According to a recent article by Michael Taylor (When Will Yellow Pages Come to the Social?) in the Kelsey Group blog, Yellow Pages publishers could be the drivers of creating Social Local Media (or SoLo, as they coined it).

Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), such yellowpages.ca, could be the drivers of localized social media verticals on lifestyle or life events where open discussion and commerce coexist.

Imagine the targeting opportunities for local advertisers as well as the creation of forums where advertisers could open up conversations on their brands, learn about local desires and uncover marketing nuances by having this local forum at their disposal, Taylor wrote. Local consumers would become more engaged and return more often to these SoLo sites on IYPs since most social media sites tend to be very local and community focused rather than far-flung global sites. Who better to own this space than the perennial local media outlet with the deepest local content  Yellow Pages?

Taylor also stressed that harnessing the potential for both local consumers and advertisers will be both the challenge and the opportunity. The opportunity exists for IYPs to be one of the first to step on the SoLo arena, but they can’t wait long otherwise niche verticals and other local media outlets will take away the advantages to be gained as a first mover.

Yellow Page publishers have already adopted consumer reviews. But the most interesting development involves YellowPages.ca, Canada’s largest online directory, which recently launched their integration of Facebook for customers who want to save and share their favorite businesses by using their link function on Facebook.com. They’ve also added social bookmarks sites such as del.icio.us, Furl, Yahoo MyWeb, and Google Bookmarks.

With the wealth of local content, IYPs could take a local leadership position in key areas such as local services/contractors, home improvement, home decorating, financial, health care, entertainment, weddings and other lifestyle oriented topics that would be attractive to social media users.

Sebastian Provencher of the Praized Blog (www.praized.com) also believes SoLo is promising. I’m starting to think social search has a great future but I also think it’s difficult to start from scratch, he wrote. I also think there might be an amazing opportunity out there for directory publishers (and anyone operating a local search site with a good amount of traffic) to launch a social search application to complement their current database of content.