360DigitalInfluence

Or is it?

2009 has been an interesting and dare I say it even a breakout year for hyperlocal thus far. The New York Times launched The Local a few months before it announced it was cutting 8% of it newsroom jobs, MSNBC bought Everyblock, and services like Patch.com are slowly but surely growing in popularity.  ESPN launched a series of local efforts this year too, and although they’re not what I would call truly hyperlocal yet, (rather local aggregations of mostly major league sports coverage), it’s another example of big media exploring the area.

If the ESPN sites do well the natural next step would be for them to broaden to true local interests like little league and highschool football community coverage. Post wiki updates from your son’s baseball game, or a pitchcount updated live from an AAA baseball game anyone? The numbers aren’t super impressive just yet: according to compete patch.com gets about 50k uniques a month and the ESPN sites are all doing under 60k a month, but they’re all trending up dramatically.

So why are so many major players interested in and investing in the space?  In part it has to do with the news industry searching for alternate revenue streams of course, but for me the more interesting reason is that hyperlocal services, whether news, reviews or plain old yellowpages style info, are and will always be at the very heart of community. If I, as a resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, have absolutely nothing else in common with my neighbor other than our shared geography, we would still both benefit from a service that gave us trusted local news and information.  If that information is created by or curated by or contributed to by people who live in my neighborhood (e.g. my neighbor who I’ve never met, but has just as vested an interest in, for example, crime levels in 10025), it is more relevant and interesting to me than if is created by an Atlanta newsroom, or even by the New York Times just a couple of miles south of me. More relevant and interesting = greater engagement = more opportunities to generate revenue (with apologies to the hyperlocal purists!).

It’s the ultimate in contextual thinking: give people information that is as relevant and targeted as possible. The kind of thinking that built Google into a powerhouse, and for me it’s an area that is poised to explode. As location based services improve and mobile broadband coverage and speeds increase, local generated reviews and content are only going to go from strength to strength: there are 307 million people in the US that care about some aspect of their local community. When somebody finds a model that scales without compromising the integrity of the content they’ll have a goldmine on their hands.

Years back we used to say that content was king. Now I would argue that hyperlocal is. Or at least that it will be soon.

Since the launch of Facebook brand pages, there has been confusion as to whether your brand or cause should set up a page or a group. As brand pages grew in popularity and were given more and more features, it seemed like discussion of groups dropped off. Finally, on Monday Facebook updated the look and function of Facebook groups and now that they dust has settled I think it’s worth revisiting the age old question, “Do I want a Facebook group or a brand page?”

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In the second of our series of medical blogger interviews from Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas we talk to two of the most popular nursing bloggers on the Internet - Kim McAllister from Emergiblog and Gina Rybolt from Codeblog. Both have followers in the tens of thousands for their blogs and were kind enough to do a “tag team” interview for the first time ever sharing their thoughts on everything from why they blog, to how they manage to do it without divulging any confidential patient information, to how they would like pharma brands and marketers from those brands to approach them through social media.  It’s an enlightening 5 minute video interview:

At Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas this is an important year for the evolution of medical blogging. Thanks to an effort by Kim McAllister, the ER nurse and blogger behind Emergiblog - this year is the first year that there is an entire day focused on “Medblogging,” a term that includes patients, nurses and physicians blogging. After the first panel of the day on the state of the medical blogosphere I had the chance to connect with Kevin Pho, arguably the most prominent physician blogger online today at www.kevinmd.com. Here are some of his thoughts on why he chooses to blog and where he see the future of the medical blogosphere headed:

You may have already heard about this event, but I am thrilled to announce that Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team has partnered with American University to bring Gary Vaynerchuck, the “Social Media Sommelier” to AU’s campus in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, October 14, 2009.

Don’t live in D.C.? Don’t worry! You can still participate by tuning into the live stream of the event right here.

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Gary has quickly grown to become a well recognized business leader in the wine industry for his strategic approach to branding and strong entrepreneurial skills after he was able to exponentially grow his family’s wine business from a $4 million business to $45 million business within a 5 year period.

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For a few years at this point, I’ve written about Brands Worth of a Weekend - where the weekend in question is a one for enthusiasts to come together and bond with the people behind their passion brands.  Meanwhile, Influencer Events - where influentual bloggers/tweeters and the like are invited to spend a day or two having a brand experience - have exploded in frequency.  While each may be classified as events for content creators and there are some best practice similarities (make personal connections, send a thank you, be clear about where and how content can be tagged), I would argue that there are even more differences.

Click through the “more” break to view table of consolidated lessons shared in an internal discussion of 360 DI strategists across the network.

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Earlier today the World Business Forum, one of the largest business events in the world, kicked off at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It was a fitting venue to host a range of visionary speakers that could rightly be called “rock stars” for their varied achievements in the world of business. I was invited as part of a cast of about 50 business bloggers to cover the live pulse of the event and managed to participate in a blogger meetup the night before the event started, as well as a few hours today.

As regular readers of this blog know, I tend to make it to a lot of events and many of them are focused on such niche topics as the future of social media and how Twitter is changing business. I expected, after receiving the invite to WBF, that it would be illuminating in a completely different way about the world that we all work in. My hope was that it would offer a chance to contemplate a future of business in which social media was just one piece of the puzzle and not the whole story. In that respect, the first day of WBF certainly delivered. continue reading

Last week, WOMMA hosted a webinar that discussed common interests and online behavioral trends among Generation Y–specifically people from the ages of 22-29, who they’ve dubbed as “Early Careerists.” Being a relatively recent college graduate and Early Careerist myself, I found some of their findings especially interesting. Below are a few findings that I found most compelling: continue reading

As President of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), I have been anticipating the final release of the FTC guidelines which came out this morning at 8am. Figures that I would be in Paris with our Digital Influence team and not in the US. But even here, everyone is paying attention to the issues raised by these guidelines. This is an important step and will cause many marketers to revise their approach. I wanted to take the time to summarize some key issues as we all dig in to the document.

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At Stream, I helped facilitate a great session with Jory Des Jardins (co-founder of BlogHer) and Christine Cea (Director of Brand PR, Unilever) entitled After the One Night Stand – How To Get Beyond Buzz and Create Sustained WOM Programs. Our session focused on this challenge from three perspectives: the agency, the client, and the partner.

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