1-800-Flowers pulls local RCF phone numbers

In a comment last week in Mike Blumethal's blog about Yahoo Local Mapspam, I mention the frustration of a local Butler PA florist being challenged to prove his company was a real brick and mortar store while a national affiliate marketer had managed to place 'local' listings without addresses throughout Y Local.

The 1-800-Flowers remote call forwarded (RCF) 'local' numbers were appearing in city pages right along with brick and mortar flower shops:

"Meanwhile, over the last few days Y Local (along with yellowpages.com, switchboard.com and AOL Yellow Pages) has added 1-800-Flowers’ listings (which feature local phone numbers that remote call forward to 1800Flowers.com’s call center) to cities all over the US. See Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston and St. Louis for examples. See any ‘physical locations’?"

1-800-Flowers' listings included tracking codes (in addition to the remote call forwarding numbers [RCFs]) and typically appeared in regular Local results looking like this:

A few member florists of FlowerChat contacted senior management at Bloomnet (1-800-Flowers' florist services division) and expressed concerns about the new marketing tactic.

As of last Friday, the 'local' campaign - banner ads and 'local listings' - were removed from yellowpages.com and its related sites (including Yahoo Local). One FlowerChat member reported 1-800-Flowers' management as being unaware of the RCF's.

"...they have taken down the (listings on the) sites that they had control of, and are communicating with their (hired) marketing company to remove anything that appears to be a "local" listing that is in fact not. They do not want to be part of listing local numbers that forward to their call centers, they use 800 numbers for corp. ads."

RCF's purchased by affiliate marketers of flowers to appear 'local' are not new, but their use, coupled with local-sounding names and/or phony addresses violates consumer protection laws in 24 states. Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum recently filed suit against a New Jersey flower telemarketer stating

"Consumers are entitled to know with whom they are doing business, and companies who deliberately attempt to conceal their true identity or location have no business operating in our state."

Kudos to the 1-800-Flowers leadership for pulling down a campaign that made them look like they are running local businesses when they weren't.

The questions still remains as to how Yahoo Local can provide an accurate data set when a partner like yellowpages.com appears to be able to place 'local' listings there for companies with no physical presence.