Local Quotables: BJ Emerson, Joe Meyer, Tim O’Shaugnessy and more…

The best words about and around the hyperlocal industry.

Of all people, the VP of technology at Tasti-D-Lite, BJ Emerson, turned a sharp tongue on location-based services at the LocNav conference in San Jose. Jim Brady talked scale; Joe Meyer described the realization that there was a business in local companies; and one small business owner cleverly noted that Twitter and Facebook don’t do a local merchant much good “if people don’t know where you are located.” More wise words and wise-cracks:

Tyler Bell, Factual, October 19, 2011
Twitter: @TWBell: “They used to call it ‘stalking’, now they just call it ‘location-based marketing'” -BJ Emerson at #locnav

Jim Brady, Journal Register Company, October 19, 2011
Street Fight: Local sites are not easily scalable. For local sites to be good, you need local bodies. So while you can centralize some back-office functions, the core journalism can’t be easily scaled.

Gary Gale, Nokia, October 19, 2011
Twitter: @vicchi: “We have the mechanics (of social location) down, but we don’t have the dynamics down” … BJ Emerson’s talk at #LocNav is totally quotable

@JSeattle, CHS Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, October 19, 2011
Twitter: @JSeattle: If indie hyperlocal sites ever disappear, know that it was partly to do with how relatively hard it is for small biz to buy advertising

Joe Meyer, HopStop, October 19, 2011
Street Fight: “We were dealing with [big brands] on a one-off basis. But as we started to hear more and more interest from local business, we thought, ‘why don’t we bring that targeting capability to true local businesses – that was the genesis.”

Tim O’Shaughnessy, LivingSocial, October 18, 2011
The New York Times: “Radio stations are a primary means for people to find entertainment and learn what’s going on in their communities […] This matches perfectly with LivingSocial’s mission to help people find great deals and values around them.”

Shane Reed, small business owner, October 14, 2011
The New York Times: “You can have a great Twitter account and Facebook page […] but if people don’t know where you are located and can’t find you, it’s really not doing you much good.”

Thom Ruhe, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, October 19, 2011
Reuters: “Communities looking to support an entrepreneurial ecosystem need to first and foremost have the will to do that, to have community buy-in broadly.”