I’ve been reading several postings about Google’s first Local Symposium that they hosted at their HQ the other day. Here’s one.
Thanks to Jerry Michalski for inviting me to participate in his Yi-Tan Weekly Call today about community building at the neighborhood level. There, I learned about other efforts, including…
LifeAt, Meet the Neighbors, Neighborology, i-neighbors, Front Porch Forum, TownConnect, Mesh Tennis and rBlock
Vivek Hutheesin, rBlock’s founder, offered many excellent insights. And from his most recent blog posting…
Fatdoor has just announced in Private Equity Hub their first-round financing through Norwest Venture Partners and their new CEO, Jennifer Dulski, from Yahoo! Here is a quote from Jennifer, which I know is true from my own experience:
“Building online local communities that scale is an extremely difficult problem to solve, but the market opportunity is immense and consumers are craving a solution that will make this vision a reality.”
To address this immense market, any platform needs to first solve some very difficult problems in four areas – boundaries, applications, verification, and privacy. rBlock believes that it has solved them all. However to win a big share of this immense market, rBlock’s solutions must be integrated in a manner that leads to viral growth. This requires, among other things, a user-interface that’s easy-to-use and scalable. rBlock believes it has solved this too, paving the way for more plan execution than experimentation.
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.
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.
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