Glorious good day!! Rand Pipp here, bringing you my first blog post on MojoPages. Given that you are reading this on a Blog, you are a witness to how the Internet is shifting relationships between people. In business this shift in relationship is between employers, employees, customers, vendors, partners, and stockholders. I call this a RelationSHIFT: the leveraging of the immediacy and global reach of the Internet.

Jager spoke of the union between the business member and consumer review under his Blog post “Yin/Yang”. I would like to further that conversation relative to the impact of community on the changing face of business directories.

MojoPages is focused on allowing consumers and businesses better communication with greater knowledge. It is this collective wisdom of the community that results in what we see as the “Next Generation of Yellow Pages”.

In the Yellow Pages world, the first paradigm shift occurred when the telephone allowed consumers to “let their fingers do the walking”. Driving, or walking from store to store was no longer needed. The categorization of businesses gave the consumer the ability to search for businesses by type and then call businesses to compare their services to determine the best-fit. You could now let your fingers do the walking. The result was that a greater choice was available in much less time. But the consumer was still only hearing the business’ viewpoint.

“The Next Generation of Yellow Pages” is focused not only on letting consumers learn more of each business, but also allowing the consumers to learn from each other. This consumer community, or social network, also allows the businesses to better understand how to respond to the marketplace. Both the consumer and business learn more about each other. Sharing consumer wants, needs and experiences is a two way street. This is the RelationSHIFT: MojoPages brings knowledge to the interchange of commerce. With knowledge, choices can be made that result in greater satisfaction for all involved.

Consumers are now being offered greater diversity and greater availability (see Chris Andersons Long-Tail for more on this). As this market of abundance is created it has a profound effect on both the businesses and the consumers’ experience. Businesses have a much greater access to consumers so they have greater flexibility in what they offer (more exposure, greater ability to select the ‘perfect’ customer) and customers have much greater knowledge of the businesses resulting in better choices (greater selection with more depth of information allows for much better fit).

So how are we implementing this for ourselves? Well, MojoPages is taking RelationSHIFTS to heart. It is no longer us vs. them. We are incorporating our customers in the process of creating this startup. Our customers are an integral part of our team, in fact we think of them as ‘members’. We are asking you what you want and actually giving you direct input into what our service will look like. We really do want your input, we really are listening. If you have relative expertise or experience or ideas that lend offer good feedback to the posts here, please comment. We want to use the collective wisdom to make the best Next Generation YellowPages: for the people and BY the people.

Rand Pipp

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