When It Comes to Mobile Local Search and SMBs: Mind the Gap
Mobile is inherently local and thus conducive to location-based, high-intent user engagement, all of which appeals to many SMBs. B ut mobile also exacerbates their paradox of choice. That’s why there is a big opportunity for third parties to help SMBs get there. That can be marketing or SEO consultants, but the real opportunity is for the local media organizations with deep roots and existing relationships with SMBs…
Why Cars Could Be the Next Big Platform for Local Search
Amid praise and criticism of the flatter design of Apple’s newest mobile operating system, the company quietly introduced a potentially transformative feature in iOS7: iOS in the Car. Pedestrian-friendly cities like New York and San Francisco may prove a fertile breeding grounds for local discovery apps like Foursquare, but it’s the suburban car-bound consumer that presents the biggest opportunity for local technology companies today, including …
The Good and Bad of Local Discovery on Our Summer Road Trip
Greetings from a summer road trip in the Pacific Northwest. Amid games of twenty questions and alphabet animals, we have faced the typical needs of the traveler: shelter, food, gas, and fun. Naturally, we’ve turned to local search, just like the other 31% of leisure travelers (up from 18% in 2010). I’ve written mainly about local search on the homefront and travel is another kind of use case entirely, one that in many ways has been “solved” by existing services — but has it? In our experience, you often have to be creative to get what you need…
Everybody Is a Media Company, So Now What?
The explosive growth of personal media has disrupted everything it touches. The same inexpensive tools that consumers are now using are also available to any-sized businesses, which has the potential of entirely leveling the playing field in consumer goods and services by driving down the cost of marketing. The neighborhood doughnut shop can just as easily make and distribute media as the Kroger Bakery up the street or, by God, even Walmart. We may chuckle today but just wait…
How Facebook’s Rumored News Product Could Hurt Local Sites
News websites dodged a bullet when Facebook didn’t announce a rumored RSS or news-in-your-news-feed product yesterday. If Facebook actually got serious about these plans, news websites could expect an even larger portion of their site’s traffic to be directed through the social network — and their brands could be endangered…
Authenticity: The Force Behind the Local Snowball Effect
One of the new values that the Web demands is authenticity. For news, it means a commitment to truthfulness by bringing readers or viewers as close as possible to the source of information. In business, it also means being truthful in our behavior, attributions and even our intentions. It’s an underappreciated and underutilized value, and it strikes at the very heart of marketing — especially at the hyperlocal level…
SMBs Have Some Major Advantages Over Brands in Social Marketing
Social media is merely a digital extension of local conversations. We talk about the weather, the 4th of July parade, the upcoming festival, local news, et cetera. SMBs need to always be thinking about how they can join/start these conversations in order to build fans, follow leads, offer discounts, improve their reputation and, most importantly, compete with national brands…
Why Mobile Ads Are ‘A Little Scary’ (And Potentially So Valuable)
Mobile isn’t a mass marketing vehicle; it’s my one-to-one, highly intimate connection with the Web. It’s a personal device, and its connection to me is private (or not), powerful, and controllable entirely by me. It is, in fact, a portable, electronic version of me, and I will not permit interruptions in the name of commerce for long…
Two (Big) Things Preventing Local TV’s Collapse
The concept of network content distribution through local affiliates is being challenged by the Web. Local broadcasters are middlemen in the delivery of network content to the masses, and that was fine in a world absent horizontal connectivity. So it would be easy to assume downstream trouble for local broadcasters. But while there’s quite likely much of that ahead, it won’t totally kill the industry. There are two enormous roadblocks standing in the way.
The Local Search Shadow Economy
We know that there exist a great number of businesses in our local communities that service a variety of needs at their clients’ homes or business locations. Aside from specialized services like Angie’s List and Service Magic, there are few local search outlets that serve potential clients or service providers well in terms of their ability to connect a need with the appropriate provider…
Mobile Local Advertising: Not Just for Early Adopters Anymore
Over the past few years I’ve done some axe-grinding about the lack of location targeting in mobile advertising — and the fact that desktop ad strategies have largely been ported over to the small screen, particularly among large brands and agencies. But in recent months we’ve started to see some of those habits break down, beginning with newer companies in mobile that don’t have to “unlearn” anything to get there…
It’s Local Media That’s Broken, Not Hyperlocal
In mid-sized cities across America for nearly 100 years, the daily newspaper was the purveyor of enterprise journalism, the opinion maker and a focal point for advertising. In many cities they were monopolies: they set the pricing for advertising, they promoted and punished political officials, and they decided the news cycle every day. But as digital has overtaken American life, mid-sized American newspapers have not kept pace…
Report: Pureplays Using Legacy Media as a Farm System for Sales Staff
Local media companies need to do something to protect their digital sales assets or run the risk of losing them to pureplay web companies, according to a new report from Borrell Associates. Pureplays offer starting salaries in the range of $12,500 per year more than their nearest competitors, the local TV stations. The gap between starting pureplay sales people and those who work for newspapers is an incredible $21,000 more…
Local Video Copyrights in the Age of Online Virality
We need to find a way to attach revenue-producing messages to videos, so that the Web can do its thing without hurting the incentive for local media companies to create such videos in the first place. And I’m not talking about attaching 30-second prerolls. It can be done, and we need to talk about it. The Web is not TV…
Realigning News Sites to Connect ‘Local’ and Interests
When we talk about hyperlocal, it’s usually about taking content and advertising down to the neighborhood (and sub-neighborhood) level. But it’s possible to go a bit deeper than that, and I think there is still a lot of work to be done around combining local content and advertising with people’s interests…
Why Local Media Should Build Search Products to Take on the PurePlays
In order to appear competitive, most local media companies have formed digital divisions that offer services for local businesses that are available only through deals with pure-play companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo, which guarantees that a certain portion of the business we generate will always end up in their hands. There simply has to be a better way…
5 Ways Brands Can Leverage Place-Based Mobile Targeting
The ability to target consumers based on location is no longer an emerging element of mobile technology — it is the standard on which all other strategies are based. The growing demand for this type of mobile advertising has brought on the development of new and effective location targeting strategies, the most popular being place-based mobile ad targeting. Want in? Here are five place-based mobile targeting strategies to try.
Looking Up: Local Data and the Real World
Google Glass may be overpriced or simply too odd for many consumers, but it still represents a manner of thinking about the interconnectedness of the internet and the world that is an inevitable outcome of current trends. With smartphones as our constant companions, we already spend a vast amount of our time looking down to look things up.
Why Hyperlocal Is Naturally Suited for Investigative Reporting
A new study by local media research/consulting firm AR&D and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) reveals that investigative reporting is a big draw for consumers when it comes to media choice. Sixty-two precent said it was reason enough to follow a particular news organization, and it ranked only behind weather (54% preference) in terms of interest — and that interest is growing. Investigative reporting is plain old reporting. Period. And it begins with getting off the lazy and easy commodity news bandwagon and growing a reportorial spine…