Smalltown Gets a Little Bigger

Smalltown has now grown from three to five communities, added video and hired an experienced VP of sales, Daniel Payomo — most recently with Backfence.

Here’s the press release that went out this a.m. Founder and CEO Hal Rucker sees Smalltown as much as a rich-media and viral marketing platform for small businesses as a local community destination. He doesn’t see it particularly as a yellow pages site he told me.

Rucker also told me on Friday that they was at least once weekly usage frequency by a substantial number of people in their markets — most of it direct navigation. That’s a good sign for the site, indicating it’s starting to build a brand identity in some of its markets.

Most interesting, however, is the addition of video to the site. As a reflection of the importance video now occupies, both for users and advertisers, Smalltown has added video to its webcards:

Each of these webcards has a unique URL and so can be found in search results. With the addition of video these become like targeted, searchable TV commercials for local businesses. The video right now must be shot independently but Smalltown is exploring ways to expedite creation of video for local businesses.

Once thought a distant “nice-to-have” feature, video is fast becoming a “must have” for local sites.

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Here’s more detail from Peter Krasilovsky.

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