News Category

Add Your Cell Number

We just did a beta launch of a new feature on our site that allows you to add your cell number to our site. We are doing this strictly on an opt-in basis, because that is what our users have told us to do. Why add your cell phone? If you’re like me, to be easily reachable by others that you care about. In fact, although both my home and cell phones are listed on WhitePages.com, I prefer that people call me on my cell. After all, I carry it with me everywhere and I turn it off when I don’t want to be disturbed (unlike my home landline phone). It’s also good to know that I can be easily contacted in the event of an emergency. For others, such as service professionals for example, there might be business reasons to add their cell phone.

mobile listing

For this first beta release, we’re keeping the service very rudimentary. Although the service seems very simple on the surface, this is a very big milestone for us at WhitePages.com because it marks the first time ever that…
- we have added cell numbers to our site
- we have allowed our users to contribute listings
- we have configured our database to allow real-time updates on a listing-by-listing basis

Lots of product development and engineering heroics have gone into making that possible. Woo hoo!

Now that we have our foundation built, please stay tuned over the coming months, as we look forward to layering lots of additional (and useful!) services on top of the base offering.

Posted by Alex on April 30, 2008 – 5:05 pm in News | 1 Comment

Starbuck Advertising

I don’t if anybody else out there has noticed, but Starbucks has begun taking out full page ads in the Sunday New York Times. Admittedly, I’m not one to comb the different media channels looking for SBUX advertisements, but I have to say that I was a bit shocked to see such in-your-face advertising coming from a company who’s advertising budget has traditionally been spent in the store (or masked in barista training to help ensure that the ‘third place from home’ customer experience was always prevalent). Maybe this has been going on for awhile and I’m just now noticing. Either way, it’s interesting to see SBUX trying to regain the brand essence it once guarded so tightly.

In addition to the picture of a recyclabe Grande coffee cup, the following words appear on the ad:

“We believe that our baristas can hand-make any espresso beverage perfectly. With over 87,000 possible combinations, that’s a lot of perfection. This is why we promise that if your drink isn’t perfect, every time, let us know and we’ll make it right. This isn’t a promotion, this isn’t ‘for a limited time only,’ this isn’t ‘while supplies last.’ This is every coffee, every day, forever.

Looks like SBUX is trying to reposition themselves as incredibly customer-focused, with the ability to make a perfect coffee drink all the time. This positioning is much different than the ‘third place from home’ positioning and overall in-store experience that SBUX once built their brand on. Granted, getting the right cup of coffee, everytime, is certainly part of that experience, but the ad makes me wonder if they’ll ever be able to regain the essence of the ‘original’ brand. Seems to me that they should put the focus back on what they once were….warm, inviting, personal and friendly….versus spending a bunch of $$$ on trying to change perceptions through advertising.

John Lusk
VP, Marketing

Posted by John Lusk on March 10, 2008 – 1:52 pm in News, Marketing | 0 Comments

Searching for People Search

We were delighted to see how high “white pages” and “people search” rank among the top 25 non-branded/non-adult search terms , recently compiled by Compete, especially given that we bought PeopleSearch.com just a few months ago. And we even beat “britney spears” at #18! We typically ranks lower among all keywords if you include branded terms (e.g. myspace, yahoo, etc.) but I haven’t seen any third party cut the list like this before. Based on other data we have access to, e.g. Google Trends, we actually know of some inaccuracies in Compete’s top list, but the bigger point is that our services are clearly in high demand as measured by web search queries. As we continue to improve on our services and as more people find us, hopefully they can focus more on just people search, rather than searching for people search!

Top Search Terms - Jan 2008
1. dictionary
2. heath ledger
3. white pages
4. weather
5. lyrics
6. yellow pages
7. people search
8. irs
9. fafsa
10. cloverfield

Full top 25 list at Compete.

Posted by Alex on February 25, 2008 – 12:58 pm in News, Marketing | 0 Comments

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

Football, cheese covered food, beer and monkeys

In case you have been living in a box, or perhaps you are not a sports fan, I’d like to remind you that this Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday. A day where millions will gather in front of their television screens to watch a bunch of dudes pound the crap out of one another so they can claim the title of World Champion and then go to Disneyland. In addition to watching the game, we also stuff our faces full of really bad food (bad for you, not bad tasting) and drink lots and lots and lots of beer.

1,200 calories: Amount the average Super Bowl watcher will consume while snacking. To burn that off, it would take walking for four hours or running an hour and 45 minutes.

30 percent: Increase in sales of processed-cheese loaves the week before last year’s Super Bowl. Flavored snack-cracker sales jumped 68 percent.

$11.8 million: Additional sales of beer (regular and light) during 2005 Super Bowl week.

Aside from the game itself, many people tune in to watch the commercials. Everyone knows and expects to see entertaining commercials during the Super Bowl, its part of the whole experience. Have you ever wondered why some companies chose to spend millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad and others don’t? Inc.com published a story today that tries to answer that question and it isn’t necessarily about having budget as our very own V.P. of marketing John Lusk explains in an interview with the reporter last week:

“You have to have a very good understanding of brand before you do something of that nature,” WhitePages.com’s vice president of marketing John Lusk said, noting his company’s own brand is still evolving. “A growing company is constantly trying to reinvent itself, and with that, you’re always reassessing who you are. So for us to spend $2 million telling people who we are and knowing that that could change in nine months is a big waste.”

“Our background, that scrappiness culture really sticks with you and it forces you to better understand where to get the best bang for your buck,” Lusk adds.

You can read the complete article online at the Inc.com site. It includes perspective from other industry experts including Go Daddy.com, a company known for their “interesting” Super Bowl advertising.

If you are curious about the ads for this year’s game, you can catch a sneak peek here.

Posted by Tiffany on February 1, 2008 – 5:45 pm in News | 0 Comments

Chips and Dip and Dorks and Nerds

(Administrivia: this is cross-posted to our new WhitePages.com Developer Blog, focused on a engineering and tech ops-centric view of WP. Check it out!)

Like many small tech companies, our dreams are bigger than our staff: we’re always looking for those holes in the work week to try out new technologies, learn a new skill, or build a great prototype. But there’s always one more feature to write or bug to fix, and it’s hard to find the time.

Last week, we found the time. Jan 14-18 was our inaugural Hack Week, where our engineering, IT operations, data, and product design teams dropped their normal workload to build interesting things. Work began on Monday (or earlier), and we went pencils-down on Friday 2pm, for a series of 5-minute talks on each project, plus beer, carrots (not in the beer), and some weird chip-like things with a sour-cream-heavy dip.

We ended up with 30 projects, teams ranging from 1 to 7 in size, including

  • Porting features of the Smalltalk debugger to Perl
  • Using our geographic data to draw different kinds of maps - too bad the Zillow neighborhood data didn’t become available until midweek
  • Testing managing our code base with Subversion, Fisheye, and Crucible (yes, we’re still a cvs shop…)
  • Building bootable Windows CDs with core backup, recovery, and virus scanning tools for our install base (until we get everyone on MacBooks, anyway)

And a host of things we can’t talk about just yet. We have at least three projects which will make it out of Hack Week to the Interwebs - more to come on that later.

We had an esteemed judging panel which chose three winners - one from QA, one from Development, one from IT, so a nice mix - and each one received a chumby. I dropped one of the chumbys - seems like it should keep working, but we gave that one to the IT guy just in case.

The overall feedback was quite positive and we’ll be doing it regularly. One engineer did mention that it was “creativity with a gun to your head:” he’s planning his vacation for the same week. Can’t win ‘em all.

Posted by Scott R. on January 29, 2008 – 2:38 pm in News, Engineering | 1 Comment

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

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

Now with 80% People Coverage!

Yes, that’s right. With 180 million people in our database, we now cover 80% of all US adults. Given that we started 2007 at just 40% coverage, which is where the rest of the directory assistance industry is at, the team here feels real good about ending the year with this milestone. After all, we have doubled the size of our database in just under a year.

What’s the significance of this? On most other directory assistance-like websites (as well as calling 411 directory assistance), you have approximately a 4-out-of-10 chance to find the person you’re searching for, whereas on our websites, you now have an 8-out-of-10 chance. That’s quite a different user experience. Looking at this milestone more broadly, this marks the first time ever that you can find 80% of the US adult population in a free, easily accessible service. Yet another perspective… compare us to some of the other leading online repositories of people data:

people search database size

To be fair, this chart is not an apples-to-apples comparison, nor do we want want it to be an apples-to-apples comparison. After all, we are quite happy to differentiate in the sense that:

  1. We provide instant gratification to our users who seek contact info (rather than first having to become “friends”).
  2. We are free (unlike pay-per-lookup or subscription-based sites).
  3. We have better coverage (as is evident from the chart above after all). Why? We aggregate data from multiple sources, including offline.
  4. We serve a simple use case: finding and connecting people with each other. No fuss.

What do you think of the various improvements we have launched recently?

Posted by Alex on December 11, 2007 – 9:50 am in News | 0 Comments

Improved Search Forms

And here is another website enhancement launching in time for the Holidays… We just added new persistent search forms at the top of all our search results (as well as the “not found” pages). This will make it easier for you modify your searches on our site, which will benefit all users (in particular those of you who are power users). We have also improved the user interface for our search suggestions, which you’ll notice throughout the website as you conduct searches.

How do you like these improvements? What can we do better for you?

persistent search forms

Posted by Alex on November 16, 2007 – 4:55 pm in News, New Products | 1 Comment