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The Perfect Local Media Company in 2014:

A Composite Sketch

Sebastien ProvencherCo-founder, Praized Media

sprovencher@praizedmedia.com

Social Media: 2004-2009

Maturity of the blogosphere

Arrival of social Yellow Pages (Yelp, Qype, TrustedPlaces, etc.)

Arrival of social news (Digg, Reddit, Mixx)

Explosion of social networking (MySpace, Linkedin, Facebook, etc.)

Growth of real-time media (Twitter, Friendfeed)

Can We Extrapolate Future Local Media Features?

Social Media Landscape

Activity Streams

Display internal and external activities, some automated, some human, in a reverse chronological order

Aggregation of activities, content and reviews

Enabling interaction on the activity stream is important (like, comment, share)

Identity System & Social Graph

Leverage an existing social graph with a friend system (synchronous or asynchronous)

Status Updates & Real-Time Conversations

Enable status updates and conversations between users & merchants. Don’t forget conversation threading.

User Content

A basic social building block: ratings, reviews, comments, blog posts, citizen journalism, etc.

Trends & Top Lists

Trending topics/filters/lists will be needed to organize content and cut through the noise

Geo-Localisation & Hyperlocal/Neighborhood

Automatic detection of location is fundamental, maybe to the neighborhood level but is there enough content

in smaller areas?

Questions & Answers

Internet users have a lot of questions and search engines don’t have all the answers.

Distributed Content, Features & Business Model (API, RSS)

The Web is fragmented. You need to deportalize your content and business model and integrate yourself

where local conversations are happening

E-mail

Thought e-mail was gone? Think again. Useful to provide incentive to come back to your site.

Reward Systems

Human behaviours can be influenced by reward systems. "Reality is broken. Why aren't game designers trying to fix it?" - Jane McGonigal

Check-in

Checking in is now a required feature for

mobile local apps

Sharing and Short-form URLs

Sharing is a key social feature and a short-form URL is now needed to share in Twitter

Community managers

Image source: http://www.pisitoenmadrid.com

Not exactly a feature but a requirement nonetheless. Humans are needed to manage your community.

Summary

Many interesting new social features

Did I forget any?

Does this create a compelling local media story?

Thank You!

Sebastien ProvencherCo-founder, Praized Media

sprovencher@praizedmedia.com

http://blogs.praized.com/seb

Twitter: @sebprovencher