When I initially came across the result pictured above, I didn’t think much of it, Facebook pages often show up in search results. The thing that made me curious was the familiar way with which the title and url structure appeared to be optimized for search. ‘Click’ oh my… Here’s what I found:

The screenshot above reveals a facebook category/town page. This is clearly yellow-pages-centric. 4 business listings organized by geography and buiness type, that’s the yellow page recipe. Clicking on any of these listings brings you to an unclaimed facebook page. Here’s the screenshot when I click on the first one:

It’s like the love child of a Google Place page and a Facebook business info page- Placebook (Interestingly, a whois look-up for placebook.com reveals the owner of the domain as E-bay).

To navigate to your facebook yellow pages, go to your Wall and click on the link to your hometown in the top right. If you can’t find the link, update the hometown field in your facebook settings. After you click the link, you’ll notice the business listings and a box from which you can change the business category.

There are two things that make me think Facebook can be a real contender in Local Search. The first is the sheer awesomeness of the results. The algorithm that will generate the results will be built around your network of Friends (presumably) and will include photos of your friends along with the results, as you saw when you clicked on the link to your hometown. That is the epitome of local/social.

The second thing is content. I recently read that more small business owners have created facebook pages than websites.

It will take a while for Facebook to catch up with Google. They still have to build out the infrastructure of a product that is clearly in its infancy. And they have to get people in the habit of “searching” for things on Facebook.

They could begin by optimizing for Google like everyone else. Which appears to be exactly what they did.

The logic being that those folks who still use it can opt-in and receive it. This is one of those weird logic things that makes you wonder if the world has gotten too complicated for politicians.

Where they will go to opt-in? How will they be informed of this?

And here is the big question? Is the City of San Francisco going to take on the expense of publishing the book? Certainly, creating this law will remove the profit from creating and distributing a phone book. So, if not the city, who? I genuinely believe, many people believe there will be a phone book to opt into following this law. Obviously, you can’t pass a law that sucks the profit out of a business and expect the business to continue to operate. There are likely many who have that expectation, probably even the mayor.

It’s ok for you and me to fail to recognize things like that, but not for elected officials. Again, it makes me wonder if the world is too complicated for politicians.

I am an interested party. I am a partner in an agency that sells internet advertising and yellow pages. Our yellow page business is in decline and will continue to decline, likely to Zero. The only question is when. Our internet marketing business is growing rapidly. As our clients spend less on yellow pages they will likely spend more on internet. It’s heads my client wins, and tails my client wins. As long as, and here is the major point, the decline happens naturally. If it doesn’t happen at a pace dictated by the free market system, there will be consequences for the local economy.

Let’s Look at it from the point of view of a small business that I am familiar with in the the bay area. This business has a sophisticated internet marketing program and a 6 figure yellow page spend. The yellow page spend represents hundreds of calls from new customers each month and the largest portion of the advertising budget.

If this law takes effect, he will have to cancel his yellow pages. Although, yellow pages provides a high volume of calls, the cost per call is much higher than on the internet and I can’t see how it could remain profitable with the drop in usage an opt-in program would cause.

With the volume of new customers reduced so much, he would be forced to lay workers off. I guess he would see a bump in internet calls but not nearly enough to offset the loss in call volume. My guess would 5-7 guys would be laid off.

I think most other small businesses in the area that advertise in those books would make similar decisions. Which means more layoffs from small business.

Now I’m going to guess and say yellow pages in the bay area is a 20 million dollar industry, give or take 10 million. Does it make sense to just take this money out of the economy. What does it mean to the people who sell the ads?, deliver the books?, recycle the paper?, sell recycled paper? and on and on. It means lost jobs, lost revenue etc.

All of this will happen eventually, as progress slowly and steadily advances. There is no need for government to interfere. They’re not selling crack, their selling ads that contribute millions to the local economy. I understand why the casual observer thinks this is a good idea. They don’t have access to the data one would need to make an informed decision. Elected officials do have access to the numbers and should be able to make better decisions.

In a post related to the Seattle law, Treehugger.com asks “Whether Yellow Pages are a right?.”

And the answer is of course! Do I not have the right to sell a legal product and earn a living? Do my clients have the right to advertise their business in a medium that is effective and helps them grow? Do people have the right to access local business information in way they find most convenient?

I think this decision is being made a group of people who think they are smarter than other people and either have never looked at the numbers or have chosen to ignore them.

The yellow page industry filed a lawsuit last month. Scary how quickly a government decision can force a business to start paying big money to lawyers.

The likely result of San Francisco’s Yellow Page Law? Everyone loses but the lawyers. What else is new? (For those wondering, being relieved of the burden of having to recycle your yellow pages doesn’t qualify as a win. Not when the stakes are this high. )

Joe looked up from his paperwork and thought out loud that the phone hadn’t been ringing much in the last few days. He finished the estimate he had been working on and emailed it to the old couple he met with last week.

Still thinking it had been unusually slow, Joe logged into his Google Analytics account. The Dashboard indicated that traffic had slowed in the last 5 days or so. He clicked on ‘Traffic Sources’ and found the decline in traffic was pretty evenly distributed throughout his organic and paid advertising. The beginnings of a frustration that can only be caused by internet advertising began as Joe started wading through the links in GA’s main navigation one at a time.

Joe Highley is a roofing contractor. A former bond trader, he had grown tired of building a book of business that lasted only as long as the economic cycle. Owning his own business would not make him immune to the economy but it would put him in control of his own fate. That difficult decision proved to be a good one and Joe is proud of the ‘Since 1994′ that appears in all his ads.

Joe relied on his courage and salesmanship when he started out. He mortgaged his home, hired 2 guys, and purchased $43,575 in yellow pages advertising. He spread it across multiple counties so the monthly payment would be staggered. His phone bill would not bear the full weight of the $4,000 plus until October. The first book would drop in March, the beginning of the season.

Joe focused the ad copy on repair, thinking that would get him busy faster and make the sales a little easier. Maybe convenience and service would be more important than price and experience on the repair end of the business. Luck struck in the form of a wicked storm in early April, Joe’s phone started to ring and it kept on ringing as Joe’s yellow page budget swelled to 6 figures over the next 10 years.

That’s when it started to fall apart. As the advertising bills swelled competition from multiple publishers and the internet made the spend less effective. Combined with a soft economy, Joe was in real trouble for the first time since starting the business.

Staring at bills that had no chance of getting paid out of cash flow, Joe started to work out a plan. Over the next 2 years, he became a sophisticated internet marketer. His cost per lead on the net was far lower than yellow pages and the volume of calls was good enough to get him back to profitability. The stress level was, well, manageable. The best a small business owner could hope for.

Ultimately, Joe’s sophistication on the internet allowed him to cut his yellow pages spending in half. That was now providing a significant chunk of what Joe was able to bring home each month.

Getting impatient going through the links in Google Analytics and finding no answers to his problem, he skipped ‘Browser Capabilities’ and clicked on Mobile devices. There it was. His mobile traffic had gone down by half at the end of last week and was now nearly flatlined.

Android, Iphone, Ipad each one looked dead. As if all at once, everyone decided to throw their handhelds in a river. 8 Years after the first Iphone, mobile traffic to Joe’s site had swelled to 65% of the total volume.

A sophisticated internet advertiser, he realized a lot of that was due to tablet sales and that ‘mobile’ referred more to the operating system than it did the user’s place on earth. In reality, the searcher had only moved from the desk chair to the couch. However, after he bought an Ipad, switched on the w-fi and sat in a more comfortable spot, the world started calling the traffic mobile and Google Analytics was no different. The change seemed semantic.

Joe pulled out his own phone, touched the screen so the image would display on the flat panel hanging in his office and spoke the name of his business to Google’s search box, the list loaded and speaking to Google once more he said “one” and waited for the top result to load.

The normal pride Joe felt when his mobile site loaded quickly, was replaced by a combination of fear and anger that can only happen when know you something bad is about to happen and there is nothing you can do about it. Rather than seeing his own site, Joe was presented with a page containing the Verizon logo and a headline that read “Stay Informed And Empowered.”

Following that was a paragraph that started like a history lesson, detailing how the network had began charging subscribers for downloading more than 5 gigabytes of data back in December 2010 and now it was time the owners of that content being downloaded shared the burden of the cost.

They made it sound more than just palatable, they made you feel like you should be asking, How did those darn content providers get away without paying for so long?

Touching the number on the screen led to a conversation with a Verizon sales rep that filled in the remaining answers to the original traffic problem. According to Verizon, there is no charge for your website to be on the internet. Only if someone downloads it while on their network. It started a couple of weeks ago but didn’t cause a problem until the 100 free downloads were used up.

The Verizon rep walked Joe through all the available plans. He asked Joe about his Analytics data and in the end recommended a plan that would provide Joe with the best opportunity “to be available” on Verizon’s network 100% of the time. Next, Joe had these conversations with At&t, Sprint and several cable companies who had all started similar plans when Net Neutrality rules were officially vacated for mobile devices.

The cable companies surprised Joe, after all, these weren’t “mobile networks”, how come up he had to pay them. Turns out mobility is determined by the device, the operating system, not the network. Not just semantic anymore, Joe thought as he pictured some guy leaning back back on his sofa and pecking away at his tablet as the wi-fi delivered the same signal to his wife paying bills on the laptop on the dining room table.

Joe stared at the 7 contracts lined up side by side filling the entirety of the panel on his wall and decided whether or not to sign an annual contract in order to get the discount. It had been nearly 2 decades since he faced a decision like this one. Then the yellow page contracts had been printed out and lined up on his desk but ironically the logos on many of the contracts had not changed.