Biggest Loser Couples Season 9 Hometown Guides

 

Season 9 of NBC's Biggest Loser is already in full swing. James, Patti, Maria, and John have left the show, but they continue to stay dedicated to living and eating healthy at home. To see how the Biggest Loser contestants live each day, check out their hometown guides. They provide great advice to living well in Orlando, Florida, Lafayette, California, and Bartlett, Illinois. John and James are pretty crazy about the Olive Garden's Venetian Apricot Chicken.

Finding The Best Businesses In St. Louis

With more than 10,000 votes already cast, the Fox 2 Hotlist is off to the races. There are more than 1,000 businesses competing to be named number 1 in more than 100 categories. Winners will be announced in March, but there are already a number of very competitive races, and it's all good. Local businesses are getting great free promotion and hearing wonderful things from their loyal customers. The personal trainer contest is particularly close right now. Check it out. Cast your vote today!

Local: Start Playing Games

If you live in the same small bubble I do, you know that people have been amazed with the whole local gaming phenomenon. Companies like Gowalla, MyTown, and Foursquare have demonstrated that all of a sudden after years of big brother and privacy battles on the web, consumers are now more than willing to share exactly where they are and where they go. Why? In the name of glory and status.

How's it work? Consumers use their mobile devices to prove they've been somewhere in return for winning that location or gaining status. We used a tagline at CityVoter a while back: "own your city" and this is kind of the idea -- especially with MyTown - which is like Monopoly. Foursquare says "unlock your city," and you do so by visiting different places and "checking-in" on your phone.

Brand marketers are going to watch this trend closely because it takes the whole geo-location and personalization of advertising to the next level and may give all those mobile advertising companies a business model. It's no surprise Google acquired AdMob for $750M and Apple acquired Quattrowireless for $275M. Both of these wireless advertising platforms lay the foundation for location-based advertising.

We're watching this mobile and gaming space closely too. Specifically, I'm interested in seeing how trendy these games are and who is being smart about earning consumers' trust. Mobile by nature reaches early adopters, and they're a fickle demographic. I expect a lot of churn as game downloads get faster, more devices are supported, etc.

I also expect brands will struggle to gain a foothold on these platforms. I'm not a gaming expert, but at Forrester it was clear from our research that gamers are interested in the game. So unless these location gamers figure out a way to private label scavenger hunts or get wise about product placements (like TV shows), gamers will reject intrusion into their space. An experiential marketing professional I really respect said recently, "wouldn't it be cool if when you went into your dry cleaner, the owner said, 'no payment, today's service is on Tide.'"? Maybe. It could also foster a culture of entitlement that plagues Yelp. People who threaten or expect something in return for their loyalty. You know, like that person in front of you in line demanding a better seat, free food, or an upgrade because they're elite. Hopefully, that isn't where this is heading. But chances are with thousands of new badge holding, property owning, mayor-named people running around, I feel like I'm doomed! I don't know my frequent flyer numbers. It's the back of the bus for this kid.

What is a hyperlocal platform?

Last month, December 23rd to be exact, I took my first swag at putting together a formal definition for a "local platform". You can see it here.

Since then, we've worked pretty hard beating on that definition to see if it make sense and to see if it really fit with what we were doing that was so different than the rest of the local online market. It was close, but we've gone a bit further in refining that definition. This definition (see below) is more at the core of our 2010 positioning and it aligns nicely with our company goals:

"A Local Platform Enables A Small Centralized Team Of People To Activate Remote Markets and Engage Consumers In A New Reciprocal Relationship."

A bit wordy, but these words are important. We choose them for a reason:

• Small Centralized Team means you use technology and social media to do things more efficiently 
• Activate Remote Markets means you start a new conversations you don't interrupt existing conversations and... 
• Engage In A New Reciprocal Relationship means you make people feel comfortable sharing with you for mutual benefit

This definition provides us with an important framework for describing the difference between great local apps and great local platforms. More to come on that shortly.

100% growth in 2009 - Welcome TwentyTen

This is the time of year at CityVoter that we focus on looking forward not back. We just released our new look and feel for our 2010 "best of" contests. You can see it here, here and here. It is a design that aims to celebrate our winners and give consumers more immediate access to the best local businesses. It also introduces the ability for consumers who voted for their favorite local businesses to create and share their own local lists. In this way, we've given our partners very valuable content creation tools. Through our widgets or through our API, partners can syndicate user lists throughout their site to grow their relevant local content and support news or advertising promotions. We'll be adding more community features shortly to grow our question and answer network and generate more valuable recommendations.

To look forward and understand where we are going, it is always helpful to understand where we've been. There are a couple famous proverbs about that, but I'll pretend that's an original idea for a moment. 2009 was a strong growth year for CityVoter. We are a web business, so even though we measure our success on a city by city basis, we do track and value pageviews/uniques. This past year, our "best of" events generated close to 60M pageviews and attracted close to 13M people - that's a 100% growth in uniques over 2008. This growth was hard fought for our team. We're a lot smaller than we were a year ago and yet we continue to find really smart ways to innovate. 2009 taught us how to manage our time better - which processes to keep and which ones to let go. We also got a lot smarter about working with our media partners.With more than 30 media partners, we were caught in their revolving door of personnel changes. We never built the customer service team large enough to keep up with this unprecendented organizational churn. Through a better evaluation of who we want to work with and more importantly who wants to work with us, we're in a position to make a few cities in 2010 really big. We've got the platform in place to complete the CityVoter vision of how a city should would and we're excited to take it to the next level.

Facebook Makes 2010 The Year of Local

"Local" is one of the fastest growing sectors on the internet for community, content, and commerce. This may sound like a self-serving argument, because our company, CityVoter, is focused on this space, but there are others who can provide supporting evidence for this. See here. "the online local-advertising market is projected to grow 5.4% in 2009 to $13.3 billion*, according to media research firm Borrell Associates."

If you're reading this, chances are you know why this market is hard to crack. You know that local doesn't mean just one thing. That reaching the local restaurant owner and local plumber efficiently and getting them to buy something is not simply a matter of picking up the phone and calling them. They're busy, distracted, and they do business with brands they know and people they trust. I'm less interested in describing why local has stumbled on the internet and more interested in describing why in 2010 it is going to take off. In a word:

Facebook.

Facebook has done the single most important thing to accelerate the ability to acquire local advertising revenue. Facebook's brought small business owners online.

How? This morning, the owner of the local salon is uploading photos of her kids. The local plumber just told his buddies on Facebook about the hockey game last night. The owner of the flower shop just got a Facebook invite from an old high school boyfriend. All those wonderful silly little things we do on Facebook have primed the pump for local in 2010. These business owners now spend time online and see the connection between promoting themselves and promoting their businesses. They've uploaded photos, they've made comments, and seen the viral social media behavior in action.

But weren't they doing that last year? Yes. But now we see real evidence that this familiarity has set in. Below is a graph that shows CityVoter's growth in business owner participation. Business owners are taking control of their profiles, managing their reputations, and having fun promoting themselves online. I see 2010 as the tipping point.



So what's this mean for everyone else? Well, it makes it a lot easier to explain your internet advertising products and discuss their value. "Discuss their value" huh? Yes, discuss their value. That means you better have valuable local products...no, not banner ads.

You need a local platform. A local platform is a scalable software solution that enables a centralized organization to activate and engage remote local markets in three areas: community, content, and commerce.

Today, these areas are being handled in disparately by different best of breed vendors. In 2010, these different pieces will come together under trusted local brands, and we'll all have Facebook to thank for helping make the internet real for mom and pops.

* - see comment below: Borrell has modified the $13.3 billion 2009 projection mentioned in this article to $13.9 billion - thanks, Gordon

The Skill Gap At Traditional Media Companies

We've been working with newspaper, radio, and television companies for the past five years to help develop new digital promotions and products. We're coming up on our fifth year anniversary, and there's a refrain I've heard for each of the past five years that's worth airing out. "This year, you're really going to see a shake up in management." And so far, it's been true. There's been plenty of "shake up".

That said, there hasn't been the necessary realignment or development of talent required to change thinking or behavior. The old guard just keeps shuffling the deck.


The image above is emblematic of the issue. Corporate has some great digital corporate development talent looking to acquire digital assets, partner with major portals, and re-org the company. And some local properties have superstar sales or digital folks who understand the digital ecosystem and stay hip on new trends and vendors so they drive business development. But the gap between the two groups is very wide and causes a lot of problems and failed initiatives.

You could argue this happens because corporate execs aren't in place log enough to identify, learn from, and elevate local superstars. But I believe it is less about tenure and more about experience. A true hybrid - someone with enough digital experience to move quickly and someone with enough traditional experience to understand the battle in local markets -- is needed. (If I still worked at Forrester, I'd come up with a clever name for this person. Hybrid Media Czar-angelist. We were big on Czars for a while and evangelists too.) These people are almost impossible to find. I'm keeping my shortlist and not sharing it on linkedin either.