360DigitalInfluence

This weekend saw the New York Knicks host what they billed as the first ever fan #tweetup, at their home court, the legendary Madison Square Garden here in New York City. They put together a very impressive panel to chat social media and catch a game, and really pulled out all the stops: three big screens broadcasting tweets, official #tweetup t-shirts and those cute little tweetup nametag stickers.  The event was sponsored by Discount Tire: definitely a little different than your run of the mill ‘few folks in a bar’ #tweetup.

The panel featured Amy Jo Martin, head honcho of @digitalroyalty (the folks who did, among other things Random Acts of Shaqness),  Peter Robert Casey ( the first ever media accredited micro-blogger, he covers St John’s basketball here: @Peter_R_Casey), Jim DeLorenzo (a VP at Octagon, the guys who have developed Twackle, a sports tweet aggregator), and Jack Dorsey* (founder of Twitter and Square).  Three sports/marketing folks, and one guy who hand in inventing (or popularizing, depending on how you look at it) micro-blogging. A serious panel indeed.

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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.

A really interesting example of aggregation launched recently in the academic world. Fururity.org is a no nonsense aggregator, pulling the latest research from North America’s leading research universities, compiling the finding in an easy-to-digest interface complete with a by topic architecture spanning across major research disciplines.

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