Posted on December 20th, 2009 by Atif
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. Read more »
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Posted on March 30th, 2009 by Atif
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.
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