In 2005, I called on Boston Magazine repeatedly and tried to convince them that their magazine needed to not only go online with more content, but become part of the local conversation by engaging consumers to contribute their voice to the publication. The web could make that happen.
As we approach the dawn of 2010, we see Esquire making big noise about their new interactive magazine. The cover actually reads: "A living, breathing, moving, talking, magazine?" "WTF?!" If I were publishing Esquire, I wouldn't say WTF. I would say "hold on we're just getting started", and I'd release a flurry of new ways to engage my readers and get their feedback. They seem to have surprised themselves. In the age of social media, their audience and advertisers expect this and more. It's not augmented reality, it's media's new reality.
Last night, our media partner in the greater Seattle area, King 5, began announcing their 2009 Best of Western Washington (BOWW) winners during their Evening Magazine television program. King 5 is using CityVoter to make its BOWW annual promotion bigger, and this year it was simply huge. More than 300,000 unique visitors visited the King 5/CityVoter BOWW website in a 6 week period. These visitors spent an average of more than 6 minutes on the website browsing local businesses, voting for their favorites, and recommending places. In fact, the site accumulated more than 90,000 recommendations from voters in just 6 weeks. This is enormous free promotion for local businesses at a time when they need it most. We very proud to be part of this success, and we're grateful that King 5 has the vision to integrate this program with its core programming. It is a best practice.
We've got a lot of exciting changes coming to CityVoter shortly. New ways to make our best of programs even better. King 5's success is a great motivation for us. It is clear local communities love this promotion and really get involved. Awareness is key, and there is still no better megaphone than local TV.
I talk and write a lot about how "local" is about brand and connection to a community. We've been fortunate enough to work in some cities now for more than 3 years, and we've built impressive brands in places like Sacramento, Denver, and Detroit. "A-List" signs are in windows around the city, and people know to vote every year.
Our media partners are starting to really benefit from the investment they've made in developing new brands and advertising products in their markets. Recently, we had one partner tell us "out of the more than 50 vendors I've seen this year, [CityVoter's Best Of] is one of the best opportunities I've come across." This is a city that has made more than $300K from our "best of" program.
We have also seen the fruits of McGraw-Hill's local brand start to play out in their markets. For more than 3 years now, they've been collecting votes for their A-list and running fun promos like this. Now, they've capitalized on this brand to help promote local businesses with a new kind of advertising product. This is a great way for them to diversify their dependence on national advertisers as well as help local businesses develop new online videos that can drive business through new channels like search engines and YouTube. Read more about their approach here.
I am not a big fan of hearing about contests, joining, and then never finding out who won (because I never do). A couple of weeks ago, we announced a contest Office Depot was running to help local business owners. As part of the prize for submitting a winning video, business owners would receive thousands of dollars worth of prizes. Sounded great, so we told all our local CityVoter business owners about the opportunity. A few weeks later, I got a very nice email from Absolute Abstract in Philadelphia telling us they won a prize worth $2000 from Office Depot. Very cool.
We also announced another contest in Dallas where CityVoter was giving away iphone gift certificates to consumers and businesses who downloaded our new "best of" city app. Today, I sent out winners' announcements, and I'm very happy to congratulate Circle Park Bridal in Dallas. They had the most number of customers download the app and email us on their behalf.
While it's fun to compete, not fun to lose, I hope it is at least a little nice to know these contests do have real winners and they're local business owners just like you. See Circle Park's Banner to the right. More fun stuff to come...
Once we finish voting in a city, we give businesses who competed a chance to reach back out to voters with special offers to thank them for their loyalty. We've been doing this now for years, and a number of business owners are getting the hang of email marketing.
Many business owners sign up for Constant Contact each month so they can begin their own dedicated email marketing. If a business owner doesn't have an email marketing list, we help them create one with product giveaways, but also with dedicated emails to local consumers.
How well do they work? Open rates of hover around 20% and CTRs are above 3%. Since these are consumers who live in the area and who have voted on CityVoter, the engagement stays consistently high until voting begins again.
Here is one of my recent favorites: 20% off a Studio City Tattoo in LA "doesn't hurt a bit". Classic.
The Wall Street Journal today posted a story about how retailers continue to rely on unsolicited paper catalogs to drive sales. This is a very important observation for us at CityVoter since catalogs are local, measurable, and image based. They also tend to be themed for geography and season.
As the article points out, catalogs are a huge environmental issue and will likely start to weigh on consumer sentiment and perception of brands. I live in hippyville Cambridge, and as a result, I have already have begun to actively block catalogs sent to my house by using: http://www.catalogchoice.org.
Smart brands and web marketers will migrate some of these direct marketing techniques online and use social media to help. We see this as our local opportunity as catalogs tend to intersect in usage and demo with glossy city mags.
For the past few weeks on CityVoter.com, we've been profiling guides to healthy living created by the contestants of NBC's Biggest Loser. After they've been voted off the show, they come to CityVoter.com and share their secrets to where they go in their hometowns to stay focused on their fitness goals. Coach Mo recently left the show and created a guide to his hometown that included his favorite spots for food and fashion. Sean Algaier built a guide to Glenpool, OK and gave his fans a sense of what it is like to walk a day in his shoes. His guide is fantastic. Check it out here. The Biggest Loser is one of those inspirational programs that makes healthy living feel attainable to so many people. These guides are just one more way to help people take steps to living well in their hometown.
I just got back from Denver where I was able to meet with a number of really smart digital agencies that are starting to do some really interesting work in the area of social media. I say the "area" of social media because the definition of what makes a campaign social media is really left open for interpretation.
Here's my travel list... built it all by myself. Love the new "create a list" functionality guys!
Found this great blog post on more examples of large companies attempting to go local with their marketing and their messaging. I cannot imagine any campaign can escape this kind of criticism and critique, but clearly there are better ways to support local business owners and communities. Billboards and signage stoke anger and are disingenuous at best. "See we put a sign here. We know and love you."
I like the approach from Barnes & Noble, but without real geographic reach, they too fail to convince me that they're trying hard to promote local "booksellers". The menu in the image above is the entire scope of the cities where they provide local book news.
I have spent the past few days out in Denver and have been enjoying the snow. Yes, snow. Yesterday, it was 70 and sunny. Today, it snowed. I look forward to posting my "list" of new favorite Denver places on CityVoter.com soon. I hit some good spots thanks to our CityVoter iPhone app.
Today, while it snowed outside, I had the pleasure of attending Liberty Media's CEO Netleaders conference. They've held this event four years in a row now, and it's a chance for people who run companies in the digital space to get together and compare notes. This event focused a lot on innovation. The advice...make sure your internet company has a differentiated product and service. It also focused a lot on the economy. We heard from a leading Wall Street analyst, and he provided a lot of data. In addition, CEOs were asked to provide their take on where we are in the recovery of the economy. While everyone could point to online traffic, CPMs, and smart phone adoption as reasons to be conservatively bullish on the economy, the comment that had everyone talking was about wine. One of the entrepreneurs on a panel mentioned his restaurant is seeing an up tick in the number of expensive bottles of wine being purchased with dinner. While he said the number of people dining fluctuates a little, the amount people spend on wine only really increases when confidence increases. So, for all the Wall Street data and research, I offer you this. Wine is the new leading indicator of the economy's recovery. Buy buy buy.
I hate captchas (above) as much as the next guy...but when I saw this question (below) as part of a verification system on an online survey it struck me that perhaps computers were regressing...if a computer can be used to formulate an advanced hedge fund trading algorithm, couldn't a bot learn to do simple math? (Psst...the answer is 5).
Recently, we saw a couple bigger media companies (AOL and MSN) spend interest and money in start-ups (Patch and Everyblock) who are pursuing the citizen journalism space in neighborhoods or what people like to call hyperlocal content. There are lots of companies in this area, but the ones I pay attention to are Patch, Outside.in, and Everyblock.
There is clearly a big push toward creating original local content and doing it in a way that is scalable (low cost). This is not new, and it's a logical evolution of the personal blog space. What's interesting is that the quality of this local content is improving and there are going to be standards and rating systems that will help filter out the rambling nonsense and identify thoughtful commentary or investigative journalism.
To that end, I believe it is more interesting to watch the other companies that don't fall directly into this space, but who are doing very interesting localized journalism. See ESPN's Dallas version here, see Huffington Post's Chicago version here, and Plum TV covers high-end destinations. They will rely heavily on a video product which in my mind is key. I don't believe the mass market (or more importantly advertisers) have discerning tastes when it comes to the written word, but they certainly know and like when they see beautiful talent, a slick graphics package, framed photography, and a steady camera.
We play in this market because we want to provide premium local content around photo and video based "best of" lists, local guides, and lifestyle and entertainment features. The stuff local magazines do and need to do more efficiently (low cost).
At a corporate level, broadcast groups need to pay attention to these macro citizen journalism trends. This is not high school sports coverage, this is all areas of content. This is most certainly the local broadcasters' turf and local stations cannot and will not compete piecemeal for this opportunity. It requires a new operating model that cannot be figured out in the trenches of day-to-day.
I am the founder of CityVoter. These articles are about how our company believes the Internet should be a great way to get local recommendations. We have a vision that is helping consumers make better decisions, business owners get free promotion, and media companies grow their online audiences.
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