Last week at Inman Connect, a real estate technology conference, Jeff Jarvis discusses two ideas we believe in:

1) Real estate professionals can leverage their networks to become hyperlocal media resources. And by doing so, they benefit from building the community networks they need to source referrals for their real estate business.

2) Real estate professionals should be thinking beyond what used to be the work of real estate sales. As the industry changes and makes real estate a much tougher career, Jeff suggests that Realtors, as hubs of the community, can build new local businesses, like social media marketing, based on the work they do with their community.

Twylah is a service that aggregates a Twitter feed and compiles the articles they link into a Flipboard like display.   Many reviewers have explained the mechanics of Twylah in far more detail than I can:

• Robert Scoble: “Twylah lets media brands and celebrities monetize their Twitter stream”
• Neal Schaffer: “Twitter SEO? Think Twylah“

We’ve been working together with Eric Kim, CEO, and Twylah to create “breaking news” Twylah pages for the Twitter feeds across our 300+ city Breaking News Network. These Twylah rendered pages are subdomains of our Breaking News cities, and can be viewed on many of our Breaking News cities by including the subdomain title “news” preceding the Breaking News URL, such as news.breakingsfnews.com.

The current iteration of Twylah pages sit separately from our Breaking News websites and don’t have a direct link to the website itself, only the Twitter feed. We’ve been waiting for Twylah to unveil their embed system so we can embed the page directly to the site itself. Thus, all of these subdomain pages are completely hidden, findable right now only through search engines.

So our experiment simply measures how Twylah performs to drive search engine traffic based on breaking news to hidden Twylah pages. Here are the results:

Approaching 900 uniques per day

Number of Google indexes over span of 3 months for selected news sites:

CONCLUSIONS:

1. It’s well documented that Twitter has become the leading social media for broadcasting “breaking news” nationally and locally. People constantly search for breaking news about a city. Twylah’s service allows breaking news tweets to be indexed and discoverable persistently, not forgotten as most tweets are (according to bit.ly, the average half life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours). Simply put, Twylah delivers organic traffic from sets of older tweets even when the pages it directs to are hidden (and therefore not discoverable by any other means).
2. Twylah automatically facilitates conversations around brands. Through Twitter, we can curate the key influencers associated with a brand and, through Twylah, deliver their commentary to an audience who wants this information in a coherent published format. For example, a well curated Twylah page can deliver real time information about specific movie openings by aggregating content from the media, arts and events publishers on Twitter whose use Twitter to monitor movies. Moreover, on the Breaking News Network, every city already has a set of curated local influencers across a variety of topics, so it’s possible now to develop hyperlocal Twylah channels devoted to movies, the arts, sports, or any other topic. This approach to hyperlocal branding is still in its infancy, and we’ll be focusing on this subject extensively over the next few articles.
3. Twylah, via Twitter, delivers a broadcast solution to brands that other social networks can’t. Eric Kim states: “We are targeting Twitter publishers (brands and personal brands), who consistently create and curate valuable content on any topic.” This type of “broadcast” branding is where Twitter excels over Facebook, which seems to moving towards developing its news feeds favoring personal transparency over commercial branding. It is especially powerful for delivering ticker tapes of breaking news and media feeds that wouldn’t be as effectively distributed across platforms like Facebook where such news might be perceived as excessive.

The classic, and perhaps only business model supporting hyperlocal journalistic efforts like Patch.com and other local media is local advertising. On StreetFightMag.com last week, Ted Mann, Digital Development Director for Gannett NJ, discusses why Gannett’s hyperlocal experiment InJersey.com failed. The main and obvious reason is simply local advertising cannot adequately cover expenses. So…

What if local media were positioned as a community service without the advertising model?

Can hyperlocal media thrive and engage the community as a good will service?

1. The value of hyperlocal is in the information

I paraphrase from Alex Salkever’s June 24 article Hyperlocal’s Automated Future. The website platform and curation tools now exist for any individual or business to develop local media cheaply. A WordPress blog is an easily customized platform for anchoring the news system. Curation and aggregation tools, plus hyperlocal social applications like See Click Fix can provide a panoply of local interest content.

Although still an immature technology, an automated news aggregation and publication service like paper.li or Twylah can be embedded to display in newsprint “Flipboard” format.

2. It’s not just the website… hyperlocal spans across social and mobile media

A community media service must now span across all social media for hyperlocal engagement. Twitter, a perfect media for broadcasting real time local news, can be used to curate the best local Twitter feeds into lists.

Facebook is becoming the arena where the locals will gather to discuss local news, events, even the Daily Deals around town. (Ted Mann’s point #9 – use Facebook as the local watering hole). The social “metrics” for engagement are high for local news:

3. Partner with everyone

Ted Mann’s #4 recommendation for developing hyperlocal content. Companies developing applications serving hyperlocal audiences, like SeeClickFix above, want to partner with local publishers to gain traction. Local publishers want to partner with new application developers to deliver unique local content to their audience. It’s mutually beneficial to overlay new social content, even social commerce applications across national hyperlocal networks. Even better if there is a business model associated with the application for revenue share opportunities between publisher and application provider. One long term mission of a national community service network is to create exposure for a variety of social hyperlocal applications that would not normally get exposure from traditional media.

4. Support the business community

Local businesses are integral to engaging the community because they have the commercial incentive to create content that helps to publicize their business, directly or indirectly. Local food critics own restaurants, real estate columnists are Realtors. Yet, the classic advertising model forces them on the sidelines because that kind of publicity has tangible dollar value that traditional publishers need to extract. So why not support the business community by embedding the most compelling websites and blogs of local merchants into hyperlocal media as content free of charge?

A full website presence has far greater utility for the featured businesses and for the reader than a tiny banner ad selling at $500-1,000 per month. Engage the business community, and they will make the effort to engage locals because 1) it’s free to them, and 2) it’s their marketing vehicle.

5. What is the business model anyway?

Hyperlocal media systems like Breaking News are easy and cheap (often less than the cost of a one-month banner ad) to develop for individuals and groups wanting to create a community media presence in their city. The business model for the owner is not to make money, but to serve the community and be positioned as a local media star in order to enhance the business development prospects of their “day job”.  It’s the same rationale for serving as a Chamber of Commerce president, or even 50 years ago, starting your own local newspaper; it just helps your career. The owner of the community media service pays it forward.

6. What is the impact of hyperlocal media as community service?

The greater impact of the community media service model may be disruptive. The perpetual discussions revolving around how to monetize local journalism have yet to point to a cashflow positive solution. An automated media model that requires few resources and supports the local business community can put pressure on traditional local publishing models. Yes, the content is curated, aggregated and automated, but it’s real time local information that readers want. In time, the new social local applications now being developed can be easily added to supplement the information stream and generate the local engagement needed to survive, even prosper within the hyperlocal media landscape.

Reference:

Groupon-like deals can work for real estate, but not as a typical $10 for $20 worth of product purchase. Real estate can’t be sold as a 30% off purchase price item (although they certainly tried variations of this at California real estate investment clubs in 2005). Real estate marketing has generally relied on variations of online lead generation, like providing real estate listings, in order to capture contact information. A real estate Groupon would essentially have the same mission of driving the active client out of the woodwork by providing a saving incentive.

Real estate marketing and the need to draw active clients out of the woodwork

The real estate industry is a peculiar local business for couponing because real estate transactions are solitary, even once in a lifetime events, compared to every day activities like eating out. In a nutshell, real estate marketing has been based on community networking and leveraging referrals to build Realtor brand recognition. The big hurdle is building community visibility to achieve that branding. Marketing then became a shotgun numbers game that spawned the traditional pushy  techniques that make consumers cringe. To avoid this spam stream, active home buyers and sellers now try to control who can contact them, and it makes them harder to find.

What will a Groupon for real estate look like?

One major coupon difference is that a consumer can’t assess the market value of a real estate service like a restaurant coupon. Couponing real estate services will likely require either pre-transaction interaction (“feel free to call me to discuss the details before you purchase the coupon”), and/or lead qualification processing.

I see two consumer models for real estate coupon services: 1) Nominal consumer payment upfront for redemption rights of a discounted service, and 2) No consumer payment upfront, but registered leads are qualified by the Realtor, chosen and purchased from the coupon provider. We’re using some examples below from Housetipper.com, one of the first coupon services for real estate.

1) Payment for discounted services model

from Housetipper.com

At first blush, the $25 purchase fee in this ad acts like an option that locks the 4% commission offer for a specified window, say one year. However, no consumer would purchase this kind of offer without due diligence of both the Realty and their standard pricing policy (maybe they always charge 4% commission rate). The deal terms will add language to solicit the potential buyer to “contact” them with details, or to join an on-site discussion thread.

This offer works because it accomplishes two things a Realtor wants: 1) pulls a potential client into a conversation, and 2) qualified client commitment when they actually pay $25.

The business concept works because the Realtor receives leads with no out of pocket fees, and the deals provider receives the full fee revenue from the consumer. However, the business model will be inherently limited due to the small number of coupons that can be sold in a locality (more on this later).

2) Free but transparent lead generation model

The coupon purchase price may dissuade many potential clients from inquiry if they have to actually pay. One way to bring more leads to the table would be to create a free offer, say, a free home inspection if a client signs a listing agreement (note the fine print can cover the Realtor’s out of pocket risk by stipulating that the rebate for home inspection be paid at closing). More potential clients will sign up for the deal without financial commitment.

The transparent lead generation system is a new concept in delivering leads. Once a lead registers, their name, email address and phone #, and if applicable, their social media profiles like Linkedin are presented to the Realtor. The Realtor can choose to either green light or red light the lead, and will pay a specified green light fee, like $25, to activate contact.

The traditional intermediary based lead generation systems that harvest email addresses from website inquiries and sold blind in bulk, are generally stale and poor quality; a 3% hit rate is doing well. Transparent lead generation systems reveal potential clients to due diligence and assure qualification, even to the point of Realtor contact with the lead before green lighting. Coupon providers can work on an honor system because any Realtor who would try to side deal with a client to avoid paying a fee would make an immediate unethical impression.

Final hurdle – distribution and scale

The biggest hurdle with real estate couponing is building an effective subscriber base for deals.

1) In today’s economy, the number of people in the market for real estate is small

2) Subscribers only subscribe when they are in the market, a very short window. And how will they find the real estate coupon, when limited deal revenue won’t support supplemental marketing campaigns?

3) Real estate is inherently local, the coupon provider can’t market locally in every city (unless they are Groupon) so the marketing effort will fall on the Realtor and local media. This is a lot of resource coordination, and Realtor “sharing” the deal through Facebook won’t likely tip a deal into significant numbers.

Solution to Scale

Coupon providers will need to augment their distribution through affiliate relationships. For example, deal syndication networks can be developed with real estate listings sites like Trulia or Zillow, brokerages, and hyperlocal networks like Patch and the Breaking News Network that can distribute deals locally. Scaling will require a coupon provider to collect in aggregate enough small fees (much smaller than traditional Groupon yields) to cover centralized operating expenses. Building national client offerings from housing related retailers like Home Depot will also support scale.

Based on my work with the real estate industry, I see enthusiastic demand for real estate Groupons from Realtors, as well as mortgage brokers, insurance and other real estate related services. And why not? Realtors will try any free or cheap marketing opportunities that enhance their lead quality.

Local community news has always been hard to produce profitably with scale. Local news is only relevant to those who live within the community, and it makes cost per thousand based advertising models untenable when readership may log in the hundreds. Without a revenue model to hire editors and writers, the cheapest way to source local news content is either through volunteer reporters, or aggregation of local media by engines .

Problems with Local News Aggregation Technologies

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick recently posed the question “Why haven’t neighborhood news technologies worked out?”

I sure hope someone can nail it. Give me the news about my neighborhood, please... I care about what’s happening in the neighborhood around me and I want to see the fabulous new technologies of open government data, online news syndication, social networking and data mining all put to service to fulfill hyperlocal news wishes and dreams I didn’t even know I had yet.

From the article’s comment stream, it seems news aggregators like Outside.in, Fwix, and EveryBlock have three problems:

1) Local news presented by algorithm isn’t customized to the needs of the reader and therefore, sterile and/or irrelevant.

2) Most local news is inherently uninteresting. Ever watch a local TV station and care about anything about the car wrecks, murders or city council meetings covered? It’s lower grade information that doesn’t enrich or improve our lives as much as the content we generally seek on the web.

3) Aggregated local news lacks the social element, whether it be real reporters or people in the community engaged in local discussions.

1. Local News needs manual curation

The news needs to be right. Fwix often reports irrelevant news; Rocklin is 80 miles north of Modesto, CA (see image)

Engines query for local articles via RSS but they require a human team to identify the best feeds in every city and continually update these feeds. Feeds can be sourced not only from mainstream media, but also blogs, Twitter and other social media links, and eventually Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and other geo-localized media sources as they attain credibility by reaching critical mass of local participants.

2. Local News needs more content

Again, it’s hard to produce content without somebody paying for it. However, there are new producers of local content that haven’t yet made an imprint as local media sources. Civic organizations, local companies and merchants like Whole Foods have websites and blogs that broadcast timely information people want to know about, but may not have RSS feeds for simple aggregation. Companies like Nozzl Media and DataSift are developing ways to aggregate and filter this kind of content. Finally, locals using Facebook groups, Yelp and Foursquare are documenting what’s happening in their city, and their reviews are starting to be included in sites like EveryBlock. People will eventually find where their friends are congregating and which stores are popular through the aggregation of these geolocational systems (see Checkinmedia image)

3. Local news needs personalization

Although some people may like crime reports for their city, all I really want to know about the 1/2 mile radius around where I live is 1) all the daily deals merchants in my neighborhood are offering, 2) what’s playing at the theaters, 3) the Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Safeway circulars, and 4) where all my friends are congregating around San Francisco. That’s it, at least for today. Once the content sources from deals services, supermarket chains and theaters, and geomedia are aggregated, this kind of personalized local portal becomes relevant to daily life.

4. Local News needs to be social

Readers are motivated to participate in social news for two reasons: visibility and content ownership. Just like yesteryear’s “Letters to the Editor”, readers comment frequently on mainstream media news sites like Huffington Post or LATimes simply because they know their input will get read by thousands. News aggregators (like EveryBlock, right image) have a hard time pulling in conversations simply because there is nobody to converse with!

To succeed in gaining participation, hyperlocal news sites need on-the-ground ringleaders in each city to engage their communities and promote participation. But ringleaders need compensation. Fwix and other news aggregators own every city and provide little incentive for others to own and grow content for them. We modeled The Breaking News Network as a kind of franchise that facilitates the creation of a local media resource by individuals and groups in a city, and gives them city/community ownership so they have vested interest to grow their properties.

Patch hires editors for each city who can spur participation in their community, but is currently burdened with a high expense / small revenue model that is under scrutiny by Business Insider among others.

5. Local News needs to be easy to read and digest

The  popular Flipboard for iPad validates the concept that people like reading aggregated and personalized news in a newspaper format. Reading within familiar typeset frames is easier than perusing streams of news that characterize news aggregators like Topix or EveryBlock. There’s opportunities for aggregation and presentation technologies like paper.li to make it easier for news to be curated and read in this more reader-friendly format. For example, BreakingSFNews.com (image below) embeds paper.li as another way to read about SF news.

Since Twitter is finding it difficult to create a bona fide business model based on its platform alone, they should look into developing broad new applications based on Twitter

First, look at what Twitter does best: breaking news. The Twitter platform is natural for disseminating local news right down to the neighborhood level. Ev Williams has discussed this before: “Twitter to start serving local news to users – March 7, 2009“, but the lack of a viable revenue model has crimped the execution.

Twitter has had the opportunity to own social local market for a couple of years, but now Google “Google Exec: Local is our Top Focus – Dec 8, 2010” and Facebook “Facebook’s Emily White details Local Efforts – Dec 10, 2010” are hard charging into local; not to mention Groupon’s potential $950 million war chest. It’s crunchtime.

So here’s a recipe for building a local business model based on Twitter:

1) Twitter first creates a series of geographical Twitter accounts with a new Twitter name coding system that uses, say *, instead of @. For example, *Berkeley_CA or *Boston_MA. Start with metro areas and expand into smaller cities: *Waltham_MA and neighborhoods: *BackBay_Boston.

2) Each *Twitter account curates the best Twitter feeds within the geography, and is automatically set to retweet local feeds with the type of local information that communities want to see: News, Things to Do, and Deals. Curation is best done manually on-the-ground by a local; this person could be recruited as a volunteer who wants to serve their community in the same way About.com populated their experts. The *Twitter feed would look something like this:

3) The third step is the key departure to Twitter’s general strategy – building a Twitter based application (note Evan Williams doesn’t mention anything like this in his October “What’s next for Twitter” interview). Twitter should build hyperlocal websites similar to Patch.com for each *Geography, and create an automated overlay similar to http://paper.li/breakingsfnews/community-news or FlipBoard:

4) The final ingredient is monetization. Just like Patch, Twitter can now build a national network of hyperlocal websites without the HR expense of hiring editors. They can now leverage their local media presence to deliver Deals and coupon based advertising. By using deal syndication networks, Twitter won’t even need to hire a massive local sales force.

Get ready for the commercial social media...

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The latest Facebook metrics are powerful: 400 million active users (7% of the world), 50% of them logging on each day and spending more than 55 minutes daily on Facebook.

The sudden concentration of traffic on the social media led by Facebook has caught business by surprise. In particular, small and local businesses don’t quite realize their consumer is now spending a majority of their time on the social media, but they continue to rely on the old online standard: their website. Websites and blogs are critical as marketing collateral, but local businesses need to develop an online marketing presence that spans across the social media ubiquitously.

With all the buzz around Foursquare and Gowalla, why is hyperlocal media suddenly hot? Geolocation is changing the social media by providing nothing more than the tagging mechanism to define social networks by localities. Geolocation facilitates the development of a new, more practical, more intimate Twitter/Foursquare network of friends who just happen to be living down the street. It’s far more compelling to build a social network of folks you can have coffee with than the national networks than generally evolve in Twitter and Linkedin. I myself see this… I am starting to socialize with San Franciscans…

The Hyperlocal Marketing Opportunity

So we’re seeing social apps like Twitter and Yelp quickly adopting location “check-in” functionality, with Facebook in the wings. And this presents a huge opportunity. It’s a no-brainer for local retailers and businesses to see that they need to provide the most effective online venue for their local customers to “check-in” to. The new local “websites” are the Facebook business page, the new local advertising vehicle is the Twitter coupon, and the new reviews column is Yelp.

You haven’t seen them yet, but Facebook is primed to evolve into a massive Sunday advertising circular for local businesses:

And why not? It’s free. Enterprising local media publishers (for example, Breaking News sites) will curate and compile these merchants into local online directories.

Twitter will develop hyperlocal couponing systems that will be online equivalents of PennySaver coupons and Valpak:

And why not? It’s free. Couponing is effective because it is perceived by consumers as “found money” while straight advertising may now be considered “spammy”. You’ll see the advent of new local social media based advertising agencies that will create turnkey Twitter / Facebook / Foursquare couponing campaigns for merchants. And these campaigns will be accepted because online data is more efficient for tracking and analysis than traditional advertising channels like radio / TV or inefficient direct mail offerings like PennySaver. There is a defined ROI.

Conclusion

2009 was the year when the masses found Twitter and Facebook. 2010 will be the year when local business begins to recognize the power of leveraging Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare et al to achieve a level of community engagement that standard “one-way message” advertising can’t achieve. It’s about being ubiquitous across the social media so your community of customers can find your services via their preferred channels – Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Related slideshow: Ubiquity marketing (Jan. 2010)

Related webinar: I’ll be discussing “The Impact of Geolocational Media” on the Virtual Bar Camp April 6 at 2:15pm, Room #4. Register and join our discussion.

The powerful launch of Google Buzz (Mashable | Google Buzz has completely changed the game) last week signals the arrival of the Real Time Web as a truly new media. It’s been well documented that Twitter has established itself a breaking news source. Google Buzz, Facebook and Twitter form a triumvirate channel for sourcing news media that will continue to grow in influence.

The real time web implies that online news will flow more and more through applications, not websites. The problem facing mainstream media is their dependence on traffic through their websites for advertising revenue.

The journalistic media on the other hand continue to try to erect walls that halt traffic flow through their websites, either by charging subscriptions (New York Newsday gets 35 subscribers after three months), by limiting access to their content by aggregators (Murdoch’s gambit with blocking Google from indexing Sky News content), or simply by not providing an RSS feed for syndication (Santa Barbara News Press and many other local publications).

Social media thrives on RSS to find, deliver and syndicate news from journalistic media, and it directs traffic back to the news source.  If the traditional news media continues to ignore social media sourced breaking news, they risk becoming irrelevant to their communities who demand this real time news. People will eventually find that real time news directly from their community via one of their social networks and news aggregation applications.

Based on the web statistics presented in the previous slideshow, I’ve been asked for reasons why breaking local news receives 15+ clickthroughs per tweet across Breaking News Network city sites. With a little analysis, we discovered that the Breaking News sites are generally the first to tweet out a newly published article from local news media sources.