A good dentist is hard to find
By \ August 9, 2006
I’d been working in the Web industry for a few years before I realized how the Internet was going to change absolutely everything. The year was 1999 and I needed to figure out how to tie a bow tie. I don’t remember whether I went to Alta Vista or Yahoo! or what, but I typed in “how to tie a bow tie” and bam–there it was. Diagram after diagram, right there for the taking. I thought to myself, “Oh my God. Suddenly there’s nothing I can’t find out.”
In order to understand the earthshaking profundity of this realization, you have to put yourself back into the pre-Web mindset. Most of us over the age of thirty grew up with three channels on the TV and a library. To figure out how to tie a bowtie or fold a fitted sheet or make a Manhattan or who was the president in World War One took actual work, and most of the time it just wasn’t worth it.
But now we can know anything—anything–with a few short keystrokes.
And yet… we can’t.
The Web utterly neglects an essential part of the business of life. Trying to find small consumer businesses, for a specific need, in any given city, is absolutely impossible. In the three-channel-TV days, it was simpler: look in the Yellow Pages, ask your neighbor, whatever. But now what do you do? The old systems for finding a plumber, a jeweler, a housekeeper have disappeared: we don’t talk to each other as much, our networks are more niche, and the Yellow Pages (online or off) are practically useless. Even Google, which I revere, fails at this simple task. (Try searching “contractor” in “Baltimore, MD” and see what I mean. I don’t want a government HVAC contractor, for the love of Jah! And clicking through on any result inevitably brings you to some irrelevant directory listing of inaccurate information.)
I hadn’t read much about this problem until the New York Times did a piece on it this week. The piece lauds insiderpages.com for using the review strategy: “InsiderPages hit on a clever strategy. The company approaches parent groups at a community’s schools and children’s sports teams — real-world social networks, if you will — with a fund-raising pitch: write reviews of your favorite businesses and InsiderPages pays $1 or $2 a review.”
But the problem is more complicated than just providing a place for paid local listings and an outlet for reviews paid or otherwise.
First, most of these sites (besides Craigslist, which is free, but badly organized if you use it as a directory instead of as a classified section) require advertisers (cash-strapped local businesses) to pay for listings. The old, useful Yellow Pages never did that. Sure, it was an advertising medium, and you had to pay for a display ad; but the Yellow Pages understood the push-pull of marketing: you gotta offer utility in order to make your product valuable enough for people to pay your advertising dollars. So they listed everyone—and the ones who paid got more attention. Brilliant! So why isn’t it being done that way online?
Second, most small local business people still don’t see the immense value in having a web site, making a small investment in online marketing, and providing real information on their sites. They’re a few years behind the curve, and usually don’t have the money to invest—or so they think. They still don’t realize the true direct-response potential of te medium, to their great detriment. (Although talking to most contractors, you get the feeling they wish their phone wouldn’t ring, they’re doing you such a favor to answer it.)
The object lesson here is that while we in the industry constantly tout the power of social networking, the netroots, the long tail, or whatever the meme du jour happens to be, the basics get us through our everyday lives. A good dentist, a good electrician, a good babysitter—they’re impossible to find since the Web had its way with us.
But at least I can still find out how to tie a bowtie.