If 90% of Your Customers Are Offline….Lessons from db twang.

Posted on October 10, 2006
Filed Under Commercial Trends, European Web 2.0, European Web 2.0 pipeline |

Google and Yellow Pages had a little head to head recently , in front of an audience of a thousand people. What they had to say to each other was fascinating.

Aren’t you guys competitors, the discussion moderator asked? After all you’re both chasing the local search market.

Not at all said the guy from Yell - the vast majority of businesses are not online.

Not at all said the lady from Google. We’re happy to see Yell bringing those businesses online in some form or other.

It puts not only Google but many other local ad companies in perspective. As it is Google only covers a third of information on the inter-web. But take into account that most businesses are not there either….

The real growth lies in getting businesses out of the bricks and mortar and onto the web.

That’s not to denigrate the efforts of players like Smalltown or the back fence content businesses. But being really local means going to relatively sparse ground right now.

Which in turn means the Long Tail theory will rule for a few more years yet - create the niche. Keith Bohanna spoke about it recently.

Keith is building dbtwang, a niche site for high value guitar dealers and buyers. The level of detail that a site like db will carry is a fascination in itself.

Each guitar listing will have 183 pieces of data describing the guitar. Now that’s a really specialist piece of knowledge and I think Keith is showing the way here, providing detail that also insulates db from the Yell/Google services.

Comments

One Response to “If 90% of Your Customers Are Offline….Lessons from db twang.”

  1. keith bohanna on October 10th, 2006 1:14 pm

    Thanks for the mention Haydn. You are right - both the offline connection and the deep data are key requirements for our (planned) success.

    Adding to the mix is the fact that our audience are in the early to late majority in their use of the internet so we need to be careful with our pitch of services to them. Even the visual design and user interface will need to be tailored to this.

    keith

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