CityVoter, which has been a co-branded, city guide and content/community partner for local media affiliates, and more recently a direct destination, is doing something very interesting as it evolves. Consistent with my earlier posts about local and demographic targeting, the site is pitching national brands and other entities on local targeting (contests, local promotions) but with a twist.
The voting on CityVoter offers high levels of engagement with local (and vertical) audiences. In addition, CityVoter’s registration data offers demographic profiles of users. Hence advertisers get access to specific, engaged users (voters) in local markets. People complain about how social networking isn’t working for advertisers. But this appears to be a different case.
The proof of concept was its relationship with Exercise TV for the lauch of that cable channel:
Between January 28 and March 23, ExerciseTV and CityVoter invite fitness professionals and their clients or friends to nominate themselves or their favorite trainer at www.exercisetv.tv/toptrainer.
And here were the results:
Between January 28 and March 23, nearly 10,000 people voted for their favorite Boot camp gym, cardio instructor, dance instructor, general fitness trainer, kickboxing instructor, personal trainer, pilates instructor or yoga instructor. Eight trainers were awarded the title of Top Trainer, one in each of the listed categories. The contest drew almost 100,000 unique visitors to the ExerciseTV site.
The company is now working with other brands in similar ways. In addition to national promotions, the site continues to work with local media partners to capture SMB ad dollars.
The voting concept is a very smart one. Even though other sites offer “best of” lists and voting, this is core to the CityVoter concept and helps drive participation by a broader number of users.
May 15, 2008 at 9:27 pm |
[...] CityVoter Pitching Brands on Local, Screenwerk [...]
May 30, 2008 at 4:19 pm |
[...] CityVoter.com is a social networking site that provides their audience information about ‘What’s Hot’ as it relates to local business. All of their content is created by their audience. The communication begins when a member asks “What is the best Philly cheesesteak in Philadelphia?” or “Who is the best trainer in Phoenix?”. After that, the rest of their users take over from there. This is a fresh approach to gathering user reviews and when combined with their personas will provide a very targeted advertising network. [...]
January 9, 2009 at 12:14 am |
Just one more venture where the “city guide” concept of monetizing is a flawed business model because it presents a false value proposition to the local business -Meaning these sites have very limited users (local consumers). It’s about eyeballs people! What local business cares about their rating and reviews if the site doesn’t deliver a reasonable amount of traffic? City Voter is a terrible search engine – a user only gets the local businesses that have been sold a sponsorship by the third party reseller, the local radio, TV station or print publication. I typed in “office furniture” and got florists because the local media company hasn’t sold any office furniture businesses into the local guide. You only get one chance in this world of Internet users.
CityVoter is just one more player behind the 100’s in the long tail of local search – the tail begins after the 95% factor of all searches that originate on Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. With the exception of “Yelp”, a foodie review site, Cityvoter is just another Kudzu (talk about a terrible name!)