Andy Sack, founding CEO of now-shuttered Judy’s Book, offers this advice for folks looking to get traction in the “local reviews and word of mouth referrals business”…
i) GET TO CRITICAL MASS
- Do this by limiting geography — stay in one geography for 3 years. Yes, 3 years. Do not expand geography for the first 36 months. Every successful online local business has been in one geography for 3 years.
- Do this by limiting the number of categories or professions you’re trying to get word of mouth on. Do not try and do the entire yellow pages. Choose at most five categories. I might suggest: restaurants, dentists, doctors, auto mechanics, and real estate.
- Do this by aggressive customer acquisition. Whatever your strategy for customer acquisition, get aggressive about. Do not sit in an ivory tower and expect to get to critical mass.
- Aggregate content from other places on the web so you can avoid the empty database problem
- Spend as little money as possible
ii) Go back to step i
Steven Clift made an interesting proposal on MediaShift Idea Lab at PBS.org the other day…
Why not declare a night once a year in late January as “National Night On”? (“On” as in “online.”)
Go for it Steven! And he went on to write…
What bugs me about the Internet, even the rise of social networking, most of the investment tends to reinforce existing ties – friends and family – and the tools that build new ties are more about professional networking (LinkedIn) or dating. There is a huge difference between publicizing private life online and creating open and accessible online spaces for local public life. There are a few projects like E-Democracy.Org’s neighborhood forums in Minnesota and England, the Front Porch Forum in Vermont, and the Annenberg School’s i-neighbors, and many independent efforts trying to create larger neighborhood-wide exchange, but nothing that I know of designed to be peer-to-peer two-way is essentially block-level based.
A growing number of “social networking + local online” efforts are in that first group mentioned above… making it easier to keep up with old contacts. This can further exacerbate the very problem that Front Porch Forum and others are designed to address… isolation from the people you live next to. FPF is all about helping neighbors get to know each other and build community within the neighborhood.
Duncan Watts of Yahoo! takes Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point thesis to task in Clive Thompson’s FastCompany.com article today. In particular, he goes after the notion that a small number of people carry extra weight in igniting trends that spread exponentially… influentials. Rather, its society’s readiness for a trend that matters most…
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”
Also noted today is this tidbit from Kevin Harris…
I was talking to a group of community workers today, getting their views on the use of community centres and ways of getting people through the door. Most of the way through a 12 month funded programme, they told of an influx of new people coming in. This is in an area of low expectations and high needs.
The explanation is that ‘word-of-mouth takes 8-9 months…’
‘It’s about people having the courage to act on what they’re hearing. It can take you a year to get confidence in the community, that there’s something new for them to try and to trust it. It takes time for the confidence to work through.’
Reaching people is hard work. About 30% of our pilot city subscribes to Front Porch Forum and I’d guess that almost that many are familiar with the service and are open to signing up… just haven’t gotten around to it or don’t quite understand or trust it yet.
Congratulations to Justin (Front Porch Forum member) and his MocoSpace team. From Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch…
Mobile social networking startup MocoSpace raised a $4 million B round from existing investors General Catalyst, Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and former eBay exec Michael Deering. The previous A round was $3 million in January 2007. MocoSpace is a mobile-only social network with two million members and serving one billion pageviews a month (from mobile phones). When we last wrote about MocoSpace in August, it had half as many members and pageviews.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more