I found myself in this situation just this past week. I was half-watching Whitechapel, a crime mystery show set in England on BBCA, and the detectives had been in the home of a batty old woman who suffered from obsessive hoarding. Another character in the show was a sort of consultant for the police about historical crimes, and he’d mentioned a serial killer in America in the late 1800s, H. H. Holmes, who’d murdered potentially considerable quantities of people he’d lured into the hotel he operated, and the rooms were set up in some maze-like arrangement. Since Holmes was entirely unfamiliar to me, and since the whole story sounded so over-the-top, I figured it was fictional. But, not so! When I Googled this on my Android cellphone, I quickly discovered that there was indeed such a killer!

The Wikipedia article for Doctor H. H. Holmes described how he’d built with the help of a carpenter accomplice and other contractors a three-story hotel in Chicago at the time of the World’s Fair in 1893. The street-level floor was for shops and his pharmacy, while the upper two stories were hotel rooms (or boarding house rooms) and his office. However, the upper two stories were layed-out like a maze, with doors that opened into walls, stairways that went nowhere, and gas pipes which he apparently controlled to suffocate people. There were also chutes and a dumbwaiter, purportedly intended to deliver the bodies of his victims to the basement where he might bury them, burn them in his own crematory ovens, or dissect and render them (in acid) in order to convert them to skeletons to sell to medical schools. He apparently lured quite a number of women into these torture chambers / charnel house, as well as a few men, before he was eventually found out.

Later, when information about Holmes’s crimes began emerge, newspaper reporters dubbed the hotel a “murder castle”.

Aside from the astonishingly extreme nature of his crimes, my attention was caught by some other details involved in his story. He also traveled about, committing various fraudulent con jobs on people, and taking murders out in many of the places he visited. And, one of the places he came to was Fort Worth! A couple of the women he’d murdered had apparently been sibling heiresses of a railroad fortune, so he took ownership of one of the sisters’ (Minnie Williams’s) real estate property in downtown Fort Worth.

So it was that Henry Howard Holmes came to Fort Worth (using the alias “O. C. Pratt”) along with another woman he’d duped, and his carpenter from Chicago, Benjamin Pitezel (using the alias “Benton T. Lyman”), and they apparently began construction of another hotel for a brief period before they were run out of town under a cloud (Texans apparently caught on quickly that “Pratt” and “Lyman” were committing fraudulent transactions — particularly one involving absconding with a shipment of horses — and horse theft was so reviled in the Wild West that they risked getting rapidly hanged for such a thing).

So, I was quite curious — did they build yet another “Murder Castle” in Fort Worth? How far could they have gotten in construction? And, most interesting of all — where was this structure located, and does it still stand?

Many of the articles on the subject seem to reiterate information from the Wikipedia article, so most of them are pretty vague on the details around what Holmes and Pitezel specifically did while in Fort Worth, and where they were doing it.

So, while digging into it, I found a book that mentioned a specific location in Fort Worth where Holmes and his accomplice were apparently trying to set up shop all over again. In that reference, it states that “Minnie Williams’s property consisted of a large, vacant lot on the corner of Second and Russell streets, not far from the Tarrant County courthouse.”

Looking at a current map in Google, there is no “Russell St” that crosses 2nd, and 2nd St is relatively short, and the only other Russell St in Fort Worth is out near White Settlement.  Soooo…. 2nd street is near the courthouse and isn’t very long, so I thought that street name was likely correct. However, I thought either a street changed name since the late 1800s, or the author of that book had the wrong cross street name. With further digging, I find that the author got the street name wrong, AND the street changed names.

I found an old copy of the Fort Worth Gazette from 1894 which talks about the Williams sisters likely being murdered (“Fort Worth Girls Murdered“), and refers to Holmes and his accomplice building “the Rusk Street Fire Trap”!

Even better, I located an old 1927 map of downtown which shows that Commerce Street, which crosses 2nd near the courthouse, was earlier named “Rusk St”. (click on map icon above to view)

That Gazette article goes on to say that “a fine three story building and site will go for a few thousand dollars”, indicating that it’s to be auctioned off to repay Holmes’ creditors in Texas, and it would likely be sold cheap.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure which corner of the intersection the building was located on — and if it was poorly constructed, it likely was replaced in the intervening years.

It appears to me that current, much more modern buildings likely entirely replaced the building they constructed, although there could be remnants of it incorporated in one or two of the buildings around that spot.

Considering how there are many historical photos of Ft. Worth, it likely should be possible to locate a pic of what would have become the “Texas Murder Castle”, if H.H. Holmes had not been run off by the good folk of Texas who just don’t put up with that sh*t!

• See also the classifieds notice when creditors took possession of the property of Benton T. Lyman – it outlines which specific lots were involved: http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth109894/m1/5/

While it might seem I was picking on Costco in the article, there wasn’t room in it for the reporter to really include all the information I provided. Costco really isn’t alone in performing less-than-optimal optimization for search engines — a great many online retail catalog sites are in the same boat.

I go into this in more detail over on Argent Media’s blog: Costco.com SEO Lacking, But They’re One Of Many.

Playroom at Google offices in Dallas area, 2007

The Dallas Business Journal reports that Google opened a new office in Frisco for around 50 employees in March.

The DBJ writer states that this is Google’s “first office in North Texas”, which is unfortunately incorrect. Google Audio, their radio ads project, had earlier opened offices back in 2007 next to the facility I worked at in Coppell, as I reported on Natural Search Blog, and as Search Engine Land mentioned.

Google also previously had an office in Dallas, as Bill Hartzer has mentioned, and I recall that they had previously had an office in Irving which was devoted to PPC ad optimization specialists.

In fact, Google has opened and closed offices with such frequency here in the DFW Area over the past handful of years that one now can’t help but wonder if they’re really serious, or is this to be an extenuation of the schizophrenic office-opening exercises they seem intent upon doing?

Here’s the office location:


View Google's Dallas Area Offices in a larger map

The DBJ article fails to mention what Google will be doing with the 11,000 square feet they’ve leased in Frisco at 6175 W. Main St. this time around.

Maybe I should sneak over there with my camera, as I did back in 2007?

Google Offices - Corner Lounge, Coppell, 2007

Jennifer Fritzsche, an analyst with Wells Fargo, referred to the valuation as “sensible” at roughly 2.1 times an estimate for EBITDA, “given that the directory business is declining fairly quickly.”

Beyond “sensible”, AT&T may have well decided that they would incur undue risk of intervention from state and federal regulation authorities if they had pushed for a much higher valuation. I had earlier suggested it would be grossly irresponsible if AT&T overvalued their Yellow Pages, and, after Verizon’s divestment of Idearc/SuperMedia, I’m not sure another company could get away with an unreasonably high price tag.

Still, this sale and its somber valuation amount to a dinner of eating crow for AT&T executives who had poured investment dollars into their Yellow Pages business, particularly investing in aspects that were less likely to return profit compared with cost. It wasn’t that long ago that I had sharply criticized AT&T for purchasing YellowPages.com for $100 million, apparently mainly to obtain the vanity Yellow Pages domain name. That was followed in short order back in 2009 by their purchase of the YP.com domain name. As I had noted back then, it was a terrible investment because the entire concept of Yellow Pages has been eroding in brand value, and a good online business/presence doesn’t require a literal keyword phrase to be successful. It didn’t take AT&T too long after the purchases to decide that it was indeed time to step away from association with the “Yellow Pages” name, and they switched over to using YP.com.

If only they had spent the $103.85 million on cutting-edge research and development in order to evolve the product, instead of trying to take shortcuts into a successful online business model!

It was very easy to see before they purchased YellowPages.com and YP.com that those domains were insufficient in value compared to their prices, since searches for “yellow pages” were clearly moving into decline. All of the major YP companies have had severe struggles in the past five years as advertisers and users have migrated from their highly profitable print directory product over to many other online and mobile business information sources.

This isn’t to say that large Yellow Pages companies cannot have a future in the internet world. There continues to be some usage in print books, and there is still a considerable amount of cashflow going on in those companies. However, for any of them to have a longterm future, they need to have leadership that is devoted to longterm success rather than short term stock market reactions. They need to refine a business model that works in this post-print world, and they need to do some major capital investment in R&D.

Unfortunately, I foresee a few of these companies eventually getting gobbled-up by other companies, if not failing outright, because they are only focused upon shortterm, immediate-gratification business. There’s a lack of serious devotion on capital investment — costcutting on internet/mobile product development as well as on the legacy print side, lowered entry wages which do not attract the talented/creative people the companies need, and outsourcing to foreign companies under the mindset that good interactive development is a mere commodity which can be obtained anywhere.

If one takes a step back and maps the trends, it’s extremely easy to see where these behaviors are likely to lead. It’s patently ridiculous in most cases for a YP company to cut staff from their interactive sides while chopping costs from the legacy print side — when print will continue to erode and the only possible future is in developing something viable in the interactive side of the house!

Earlier, Google attracted sharp minds by providing challenging work, and offering competitive/attractive salaries and benefits — this is how to get some of the best and brightest working for you. It simply isn’t possible to attract the cream of the crop if you’re doing so on a shoestring.

And, the idea that outsourcing development of business directory applications to a foreign country — which may not even commonly have street addresses — is probably an exercise in futility.

So, for a number of the Yellow Pages companies, the current problem is insufficient capital investment in building innovative/competitive products — no one is standing back and trying to build a strategy for a realistic future.

AT&T’s dimming star as a Yellow Pages company wasn’t so much a failure due to a lack of investment as a similar failure of leadership vision — there was some sort of awakening at some point that online was important, and they threw tons of money at it, but they threw the money in the wrong direction. Perhaps it was some sort of entrenched, Business 1.0 worldview of buying success outright. However, this is the Business 2.0 world, and old Wall Street models don’t seem to work entirely the same way any more — there needs to be a really clear vision and drive towards a competitive future along with capitalization to make it happen.

The stockholders in the suit (“Local 731 I.B. of T. Excavators and Pavers Pension Trust Fund et al. v. Swanson et al“) had said that executives had made false claims during the period, stating that print Yellow Pages were not becoming obsolete, among other things, and that they had made false assurances about the financial condition of the business.

RHD had filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in 2009, and later emerged from bankruptcy under the new name, Dex One Corporation, in 2010.

Aside from the claims around the company’s finances, the issue of whether print Yellow Pages are becoming obsolete or not has been a controversial one in the past. The industry as a whole had been financially strong and growing for nearly a hundred years up until the advent of the internet. However, there were indicators that the industry was beginning to be impacted by significant changes in consumer behavior by at least 2007, if not prior (see “Google Trends: Yellow Pages Will Be Toast In Four Years“).

During the period cited by the class action suit, the RHD CEO, David Swanson, made a number of bullish statements regarding the print YP business such as this one quoted by Barron’s in 2008:

“Wall Street has it completely wrong, and that’s completely understandable,” says David Swanson, R.H. Donnelley’s chief executive. “They think we sell a product that’s falling off a cliff. That assumption is wrong.”

Stock analysts are “the worst demographic for yellow-pages usage,” Swanson adds. “Just because they don’t use it, they assume nobody is. If you go to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the print yellow pages is a much more stable” business than it may be in Manhattan.

He had represented that references to print YP directories were growing:

However, it had also been clear that some of the cited YP statistics had been skewed, overestimating usage.

Fast-forward to here in 2012, and the question doesn’t seem so controversial — larger print YP companies have definitely seen erosion of advertisers, some of which was due to usage erosion (particularly in larger metro markets).

Since the suit was settled, it’s hard to find anything definitive about the contention over the claims around Yellow Pages viability versus obsolescence. In such cases there are a score of reasons why defendants might choose to settle, so it’s not necessarily an acknowledgement that the executives knowingly made false claims about the long term prospects of print YP (whether the industry might see a “cyclical” versus “secular” downturn as mentioned in the above video). However, there had been clear warnings sounded by many industry analysts leading up to the period, so it likely wasn’t a good idea to insist that yellow pages phonebooks were not facing risk of a secular decline.

Print YP is not altogether dead, I should note. I continue to see smaller directories in rural markets that are likely performing well, along with certain kinds of specialized business directories in large urban markets (based on the apparent numbers of ads in the directories). For instance, various ethnic directories in print seem to be very strong in the Dallas – Fort Worth area, like books for Indian-owned and Korean-owned businesses.

However, the environment for print YP has changed in a very massive way, and continues to evolve (or devolve, I might say). All of print media has faced the disruption of internet and search engines, and those mediums probably can’t expect to reverse the macro-level trends, even if there are some exceptions to be found in the micro-level.

The main takeaway from the R.H. Donnelley investors settlement could be a warning for AT&T, as they contemplate divesting themselves of the Yellow Pages: Wall Street and the S.E.C. may be very skeptical if they place too high of a valuation on their directories company.

Read more about the settlement at: R.H. Donnellley Reaches $25M Deal In Shareholder Suit.

If this sequence of events sounds familiar, it is — because Verizon did this when they spun off their Yellow Pages to form Idearc.

It’s a little disappointing to see AT&T likely planning to divest itself of Yellowpages.com and their print directories, because only in January of last year it had seemed possible that they might have toyed with the idea of performing a massive three-way merger of yellow pages companies by acquiring both SuperMedia and Dex One. I’d heard some convincing rumors, noted their increasing partnership agreements, and knew that it made sense for a few of the major YP companies to combine in order to pool resources while reducing costs. There was (and is) still quite a lot of cash flow going on in printed yellow pages books as well as some growth in IYP business, but there have appeared to be too many competitors in the field for a while now. AT&T’s statements appear to corroborate the assessment while also demonstrating that print market continues to shrink compared to online.

Will AT&T find a buyer for their YP business?  Considering the direction that traditional media businesses have been going (the ones which are struggling to evolve into equivalent profitability in the online marketplace), it would seem unlikely that they’d find a someone to acquire that unit unless it was a hedge fund looking to break up the parts to sell off individual pieces as a divestment strategy.

What seems more likely would be for AT&T to attempt to spin-off the unit into its own company — and in order for them to do so profitably, they would have to saddle it with some substantial degree of debt load.

This latter possibility is the most concerning of options, because it might create a high chance of failure and associated financial losses for whoever owns its stock and debt instruments. Both SuperMedia and R.H. Donnelley corporations were propelled into Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring, citing untenable debt loads as a factor. Since print YP is such a large component of these companies, and since replacing of print with online advertisers typically isn’t a one-to-one exchange in terms of profitability, large amounts of debt load will sand-bag such a company to a degree where they cannot effectively operate and compete. AT&T’s challenge, I believe, will be to offload a sufficient amount of debt to make it a profitable exchange, while convincing regulators and Wall Street that the operation isn’t producing a sabotaged company from the outset.

The resulting scenario could look like a high-stakes game of tossing the hot potato — who will be left holding the bag if the resultant company fails?

It’s just me for now, although I have friends and contractors I’ve partnered with to collaborate on some projects.

Read the formal press release announcement at: Local SEO Industry Expert Founds Argent Media Search Marketing Agency in Dallas.

Read it at Train SEM: Interview:
Chris Silver Smith.

Let me also say: this is in no way dictated by UBL, and they’ve never put limits on my expressions of opinion (and, anyone who knows my history with Verizon knows that I’m not a corporate patsy nor afraid of speaking my opinions about companies far more influential and powerful than UBL — in fact, it’s not widely known but I actually started the process to resign once when Verizon’s public affairs department tried to keep me from speaking at a Search Engine Strategies Conference, but they ultimately backed down). I can’t blame people for being skeptical about business communications, but I do try to be forthright in stuff that I say, and I believe one of the reasons UBL asked me to be an advisor in the first place is because I express my opinions. So. This is not a disingenuous attempt to spin-doctor the truth on my part.

I’m speaking out about the Local Paid Inclusion dealie because UBL has apparently been dragged into this, and aspersions and suspicion have been cast their way — unfairly, from my point of view. I saw Barry Schwarz’s opinion piece this morning, “Bruce Clay Hurts His SEO Legacy & The Industry“, and I was left disatisfied with how the opinion of many has been negatively impacted regarding Universal Business Listing. I’m not saying Barry did anything unfair or illogical — I think I would’ve come to a similar conclusion that he and others have arrived at, based upon the limited communications that have been published about the matter. But, the fact that the series of events has left people with some degree of skepticism and suspicion of Universal Business Listing is why I decided to go ahead and post this.

For any of us involved in online reputation management, you sometimes have to weigh whether talking further about something is just going to throw fuel on the fire or actually help resolve it. But, it is clear that Bruce Clay’s statement on Local Paid Inclusion left many thinking that UBL caused this whole thing in some way, and that Bruce was a victim of their actions.

Here’s what I know about the matter, and my conjecture/opinion on what may have happened:

• UBL has been discussing and experimenting a number of different business information distribution products and ideas for products, including some variations referred to internally sometimes as “paid insertion”. None of those have had anything to do with “paid inclusion” nor paying to get top rankings in organic search results in local search engines such as Google, Bing, nor Yahoo!. Some of the experiments in listing distribution to search engines and online local directories are being prepared for testing and are in “Alpha” stage.
• Bruce Clay has been predicting that local search would involve paid inclusion for a while now. In fact, I sat in the audience at SMX West this past year when he spoke on the Local Search Tactics session panel, and I was fairly stunned and not impressed when he suggested that Google would start producing paid placement listings throughout local search results in a massive way and stated that the local search results were “not organic”. I thought it was a highly unusual thing to say, and anyone familiar with the trends in Google’s local search development (not to mention their overall philosophies of search development) would never have said such a thing. At the time, I considered publishing a blog post critiquing the statements made in that presentation, but I opted not to do so out of respect (not to mention it’s not good form to publicly critique someone you work with on an advisory board). I now regret not speaking about it then — if I had, it might have kept this all from happening.
• Bruce seems to have possibly convinced himself of his own predictions around paid local inclusion. He published a blog post of internet marketing predictions in late January which also invested a considerable importance in the concept with these statements:

  “Local results become a massive revenue source for the search engines. A local paid inclusion program develops where brick and mortar sites can get local result preferential listings for a reasonable monthly fee.”
  
  and:

  “Local Paid Inclusion will replace traditional SEO and PPC as the first traffic tactic. Premium listings in local results will immediately gain popularity as early adopters happily get traffic for a low fee in a matter of days. This will be the most significant traffic tactic in 2012. Everyone that has a local address will participate.”

  That latter statement is essentially the same sorts of things he’d said earlier last year at SMX West.

• I believe Bruce may have so convinced himself that paid local inclusion would be happening that he heard what he wanted to hear when UBL personnel discussed some of their “paid insertion” types of products.
• Bruce has been a reseller of UBL’s local listing distribution service, and based upon that relationship and his misunderstanding of UBL product plans, he published the LocalPaidInclusion.com website — that site, its description of products and its content were done without any knowledge nor involvement on the part of UBL.
• I think it highly likely that when the reporter, Miranda Miller, at Search Engine Watch was pitched the story by Bruce Clay (“Google, Bing & Yahoo in Partnership to Sell Top Organic Local Listings?“), he must’ve hinted that UBL was his backend partner. Or, perhaps someone else with a passing familiarity of Bruce’s business told them that UBL was a partner, based upon the preexisting relationship for normal local listing distribution services.
• When Miranda called UBL and spoke with CEO, Doyal Bryant, I think he misunderstood what he was being asked — if a reporter called out of the blue and asked if he was planning some sort of distribution project with major search engines, he’d truthfully answer “yes”, unwittingly confirming a story about a completely different thing than what he realized. When he said a project was on hold with search engines pending some testing, it was something involving normal listing information distribution services — not a guaranteed top listing placement product — because there isn’t one. I understand there was a very brief call involving him speaking to her on a mobile phone while stepping out of a meeting — so, perhaps the call quality wasn’t all that great as well.
• While Miranda was only one of the players in this comedy of errors, I think it behooves a reporter to doublecheck that they’ve heard rightly when the story appears to be extraordinarily unbelievable. I wasn’t witness to the convo betwixt her and Doyal, but I also think that some level of misunderstanding was going on, that some degree of it was also her responsibility, and that perhaps she should’ve blinked and paused to doublecheck that particular story. At the same time, it’s understandable if a well-established person has given you a story and others reportedly involved appear to be confirming it.
• UBL was dismayed by their abrupt association with a controversial project they knew nothing of. It was also difficult to figure out how to explain their CEO’s apparent confirmation to Search Engine Watch without further muddying the waters with references to their “paid insertion” types of products, and they also didn’t wish to reveal details of other local technology products that they have in the works.
• There’s also the fact that they have respect of Bruce Clay and didn’t wish to cause him embarrassment, and, just as with any corporation, there are issues around what it’s safe to say about people who’ve worked with you in terms of liability. (I’m also on the record as saying that I respect Bruce Clay, and consider him to be one of the pioneers in SEO. I still respect him — I’m just wishing he’d gone further to clarify that UBL wasn’t involved in this, and that UBL’s not forcing him to shut up about the fact that nothing’s going on.)
• The negative publicity was a bit confounding to deal with as well – how do you disprove a negative?  As it was, UBL executives showed restraint with their statements. Unfortunately, this restraint and vagueness about proprietary product plans lead people to conclude they were more deeply involved than the reality.
• Bruce’s blog post around the matter was disappointing from UBL’s perspective. It was a sort of politician’s apology, like when someone says “I’m sorry you feel bad about what I did to you.” The blog post did take some responsibility and apologized some, but it also continues to muddy the waters by hinting that there’s a nondisclosure in place keeping them from revealing the full truth of the matter. This mystery partner, we’re lead to believe, is being mean to Bruce Clay by keeping him from telling on them. He’s trying to have it both ways in that blog post, which just isn’t cool.
• There was no agreement betwee UBL & Bruce Clay to have a paid inclusion service that would give preferential treatment in local search engines with Google/Bing/Yahoo, as far as I’m aware. I’m on the Board of Advisors there, and chat with Doyal Bryant about the major company plans on a somewhat frequent basis, and this sort of product concept has never existed there. Never. Not even speculatively.

Perhaps there is some mystery partner lurking in the background somewhere that really did have such an idea, and convinced Bruce that they could deliver it. I don’t believe that partner was UBL. There’s no agreement with UBL over such a product, so there’s no nondisclosure keeping Bruce from talking about the complete nonexistence of the exclusive Local Paid Inclusion product with UBL. This is less than vaporware, I believe. UBL is mystified by it, and mystified as to how to disprove a negative.

Their fault, if there is any, is by way of the busy, workaholic CEO of UBL, Doyal Bryant, who is guilty of not slowing down and taking the time to carefully understand the context of questions that were asked of him when a reporter called him up and asked about projects which sounded vaguely like things the company really does, involving someone with whom the company really has had a partnership.

The truth of what actually happened is pretty straightforward. There’s no big conspiracy going on. It’s a bit of a comedy of errors.

As you can see above, one email note for “magicJack Plus” included a little telephone symbol, while another one for printer ink included a little fountain pen nib symbol at the begining of its subject line.

It appears that spammers have woken up to the same concept that I wrote about in “Special Characters Are Lucky Charms for Twitter“. In a list of text titles or status updates, adding a little icon-like picture to just a few lines is very eye-catching.

Of course, if this becomes too common, the notes won’t stand out at all, and they’ll risk getting visually filtered by consumers who’ll start associating it with spam, since most of these notes are sent to people based on poor or nonexistent demographic targeting.

This sort of thing should be considered by marketers to be the spice in their stew as opposed to being the main ingredient. Consumers are very fast at relegating types of ad objects into being thought of as undesirable, extraneous stuff to be ignored.

There’s also a higher risk, I would imagine, that these types of special characters might not display properly across platforms and email systems. I’d bet $ that quite a few mobile phones and webmail systems would either display an unknown character symbol or nothing at all in many cases.

However, I must grudgingly admit that there’s a level of cleverness and sophistication for the email marketers who are using this concept — it can work at increasing clickthrough by some degree for the very same reasons that I had suggested it could increase attention for Tweets.