My office is a two story building located on Route 34 in Wall New Jersey. My Internet marketing company occupies most of the second floor and there are three other companies in the building.

For the last eight weeks, each day I enter the first floor lobby I see four plastic bags sitting inside the front door.  Can you guess what’s in the plastic bags? Garbage? Not exactly but very close.

If you were to open the bags you would find the most recent Yellow Pages or Yellow Book or whatever the hell their calling it these days. These bags have been littering the lobby floor for over two months – nobody wants them! It’s just a matter of time before they end up in the recycling dumpster in the back.

It appears that no one wants their fingers walking anywhere aside from a mouse and keyboard and I have not met anyone in the past 5 years that can answer the burning question, “why be yellow?” When will this book die?!?

We live in a clickable culture where everything we want is just a click away. Whether local, national or global our connect customers turn to the Internet, search engines to be more specific, for everything they want. Companies are spending their former Yellow dollars on Internet marketing such as search engine optimization, Pay Per Click, podcasting, blogging, email, social media and alike, and rightly so.

The yellow pages failed to adapt quick enough, they rested on their laurels and now they are paying the price. Back in the day the Yellow Pages controlled all the information and companies’ payed big money for their coveted listings. Along comes the Internet and the Yellow people decided that they were not going to give away their information. The thought process was that their reputation and market share would keep the book at the top of mind of consumers. They were wrong.

Along came search engines like Yahoo!, Google and MSN. These search engines began to categorize and index businesses for free. Consumers began to see the benefit of having the world (not just their county) at their fingertips. Yahoo! launches local search and put yet another nail in the Yellow coffin. Now all search engines have a local component complete with detailed maps and driving directions. In just a few short years the market completely shifted from Yellow page lookups to online queries.

The yellow response to all this change, Superpages.com and YellowPages.com. Too little too late. Even with big budget advertising campaigns featuring Kung-Fu star David Carradine (I liked him better in Kill Bill), the Yellow online movement never takes hold and now just like their spokespersons Kung-Fu character,”Caine”, they are destined to aimlessly, “walk the earth”.

Contrary to what business people are being told by Yellow sales reps, no one goes to SuperPages.com or YellowPages.com to find the products and services they need. If we did, we’d be, “Yellowing” people as opposed to, “Googling” them.

I personally deal with businesses of all types and sizes and I hear the inflated claims made by Yellow reps. I’ve heard it all from inflated numbers of searchers to claims that SuperPages.com powers Google! Some businesses fall for it but far more have and continue to shift budget to online offerings. At best companies are hedging their bets by keeping a very small ad in the book and a listing within the online Yellow counterparts.

Here’s a quick little fact. One of my clients is Zippos Car Audio. Zippos is one of the top car audio dealers in NJ. They own four car audio stores in New Jersey. In the past they have been big Yellow Pages advertisers in multiple books. The budget was staggering. They were convinced (by their Yellow rep) to add their listing to SuperPages.com to the tune of almost $1,800.00 per month. The Yellow rep told them that they would get tons of traffic to their site because SuperPages.com is the largest shopper’s portal on the Internet.

Once my company was hired we re-developed their website and began an intense search engine optimization program. We started watching where traffic was actually coming from. On average Zippos.com receives 3,700 visits per month from search engines (Google, AOL,Yahoo! Ask and MSN). SuperPages.com delivers a whopping average of 42 per month. Not 42 hundred or 42 thousand, just plain old 42.

How much do you think Zippos spends with SuperPages.com now? Zero. How much has it impacted their business when they stopped spending almost $22,000.00 per year on SuperPages.com? Again, zero.

All this being said I don’t want the Yellow Pages to go away. There are plenty of great uses for the Yellow Pages. Makes great kindling, can be used as a booster seat for children, doorstop, origami paper supply and that’s just off the top of my head! Plus what would all those tough guys at the gym rip in half to impress women if the Yellow Pages went belly up?

On a personal note I just hired a new landscaper. Guess where I found them?

The Better Business Bureau reports that car dealerships are the most complained about business type with cell phone sales a very distant second. No big surprise that car dealers are the brunt of consumer complaints. Car dealers have historically had a reputation for underhanded dealings which is why the term, “car salesman” evokes images of plaid jackets, patent leather shoes and toothpick sucking shysters.

To be fair, not all car dealerships are bad and not all car salespeople are scam artists, in fact most of them are quite the opposite. There is no shortage of bad salespeople and unscrupulous businesses in every industry, car dealers just seem to have gotten permanently tattooed with an unethical moniker.

In my marketing book I rant about the uselessness of car dealer websites. I ramble about the absurdity of practically every car dealer on the planet using one of three companies to develop their websites, email marketing and just about any other type of online advertising a dealership does. 

When it comes to marketing why would you use the same company that your competition uses? Every car dealer website seems to be a variation on every other car dealer website. The same useless information used over and over again.So why do car dealers do this? I’ll tell you why, because it’s easy. They have to put zero effort into it. They pick a template and all the content is created automatically. Even in their email marketing they just have to choose a few canned articles and voila! Instant email!  Sounds pretty easy right? When was the last time anything easy produced worthwhile results? The same car dealers that have been accused of scamming consumers seemingly have forgotten one of the oldest rules in the book when it comes to sniffing out a bad deal. “If it sounds too good to be true…”

With the car sales industry taking a major hit due to our current economic landscape it seems that dealerships are taking a second look at the web as a marketing tool and an even closer look at the services they are paying for. Recently I was called into a very prestigious Mercedes Benz dealer in New Jersey to take a look at their Internet marketing efforts.

After looking at their website, pay per click programs and email marketing it became abundantly clear that they were being ripped off. First off their website was exactly what I expected it to be, useless information. What I didn’t expect to see was a search engine spamming technique called, “cloaking”. Cloaking is where you use technology to show a search engine spider one thing and a website visitor another. This type of tactic is what got BMW banned from Google a couple of years ago.

On the Pay Per Click side of things they were paying for a ridiculous amount of irrelevant key phrases. One of the first questions I asked was, “do you sell Mercedes Motor Homes?” the answer was no so I wondered why they were paying to show up under that search phrase? The company handling this program for them gets paid on the clicks so they targeted lots of phrases even if they had no relevancy or benefit to the dealership.

Their email marketing program was no better (big surprise). Again, they are using the same service as all of their completion. Here’s how it works. Every month they select a few canned articles and an email newsletter is sent out to their list of 27,000 names. I asked if all the email addresses were people that purchased vehicles from their dealership. Half were and half were just people that requested information or stopped in while shopping for a car and end up purchasing elsewhere.

At first glance you may not think this is a big deal especially since they told me that they are getting some response. Here’s the catch. If I did not purchase a car from them and I’m on their mailing list chances are I’m on the mailing list for other dealerships as well. If they are all using this email marketing service that means I’m getting the same content from lots of dealerships. This is not only annoying but shows a lack of effort on the part of the dealership. They can’t event take the time to create something original? Here’s an opportunity to show your expertise and all you do with it is show that you’re the same as every other dealer and that I’m not worth the effort.

Long story short (too late) make sure you are involved in your marketing efforts. Know what people are doing on your behalf and stop being lazy! Nothing good happens without effort. If you truly want to connect with your customers show them that you care enough to put the effort in.

Some of you may say that it’s poetic justice that car dealers are being ripped off. Keep in mind each time they rip off a car dealer we the consumer end up paying for it in the end so if you happen to run across any of these car dealer centric marketing companies be sure to show them your appreciation.

This post written from Starbucks in East Brunswick, NJ

Yes you too may suffer from RRHS (red riding hood syndrome) and not even know it! Little red riding hood (“red” to her friends) was clearly in denial. She knew damn well that it was a wolf in grandma’s bed but refused to believe it.

Red: “What big eyes you have grandma” – Wolf: “All the better to see you with”.  All the better to see you with! Are you kidding me!

Red saw a figure in her grandmother’s house, her grandmother’s clothes and her grandmother’s bed and just assumed it was granny. If she failed to mentioned the big teeth she wouldn’t be with us today.

How many times have you fell victim to an offer that looked to good to be true and assumed it was? How about all that spam messaging on the Internet, ever gotten sucked in only to wonder later, “what was I thinking?!?”.

If you’ve ever punched a monkey in a banner ad to instantly win an iPod then you too may suffer from RRHS.

Well there’s good news! RRHS is treatable. Many past sufferers even go on to live full and productive lives but the first step is admitting that you may have a problem.

Here are some signs that you may suffer from RRHS.

1. You never wondered how the deposed Nigerian dictator got your email address in the first place.
2. You ignore the fact that Viagra is a prescription medication and should be prescribed by a doctor. Just because the email states that it’s “The Real Deal” does not mean it is. Buying prescription drugs from spam email is like buying produce from your garbage man.
3. You approve the comment on your Blog from the guy who writes “Nice stie – thank you ” even though it’s followed by a hyperlink reading “Cheap Levitra”
4. You actaully think that your loan was approved even though you never applied for one.
5. You can’t wait to open the next e-card from an old classmate.

These scams exist because RRHS exists. RRHS is very real and until we cure everyone, scams like these will continue to run rampant.

Some scams are not as recognizable. There are tons of self proclaimed Internet marketing and search engine gurus out there claiming to have created riches for their clients and guaranteeing they can do the same for you!

Claims of guaranteed Google placement! Page one rankings! Increased PageRank instantly! Raves of how they’ve unlocked the secrets of search that will lead to tons of traffic for your site. These animals prey on hapless RRHS sufferers and it must stop!

Just as Red eventually realized that a wolf has no thumbs and could never have possibly tied up an elderly woman, you need to realize that no one can guarantee anything when it comes to search engine placement. There are no great secrets to unlock, no magic bullets, just lots of over inflated claims.

If you suffer from RRHS it’s imperative that you question everything. Analyze every detail and then question it again before hiring anyone to assist you with Internet marketing.

Thanks to corporate supporters of RRHS like Google, there is information available to help combat those who prey on RRHS sufferers.

It is my hope, no, my dream to see a world free of RRHS but I can’t do it alone. Together we can wipe out RRHS through common sense and just not being stupid. It won’t be easy, some people may need to be beaten but it can be done. Won’t you help?

On a side note, many of you will be happy to know that Red went on to live happily ever after. Oh sure she had to go through years of therapy after the woodsman defiled her muffins and ran off with grandma but eventually she pulled herself together, went back to school and became a partner in the law firm of Wolff, Wolff and Muffit – Good for her… Good for her.