Everybody’s Going Local
I’m becoming increasingly intrigued by the number of “local” web sites that are being launched or revamped at the moment. Backfence.com, which launched its newest California site this week, is just another in a long line of similar sites in the same space: Kudzu.com, Judy’s Book (read my take on them here) and Yelp.com, to name just a few. Search Engine Journal reports that Yahoo! Local has updated this week as well.
While the ‘local’ concept isn’t new, it looks to me like many of these sites have finally hit on the magic combination of mashups, reviews, social networking and news that create the elusive “stickiness” factor that so many sites fail to find. Finally, many of these sites are actually useable and offer some great information to consumers.
I think we’re on the verge of a tipping point here, where some of these sites actually start to cross over into the mainstream and move out of the geek/Web 2.0 crowd.
Of course, with so many competing sites out there, there’s bound to be a shakeout. And I’m not sure which of these sites will still be standing a year from now (though the smart money is on Yahoo! being one of them), but as the dust settles I’m sure we’ll start to see who the clear winners are.
The bottom line is I think there is an incredibly rich opportunity here for some smart advertising by Realtors. As the feature sets become more and more compelling, consumers will migrate onto these local/neighborhood sites, and with the right ad buy a smart Realtor or Broker could be right there in front of them.
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Jeff | Sep 15, 2006 | Reply
Trying to build the ChitownLiving brand in Chicago with a mix of local, national, and personal content. We’ll see how it goes. Great post.
Brad Nix | Sep 16, 2006 | Reply
I couldn’t agree more. My company has been using http://www.kudzu.com for some time now (I even encourage people to review my services on Kudzu from my blog) and are considering purchasing an ad. This post gives me confidence to go forward with the ad placement.
However, I also think that reviews are better than paid ads. I believe consumers will sort by reviews and all it takes to be at the top is a whole bunch of reviews. Now the question is…how to get more reviews without being the cheesy “please rank me high” review-requester?
Joel Burslem | Sep 16, 2006 | Reply
Brad,
If you’re looking to boost your # of reviews, I’d suggest you include a line like “Please review me on Kudzu.com” in all your offline marketing materials - even handouts to your existing clients.
pete | Oct 12, 2006 | Reply
Does local make sense? That is something I am trying to do too (http://visualizemilwaukee.blogspot.com). What do you think people are looking for in a local-only real estate blog? Most of what I see are either non-local or Realtor-specific sites. Maybe that’s just where the expertise is, but it seems like it would be great to have more “local overview” information. I’ve seen this for a few areas, like Chicago and Manhattan.
Teresa Boardman | Sep 13, 2007 | Reply
I guess I beat the crowd. I went very local in 2005.
Chris Dowell | Nov 23, 2007 | Reply
Local marketing works. Online viewers want to see real estate facts and stats from the area as well as information from the local market. Too many people are viewing national news because they can’t find good sources for local info. The national information is mostly wrong for my area.
Chris Dowell | Dec 16, 2007 | Reply
Local works! People looking in KC don’t want general real estate information that is based off of stats from another state. Consumers want specific real estate information based on the area they are looking to buy or sell.