Greg Sterling reports on his interview with Craig Newmark today… lots of good stuff. I like this point because coincidentally we’ve been saying the same thing about Front Porch Forum…
Newmark said that “In the race between tortoise and hare, we’re the tortoise.” And he described the site’s now 12-year history as one of “slow, continuous, undramatic growth.”
Of course, craigslist is now in about 450 cities (50 more coming soon) and Kevin Abramson reports…
With 20 million monthly local visitors, Craigslist is the 28th largest Web domain in the U.S., according to Nielsen//NetRatings. And while the company does not disclose revenues, it will rake in an estimated $150 million in 2007. Not bad for a organization with 25 employees.
I’ve been reading several postings about Google’s first Local Symposium that they hosted at their HQ the other day. Here’s one.
Greg Sterling writes about online reviews today… lots of good stuff.
Adding to the mounting evidence that online reviews are now critical for both consumers and businesses, comScore and the Kelsey Group released online survey data (n=2,090) last week showing that 24% of consumer-respondents used online reviews in the context of looking for a local service business (during the preceding three-months)…
PQ Media issued a new report that estimated “word-of-mouth marketing” has become a $981 billion business. In addition, the report says that among consumers surveyed, 80% rely on friends and family for recommendations. This phenomenon is now moving quickly online… [lots more]
Taken together, these data all show how significant online reviews are becoming – as an extension of traditional “word of mouth” – for both consumers and local businesses. As the stakes get higher, which all these data suggest they will, the risk is that there’s more gaming and manipulation of reviews. Note that 30% (of the 24%) in the comScore data wrote reviews because they were asked to do so. (And see my recap of the SMX panel on user review content.)
Reviews and recommendations are a large part of the Front Porch Forum postings. Most arrive upon request from a neighbor.
John Kelsey writes today…
In 2005, Jonathan Weber launched New West Publishing, an online independent local media company designed to serve the “culture, economy, politics, environment and life style of the Rocky Mountain West.” Today NewWest.net is structured as a regional publication that also focuses in on seven local markets. He reiterated… the difficulty of selling local online advertising. Success requires patience and persistence, the blocking and tackling of the online local media business. At the same time, you need talented players and a good strategy. These could be described as great content and local authenticity.
What I find most refreshing about New West is that Weber resisted the forces encouraging him to replicate his platform in other markets (New South, New China, etc.). Unlike most other entrepreneurs in the city guide and free DA business, Weber said, let’s do this right in one market area and then, and only then, consider expansion.
Great content and local authenticity… that’s a winner. And that combination appears to be in short supply.
Greg Sterling writes today about Yahoo’s new trial service called Neighbors…
Yahoo! has introduced a very interesting new feature on Local: Neighbors. A new tab will appear, “Neighbors,” that offers a community discussion area and organizing tool…
Andy Sack, former CEO of Judy’s Book, shared some lessons learned this week on his blog…
The first mistake: we weren’t aggressive enough in customer acquisition…
The second mistake: we expanded out of Seattle in August 2005 and went national… Ultimately, this decision prevented us from focusing on the customer acquisition problem I mentioned above as well as other improvements that would have made our product more sticky and compelling…
Interesting insights for Front Porch Forum to consider as we look to expand beyond our initial community.
It’s a bit apples-to-oranges, but I wonder how Craiglist in San Francisco compared to Judy’s Book in Seattle before each decide to expand beyond their original city? My sense is that Craigslist benefited from a much more solid homebase than Judy’s Book… but I don’t have any numbers to back that up.
David Ardia’s post just alerted me to the fact that iBrattleboro is being sued for libel over something written in the comment section of their site.
Steve Outing offers his “lessons learned” on the just-dead Enthusiast Group (“experiment in grassroots media and social networking (as applied to niche sports)”). Here’s one of his lessons that caught my eye…
If citizen-content-exclusive destination sites don’t make sense when it comes to hyperlocal content, what else can you do with user-submitted content? Another approach is to focus on micro-targeting the citizen submissions. I’m intrigued by websites like YourStreet.com, which geo-tags local news and information and puts it on a map mash-up. Using a model like YourStreet’s, a news organization might create a map service that presents hyperlocal (geo-tagged) content on neighborhood maps.
While I live in Boulder, Colorado, I couldn’t care less about news from schools or community organizations serving neighborhoods across town. But I care a lot about anything to do with the school near my house that my daughter attends. I care about the announcement from the local fire station about staffing changes. So targeting that sort of news and information to me is a powerful service that a news company can provide. (Of course, I’d want the option to expand the range of micro-news and information that I view.)
If you can gather, slice and dice hyperlocal citizen news and information, think too about disseminating it outside of your own website. Create a customizable widget that a neighborhood blogger, say, can include on his site to offer his readers links to news and information pertinent to his neighborhood. That’ll drive traffic back to your website, or might include ads that you place within the widget. Win-win.
If a news website can filter the minutiae (from a wide variety of sources, internal and external to the news organization) that’s relevant to a specific online user, and present that in context with the professionally produced output of the news organization, then I think you’ve got something valuable.
Marchex is working on a new network of neighborhood blogs called MyZip. If I read the description correctly, they posit that the $50/month paid to a blogger in their network will provide sufficient incentive to keep up a five-post/week pace indefinitely… that’s about $2.30/posting. Hmm… could be interesting.
I would neither blog about or read regularly someone’s daily blog about my neighborhood… and the $2.30/post payment somehow makes it even less likely. What I want… to hear from and interact constructively with lots of my neighbors. That’s our aim with Front Porch Forum.
Time will tell. Lots of room for new ideas. Marchex doesn’t have the MyZip site up yet.
Kirby Winfield offers a good post today, for as far as it goes, about helping people connect to their local communities through the internet…
It’s been said that individuals today are increasingly disconnected from their communities. They are “bowling alone”; i.e., although the number of people who bowl has increased in the last 20 years, the number of people that bowl in leagues has decreased. Since people bowl alone they do not participate in social interaction and civic discussions that might occur in a league environment.
The Internet has been criticized for its isolating impact on society. In many cases increased engagement in online activities results in exacerbation of the “bowling alone” phenomenon.
There is a huge market void in local online media. With the exception of business search/reviews, no one has solved for community connection and conversation at the neighborhood or town level at scale. This brings me to the opportunity of “digitizing local.”
Some of the most passionate and well informed citizens in the country still communicate about their communities through print newsletters, in person meetings, and other offline means. These people thrive on being active locally. If you can somehow harness their knowledge, energy, and networks, you can create a vast forum of local influencers and relevant evergreen local content…
This, of course, is exactly what Front Porch Forum is all about in the 19 Vermont towns that comprise greater Burlington.
He goes one to say that no one has cracked this mystery at scale. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to look at it. Kind of like saying that none of the big box retailers have yet to really feel like a valuable local business. It could be that, when it comes to local, the internet will deliver on its promise of decentralization and small scale and we’ll see thousands of super-valuable local sites rising up, each unique to their own special community… not the one-size-fits-all big box approach emanating from Silicon Valley. Kind of like 100 years ago when every town had its own stand-alone, locally owned, daily newspaper.
Of course, the chains came along and gobbled up those papers eventually and left us with the USAToday model.
Maybe the internet will help usher back true local flavor and thousands of successful local media companies that enliven and enrich their home towns in ways that no clever distant mashup could ever achieve.
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