Open sourcing US business listings promises a sea change in marketing

How many phone calls does your business get every day asking to verify its listing in an online directory? If you're like us, you probably get five or six of these calls a week. And frankly, we've started declining to verify the information, since we know that they are simply exercises in creating marketing mailing lists that are going to be sold to other companies.

Now, every marketer at some point or another has looked for mailing or business listings for marketing programs, so we understand the need for this type of data. Companies like infoUSA and DirectMail.com are happy to provide marketers with such lists with prices ranging from $50 to $1,000 per thousand names, depending on how targeted they are. The only problem: many of those lists are out of date and contain large numbers of unverified entries that don't produce results. Heck, we're still getting mailings for companies that haven't occupied our office space for over five years. Worse, many of those lists don't have geocoding of the data, making targeted mailings or real-world marketing programs hard to manage. We documented our experience showing Google Adwords significantly outperforming an email marketing list from InfoUSA last year.

iBegin Source, a new open-source business focused on local search, promises to change this business in a significant way. It uses Wiki technology to allow businesses to add and modify their own listings. It provides non-commercial access to its lists for free, and commercial access to geocoded lists for $1,000 per state, or $40,000 for the entire country. When I looked at Massachusetts, which has more than 283,000 businesses listed, that works out to about $3.50 per thousand names. And with commercial access, iBegin feeds you regular updates to the list, so it doesn't go stale. But more importantly, it allows businesses to update the list themselves and notifies users of the list when that happens. This one feature is probably one of the biggest differentiators for iBegin and could improve business marketing efficiency dramatically.

iBegin only launched on March 15 this year, so it is too early to predict its success. But in our book, they've broken new ground in sourcing US business lists -- and in the process, may have put a lot of mailing list brokers out of business.

Technorati Tags: AdWords, Direct mail, Google, iBegin, InfoUSA, List brokers, Local search, Marketing, Wiki