The City as a Train Station: (…) We can think of the city as the place we access networks that give us the ability to travel to or interact with other places and things. They are our “network access point”. Just as some train stations or air hubs have better service that others, so to with cities. How many networks does it give you access to? How can you improve your connectivity?

What it means: As I’ve mentioned before, “local” is much more than local businesses. It’s much more than consumers/readers/taxpayers.  It’s much more than news, classifieds, crime information. It’s the complete ecosystem of local stakeholders and their complex interactions: consumers, businesses, news, classifieds, schools, local governments, events, etc. I believe that’s one of the main reasons why “local” hasn’t been cracked yet. Everyone is focused on one or two pieces only.

“Local” is real life. It’s complex and chaotic. If you start thinking of the city as a platform, you quickly discover the various pieces of that universe. Breadth/depth of information/social interaction will be a key success factor to “own” local.

i wanted to give you all a heads up on some big changes we’re making to our  geo-tagging API. (…) people, we find,inherently want to talk about a “place”. a place, for a lot of people, hasa name and is not a latitude and longitude pair. 37.78215, -122.40060,for example, doesn’t mean a lot to a lot of people — but, “San Francisco,CA, USA” does. we’re also trying to help users who aren’t comfortable annotating their tweets with their exact coordinates, but, instead, are really happy to say what city, or even neighborhood, they are in. annotating your place with a name does that too. (…) for this first pass, we’re only going live with United States-centric data,  but that will quickly be expanded geographically as we work out the kinks in our system

What it means: in a move that shouldn’t surprise anyone, Twitter will now enable attachment of “place” information to individual tweets (messages). It’s a brilliant move as people talk about places all the time but they don’t know their latitude/longitude coordinates. By the way, I think lat/long coordinates are for machines, i.e. auto-geolocation tagging. Humans mention “places” when they talk about geography. This means Twitter is starting to embrace structured local data in a way that’s much closer to the DNA of directory publishers. This crystallizes even more the importance of “local” in Twitter’s strategy.

Google has just turned on a nifty location feature in search. Now, you can refine search results with a “Nearby” button, which will filter your results that cater to your location. So if you do a Google search for Italian restaurants, you can click the “Show Options” button to access a “nearby” filter to see results for Italian restaurants in the city/area you live in. You’ll also be given local business results as well.

via Google Enhances Local Search With “Nearby” Filter.

What it means: Google is now officially a “local” search engine, with every search being a possible local search. One more step towards the Local Wide Web!

Ingram describes the “what” and mentions that “according to the survey, questions ranged from the somewhat open-ended and philosophical (“Why are men so stupid?”) to the explicitly practical (“Point-and-shoot camera just died — need to replace it today for vacation. What should I buy?). The most popular question types were recommendation and opinion questions, such as “I’m building a new playlist — any ideas for good running songs?,” followed by factual knowledge and rhetorical types of questions.”

The question topics (see below) are also very illustrative and many of them have a “local” intent.

Participants reported that questions about religion, politics, dating, health, pornography and financial issues would probably not be asked in their social network as they are too private. Caveat from the research: “the prevalence of technology questions in our dataset is likely due to the survey population, which consisted of employees at a technology company; we would expect this proportion to be lower for other populations.”

As I was very intrigued by the “why”, I read through the whole study and found the following insights from the researchers (directly quoted from the document):

Type of Information Need: The strength of social networks seems to be in their ability to provide answers to questions of a subjective nature; our respondents especially preferred social sites over search engines for opinion and recommendation questions.

Trust: Although Q&A sites and the blogs and rating sites indexed by search engines provide subjective data such as reviews and recommendations, people tend to trust the opinions of people they know rather than the opinions of strangers

Response Time: Although search engines have near-instantaneous response times, obtaining a timely response requires entering an optimal query, which may be difficult in some situations. Responses on social networks were often received within less than an hour of posting (40% in our sample), and nearly all questions received responses within one day

Effort: Questioning in natural language, rather than figuring out optimal queries for a search engine, lowers the barrier for asking questions on social networks

Personalization: Respondents appreciated that members of their network knew a great deal about their backgrounds and preferences, and were thus able to provide answers tailored based on this context.

Secondary Benefits: In addition to achieving their primary goal of satisfying an information need, asking a question via social networking tools offered two additional types of benefits not present in search engines and Q&A sites. First, by posting a question, participants were also advertising their current interests and activities to their network, creating social awareness. Second, participants found visiting social networking sites to be fun and pleasurable.

What it means: this has tremendous impacts on all search sites (general or local). Consumers are now finding it advantageous to asks questions to their friends/contacts. The main recommendation from the research is very relevant. “By incorporating social features directly into search engines, such as the ability to actively collaborate with others while searching, search engines may be able to turn a mundane experience into one that provides both intellectual and social benefits.”. Seems like a winning combo.

Highlights:

• U.S. local advertising market will grow to $144.9 billion in 2014 (CAGR: +2.2%)
• Spending on traditional media will decline from $115 billion in 2009 to $108.2 billion in 2014 (CAGR: -1.2%)
• Spending on online/interactive media is projected to grow from $15.2 billion to $36.7 billion (CAGR: +19.3%)
• Meaningful recovery beginning in 2012
• 55 percent of all ad spending is with local media

BIA/Kelsey is also preparing their next conference MarketPlaces 2010. Happening at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina from March 22 to March 24, the theme of the conference is “local verticals”.

Presentations I’m most looking forward to:

• Opening Keynote Address: Jon Brod, Executive VP, AOL Ventures
• Google @ Marketplaces 2010 Sam Sebastian, Director, Local & B2B Markets, Google
• The New Content Aggregators: Rick Blair, CEO, Examiner.com
• Keynote Address: Andrew Mason, CEO, Groupon
• The New Directory/Marketplace Plays with SuperMedia, AT&T Interactive, Local Matters and Merchant Circle
• BIA Kelsey: 10 Takeaways from Marketplaces 2010

I will be attending the conference. If you’d like to meet, ping me at sprovencher AT praizedmedia.com.

Thinking about a potential integration point, John Battelle said that the goal of Aardvark’s co-founder would be to be ” integrated into the main search interface, such that when you ask Google a question, it would give you the option of “asking a human” through the ‘vark service. Now that would be pretty cool.”

As I mentioned in Greg Sterling’s blog, Google already includes Aardvark in Google Labs and says the most popular queries are:

• Travel tips
• Restaurant & bar recommendations
• Product reviews/opinions
• Local services and entertainment suggestions

Those questions sounds like Yellow Pages searches to me! As most readers of this blog know (Warning! Sales pitch!), my company Praized Media has created a local Q&A module that can be integrated into any local media publisher’s web site. Yellow Pages Group, with their Yellow Pages Answers deployment, is our largest customer using it. When we talk to directory publishers, we suggest integration within search results pages, exactly like Battelle’s speculation above. Local Answers becomes the back-up social search tool for long-tail queries that local search engines can’t answer today. Pre-acquisition, Aarvark was already answering many local queries and you can expect Google to start leveraging the content and the Q&A technology to improve its user experience.

For his part, Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley told us he fully expects Facebook and others to launch “check-in” functionality, making it “commodity by the end of the year.”

via Facebook Is Working On A Foursquare-Killer.

What it means: if you’ve been following my recommendations closely, you know that “check-in” is one of the features of the perfect local media company of 2014. It’s already becoming a “commodity”, a must for any local media company mobile products. Check-ins also represent interesting data that should be added to merchant profile Web pages (like Yelp is doing).

The first strategic move happened back in the fall of 2006 when Sylvain Carle, Harry Wakefield and I founded Praized Media to help local media companies leverage the rising force of social media and online word-of-mouth. I also started blogging about what I call “local 2.0,” the intersection of local search and social media. At the time, most people believed that this convergence would not happen. Three years later, it’s one of the hottest sectors.

We made the second key move in fall 2008. Having launched our first social local tools (for WordPress, Movable Type, Facebook and our hub site) a couple of months before, we were approached by a few major media players who signaled to us they would be interested in using the technology we had built within their own online platform. This gave us the confidence to develop white-label enterprise versions of our social local media software, which has been in the market since spring 2009. Building on the popularity of our initial module, we developed many more enterprise modules described here.

The third strategic move is happening now. Last fall (what is it with fall???), we were approached by two US investment banks who aspired to represent us if we ever wanted to find a strategic partner for Praized Media. A few companies also hinted to us that they might be interested in investing in or acquiring Praized Media. Based on that enthusiasm, Sylvain and I (along with our board) discussed the pros and cons of going to the altar with a strategic partner vs. continuing alone.

The market is super-hot for technologies like ours. In the last three months, there has been a flurry of acquisitions and funding events in the “social local” space (we’ve created a document listing them if you’re interested). We could go on the road and raise new VC money to fuel our growth, but anyone that has raised those kinds of funds before knows that this is a brutal process, even when your market is hot. It takes a lot of time and energy, and for small companies, the process forces you to take your eyes off the product/company development roadmap. At the core, Sylvain and I are product/technology guys and that’s what we want to do. In the last two years, we’ve built world-class real-time social local search technologies. We’ve assembled a five-star (pun intended) social local technology development team. We’re notable thought-leaders in our space.

The future of local media will be centered on Aggregation / Discovery / Social / Search and our technology stack enables that. We believe what we’ve built (team and technology) represents the cornerstone of the next-generation local media company (traditional or pure play), and we want to focus on building that vision with a larger organization.

For all those reasons, we have decided to hire Siemer & Associates, LLC., an investment banking firm in Los Angeles that specializes in digital media, to represent us in our search for a strategic partner. We’re obviously supported a 100% in this decision by our board and the whole team is excited by this new move. For our current customers, collaborators and service providers, it is business as usual as this does not impact our day-to-day operations (actually, it frees up more time!). Given current market conditions, we are extremely confident we will find the right strategic partner.

If you’re interested in discussing more the opportunity, you can contact Siemer & Associates at (310) 496-4510 or info@siemer.com.

First, in yet another chapter of Twitter’s improvements to become locally relevant, it has started rolling out its “local trends” for a series of US cities and ome countries (probably based on the ones with the most usage).

Screenshot source: Techcrunch

On a related note, the Kelsey Group analysts issued five predictions for 2010 and one of them is “location and geotargeted advertising will represent a long-elusive revenue stream for Twitter and for third parties that mash up Twitter streams and location data.” They also suggest Facebook will also “integrate automatic location detection
into the status updates” .

Third, supporting the permanent shift of user behavior towards sites like Facebook and Twitter, Forrester reports that “a third of all Internet users in the U.S. now post status updates on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook at least once per week.”

Fourth, David Hornik, a well-known American investor, recently attended a Procter & Gamble (P&G) outreach event in Silicon Valley. Asked what they thought of Twitter, Hornik writes: “To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium — it is best for one to many communications that are short bursts of timely information — but as good as it is for timely information, the P&G folks do not view it as particularly relevant to what they are doing on the brand building and advertising side. For those things that Proctor & Gamble thinks are most interesting and important, they do not believe that Twitter will ever approach the value they can get out of a Google or Facebook.” This reminds me of what big brands think of Yellow Pages as a medium. They don’t understand it but it’s still drives business for millions of advertisers. Twitter will be (is?) all about the same thing. And for the record, I’ve always thought packaged-goods companies could have made a killing with Yellow Pages by making their product information locally-relevant…

Fifth, Hitwise’s traffic reports in Australia (as reported in ReadWriteWeb) show that “For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive”. That would explain why in the long run Google is afraid of the new conversational capacity of sites like Facebook and Twitter. And why they’re racing to
introduce social functionalities within Google Maps.

What it means: Twitter and Facebook are both on their way to becoming serious local discovery and communication tools. It is happening.