State of Local

ClickZ.com’s Kate Kaye provides a useful 2007 summary of the hot issues surrounding Web metrics.  Kaye nails it when she says that mere “baby steps” were taken by analytics firms to catch up with the rapidly progressing widget- and AJAX-infused Web.  When you boil it down, there were three highlights in 2007.  And, as I see it, three key issues exist in 2008. 

First, the highlights. 

In March, comScore announced its new visits metric.  The firm claimed that metrics like page views were “diminishing in significance” due to new technologies, which is hardly accurate.  When sites spend money upgrading their dynamic content serving capabilities, they need to understand how consumers are clicking around.  KPIs are getting more complicated, but none is truly diminishing.  (Well, cookie visitor counts might be doomed.)

In April, things got nasty when IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg slammed comScore and Nielsen Online (then Nielsen//NetRatings) for using an outdated panel sample methodology producing counts two to three times lower than IAB client server logs.  Rothenberg called for “a solid and transparent foundation for audience measurement,” and urged comScore and Nielsen to undergo independent audits by the Media Ratings Council.

Highlight #3 was in July, when Nielsen came out with its “total minutes” metric, heralded (by Nielsen) as the “best measure of online engagement.”  But, as anyone who’s ever done site redesign research will tell you, lingering visitors are often confused, angry visitors.  When its first rankings had AOL (with its omni-present IM window) dominating the uber-efficient Google, I wasn’t left feeling like Nielsen had mastered the evaluation of engagement. Read More… »

TV news stations love their brands. They splash their logos, slogans and anchor mugs on air, on billboards and the sides of big-city buses.

Stations also brand themselves online with the same smiling anchors and punchy mottos. The strategy generally enjoys limited success, with many stations still struggling to gain a sizable share of local online traffic.

One veteran executive of the digital news world has some advice for those stations: Help your brand pack its bags, drive it to the station and give it an emotional kiss goodbye. Then go home and get to work doing something useful online.

Nancy Bruner’s been doing new media for more than a decade. She just made the switch from heading digital content for the The Seattle Times Co. to leading online development for Fisher Communications. Fisher, based in Seattle, is a publicly traded firm that owns 19 TV stations and nine radio stations, plus a satellite and fiber distribution system and a data center.

Fisher brought Bruner on board shortly after buying Pegasus News, a Dallas-based site that’s trying to forge a next-generation mold for local digital media. Pegasus has a bit of everything – staff writing, aggregating, events listings and a “Daily You” algorithm that learns users’ preferences. Fisher plans to hone the model in Dallas and then adapt it to other markets. Read More… »

Here’s a pretty neat “local” website (in Beta) that I can see providing a great service for local consumers some day. While I have to admit that I like the concept of the site, I mostly like the catchiness of the site’s name: WhatsOpen.com (punctuation error notwithstanding).

In fact, just yesterday I was asking myself this very question.  I had to help my inlaws out by buying them a new computer at 4:30 in the afternoon–on New Year’s Day–and with three major electronics retailers close by, I wanted/needed to know what’s open? In my case all three are geographically close, so it wasn’t too big a deal, but had they been in three different directions maybe a quick mobile search on What’sOpen.com, could have helped determine which direction to point the car!  (By the way, for those of you following along, I used ancient technology i.e., the telephone to call the stores, for my answer).  Read More… »

A holiday trip to my sleepy Massachusetts hometown never ceases to teach me something.  It was a wicked shockah, indeed, when I noticed, affixed to the weekly townie paper, a bright yellow Post-It shouting, “How Local?  Wicked Local… WickedLocal.com.”  On the site, it was relatively easy to find my local paper.  I was happily greeted by a clean design and simple navigation.  There were top stories that allowed commenting, blog posts, user generated photos, current weather conditions… Heck, there was even a little RSS feed just for my town’s news.   

Most impressive was that stories had been created throughout the week.  No longer do the people of my small hometown have to wait until Thursday to learn of the latest town hall scandal, boys hockey upset or embarrassing cow-tipping arrest.  True, the news fodder is thin, but this is certainly a terrific platform for instant, hyper-local information.

I quickly scrolled down the page to see who was behind this.  The firm is called GateHouse Media.  Its site boasts 101 daily publications reaching a local audience of 10 million readers across 23 states.   A quick look at its publications list shows about 500 properties, from paid weeklies to shoppers.  Monetization is achieved through standard IAB ad units and, of course, a slew of classifieds.  At the core of its classifieds is TotallyLocal.com, a consumer-facing yellow pages venture powered in part by Premier Guide, a Local.com company.  Read More… »

This is the time of the year when we look ahead and ponder the challenges we will face in the upcoming months. But as this NY Times article notes, one of the best things you can do for your business is to bring in some outside eyes.

We all tend to think we know our business better than any outsider ever could. But the reality is that new people tend to force us to look at our key challenges in a new light. And sometimes, a fresh perspective can find an answer that we never would have found otherwise.

In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track. When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”
Read More… »

Google is close to claiming 60 percent of all Web searches conducted in the U.S., according to the latest figures from Nielsen Online.

In November, Google accounted for a dominant 57.7 percent of all searches, or over 4.2 billion searches in total. Roughly a year ago, Google’s search share fell just below the 50 percent threshold, though Nielsen said that it has recently tweaked its reporting methodology, which makes it difficult to make accurate year-over-year comparisions.

But regardless of the precise percentage, Google remains the way that at least half of the people who visit your site through a search engine will find you.

But there’s also another side to that stat. If you’re trying to build any sort of local search capability, or online classified ads, you are competing with Google. Many people are conditioned to find things in Google. Not just news, but local car dealers, real estate and other local services.