Author Archives: Michael
Local online is about local offline
From Greg Sterling today…
Here’s a general article on the local market from Business Week. Many people have seen it and emailed me about it.
It bothers me because it’s pretty superficial…
Here’s the reality, which BW either doesn’t fully “get” or seem to want to explore in sufficient depth:
- Local is about offline — money spent in physical places.
- E-commerce is <4% of retail; 95%+ percent of product purchases happen offline. Increasingly those purchases start online.
- 99%+ of service business transactions happen offline/locally (yet online is the place where more and more people go to find service businesses).
- People may communicate via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook to others around the globe but they live in physical places and when they travel they’re also in physical places, where they stay, eat, shop.
- SMB advertiser acquisition is hard, yes — no dispute there (see the last two years of blog posts)
- The central barrier to more geotargeted and local advertising by nationals has been the challenges of offline tracking in any given campaign
FreeCycle Rolls its Own
Looks like FreeCycle has built its own software after many years operating through Yahoo Groups. Check out this international web service at My Free Cycle.
Front Porch Forum Expands to Starksboro, VT
Thanks to the generousity of the Orton Family Foundation, Front Porch Forum is now available in Starksboro, VT!
Any and all Starksboro residents are encouraged to sign up for this free community-building service immediately. I see that we have two dozens subscribers there already… I guess word got out before the “official” launch.
Finally, thanks to the warm welcome this evening from the Selectboard and Art and Soul folks.
UPDATE: Here’s Orton’s news release (April 13, 2009). Already 20% of Starksboro subscribes to FPF!
Local businesses and online advertising
From Google disiple, Jeff Jarvis…
The promise of local ad support for news will come only if a new population of very small businesses can be served in new and effective ways – before Google beats everybody else to it. That’s apparent in the results of Webvisible and Nielsen surveys reported by MediaPost (via Marketeting Pilgrim and Frank Thinking), which show that local marketers are leaving newspapers and the yellow pages but are still dissatisfied with – and don’t pay enough attention to – internet marketing. Factoids:
* 42 percent of small businesses say they use the local paper less and 23 percent use yellow pages less – while 43 percent use search engines more.
* “Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.”
* “Only 9% are satisfied with their online marketing efforts.”
* Mediapost found a disconnect in how small-business owners act as business people and marketers vs. how they act as consumers. That is, as consumers, they use and are satisfied with the internet and search to find other local businesses, but as marketers themselves, they use online less.
The more creative and forward-thinking local small businesses keep finding Front Porch Forum in our pilot area. Most buy ads and report back remarkable results.
What’s “local?” Define “neighborhood.”
U.K.’s Kevin Harris blogs…
Over on the Local democracy blog Dave Briggs asks, how close is local?
I’d say most people regard ‘local’ as geographically within reach, and obviously that differs individually, which is fine. If terminology is fuzzy it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s invalid. We need definitions for administrative areas (wards, cantons, parishes) but not to explain individually-variable experiences of the socially-charged space nearest to the home.
And maybe it helps to think about what local is not. For instance, it’s not the same as nearness, and that’s reinforced in this image (courtesy of Indy Johar, 00 architects), which reminds us how transport efficiencies influence our sense of distance.
So why after generations and centuries of people gathering together in villages, towns and cities, are we suddenly struggling with the fact that terms like neighbourhood and locality aren’t rigidly defined? What has happened for instance that causes Dave quite reasonably to suggest that
‘it will be increasingly important to research how people’s notions of their own ‘local’ will determine levels of interest’? …
Harkens back to a post about neighborhood scale based on early Front Porch Forum experience.
About Blog
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
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