I had the pleasure of presenting the road map of Voice Places to our VVM Editors as a group this last week. I am fortunate to be working with well known brands like LA Weekly, SF Weekly, Denver Westword, Phoenix New Times, Village Voice and many more. These are cultural icons in these cities. They were local authorities before the word “hyperlocal” was ever conjured up. I define these editors and their teams as “local legacy.They are a trusted source not afraid to review the good, the bad, and the straight up ugly in our cities. They take pride in their unbiased reviews of restaurants, music, events, and cultural happenings, as they should. When I took over as the new Community Architect for Village Voice Media, I was excited to work for a company with so many award wining content masters as well as brands with this local legacy. I was particularly interested in one of their newer projects Voice Places. I spent two years leading the product development of GannettLocal. So I was obsessive about local search. Connecting this local legacy content with local discovery in these cities was exciting to me. And after the last two months, I have never been more excited.
Local reputation of SMBs matter. In the last two months we have seen powerful Zagat integration to Google’s local search results and a partnership forged with Bing and Yelp. In addition to this massive shift in local search, Google pulls the plug on Google Places and continues to shove Google Plus down our throats.
So much for your investment in Google Places “mom and pop” shops.
Along with these shifts Google announced more Panda updates, more Penguin updates, and shifts in local search with the Venice update in the last few months. Man, if I was a small and medium sized business, I would throw my hands up in the air and ask, “what’s next?” With limited marketing dollars, where does one focus their “get found” strategy.
Well Fritz Lanman thinks he has the “what’s next” with Livestar. Livestar was released to the Apple store this weekend. His goal, to blend local reviews, your social circle, and professional critics all in one app.
While I was in San Francisco this weekend, I had time to play with it. Some things I took away form this experience:
1) Four buckets of local search into one app. “Trusted influencers”, your personal network (curious if this becomes too spammy), professional reviews, aggregation sites.
2) The ability to add your own source of professional critics is interesting. Especially from my point of view with 13 quality legacy brands who do this day in and day out. The question I ask, what sites do you depend on for professional reviews, and would you add it as a source to a new app or would you continue to go to your trusted source? Are these sources “portable” during local search?
3) I find it interesting the Fritz & company call Yelp and TripAdvisors as aggregation sites. Does this mean the closer connection to Google and Bing gives less authority to the separate communities of these groups? For TripAdvisor, I can get that… but does this mean the Yelp Elite are now a tool for search engines more than before? Do you consider Yelp an aggregation site or quality user generated content?
Overall great concept. I feel the UX is very confusing and potentially spammy to the user. Is this another Localmind with a layer of professional content?
One thing is clear, the local search game is getting more complicated. Reviews and reputation can come from everywhere now days. Even a contact in someone’s iPhone via Livestar. As the land shifts in this game, I still believe local trusted content is what will dominate. That is why I work with legacy local brands.
The rules in local discovery has never changed. Reputation matters. The tools have. As competition to be the go-to-local-search leader in this space, local trusted content will always dominate.
Keep an eye on Voice Places. We have some great things happening around this platform. After meeting with the editors this last week, I have never been more excited about what we can build.
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