At Local Matters, we’ve been working through ideation, consumer research, prototyping, and product planning for about 18 months in the area that has come to be referred to as “local social”. LocalGuides.com represents the cumulative effect of these activities, and the point of entry into a new stream of development and growth for our company.
The industry has witnessed a lot of interesting experimentation and success with user-generated content, building on the unstoppable live web experience. The increasingly engaged consumer has begun to shift their view of the Internet to a place where sharing and interaction become integral and common, and more and more expected every day.
We actually started down this dev path in 2004 by focusing on deconstructing (and reconstructing) the “shopping side” of Local Search. We spend considerable time exploring how consumers shop locally – how they make lists, how they select suppliers, how they move from research into purchase decisions, how they run their shopping errands…
We have combined this consumer research with two other themes of research & development since 2006 – one, building and prototyping consumer tools for collecting and sharing local information, and two, drilling deeply into the advertiser participation model.
The new beta site, LocalGuides.com, starts with the contemporary world of “mash-up” tools to give the user a fun and engaging experience as they search, collect, annotate, organize, and share local information. We’ve learned that succeeding in social demands a blend of useful and fun. Fun and Yellow Pages, a novel concept, huh?
Helping consumers with tools to organize, collect, annotate and share their shopping experiences is a focus that is just getting started with LocalGuides. In some respects this could be viewed as “local-vertical”. Our aim is to keep building a starting point for the “connected search layer” of shopping activities. We’re kind of tired of the disjointed way search works, and think consumers deserve better! We’ve also learned that Search is only one part of the shopping opportunity -and that context and conversation are what drive completion of the cycle.
Underneath all of this is our unique foundation of “local ontology” that provides a way for us to connect one discreet shopping activity (“kitchen cabinets”) to another (“kitchen lighting”) across thousands of business categories. To us, connected shopping activities are a natural win/need for consumers and a big gap in the search space.
The advertiser participation model is the final key element of our research. The demise of some user-generated local content sites continue to highlight the need to figure out a mutually beneficial consumer-advertiser relationship before engaging with the consumers. We think we’re onto a decent formula with the concept of “Starter Guides”. Finding that balance between consumer and advertiser value coexistence is mission critical - it’s the ball we’ll keep our eye on!
