Ghost of Midnight

Authentically Local gets organized

Baristanet and another 30 local-focused U.S. blogs just launched Authentically Local…

Local doesn’t scale. Local isn’t McDonald’s, even if the McDonald’s is right down the street. Local doesn’t send profits back to a home office somewhere else. Local is something that’s part of what makes where you are unique. As unique and flawed and loveable as your own kids. Something is authentically local if it’s the first thing you’d want an old friend, visiting from the other side of the world, to see. It’s authentically local if its disappearance could potentially break your heart.

Local is suddenly the newest, hippest, most lucrative frontier. The local advertising market alone is estimated to be $100 billion a year. Companies like AOL, Google, Apple and Groupon all want a piece of the action. Some of the devices they sell you are even collecting data about everywhere you go – all to help their local campaigns.

Certainly big corporations add a lot of convenience and consistency to our world. They also threaten to homogenize it. If you want home to feel different from everywhere else in the world – or if you want a world that’s interesting to explore, support what’s authentically local. Know the difference, and vive la difference!

Just today, I was on a panel at the annual VBSR conference and responded to a question along these lines.  Many folks in Vermont prefer to eat local and shop local, but do they click local?  That is, they prefer the locally owned coffeeshop over Starbucks, and the locally owned hardware store over Home Depot or WalMart… but do they think about iBrattleboro vs. Facebook in the same way?