Everything is Coming Up Hyper-Local

Susan Bardack is chief marketing officer for iZoca.com, a social networking website for individuals, groups and organizations. iZoca provides tools to help groups connect and share information privately, while also helping them to spread their message publicly.

Hyper-Local is the talk of the town these days. Although the idea of hyper-local has been around for awhile, it’s taking on greater importance as businesses and non-profit organizations struggle to incorporate social media into their marketing initiatives.

During a time where organizations are trying to work within tight budgets, they are reducing marketing costs and finding that using sites like Facebook and Twitter is not a “free” proposition. However, there’s a catch. I believe executives are realizing that even though they must reduce, they still NEED marketing, maybe now more than ever before.

Many businesses are struggling to utilize Facebook and other mainstream social networks to promote themselves. They are creating fan pages and then inviting their “friends” to join and find out more about who they are and what they do. The only problem; most of us get at least a few of these “fan page” requests each day. Maybe we open it up once, just to “like” the page, and then forget about it seconds later.

The main social networking sites basically let you “preach to the choir” but they make it difficult to reach an audience beyond those that have “liked” you or those you have “friended”. You can try to use your best magic to make them work, but when it comes to promoting events or sharing information with your geographic community the notion of a hyper-local social networking website makes much more sense.

Websites such as AmericanTowns and Patch serve businesses and organizations by allowing them to post their “happenings” to their geographic area. These sites allow users to be hyper-targeted with information they wish to voice to their community. Newspaper websites also fit this bill. Today I was reading The Statesman , which is a local online publication in Austin, Texas. It has lots and lots of local info (especially about the social scene), local pictures… local everything. These hyper-local websites are great content providers, but they aren’t as interactive as they could be. They have a few social tools including blogs and the Facebook “like” feature, but the emphasis is clearly about pumping out content.

I happen to be part of the next phase of hyper-local. For the past three years (can’t believe it!) I have been working to spread the word about iZoca.com to the U.S. and beyond. Well, right now, it’s just for groups and you certainly wouldn’t think hyper-local if you stopped by for a visit. But, in a few, relatively short months, we will be launching community pages which will allow groups (businesses, non-profits..etc.) to promote themselves to their local community. We believe we will be the first hyper-local website built within the context of a social networking platform. We are partnering with a CBS affiliate to deliver news, weather and sports to at least one community and hope to roll this feature out across the nation soon.

I think we will all be seeing more and more hyper-local content providers figuring out ways to play ball on the social media field. It is one thing to provide your audience with content, it is quite another to make that content come alive through discussions and other interactive features. I do believe everything is coming up hyper-local and I’m interested to see where it all goes from here. Now it’s your turn. Where do you think things are headed?

Here’s a list of hyper local websites wroth taking a look at:

• iZoca
• Patch
• AmericanTowns
• Outside.in
• EveryBlock
• Going.com
• NeighborTree
• DataSphere
• Topix

If you know of any others please let us know!