I’ve taken a bit of a blogging break due to moving and taking on a big project for an area business organization. However both of these activities have got me thinking about a few things that are very relevant to the conversational marketing theme I’ve been exploring.

Craiglist, local marketing and how it changes the landlord business

Both activities involved thinking locally rather than globally. Apartment hunting takes place entirely on Craigslist these days and this is a very good thing. Landlords don’t pay for listings in our area (they do in major markets, in part to stop scammers) and the listings can contain long descriptions and multiple photos. The old classified print ad model was based on paying per word so an apartment hunter was very limited in what you’d know before calling. Now it’s easy to screen out the dumps and get a feel for places before you contact the owners.

The net result of this local search mechanism is that landlords will be forced to clean up their places, upgrade and take better photos, a net win for the consumer and the community. After I found my new place, I mentioned it on Facebook and that I’d seen several nice units in the same building. Two friends contacted me for contact info so they could look. It turns out that the management company pays referral fees of $200- I did not know that when I posted. So with a few emails I may stand to make several hundred dollars and have some friends as neighbors. All via social media.

Skip the long strategic discussions, this is local and social

The other project is a large wiki site for a local business association- hundreds of pages covering Rochester’s downtown entertainment district with photos, video, mapping etc. (Yes, we do have a thriving downtown entertainment district with dozens of restaurants, clubs, theaters, galleries, museums, etc.) I was late to the game with the RFP process but got the project because of my social media experience. Two ad agencies were finalists prior to me but both lost when they came in with proposals that included a lot of strategic brainstorming mumbo-jumbo. The group of club and business owners were bewildered by this stuff.

My approach was to take available web 2.0 tools (Wetpaint, Flickr, YouTube and Google Maps) and show them quickly how we could organize a lot of information in a relatively short period of time at a reasonable cost. No complex strategy- my strategy statement was simple:

“The purpose of this site is to put Rochester’s East End on the map as a major entertainment destination in Upstate NY”

No brainstorming required.

Local is pragmatic and all marketing is local

The point in both of these examples is that social media must be approached with a great deal of pragmatism, particularly with projects that have a local component- and I’d argue that all marketing must have a local component. Whether I’m looking for a place to live or a place to dine, I’m not concerned about strategy and branding. I want information and input from peers.