Search Marketing Communications

I was speaking with a friend of mine who sat with Randall Stephenson at a recent technology conference.

He was proud that the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of AT&T was born and raised here.

Stephenson has taken great strides in making AT&T more relevant at a time when brands mean less to consumers than since when brands were first conceived.

One brand struggling to remain relevant and retain what value it has left is AT&T’s Yellowpages.com

A Google search for “yellowpages” finds the Yellowpages.com domain and their YP.com brand atop the search results page.

Kind of confusing… which domain is it YellowPages.com or YP.com?

Yellow Pages Search

Based upon this ambiguous messaging, its unclear to me which brand and domain AT&T actually sends its visitors to let alone which brand its actually using.

Kind of reminds me of the MSN – Live – Bing drama.

Mr. Stephenson – which brand is it – YellowPages.com or YP.com?

Anyway one thing is for certain, if I were running the site I would turn YP.com into a url shortener for both YellowPages.com advertisers and its users so they could share information with each other via their mobile phones.

YP.com looks like the perfect branded url shortening service to me.

I am sure some legal department somewhere could think of a hundred reasons not to do it but from a relevancy stand point – what could make the Yellow Pages any more relevant than deploying its YP.com brand as a url shortening service for its advertisers?

Tags: Google Search, Randall Stephenson, Shortening URLs, URL Shortener, Yp.com

This entry was posted on April 5, 2010 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Google Search, Marketing Communications, Randall Stephenson, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Firm, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, Search Marketing Agency, URL Shortener, Yp.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.