This morning I moderated “Why Local Is the New Global” at Web 2.0 with Ethan Stock of Zvents, Joel Toledano of Krillion, Siva Kumar of TheFind and Scott Dunlap of NearbyNow.
One of the interesting things about this panel is that it was a discussion of local in mostly the product, retail and brand context. There was also discussion of mobile. Ethan talked about events and merchant promotions but everyone else was talking about product search and offline product purchasing.
If this session were your only exposure to the “local space,” you wouldn’t have understood that most of the local discussion heretofore has been dominated by talk of small business and yellow pages advertisers. Overall, I thought it was a very strong discussion.
Here’s some data that Scott Dunlap presented in connection with the performance of his mobile Lucky magazine iPhone app:
But the real purpose of this blog post is to ask the guy who had the flip video camera and was capturing the session to come forward so that some of the panelists can get a copy of the video for themselves.
April 3, 2009 at 4:02 pm |
Greg, I missed your session at #w2e, but thanks for the summary. I’d love to see the video when it gets posted. What gets me about “local” companies is that the conversation always centers around businesses and products. “Local” has become synonymous with “search” (at least in our industry). Where were failing is in recognizing that “local” is about the people, not the places or businesses. For any business moving into IYP related local, they are missing half the equation. The winners in this space will recognize that they need to figure out how to serve the needs of the neighbors, and not just the businesses. They may have a very nice SEO driven business, but they’re leaving half the pie on the plate by not serving the community needs.
April 3, 2009 at 4:15 pm |
Agree that the focus has been too much on the existing advertisers and so the broader consumer behavior and need/opportunity is often missed. Indeed people fail to see the market clearly as a result