Thinking Local

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A really interesting “local” website idea came over my desk last week. I’m going to have to talk around it a bit because the idea belongs to someone else, but I’m sure it’s going to be very successful and the first thing I thought was “I wonder why there aren’t lots of people doing this already”.

And then I thought about it some more and I realised that even though the same ideas could be reapplied in any number of different interest areas, I couldn’t think of any examples. While everyone has been thinking global, and the web has gone nuts in the past couple of years connecting people from all corners of the globe in all kinds of consumer-generated consumer-controlled ways, local hasn’t been keeping up.

I’m not going to hype you in a “dot com bubble” kind of way, but advertisers are now seeking out local sites to advertise on, and they’re having trouble finding them. If you’re cooking a good idea for a local website then right now you’re in the right time and the right place. All signs are pointing to local being the really interesting waters to be floating in in the near future.

There are a couple of forces at play.

As the world gets smaller our local communities seem bigger

It’s fantastic being able to stay in touch with art exhibits in New York and molecular gastronomy experiments in London, being in a community of photographers from all around the world who use the same camera as you do, and getting an instant update from multiple sources every time Steve Jobs sneezes, but we live local, we shop local and we (probably) love local.

Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent sums it up really well in her post The World is Not Flat

“We may be on our way to becoming global citizens, yet we still live in our neighborhoods. The Web has increased our chances of finding each other, but we’re still pretty far from being integrated.”

If you’re like me then “Singapore” is quite a common word for sorting (in Flickr, Linked-in and other social network forums) or for Googling. While a lot of our tools are big global ones, we’ve all become masters of the filter and keyword search. We’re pretty good at making our own local tools, but it’s a bit of a generic experience, not a truly local one. And a lot of the tools we’d like to use just don’t exist.

Personally, I feel like I spend a lot of my time in the website-equivilant of Starbucks or MacDonalds, when actually I’d prefer a cozier corner-coffeeshop experience.

I’m not someone who’s looking for love, friendship or even particularly for RL social connection online at the moment, but there have been times in my past when I have been. I don’t know what the stats on this search for connection is, but I know it’s important for many people, including most of my friends. Social networks are (duh!) for networking. The thing is, finding like-minded people (what Micha Cornes from Three Minds @ Organic calls vertically-oriented niches) is great, and works for some things, but really what my friends are looking for is a buddy or a date. Despite how it looks sometimes, we don’t really want to be stuck in front of a computer all the time… there are some parts of the “social connection” concept it just can’t satisfy.

We’re seeing some movement in this regard in Singapore, but you can expect to see it accelerate in the near future. Sites like Whosgoing for clubbers, Fridae for gay guys and girls and even Stomp for anyone interested in what’s happening and newsworthy around them, may one day be forefathers of a time when everyone has niche social networks that align to their interests.

Money makes the world go ’round, offline and online

I ran an online community for a couple of years and there was intrinsic reward, in that it was a community I wanted to nurture, but it didn’t involve nearly the work (or server space) that a full web 2.0 social network would.

Money is following “local” though. Local advertisers want to reach local consumers, but at the moment the media they are seeking is poorly defined, or not even there. Geo-demographic targetting is one thing (yes, Google knows where you live), but for many brands it may be an entirely different and more effective thing to talk to people while they are in their own “neighbourhood”. Terry Heaton’s excellent article The Local Web poses the question:

“But if local TV is about local advertising, to where will local advertisers turn in a world of diminishing relevance for broadcasting? This is a question of profound implications, but it’s one that ought to give all local media companies hope for the future, for the real growth in internet advertising over the next decade will be at the local level. And the evolution of local media on the web will, once again, be about the evolution of local advertising.”

The fastest growing local media of course is not social networks, but blogs and RSS feeds. Traditional banners and mini-towers have been shown to be fairly ineffective in this media and Feedburner and others have been pouring research into readership patterns and are trialling new ad zones. Adotas has been asking the question “Is blog advertising ready for prime time? and their conclusion is that 2007 will be the year where this online area begins to attract some serious spending. They are calling it “the year of Blog Advertising 3.0″.

What can we expect?

Altruism, user demand or money… whatever causes this shift it’s a snowball-down-a-mountain that’s teetering on the edge. The focus is going to shift inwards and that’s going to be good for us as users. The technology is becoming available to everyone, the expertise may not be in place just yet but it soon will be, and we can expect more and more niche communities in our neighbourhood. It’s where most of us would really shop and socialise if given half a chance.

Pic: Hawpar Villa by CreativeSpark

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Filed under Community, Social Media, Trends, Web & Technology

Tags: hyperlocal, local web, niche marketing, nline advertising, singapore web sites, vertically oriented niches