Is This the Ultimate Local Marketing?

This email crossed my desk on Wednesday. I looked at it as possible spam, then I realized that the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce legitimately had my email address, so I read it. I had never heard of Try It Local, but it didn’t take me long to find it on the web.

It’s an interesting concept. This program is specifically designed for Chambers of Commerce who want to bring business to their towns. Local marketing programs are ideal for the small businesses that make up the core of chamber memberships around the country, so that seemed reasonable.

The deal of the week floated into my inbox today. It’s for a well-regarded local restaurant, although I must admit that I found the size of the deal underwhelming. Many of the features are similar to Groupon (Boston page), Gowalla and other location-based services. The main difference is that there does not seem to be a minimum number of purchasers to establish the deal. I’ve gone back to the offer several times while writing this and people are buying it in numbers that seem reasonable for this resort area in the off season.

So this platform may not be as social as some of the others, but that also seems to suit the small business environment. There are, however, social elements. The ad for what I think is a chamber of commerce publication shows “likes.” It has icons that link to the restaurant’s web page and Facebook page. It has no easy-to-use Share icons, which I think is an oversight.

But all in all, it seems well done. It appears to me to be the ultimate local marketing (for now at least) because of the program sponsorl. Chambers of commerce know the small businesses in their area and should have the trust needed to get small businesses to participate. That may not be too much of an issue. At one promotion per week, I wonder if there will be a queue lining up to participate in what seems to be a business-friendly promotion , run by a local entity not an unknown firm somewhere. That seems likely!

And that may be the main downside. Are consumers becoming so accustomed to these deals that they won’t buy anything unless there is a promotion attached to it? It happened with cars. It could happen with local businesses also. And is that in any way different from the sales and promotions they currently offer? I’m not sure. What I am pretty sure of is that this email-based program costs them less than advertising in their local newspaper. The one that loses here is the newspaper.

Try It Local points out that the program offers benefits to the chambers also, so it appears to be a win-win for them and the local businesses. For the moment, it is the most truly local deal program that I know of. Do you know of others that have a similar model?

Point of Purchase Going Mobile

I was fascinated by this interview with Scott Monty of Ford that passed through my inbox a couple of weeks ago. It’s worth listening to. About 2 minutes in he talks about the localization issue. Ford is following up their successful Fiesta introduction last year with the formal North American launch. The launch marketing is concentrated in 16 local markets. Ford will have 20 2-person teams handling the local social aspects of the launch. Monty says that Ford wants to “connect to the people that matter” and my guess is that it’s going to be dealer-centered, not Ford headquarters-centered. Really interesting!

Fast forward a couple of weeks to this article in Ad Age. It gives an additional slant on localized marketing:

It's the ad served while you are reading the news in the morning on an e-reader that knows you're at home and three blocks from a Starbucks. It's a loyalty program on your phone that, through a hotel-room sensor, sets the lights and thermostat and turns the TV to CNN when you walk in the door. It's finding a restaurant in a strange city on a Tuesday night, discovering that a store nearby stocks the TV you're looking for, or that a certain grocery on the way home has the cut of meat you need. . . "What used to be called point-of-purchase is now called mobile advertising," said Kip Cassino, VP-research at Borrell Associates. "Mobile can be an extension of a retailer's storefront."

The emphasis here is on mobile. I was reminded of these two articles as I listened to CNBC report on the CITA conference earlier this morning. If you are interested in wireless developments, and all sorts of cute new devices and appls, you can follow their coverage. I was caught by the headline of this particular report, “Charge It On Your Cell Phone.” I should add that mobile payments are not a new concept. I wrote about a concert ticket transaction that was completely mobile c. 2007 in my Internet marketing text. However, the example came from Australia; I couldn’t find an actual example in the U.S!

The section of the report that interested me most was the Visa payWave service. When I looked at that, I found that it was actually a smart card application, not mobile at this point. That’s also not a new concept; I wrote about that in an even earlier text! ExxonMobile SpeedPass still seems to be going strong, although it didn’t morph into a payment system as the initial strategy seemed to anticipate.

So initially, I said, ok nice service, but nothing new. Then I clicked on the “find merchants near you” link and saw how this fitted in. I live in a small market and admittedly the merchants now listed are mostly national or regional chains. What happens when local merchants catch on?

I’ll tell you what happens! Local merchants sign up for the service and voila—they are listed on the local map along with the big guys. More free promotion! Not to mention creating an easy transaction mechanism for their customers!

Further, this is only one step in the direction of mobile-based advertising and transactions. Billing Revolution is one firm that offers transaction processing on mobile phones. It was developed to allow mobile purchases from e-commerce sites. I can’t tell whether you can yet walk into a retail store, one that accepts PayPal apparently, and pay for your purchase with your cell phone. If you can’t do it today, it’s bound to be the next step.

As that is happening, marketing becomes more local with the ability to reach people where they are, whenever they are there. Also the opportunity to annoy them immensely while they are trying to read the morning news on a mobile device!

Haven’t I said this before? Broadcast marketing is dead. No reference implied to particular channels. The reference is to blasting a message out to all within hearing, whether they are the people you want to connect to or not! It calls for smarter, more thoughtful marketing, but the potential returns are great!

Local is Going Mobile

I’ve been working on some local advertising issues lately, so the 5 Mobile Trends article in AdAge last week grabbed me. Here are their trends:

1. Mobile will completely revolutionize the way local advertisers can connect with potential customers. Ad Age’s subhead captures the issue perfectly: “How the Computer in Your Pocket Is Changing Your Business.” Smartphone and apps users of the world have united to change your business—attention must be paid!
2. Growth in adoption of mobile shopping applications will continue to alter in-store consumer behavior, increasing the significance of mobile in point of sale decisions making. I wrote about my UPC code scanner not long ago. It really works! What’s funny is that when I’m at a store I like and where I know the people, I’m embarrassed to use it (unless I can hide behind a shelf so people won’t see me!). If I’m at a store where I don’t know people or don’t care what they think, it’s fine.
3. Brands and agencies will continue to build branded apps, but will also have more attractive display media options, thanks to Google. Keep reading—more below.
4. Advertising's outdoor real estate is fast becoming another connected channel capable of delivering high-fidelity digital experiences as unique, varied and measurable as more well-established mediums. That’s worth further exploration—does anyone know of a good recent posting?
5. Consumers have new power to express their opinions through social technologies from anywhere, anytime. Smart marketers will do all they can to encourage and act on this feedback. A lot of marketer content ought to be focused on generating customer content. How to accomplish that is one essential element of social media strategy. More on consumer reviews soon.

One of the things I did recently was to update local listings for the local wildlife sanctuary (that’s grammatically redundant, but both are necessary to my meaning). A local business needs to look at all the local media. There are many that offer free links to your website. Requesting listings is not much effort and worth the $$ it costs, since that is $0. Also free are Yahoo! Local and Google Maps/Business Center listings. There are value-added services on Yahoo! but the basic listing is free; links to both are on this page. The Yahoo! listing is simpler, note that it includes opportunities to upload photos and write reviews—both good promotion for the local business.


The Google listing is typical Google with more options. Google Maps gives you a stripped-down listing and map location. Google Business Center allows you to add the bells and whistles like I’ve done here. Images and videos are great promotion tools. What I really love is the Coupon option. As you can see, I’ve added a printable coupon to this listing. What you can’t see is that if a person is searching from a mobile device, they get a savable mobile version of the coupon. So cool! Cool, but not perfect. There is an option to create a link so you can link the coupon to a website, a blog, a personal page. Great idea—unfortunately it doesn’t work at present. They also have a Google Maps button for your desktop toolbar and a Mobile app. Their Favorite Places program offers smart-phone readable badges for heavily-searched stores, and there’s more on the drawing board. Read a good review on ReadWriteWeb.

And so it goes—and will continue to go!

Encouraging Local Businesses to Go Social

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of local media and find their business proposition compelling in a world where traditional print (see yesterday’s post) seems on an irreversible downward path. I’ve written about Cape Cod Today before. I post a local blog there and have become somewhat familiar with the operation. It is part of their local orientation that they have a blog design and marketing service as one division of the business. I follow them (as well as Wicked Local Cape Cod) on Twitter; it’s an interesting way to keep up with local news for someone who long ago stopped reading the print version of newspapers. They have a Facebook page which appears to be manually maintained with 135 followers as of today. Their Twitter account has 750 followers and uses TwitterFeed to automatically post items from their home page. The ratio makes sense to me.

Going through my summer info, I was interested that, having learned about Facebook and Twitter themselves, they had introduced a new service for their clients; setting up a Facebook page and/or Twitter account. I took a quick look at some of the businesses using the service.

The Facebook page of the skydiving service is vibrant—makes sense. This is an experiential service and Facebook is a good place to give a sense of the experiences. I don’t find a Twitter page for them. 140 characters doesn’t give a good opportunity to create a sense of experience but it could link back to the Facebook page or to their website. Their website offers basic information but not much fodder for the social sites; it’s connected to their Facebook page and that works. The website doesn't have a prominent Facebook logo, and given the richness of the content there it should be useful to people considering a purchase. A key question is--how much content can three people be expected to keep up? That will help reduce the number of options!

The Mediterranean-style taverna is active on Twitter—a good place to promote today’s menu items and special events. I don’t find a Facebook page for them (why is it so hard to be sure?*?), but they have a blog on their website.

The yoga instruction center is using Twitter primarily for branding. Not an ideal use perhaps, but this couple has had a blog on CCT for awhile and they use it in the same way. It’s an integrated communications program that’s likely to pay off for them over time.

Three businesses—three different approaches to social media platforms. There are two primary take-aways. First, any business must use the best platforms for their objectives, which must themselves be closely mapped to the business concept and objectives. Second, the social media platforms can be a real hog of employee/owner time. It’s important to select the right one and to use it consistently.

I checked another Facebook/Twitter combo for a local business which CCT describes as “recently set up.” No activity—no posts, no Tweets, no new fans or followers. That’s the danger. Everyone I know is surprised by how much time and effort it takes, whether “it” is a blog or a Facebook page or another social media endeavor. The exception can be Twitter, where it’s possible to feed directly from your blog or Facebook page, making posts do double duty. That’s fine. Whether it’s enough is a question.

Social media is a commitment that local and other small organizations should consider carefully. Many of them cannot afford much/any media advertising, so it seems a sensible option. However, there are possible downsides. Does an unmaintained page damage the brand of a small local business as it would a national brand? Probably not as much, but it can’t help. Will you buy from a retailer with a messy store? Unlikely. Does the same principle hold true for keeping your Facebook page up to date? Time will tell. My guess is yes!

Local Recommendations Go Social

I ran across a new beta called TrustedOnes when I was looking for something else on the free pr distribution site called PRLog. Since it’s about both consumer recommendations and local marketing, I was interested and checked it out. I couldn’t remember anything similar except the TouchLocal service in the UK, which I wrote about twice in the spring.

I had to create an account in order to see anything, but that’s ok. There was a privacy statement right beside the sign-up box (typo and all): “No information is collected for any purpose other then your enjoyment of TrustedOnes.” I got an immediate confirmation email and could sign in and look around.

If you know lovely Cape Cod, it’s a pretty small market. I tried Orleans, MA, the closest shopping area to me. Only one recommendation, for a restaurant in Brewster. So I tried Hyannis, MA, the closest to a metro area we have. Still only one recommendation—for the same restaurant in Brewster. I checked it out; the reviewer loved it. The page provided a map with the restaurant location and opportunities to add a review, share, etc.

In order to see more I changed the location to Boston. That’s actually the only complaint I have about how the site works. I had to go back to the home page to change location; why can’t I just do it in the location bar on the page I’m on? But this is a beta, after all.

There are quite a few recommendations in the Boston area in many different categories. I tried “landscaping” under “Other Services.” I got only one firm in Newton, MA, which is well within the trading area. When you click through you see other tags. In this case the tags included gardens (still the same landscaper in Newton). The reviewer was lyrical in praise of what the landscaper had done for her garden—interesting! There are also reviews on this link for things like maids and cleaning services. The page itself offers links to other services in Newton—obviously a much more active reviewing scene than Brewster! All makes sense!

I was interested in seeing if anyone I knew had used the service, so I gave it access to my gmail account to find out. Ok, so I’m sort of a trusting soul, but I had read their privacy promise. They came up with 278 names (which is more than I can find in my contacts list when I’m trying to find someone!)—sorry, none of them were members. I tried a specific friend’s name; she’s not there either; I could have invited her to play along. Notice the privacy promise on that page also.

I did notice that there’s one Mary Kay consultant from Providence who has put her business blurb up several times. Tacky, but obvious. Users of the site will take it for what it is; maybe it will do her some good, maybe people are indeed only going to look here for recommendations made by friends they trust.

The marketing take-aways are two-fold. The press release, which is the only info I found on the web, doesn’t give any hint of a monetization strategy. The potential for local advertising is obvious, and maybe that will come in time. Second is that I only looked at three recommendations. Two were effusive in their praise. The third was a strong but sober recommendation for a dermatologist, which made good sense.

Why do marketers believe that if they let customers say things about them, they will say bad things? Are they that afraid that their products/services are poor quality? Don’t they trust their own customers? Is a puzzlement, but one that marketers ought to be seriously considering!

Video Ads Are Now DIY

A few days ago I stumbled on a mention of Jivox, which immediately sounded like AdReady, but for video ads instead of display. Looking at the site, I think my initial assessment was right, and that SMBs may be delighted to discover it just in time for holiday advertising. According to their site, their ad network consists of “over 600 premium - branded local television, newspaper, radio and weather related sites as well as some national brand sites and portals.” I see one of the major news sites in Boston on their list and others whose name I recognize, so the network looks credible.

The business was launched in March 2008 with venture funding and presumably is still in Beta, although they don’t make an issue of that. It allows users to create their own video ad or to run an existing video ad on their network. They describe it as a simple three-step process. Creating the ad is free, or they can arrange production. Let them explain the pricing in their own words as stated on their FAQs:

I thought the service was free? Why am I being asked for credit card information? There's absolutely no cost associated with creating your ads with Jivox. A conventionally produced ad for local television can cost $10,000 to $30,000, but you pay nothing for ads created with our revolutionary AdSlate technology. We charge you only for the advertising itself: running it on the sites in the Jivox network. Once you've create one or more video ads, you set your daily, weekly or monthly ad budget to place it on the Jivox network. Jivox will automatically match your ads with the audience that is most likely to respond favorably to your campaign. In addition, once you have a live campaign, we provide automatic upload to YouTube and to local search providers such as Google Maps and GetFave, free of charge.

The ads are created with an embed link so the customer can put them on a website, blog, etc., so they can do double or even triple duty.


There’s a gallery of ads and a page of case histories. These ads probably aren’t going to win creative awards any time soon, but a video ad could be a real breakthrough for a small local business like the B&B mentioned in a WSJ article about Jivox.

From the standpoint of both advertisers and publishers who accept the ads, this is another in a step toward making rich media advertising available to even the smallest local business in a way that makes economic sense. It’s also a way for publishers to monetize their sites, at least if the sites are advertising appropriate, as a lot of social media are not. That said, it puts a lot more pressure on the free content/advertising supported business model. Can that model carry the weight for publishers of content? That remains to be seen!

Local Media-Global and Close to Home

Borrell Associates recently released its 2008 survey of local media. The two largest shares go to pureplays (57%) and newspapers (25%). According to Borrell’s 2007 survey newspaper had a share of 40%, “but pure-play internet companies (Google, Yahoo!,Monster et al.) are hot on their heels, with 33.2 percent.” Right on both counts! I wonder if anyone anticipated the rapidity of the shift (download both 2008 and 2007 here).

It is happening globally, in case you have any doubt. Yesterday’s MarketingCharts featured a report from the World Association of Newspapers that shows a remarkable move to digital media. As I read the chart, it also shows a large increase in the time people are spending with media overall, which should bode well for an informed population. TV’s global share of advertising dollars is pretty stable, but newspaper’s continues to decline. According to the report, though, “Despite the slowdown of global print advertising spending, print remains the second most popular advertising medium, and by far claims the lion's share of spending over digital media” (download the executive summary here). For the time being anyway.


Put those data against a recent article in the WSJ (subscription required) about the struggling “hyperlocal” site LoudounExtra.com, a product of the Washington Post that focuses on a single Virginia county. I took a look at it, and have some observations.


It’s certainly focused. There’s a link to the Washington Post home page, but the content is exclusively from Loudoun county. And it’s pretty exclusively news—take a look at the main nav bar if you don’t have time to visit the site itself. All the articles in all the sections except Deals (where it doesn’t make sense) have a comment function. There are very few comments; that shows on the individual articles and on their “Most Commented” tab on the home page.

I took a look at the blogs page, because that seems the obvious place for a lot of interaction. There are many personal blogs about the local community linked here, but they don’t seem terribly active either.

The site seems to be doing all the right things—except maybe one. There are ads and listings but no ability to make comments about specific businesses or venues. For instance, on the Museums and Historic Sites you can submit a comment on that page, but I can’t find a way to submit a comment or to rate my visit to Mount Vernon, one of the sites listed. That seems to be one of the more popular activities on other local sites, and I can see why a newspaper site might not want to take a chance on offending advertisers. I also can’t find an opportunity to upload photos of my visit to Mount Vernon, and that’s another popular activity on local sites.

So not only is this site perhaps too focused on a specific local area, I’d suggest it’s too focused on news and not enough on user interaction. My sentiments only, but it’s an interesting hypothesis. For whatever reason, this doesn’t seem to be the business model as print newspapers work to expand their digital franchise.

Any other examples of local sites, successful or otherwise, and insights about the reasons?

AdReady-A Boost for Display Ads?

It’s only been a few days since I wrote about a study that predicts a rapid decline in display advertising on the web. It came from Borrell Associates, a specialist in local digital advertising. Then today the SmartBrief newsletter linked me to a WSJ Online Story on a start-up that allows advertisers to create and place their own display ads. Having found creating (and I use the word “create” loosely) display ads with considerable difficulty in the past, I was eager to check it out.

I went to the AdReady site and tried it and it didn’t work. So I followed my usual strategy. I watched the instructional video.

Actually, there were two issues. I had to create an account before I could play with their customization tool. That’s ok. But I couldn’t get the customization page to load. I switched to Firefox and it worked fine. That probably was a momentary blip; wouldn’t be the first time IE 2007 has caused problems.
So I used a template called AdDonna and customized an ad. I’m not pretending that it’s great copy; it was just a trial. But I liked their image better than my own, so I didn’t change that. I changed the background color to my signature purple, added the blog logo, and I had an ad! No charge up to this point. I wasn’t interested in spending any money, so I didn’t go on to the next step of deploying my ad. Looking at this screen, though, it appears to work much like choosing your target audience on Google using audience demos instead of keywords. I couldn’t find out anything about their ad network. A blog post from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer suggests that the company is being coy about that subject at present.
It’s hard for a small local or regional business to break into online display advertising. AdReady and counterparts AdItAll and AdBrite intend to change that. Based on what I saw today, they’ve got something going here!
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Are Interactive Promotions the Next Big Thing?

A recent report from Borrell Associates, a firm that specializes in local interactive advertising, predicts an interesting shift in the expenditure of online marketing dollars. They assert that display advertising will lose ground to other types of expenditures, especially to promotions. “We believe it will peak this year at $12.6 billion, and then begin a precipitous decline to less than half that amount over the next four years.” The growth will come in online promotions, including public relations activity.

Click-through rates (CTR) for display ads have been getting a bad rap lately (and yes, there’s also been controversy over CTR for paid search ads, but that’s another story). The eMarketer chart (newsletter, February 28, 2008) from the “heavy clickers” study earlier this year got a lot of attention. According to comScore the study found “no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked." Ouch!

When Chris Autry asked in iMediaConnection, “Is Display Advertising Dead?” he pointed to low CTR and permission-based content including what he calls narrow networks for special applications and my favorite, widgets. He describes advertising as an application and recommends that, “Consumers will not be bombarded with relatively useless adverts but will instead interact and be able to use a range of applications to perform relevant tasks.”

It is also possible that the movement of traditional mass media advertising dollars onto the web has propped up online display advertising. Will these advertisers accept for long the miserable click-through rates that are the norm today?

What is the growth in online promotions going to represent? According to Borrell contests, coupons and promotional gift certificates are working well at the local level. We’ve seen a lot of evidence of the popularity of video contests in national media, from the SuperBowl to Heinz ketchup.

Are contests reaching the saturation point, though? Ok, I’ll admit I’m not an American Idol fan either, but it seems to me there is a lot of room for creative promotional strategies. If promotion is going to in large part replace display advertising, we need some creative ideas for interacting with our target audience, whether it’s local or national. Any good ideas?
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TouchLocal Reaches Out

A few weeks ago I wrote about UK site TouchLocal that was offering Internet users a trusted environment in which to exchange information and search for local businesses. Today I got an email from them. This is only the first or second I’ve gotten; they definitely aren’t pestering me. But they clearly are reaching out to encourage users to write reviews of local businesses. As you can see from their advertising page, they are also working to get local businesses to add their listings. That’s not an easy thing to do if my local area is an example of local business use of the web—and I suspect it is.













So reaching out for reviews is a nice thing to do. Is it worth a couple of airline tickets? Two recent studies suggest that it is. The first, reported in Marketing Charts, indicates that product recommendations/reviews are the most important issue in bringing customers back to a retail site. The passivity is also evident here; US users seem to be more interested in reading the reviews others have written than in writing their own reviews. Interesting. Even more interesting is the age and gender differences seen in the study results:


•Fully 41% of those age 18-24, the prime demographic for the social web, say they’re most likely to return to a site that makes recommendations. Only 29% of those 55-64 say so.
•Women are far more likely to be influenced by a welcome greeting - with 20% saying it’s the feature most likely to get them to return, compared with 12% of men.
•The older you are, the more you want to give feedback: The upper three age groups were more likely than the bottom three to say that a site that solicits their feedback is most likely to make them return.
•A few groups went against the overall trend by not selecting “recommendations” as their No. 1 choice: non-whites (they chose both “unique experience” and “feedback” ahead of recommendations), those with post-grad education (”unique experience” was slightly higher), and those with incomes under $25K (first choice was the “welcome”).
•There’s a wide gap between the lowest-income bracket and all others:
oOnly 26% of those who earn less than $25,000 per year chose “recommendations,” 10 percentage points below all other income categories.
oRespondents in the lowest income bracket were far more likely to prefer a “welcome” - 27% said it was the feature most likely to make them return, at least 13 percentage points higher than the other income categories (14% of those earning $25K-$50K and those earning $75K+, and 12% of those earning $50K-$75K agreed).
“The economy is fragile and the competition for the consumer dollar is fierce, but as these findings make abundantly clear, online commerce is now a two-way street - and retailers need to embrace that reality,” said Jason Meugniot, Guidance president and CEO.

Another confirmation comes from a Forrester study via eMarketer. Once again product reviews top the list, even more desirable than special offers or price comparison tools. Similarly, the ability to upload one’s own content is at the bottom of the list.

My own experience suggests that just making it easy for users to contribute may not generate much activity—especially the older and the more upscale your target audience is. The TouchLocal contest is one way—a relatively expensive one!--to reach out. I wonder what else can be used to motivate the passive viewers to become active contributors. Any ideas?
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An Ad Network With a Widget Twist

CBS television has launched a local advertising network that will connect local television affiliates with local bloggers. That itself is a first, and in this struggling “old media” world the local stations are likely to be happy for the support. The current participants are listed on a page from Syndigo, a company that supports vertical advertising networks.

The way it works is that a local blogger signs up and downloads the headline widget. The widget includes a banner ad for the station. It displays real time headlines and images and has links to the station’s website. The station shares ad revenue with the participating bloggers (or community sites, networks, whatever; the requirement just seems to be that it’s local). Presumably the participating sites are paid on an impression basis. It looks as if the ads are served by DoubleClick.

WBZ in Boston is one of the original participants and the widget is supposed to have been deployed to the Red Sox Nation.net site. That’s down at the moment, so no impressions there. I also looked on their advertising page and see no mention of this program. Wonder how they are going to attract local bloggers. Some local sites already link to local blogs, so they’ll have a ready-made market.

I checked a San Francisco blog, SF Bay Style, and sure enough, there’s the widget. The links take you right through to the site for KPIX, the San Francisco CBS television affiliate.
Ad week says that advertisers including At&T, North Texas Honda Dealers and Liberty Mutual Insurance have signed up for the ad network. It seems to be a great way of achieving local reach and the context of popular local sites couldn’t hurt.

All in all, it seems to be another win-win for social media!
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Online Events Extend Reach of Events Offline

Marketers who want to get more mileage out of events held in the physical world should consider linking them to a parallel world in cyberspace. Last week when new media maven C. C. Chapman visited my class at Emerson College he told us about another installment in the Verizon FiOS block party series.

Verizon has an interesting approach to making a local event into a cyberspace happening. They can only expand the super-fast FiOS network in a particular area one neighborhood at a time. What they are doing is using the block party rubric because it’s essentially a local event. But by creating an event space on the web they give it greater reach and longer life. The event is modeled after the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition series on ABC. Verizon selects a family in the neighborhood for a “media makeover.” When it’s ready they invite both the real and the virtual neighborhoods. If you’ve watched the extreme home makeover shows or Trading Spaces on TLC, you pretty much know the drill.

The basic components (at least the ones I’ve found) are:

•The MyHome 2.0 website. It has serious information about the FiOS network, an introduction to the makeover specialists and a section featuring the families that have been selected for the upgrades.
•A Facebook group
•A Flickr site
•Tie in with FiOS TV
•Blogs and vlogs all over the place.

When I tuned in to the Pittsburgh party about noon on Saturday, C.C. Chapman was broadcasting live from the Zaharko home as everyone geared up for the party. His video gives a great sense of what was happening. I also noted an invitation on Yahoo! Local and I’m sure there were lots of other things I didn’t find that were aimed at drawing attendees.

At that point I had to leave and go Christmas shopping—sorry, C.C! I caught up today—watching videos, reading blogs, and looking at some of the pictures.

And that’s exactly the point. This neighborhood block party in Pittsburgh left its footprint all over the web. Verizon has gotten a lot of mileage from the event and the promotion. It will last long after the last cup of coffee has been drunk.

One blogger was already hoping the promotion would next take place in Delaware. She wanted friends to be able to apply. The buzz is the real outcome. You might want to keep an eye on the Be The Next Reality Star page—they hold auditions.

Or you might want to think about how you can give your next promotional event a life of its own on the Internet!
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Social Networks Getting Smaller?

Much has been made of the growth of the big networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. As this table from Marketing Charts shows, there’s good reason for all the attention. They have tremendous reach. It’s easy to liken them to shopping malls, with something for everyone.

So I was intrigued last week when I ran across this article in the New York Times. The idea of a social network just for your apartment building made me to search to see what was available. LifeAt is the firm referenced in the article. It’s pretty new and the application below seems to be the work of the property manager, but if the residents choose to participate it will become interesting and vital.


As I looked I realized there were numerous sites where one can set up personal networks and other sites that have local collaborative content like Topix.com. There are, of course, local newspapers, which are offering many kinds of user-submitted content and creating community around that.


I feel another mashup opportunity coming on. There is growing support for the creation of neighborhood or small town communities although sites like FatDoor are in their infancy. Or web-savy residents will build sites on their own, taking feeds from sites like CitySearch and Craig’s List. They’ll adding a lot of opportunities for their neighbor to provide content and they’ll not only have vibrant local social nets, they’ll also have ideal opportunities for local advertising. It won’t be a virtual community like Second Life; it may in fact, be a lot more useful and engaging—a new version of the local shopping papers, but one that’s personal and interactive.
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