Yes, Joe Citizen Does Care About Hyperlocal Stuff
by Matt on Jun 22, 2009 in Industry
I’ve linked before to this recent Forrester report called “Is Hyperlocal Hype or Happening?” — a report that casts doubts on the value and interest in hyperlocal content:
“…Forrester’s data suggests that some basic assumptions about hyperlocal need to be reexamined. To start with, Forrester data shows that more consumers care about what’s happening in their country than what’s happening in their neighborhood.”
Let me ask you this: Is there anything more hyperlocal than community swim lessons at the city pool? Not much, right? Well, have a look at this update from the Richland (WA) web site today about what happened when the city finally offered online swim lesson registrations:
“For the first time, Richland Parks & Recreation offered complete on-line registration for its swim lesson program. Within three hours, patrons registered online for 268 individual lessons, generating $5,465 in revenue and reducing in-person registrations by more than half.”
Seriously, 268 in three hours? I’ll be keeping this in mind next time someone suggests that people aren’t interested in hyperlocal information, tools, and services.
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2 Responses to “Yes, Joe Citizen Does Care About Hyperlocal Stuff”
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You are on the money Matt. I get a lot of requests from groups or Joe Citizen requesting recognition or public notices on my site. All I have to do is look at my stats and see it’s very evident that hyperlocal information is very important to my community.
Just this morning I received a request from a group selling rain barrels to my community and asked me if I could post the information for them. It doesn’t get much more local than that. The majority of my traffic comes from local searches. Where I’m at, Joe cares about his community for sure.
I have to agree on the value of “local” information. Eventually, everything is local. You exist somewhere at any given time and its relatively rare for most people to be “in the air” as opposed to somewhere on the ground.
When you’re home, its useful to have a way of knowing what’s happening where and when, near your home. Add more people to your home (like a family) it becomes even more relevant. At work, similar need but reduced time – so tell me where I can eat lunch, what specials may be happening, or maybe what business opportunities may exist near me. And on it goes – you work somewhere, you travel places, you visit areas, you stay in hotels, etc.. What’s within 15 or 20 minutes of my location? Closer is better. Precision location is important too – I want to know what’s happening, maybe everything that’s happening – but only in this one particular area. My company is delivering that (geosemble.com). But the trend toward hyperlocal will continue because of the utility and relevance of that information to users.
As we peer into the future, I believe we’ll see tools that tap more and more dynamic, raw sources and link them to locations for “live” web data feeds. That’s the good news. The difficult part is that the job of analyzing signal to noise and refining and delivering data – what journalists traditionally did – now falls to users of raw feed data and risks leading to obsessive compulsive, data overload behavoir. As with all new technology, it will fall to us to find the middle way.