Kelsey Group puts on the Interactive Local Media conference every December.  While I’ve spoken at these events for Yahoo! in prior years, this time around I was happy to sit back and attend a few sessions.

It’s clear that local, mobile and social are coming together in very interesting ways.

Some takeaways from some of the panels and side conversations at the event:

• Facebook has over 900K fan pages for local merchants according to Backyard, a Facebook app provider that is set to launch.  While there are over 15mm local merchants domestically, many of these Fan Pages are concentrated in categories like restaurants and nightlife - so that coverage is actually pretty decent.  These pages are potentially disruptive to traditional “directory style” merchant profile pages.

• Kelsey Group estimates 9% of local businesses have a Twitter account.  It will be interesting to see what differences emerge for businesses as they build followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook.  One potential differentiation - Twitter for truly real-time updates (something happening now - like open late today, perishable inventory, big crowd watching the game here now). Meanwhile, Facebook might be more on the community building side of things - what do my friends think and recommend, who’s planning to go there when, etc.   Building a direct marketing channel to customers is different than playing in a community-based sandbox that happens to be about your business.  Facebook already allows admins for Pages to cross-post to Twitter.

• Yelp shared its latest figure on the strength of it’s user community - which has generated over 9mm reviews to date.  In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot more content on Yelp than just reviews including lists, great photos and interesting user profiles.  The vibrancy of its community suggests plenty of momentum in the business - but on the horizon, a different blend of UGC needs to be dealt with around status and updates from the real-time web.  It will be interesting to how the company extends into these use cases.

In case you did not see it, Yahoo’s deal with Facebook (announced earlier in December) could also be leveraged toward a powerful local-social play with its own unique advantages.  With Yahoo’s local properties / content assets and large user base, there is a foundation for high throughput of broadcasts out to the social graph.

All signs suggest that 2010 promises to be one of the most exciting years for Local in a while.

• Yahoo and Facebook Connect
• ILM '09 Overview
• SMB's Embracing Twitter

Filed under: Events, Web Apps, Yahoo!, Local

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Tags: Fan Pages, Twitter for Local, Local and Social, SMB s, Yelp, real time web, Kelsey ILM,