in New at WhitePages.com | 0 Comments

The blogosphere beckons!

Check it out this story in The Galveston Daily News. “Well traveled pooches owners sought” is the title of an article that very clearly demonstrates one of the Whitepages.com user scenarios that we’ve identified. Granted, this article hasn’t yet ended in your typically happy ‘pet’ ending, but at least it shows that individuals are using the site to help connect lost pets with their rightful owners. Nothing like a feel-good (or hopefully soon-to-be) feel good story to close out the year.

Also, when you get chance, make sure you read Vanessa Fox’s’ post on Search Engine Land. We typically don’t get tons of play in the blogosphere, so it’s great to see others recognizing how our future direction may impact internet users and their ability to access and/or control their online information. It’s a great article that references and even cooler research report that PEW/Internet released yesterday. Lots of good points brought up in both the article and the survey and certainly worthy of continued discussions.

Comments, questions, criticisms? Let us know.

Posted by John Lusk on December 18, 2007 – 9:24 pm in News | 0 Comments