Here are six trends in 2012 that will impact hyperlocal media and business models. This was originally published at Street Fight last week.

1. Cross platform conversations

Livefyre and Disqus show glimpses of how conversations can move from Facebook and Twitter to online media and blog commentary. Local conversations happening on social media, especially Facebook, simply aren’t crossing over onto local media. Note the interaction on a city community page like San Francisco; it’s huge, but random in topic.

The big opportunity is to organize local conversations that are now happening on, say, the community page above, into topics like sports, culture, movies, things to do, business, family, etc. In 2012, cross platform systems that facilitate community engagement across all social media along these topics will develop. The current best example of local topical engagement is sports media like SBNation and Bleacher Report that encourage sports blogging and fan interaction at the local team level.

2. Influence peddling at a local level

The advent of Klout and other new forms of social influence tabulation mirrors the slow power shift of media influence from traditional to social channels. Anybody with a voice can build a following, and the new business models evolving around influence metrics allow businesses to reward influencers with the hopes of converting them into advocates.

On a national level, social influence has naturally followed the celebrities; Britney, basketball players and Obama come to mind. On a local level, social influence is still up for grabs. Many sports bloggers became part of the SBNation empire simply by being bloggers for their local team. The implied business model is local influencers will attract rewarding opportunities, whether it’s in the form of a media job or simply a perk from a local business wanting to engage them.

The recognition of consumer generated revenue opportunities

A candid consumer recommendation, or a compilation of great Yelp reviews, is far more credible for a business than an advertisement. Local businesses will be able mine and filter local conversations across the social media, and participate in social marketing their services to elicit favorable reactions and revenue opportunities. For example, high school and college students often use Facebook to set Friday night plans. The most influential of them will move crowds, and local businesses, like pizza restaurants and movie theaters, will build relationships with influencers using rewards, loyalty programs, or simply a friendly dialogue.

example: using Needium to create business building dialogue

Startups are developing to provide localized services to filter, monitor and engage consumers on behalf of small business. For example, Needium monitors Twitter for specific keywords and phrases such as “looking for a lunch spot in Union Square”, that signal consumer demand for their local business client, and then converses with Tweeters on behalf of their client. They are basically building a personalized geolocated mobile response system for local marketing.

Local brands move to app development

The rapid adoption to mobile platforms impels brands like Walgreens and Starbucks to create apps specific to the needs of their mobile consumer. Local brands are headed down the same path. Yes, being on Yelp, Foursquare and Google Places provides social visibility but it limits the consumer interaction to just a check-in deal. A local merchant should have its own app complete with loyalty program, special deals, inventory search and topical information that its customers need. Building a mobile app is still beyond the pale of 99.9% of local merchants, and it’s surprising I haven’t seen a startup financed to create turnkey mobile apps for small business.

Emergence of the local social media marketing agencies

The dearth of startups serving local business with mobile app development is indicative of a larger hole to fill: there are still few turnkey social marketing agencies serving the over 4 million small businesses in America. Local business needs turnkey solutions because the resources required to learn, implement and execute a comprehensive social marketing are daunting. 2012 will bring scalable turnkey service companies like Main Street Hub devoted to managing local social marketing for SMBs.

The New Role for Bricks and Mortar

Retailers can’t escape the impact of Amazon Price Checker and Groupon on their business. In-store price checking and daily deals threaten customer retention and profit margins respectively, and they certainly aren’t going away. So how will bricks and mortar remain relevant to, and more importantly, build loyalty from local consumers?

Before social media, the decision to visit a local business was based on personal need. Now, more decisions are based on serendipitous search for things to do, what to eat, where their friends are, and special deals. Bricks and mortar can position themselves to be destinations simply by making sure they are visible, preferably with attractive offers sprinkled here and there, in all the media consumer use to find them. They remain relevant because there are potentially more tangible reasons for people to go out! Foursquare and Yelp check-ins, events planning services like Meetup and Plancast, and mobile location services will be the currency that supplements local traffic to business.

Klout is known as a metric for assessing social influence. Like Google Page Rank, few understand what else Klout can do beyond being an iconic metric. One overlooked practical role that Klout faciliates is influencer curation. Through curation, brands garner good will by providing recognition, even rewards, to influencers who have synergetic relationships with that brand. Brands accomplish this on Klout by 1) developing lists of influencers and 2) giving influencers’ Twitter or Facebook feeds the “+K” as a badge or recognition.

For example, The Breaking News Network is a local media network devoted to community service and promoting local businesses, civic groups and nonprofits. As part of the mission to recognize their communities, managers of each city in the Network develop a portfolio of +K’s. First they import their curated Twitter lists based on topics like Events, Sports or Foodie.

Next, individual social media accounts are given +K based on a specific expertise. The more liberally +Ks are given, the more good will the brand collects.

By using Klout, brands like @breakingsfnews position themselves as curators and hubs for social media sourced local news, a role that traditional local media has not yet embraced.

The Revenue Agenda for Klout and other Social Influence Metrics

Klout can also be used to deliver good will in the form of “perks” with their revenue product Klout Perks. Perks reward high Klout score influencers with freebies that hopefully will induce a quid pro quo commentary or endorsement.

Klout Perks currently only delivers offers to a national audience. If Perks could be delivered to local audiences, local merchants would see Perks as an alternative to Daily Deals by delivering value to recipients of influence, rather than the one and done coupon clippers. All in the name of good will. Over at MediaBistro’s Socialize conference, Megan Berry, Klout’s Marketing Manager, says self service perks are on the product roadmap.

Companies measuring social influence like Klout, including Peoplebrowsr with Kred and Roost with Local Scorecard, are developing products that are ostensibly metrics but are really solutions to identify, target and reward consumer influencers as potential marketers. This will lead to wide ranging partnerships between online vendors and companies providing influence metrics data. The new metrics of influence will become more refined and tangible: influencers will be tracked for how many dollars their tweets and updates garner.

Journalists continue to search for a viable business model that supports online hyperlocal publications, but they won’t ever reach the threshold of revenues to maintain operations if they rely solely on traditional advertising fees from local merchants. That doesn’t mean local advertising is also poised to fall off a cliff. On the contrary, BIA/Kelsey states the prospects for online local advertising will double by 2015, but much of that growth will come from new mobile applications and daily deals category vendors. Here are five reasons why hyperlocal news faces hurdles to profitability:

1) Hyperlocal audiences are too granular to support traditional revenue models. Local banner ads aren’t economically viable. Traffic to online hyperlocal publications is inherently small due to geography, and total ad revenue based on CPM (cost per thousand views) won’t even cover the costs of the ad sales force.

Report on AOL’s hyperlocal network Patch.com’s traffic sourced from Business Insider “Leaked Reports on Patch traffic”

Article comment:

Chris L on Jun 24, 1:18 PM said:

If their page views really are only 783K for a month in So Cal, that translates to less than $5K in revenue for a month. I doubt they can build a sustainable business on that. Revenue = (783,000/1000)*3*$2 Assumptions: $2 CPM (generous) and 3 ad slots per page.

2. Local advertising alternatives are proliferating. Newspapers lost their classifieds revenue to Craigslist. The growing number of pay for performance business models including paid search, daily deals and the new mobile ad applications are cannibalizing media spending. Advertising options will continue to expand for local merchants, leaving a smaller piece of the pie to hyperlocal news.

3. Hyperlocal media resources are proliferating. Traditional media has relegated the business community to being simply the “advertisers” and not involving them in content sourcing. Yet on the local social media, many committed bloggers are the business owners who want to discuss their industry and community, and by extension market themselves. Traditional media needs to incorporate the business community as journalistic partners instead of trying to sell to them all the time.

New community service business models are developing that focus on engaging the community around local news and providing free advertising to businesses, adding further pressure on traditional ad sales. Facebook and other social networks may also evolve into hyperlocal community platforms that center on community sourced and shared news. In sum, hyperlocal news resources will proliferate as alternatives to traditional local media, simply because it’s easier to build these properties now.

4.  Local merchants are learning how to self market using the social media. Roost reports merchants believing it is four times more effective than paid search. Those merchants that can’t do it will be taught or be serviced by local social media / ad agencies, or even the traditional media publishers themselves. Gannett wisely set up GannettLocal.com to engage with local businesses as their social media marketing educator and partner.

5. There is a visible example of an unworkable local media model. Patch.com, AOL’s effort to build a hyperlocal news network from scratch even when local news revenues were falling, demonstrates and even confirms the high hurdles in building a profitable local ad model.

After a year and $150 million, Patch doesn’t seem to be gaining the revenue traction it needs to warrant further investment, and AOL is working with investment bankers on restructuring. The Patch exercise may shut the door on the idea of building a scalable hyperlocal network based on paid content.

My article “Hyperlocal as Community Service Media” on Streetfight discusses why building local media resources to serve the community makes sense. Creating local media is no longer the province of media companies, curation and aggregation tools make it easy for anybody to develop a simple local media resource that maintains itself 24×7. The disruptive concept behind “community service” media is to scrap the classic advertising business model. Why? Simply for the good will of the community. Business owners, not relegated to being the target of ad salespeople, can now contribute local content topical to their business. Publishers of this new local media can provide access and guidance to any contributor in the community, and make sure that this access does not veer into spam.

I believe the pool of local advertising revenue will continue to slide because more local merchants will realize they can control their brand distribution via social media, and cut their ad buys. Real estate agents, once the cash cow of local classifieds, have cut back drastically because they are learning social media marketing, one of the crazes of current brokerage training. The real estate industry, with its intense focus on community marketing, tends to be the bellwether for local marketing practices.

Free local advertising also puts pressure on traditional local publishers’ fee structures. The comments on the Street Fight article demonstrate how foreign the community service concept is to local publishers who rely on ad revenue, and can’t imagine otherwise. What they miss is hyperlocal media does not necessarily need a traditional business model to thrive as long as the community is engaging in it. There are benefits to providing good will to the community.

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.

On Media Transparent last October, I explored the idea of real time deals, which requires consumption of a daily deal within a limited time frame. Merchants with perishable products – seats at a restaurant, theaters, hotel rooms, airlines – want a deals system that quickly and efficiently fills excess inventory, especially at a moment’s notice. Both Groupon and Living Social introduced their versions of real time deals this week with Groupon Now and Instant Deals. It’s the next bold iteration of how online deals will transform the way consumers shop.

Restaurants can obviously use these deals to fill their slower Monday through Wednesday dinner slots. I list other types of businesses that would benefit most from real time deals:

High margin real time deals that can be sold nationally or regionally

• Last minute airline tickets for specific destinations flying from a preferred airport(s)
• Last minute hotel rooms – redeemable within 24-48 hours. Hopefully every city in a network will have at least one deal.
• Ski lift tickets. Resorts projecting poor skiing conditions over the weekend can run campaigns to fill their chairs with real time deals throughout the week.
• Cruises, vacation packages, hotel packages preceding long weekends and vacation periods.

Services and products based on seasonal demand

• Golf course fees. Nobody golfs in February, even in California. But if the weather is projected to be fair over the next week, half price greens fees will get the duffers out.
• End of season sports equipment based on season.
• End of season amusement and water park admission

What are the implications of real time deals?

1) Real time deals encourage last minute buying.

Now, consumers will “game” the real time deal system to extract savings. Wednesdays may replace Friday nights as restaurant night. People will wait to buy tickets to concerts, sports events or theater if they know the program doesn’t have popular appeal, and set up alerts so they’re notified of the opportunities. Groupon (and inevitably other deals systems) uses a simple method to deliver deals by having the user click on the “I’m hungry” or “I’m bored” button to check on real time deals geolocated near where they are. Spontaneous purchasing is exciting; everybody loves the feeling of instant gratification of a bargain and doing something fun at a moment’s notice.

Just as Groupon has instilled the “never pay retail” consumer culture that merchants hate, real time deals will instill a “never buy early” mindset that merchants will hate more. Yet, our society is adapting to real time and I expect the new consumer behavior will embrace late buying because advanced planning is such a hassle with cancellation and substitution (discovering there’s something better to do at the scheduled time) risks. It’s simply much more efficient to, say, confirm your travel plan a day or two before a planned event than to confirm the plan a month ahead only, particularly if pricing is essentially the same.

2) Paradoxically, real time deals can also encourage advance buying for seasonal services.

Tax accountants are far less busy in January than April. Consumers purchasing cars and other large ticket items will often spend weeks or months to make a decision. Christmas trees can be enjoyed longer if offered as a deal during Thanksgiving weekend. Time limited deals can force consumers to stop procrastinating and get things done while pricing is cheap during merchant off times.

Social commerce won’t be just the playground of Internet giants Groupon, Google and Facebook. White label social commerce platform providers will allow any publishing entrepreneur to easily build social buying applications.

In my previous post, I discussed how the success of social commerce hinges on media distribution – how to get social deals noticed by consumers. For startups, it’s now challenging to build a vanilla Groupon clone in cities where Groupon and other competitors have market share simply because the markets are already mature. Nevertheless, this is not the social buying end game; social commerce is a blue ocean that will spawn opportunities. I’ll be delineating these opportunities on Daily Deal Media.

The next stage of social buying will be the development of niche categories. For example, golf is a perfect “Groupon-able” item:

• Tee times are perishable, ideally every hour should be booked.
• Golf courses in the Sun Belt need customers all year round. In colder climes, courses need customers in early spring and late fall. Golfers will purchase a deep discount greens fee coupon that expires on May 31 on the off chance the weekend weather is nice (San Francisco has been warmer this January week than it usually is in July)
• Golfers are enthusiastic about their hobby. Hook them on discount greens fees, and get local sporting goods stores to offer discount equipment and balls.

Finally, niche group buying can be localized. I expect a number of regional / state / local golf social buying systems to launch across America because there are low barriers to entry. A deal syndication marketplace will evolve to expose an inventory of golf deals that can be shared across these systems. Organizations like the PGA could become involved in branding.

Here’s a list of niche social buying opportunities with examples:

Thematic and cultural

• Mothers’ groups and women focused services (Plum District, Juice in the City)
• Teens (surprised not to find any)
• Men focused services (Thrillist / from Yipit blog)
• Cause funding services (Causeon)
• International (Exclusively.in)
• Ethnic groups (JDeal for Jewish)
• Professional businesses – real estate, legal, accounting
• Green (Gathergreen)
• Adult services (Exoticdeals)

Product

• Electronics
• Software (Appsumo)
• Beauty (Beautylish)
• Beer, wine and liquor (Daily Wine Deals)
• Luxury goods (Gilt)
• Clothing / kids, women, designer fashions (Beyond the Rack)
• Etsy modeled hand made and vintage products
• Houseware (Housewaredeals)
• Books and eBooks
• Jewelry (Sharkstores is building a product based portfolio)
• Watches (Chronoshark)

Expect brand retailers like BevMo or Pottery Barn to develop social buying systems.

Sports

• Golf / mini-golf (GroupGolfer, Golfon)
• Winter sports, ski resorts
• Sailing and water sports
• Sports and health clubs
• Fishing
• Bowling
• Billiards
• NASCAR and racing
• Go carts
• Sporting goods

Travel & Tourism

• Travel deals – (Travelzoo)
• Theme parks
• Casinos and gambling
• Local things to do / bookings / events (365 Things to Do Austin Deals)
• Vacationing, tours, ballooning, sky diving
• Wine tours

Hobbies

• Classic hobbies – coin and stamp collecting, comics, trading cards
• Restaurants and foodie (Restaurant.com)
• Beer & wine (Daily Wine Deals)
• Home and garden
• Music
• Musical instruments
• Karaoke
• Gaming and social gaming

Resources: Yipit deals directory, Daily Deal Media deals directory

This article was originally publishes on Daily Deal Media January 28, 2011.

This article is posted by Mark Armitage, Director of Marketing Communications for Socialshopping.com. The landscape for local social marketing opportunities is expanding rapidly, and he provides an overview.

For local business owners, whilst daily deals sites like Groupon and LivingSocial can drive large volumes of new customers, the profitability of running an offer through them can be questionable. By the time they’ve offered the original discount to attract customers to their store and given the deals site its cut (typically 40-50% of the coupon’s face value), businesses can find that their profit margin is low or that they’re even looking at a loss leader.

So what are the alternatives? Here are some other solutions which savvy business owners can use to drive customers online without breaking the bank:

Facebook – For consumer-facing companies, generally speaking it makes sense to use Facebook to promote their business (there may be exceptions if the service they provide is of a personal nature like, say, funeral services or financial advice).

It doesn’t cost anything to create a simple fan page and post a message at least every few days, but it’s a great way to interact with existing customers and to spread the word about the business to others. Business owners should be sure to include a link to their Facebook page on their website and any printed marketing collateral which they use.

If the business has a physical location, they should also create an entry for it on Facebook Places. Specifically designed for mobile devices, it gives the option to merge a Facebook Place with a fan page or to offer promotions using the Places service independently.

Twitter - Like Facebook, Twitter’s key benefits are that it’s free and an excellent tool to interact with existing and prospective customers. The company is also beginning to offer trend analysis for certain geographies, and as it ramps up, local targeting will become a more prevalent part of Twitter’s marketing proposition.

YouTube – YouTube and other video sharing sites can be a great way for businesses to convey their company’s personality and stand out from the crowd. It won’t work for every type of business, but again it’s free to create a basic YouTube channel and to upload clips.

You don’t need to try anything too clever or have an advertising degree to make this work. For businesses which involve manufacturing goods or preparing food, they can shoot a video to show customers how the process works, whereas office-based companies can try giving them a tour of their building or a weekly or monthly news bulletin from the staff or CEO. As with Facebook and Twitter, businesses which have a YouTube channel should be sure to tell customers about it both in person and in any other online or offline marketing sources which they use.

Google Maps – Google Maps is a really simple tool for businesses to create a placement on and, unlike the previous examples I’ve mentioned, doesn’t require a lot of maintenance once they’ve set it up. By adding photos and tags to their listing, businesses can ensure that whenever people search for their product or service in their town or local area, their location shows up. Doing so can reap surprising dividends, particularly if what they offer is fairly niche – say, a family guesthouse, or a shoe repair store. Companies can also add items such as coupons for customers to print out and bring to their premises.

Google’s analytics information for Places listings is also easy-to-understand but helpful to business owners, showing them what people are searching for when they find them, where they come from, their interests and so on.

Business directories and review sites – Local business listing sites such as Yell in the UK and Manta in the US are essentially the online equivalent to the thick directories which land on your doorstep in many cities. The key difference, though, is that as well as allowing them to provide and maintain an entry for their business, many sites allow users to post their own reviews of them, which employees should monitor and respond to where necessary.

For businesses such as restaurants or accommodation services, there are many specialist directory services. Sites like Zagat for restaurants or Agoda for travel can be great traffic drivers.

Social shopping sites – Not all sites dedicated to retail have price at the centre of their proposition. As local businesses tighten their belts and realize the limitations of daily deals and voucher code sites, a new generation of sites is beginning to emerge which combine the interactivity of Facebook and Twitter with features specifically geared towards shoppers like personalized offer feeds.

This is what my company is trying to achieve with Socialshopping.com. This is definitely a trend that local business owners in particular should watch out for, as the best of these sites offer a chance to market their business as they wish without the hefty commission charges.

Mark Armitage is Director of Marketing Communications for Socialshopping.com, a new online shopping network and community which brings together thousands of shopping fans looking for the best tips and bargains both online and where they live.

Contact Mark at mark@socialshopping.com.