True Innovation in Local News Organizations Still Lacking
News sites need to innovate around their core competencies by spending time understanding their customers (advertisers and consumers) and what problems they can solve for them. The solutions should be a good fit for the organization and should be something that they are uniquely positioned in the marketplace to provide…
How Siri Works and Why It Matters for Local
It’s pretty clear that Siri’s interpreter can examine a spoken query for syntax and keywords in order to trigger what it thinks is the most relevant web service. Often when Siri gets it wrong, this is because it has made a mistake about which service to call. In my experience, Siri is somewhat over-eager to assume you want local businesses when you say a word that sounds like a product or service category…
Taking Location-Based Services to the Public Sector
Consumers are getting more and more comfortable with location-based services like Foursquare and Facebook Places, and many small businesses are recognizing these apps are great tools for connecting with potential and existing customers. The public sector has a similar opportunity to customize services for citizens and employees by engaging with the growing wealth of location-based data…
‘Legacy’ Media in Phoenix Reach Out to Communities
Earlier this year, the Gannett-owned Arizona Republic and its sister TV station, KPNX, went hyperlocal in an audacious way. The metro region’s two major “legacy” media embarked on a plan to grow editorial contributors from the community — the affluent, well-educated and rapidly growing East Valley, including the city of Scottsdale. So how is this experiment going six months later? To find out, I put some questions to John Triplett, the content partnership editor at the Republic…
Waze Highlights Inconsistencies in Local Data
There are too many different ways to categorize businesses, and none of them represents a unified standard for online search. Such a standard if widely implemented would make all businesses categorized as grocery stores line up neatly with each other and would provide a significant boost in overall relevancy…
Hyperlocal Online Ads Are About to Get a Lot Bigger — Billboard-Sized
The next time you are in your doctor’s office, at the mall or at the local sports arena, the ad that you see on a plasma TV display or a digital kiosk could have been purchased and placed there using the same type of system advertisers are using today to buy and place online display ads…
How Local Sites Can Leverage Technology to Build Community
I wonder why more hyperlocal news sites aren’t adopting, or at least adapting to, this new news model that makes community and journalism what they should be – partners. Journalists need to enter this new wall-less newsroom that has been reassembled digitally in the community. If they don’t, they will end up clutching at their buggy whips like the hansom drivers who had to give the right-of-way to Henry Ford’s Model A…
What Can Online Directories Learn From the Yellow Pages?
I’m not advocating a return to the phone book, but I am curious about the lesson it might have to teach us. In particular, the notion of restricted and curated data sets may be worth a revisit. Without foregoing the benefits of scalability, search sites could do more to enable the curation of local data by business owners and other members of local communities…
5 Things Communities Can Do to Improve Their Online Presence
How does your community’s online presence measure up? Does it capture the vibrancy and activity your community has to offer, or does it look out-of-date and abandoned? Since most people’s first impressions of your community are online these days, it’s more important than ever to make sure that impression is accurate and positive…
The 3 Biggest Misconceptions About Mobile Location Targeting
Since the dawn of mobile, advertisers have salivated at the idea of targeting users based on their current location — but despite the clear promise of the medium, many have struggled to capitalize on it. A number of misconceptions threaten to confine the industry to the progress made in these early years of mobile, so in an effort to continue our momentum – it’s time a few these myths were officially debunked…
Why Wall Street Should Be Paying Attention to Hyperlocal Analytics
The correlation between directional trends and sales trends appears to be quite strong. That’s great for marketers — but could be pure gold for Wall Street or for just about anyone trying to analyze how a company is doing on a month-by-month or week-by-week basis. In the future, hyperlocal could become not just a way to understand customers but a way to invest smarter and way to level the information playing field…
New Jersey Hyperlocal Network TAP Celebrates 4 Years, Continues to Expand
Former lawyer Mike Shapiro’s The Alternative Press has now grown to 18 separate hyperlocal publications, including licensees, and is preparing for another major expansion. How does Shapiro do what some news industry experts have said is next to impossible for independent community sites like his? Street Fight caught up with him recently to find out…
How Restaurants Can ‘Listen’ to Location-Based Services
Many restaurants take a pulse of the Twitter and Facebook conversation about them, but how is that information being combined with and understood alongside location-based services like Foursquare? Perhaps the bigger question to ask is, if you’ve invested in social media fan building, how are you correlating that social data with the behaviors of those fans in the physical world?
Extending User Reviews to Places, Block by Block
Block Avenue launched last week with an offering that gives locals the opportunity to grade their neighborhoods, blocks and businesses down to the building level. Users assign grades from A to F on specific blocks and for businesses, which are displayed on maps to show the destination spots (A’s) as well as danger zones (F’s)…
Apple Maps: Taking the Long View
There’s no dancing around the fact that the much-anticipated launch of Apple Maps has turned into a fiasco for the company. Yet there’s little doubt Apple will buff out this particular blemish with time. The interesting part will be seeing exactly how the company chooses to address the gap in expertise that led to the current sub-par product. A big acquisition of talent or technology seems likely…
We’ve Seen the Past — And It Is ‘The Neighborhood’
For the past few years, social startups have been spiraling inward toward a smaller and smaller target: your neighborhood, your block. Now Patch is going all in by to leverage neighborhoods through communities of interest. But maybe neighborhoods are an artificial constructs, with borders that mean little even to those they bind. If that’s the case, we need to rethink a lot more than design and tools and lessons of the past…
iOS6: Can Google Beat Apple in its Own Backyard?
Mapping is a game ultimately won on function rather than form. This requires lots of listings data and search algorithms; in other words, things that are non-core to Apple. Relative to Google’s tenure in this area, Apple is only starting to stitch together local vertical content partners like Yelp and TomTom. And it’s already starting to show…
BxB Recap: Is This the Future of Local News?
The passion with the group at Block by Block isn’t just about great journalism — it’s about turning online journalism into a business; it’s about leveraging existing tools and creating new ones; and most importantly it’s about working to collaboratively across these businesses to make an impact…
Extracting Key Metrics to Make Your Hyperlocal Site More Valuable
“Quantitative” data — those UVs and PVs — work effectively for advertisers who want volume, Lofgren says, but most hyperlocals aren’t big enough to deliver multi-millions numbers in audience. “Qualitative” data, he says, tells you who your customers are — by their activity on the site, as it’s actually happening — or their identity, with information neatly served up from sign-up info. But it can tell much more if the publisher surveys a sampling of site visitors with multiple-choice questions…
Getting ‘Real-Time’ Into Hyperlocal Advertising
We’ve seen a demand to not only bring local advertisers back into the mix on mobile and online advertising, but a need to provide more relevant and more timely information within those ads. This is because consumers crave “new” at a pace never possible before now – and this desire shows in the response rates measured in multiples of a standard static banner ad…