Are newspapers a good candidate to drive the free directory assistance market? Say Hello leader Jim Geddes hopes so.
His theory, which I have previously reported on, is that newspapers are ideally positioned to rule free DA. They have the promotional power that comes with daily circulation, and they are closely identified with content that can add to DA lookups, such as sports scores, movies, weather, stocks, lottery, and auto and real estate classifieds.
Say Hello’s first affiliating newspaper is The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville. (The paper’s owner, Morris Communications, is an investor in Say Hello.) Now that the service has been in wide release for about a month, we were provided a look at the early stats.
Geddes estimates the service has already grabbed about 2 percent of Jacksonville’s DA market. The rollout’s major finding is that people will use the service for non-DA calls. Geddes says 30 percent to 40 percent of calls were for non-DA channels, such as movies.
During the rollout, up to 17 percent of callers visited more than one channel. Fifty-five percent were repeat callers.
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FYI, I just got an email from the CEO to push the stats.
——————————————————————————–
From: Jim Geddes [mailto:jim@SayHello.com]
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 2:21 PM
To: Jim Geddes
Subject: I gave you the wrong phone number
Importance: High
Ooops. The correct phone number for Jax Say Hello is 904-358-3333
Sorry about that
Jim
——————————————————————————–
From: Jim Geddes
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 1:56 PM
To: Jim Geddes
Subject: Small Favor
Hi,
I would like to ask you for a small daily favor. Can you please call the Jax Say Hello voice portal once a day for the next few weeks? The phone number is 904-993-1700. When you call be sure to select one of the many channels (Directory Assistance, Movies, Sports, Weather, Lottery and Cars with more channels getting ready to roll out in the near future such as Driving Directions and Price Comparison) and then if you want you can hang up. We need to show our newspaper partner The Florida Times-Union and their parent company Morris Communications that our daily call volume is increasing daily. We are already processing about 1,000+ calls a day but need to push the envelope further. Since you’re doing this as a special favor for me the easiest channels you should select would be Sports or Weather. In a day or two the Main Menu (the opening preamble) will be replaced with a better, more streamlined version and we’ll also add the capability for a caller to Press 1, or Press 2, etc. in response to the various audio prompts. This decreases our dependency with our speech recognition software not being able to accurately recognize the spoken word which would then automatically routes the call to a live operator – which costs us money every time an operator comes on the line. Operators are not available for Sports and Weather.
Thanks for you help and be sure to let your friends know about Jax Say Hello. Here’s a couple of radio ads that are playing on multiple FM stations in Jacksonville.
Cheers,
Jim
The Voice of the Local Market™
James J. Geddes Jr.
Pres/CEO
Say Hello Inc.
1122 Third Street
Suite 8
Neptune Beach, FL 32266
Jim@SayHello.com
http://www.SayHello.com
mobile:
904-993-1700
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