It was great to attend the Kelsey Marketplaces Conference in L.A. earlier in March, where I presented for Yahoo! on a panel about Local Verticals.  Kelsey is the definitive conference for all things Local.  It’s a tremendous place to soak in sector knowledge and get networking done.

In the words of the conference organizers:  “Much of the opportunity in local marketplaces lies with the verticals that extend and energize traditional media.”  They’re referring to categories such as entertainment, news, auto, real estate, etc. where local content is important.

My take has long been that we need to put the “L” into the local market opportunity.  Think “L” versus the lower-case “l” that defines this category today.  User needs in the local market extend beyond the traditional scope of business listing and point-of-interest information (e.g., looking-up restaurant information and reviews).

Y! Local (the business I manage) is intended for this core use case and it’s a sizable in and of itself (one of Y!’s largest properties, BTW).  But it’s only part of the wider local opportunity.  We need to think about the horizontal opportunity and the cross-programming model behind it.  No portal has a done a good job of that yet.

In terms of serving vertical needs within the current scope of Y! Local, we make some attempt of that today.  But we don’t think the answer is to add more web sites to our product portfolio to enable this.  My primary message is that users don’t need more destination sites to visit.  The more convenient alternative is to add vertical content to existing services based on user intent.  Alot of what we do in Y! Local is focused on local search so to the extent we can understand what the user is searching for, we can add vertical content on a category by category basis.

Examples can include:

• Adding menu information when we know it’s a restaurant query
• Adding service records and reports when we know the search is for a plumber or contractor
• Adding reservation or booking information when we know it’s a search for a doctor / dentist, etc.

This takes a good understanding of explicit and implicit user intent, something Y! has unique capabilities to address given our search capabilities.

The presentation I gave is below.

Read more »

• Conference Overview
• Conference Blog
• Some press coverage

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