We’re applying. Here is one of the key questions you’ll need to answer in their application, and our answer to it.

PLEASE TELL US ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE BUILDING OR INTERESTED IN. THE MORE DETAIL THE BETTER ABLE WE ARE TO MATCH YOU WITH POTENTIAL PARTNERS.

Our strategy group Brand into Media helps brands and good causes connect to consumers at a hyperlocal level. Over the past three years, I’ve worked on a project called The Breaking News Network, a national hyperlocal media network across 250 cities. In each city, we aggregate the best local media feeds and ticker tape local news across the social media. Our business model is not based on pushing ads at local merchants, a practice we believe alienates the business community, but providing a venue for the community to engage in social media. Each city is managed on the ground by social hubs in the community who benefits from the good will inherent in providing this service.

The Network partners with companies and brands to bring their services and products to the local markets. For example, we’re distributing this article you’re reading about Founderdating across 60 cities through our Social Marketing Channel, devoted to content that help local business understand social media. We use our Breaking News Twitter and Facebook feeds for distribution.

Interested in social marketing and entrepreneurship? See our latest article about @founderdating & apply for a date! breakingsfnews.com/founderdating-…

— Breaking SF News (@breakingsfnews) February 8, 2012

We’d like to participate in Founderdating’s San Francisco meetup on March 1 to find:

1) co-founders who want to build brand management businesses using the hyperlocal principles we’ve learned from and can leverage with The Breaking News Network. (Hint: our secret sauce is we can create new hyperlocal networks).

2) technology partners building local, social, mobile products who need channels to reach the hyperlocal sphere.

3) brand partners, particularly good causes, arts organizations and foundations, both national and local, to develop social media strategies to elevate their local presence using their existing chapter infrastructure.

Once you’ve applied to FounderDating’s meetup, think about applying to be a part of the Founders Network, a peer group of entrepreneurs.

If you’re a business, civic group, arts organization or good cause, and you’re actively using Twitter to share your community news, events, initiatives, or even reviews, we’ll automatically retweet your messages to our community follower base.

Why?

We firmly believe in the power of social media at the local level. Most of your daily errands, your business and your livelihood is really done within walking and driving distance. We want to empower you to be able to reach your local audience via our 300 Twitter feeds.

Again, we are community service media. We believe in Buy Local. We want to help our local causes. We will never charge you a cent for helping you get your word out, ever.

How?

You can tweet through our Breaking News Twitter feed (whatever city you are from) simply by adding our Breaking News Twitter handle (like @breakingsfnews) at the end of your tweet. And follow our Twitter feed @theBNN so we’re alerted to you.

The tweet will show up instantly like this on our Breaking News Twitter feed:

We’ll authorize you

When you send out a tweet to us the first time, it will not get retweeted automatically. We will do it manually.

We will check your Twitter feed. If it meets our standards of good local community content (no spam or self promotional Twitter history), we will authorize you to allow you to tweet through our Breaking News Twitter feed any time simply by mentioning the local Breaking News Twitter feed (like @breakingsfnews).

We will tweet back to you that you have been authorized. We use Grouptweet to facilitate this all for you and highly recommend them for developing your own collaborative Twitter system (easier to use than CoTweet and Hootsuite!)

Oh, and contact me at @pkitano or thebreakingnewsnetwork@gmail if you’re still unsure about these instructions.

Our Twitter feeds are managed by locals. We’re looking forward to helping you get your word out!

Among our first assignments with real estate brokerages was to explain to thousands of agents the new realities of social marketing; how to build real estate blogs and use social media to foster community engagement. By early 2009, the housing crisis was in full swing. Traditional real estate marketing did not work as buyers disappeared with the economic crash. Realtors (for those not in real estate, the word Realtors is trademarked by the National Association of Realtors, and is generally capitalized), in desperation, jumped en masse into social media, but could only parrot their old sales training by trumpeting “it’s a good time to buy” to an unreceptive, even hostile audience. We thought the best marketing strategy while the economy was crashing around all of us was to stop this “good time to buy” messaging and build trust with the community by positioning the Realtor as the community hub. We developed Breaking News in the spring of 2009 to test this idea.

Breaking News is simply social media sourced news that is curated and automated to ticker tape 24-by-7 the most interesting local media in a city. Local news organically builds follower bases on social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. Conversations happen; yes, locals like to engage with news.

We developed Breaking News to support the real estate community. The marketing model behind Breaking News follows the premise that successful Realtors have always had a stake in their community, as mayors, newspaper publishers or Chamber board members. Breaking News updates the concept by positioning the Realtor as social news hub, which puts them right in the center of where news reporting is headed. A few months after launch, Breaking News won the Most Innovative Media award at Inman Connect, a prominent real estate technology conference.

Here are five key features that made Breaking News an effective marketing platform for real estate professionals and other local business.

1) Realtors “own” their city or neighborhood, and are interviewed to make sure they understand how to leverage a media property for building community engagement. In many cities hundreds of Realtors compete for business within a few square miles, and geographical exclusivity has always been coveted as a critical competitive marketing advantage. Ownership also puts skin in the game, and Realtors developed Breaking News as an asset they could use over the life of their careers and beyond.

2) Breaking News automates local news curation and aggregation using RSS feeds of the best media, blog and social media resources in a city. The 24-by-7 ticker tape of news allows Realtors to do what they do best – network and engage with their community.

3) Breaking News is customizable to the owner and the locality. The system is built on WordPress so owners can customize the design and messaging. New news feeds can be added easily. A comprehensive updated tutorial, along with twice weekly webinars on social media marketing and community engagement, provides guidance for Realtors in developing Breaking News as a local media asset.

4) Breaking News is community service media. We’re disrupting traditional local publishing business models by showing local business how to use social media to market themselves instead of purchasing advertising. We offer access to Breaking News social media feeds to anybody who wants to have a broadcast voice into the cities and communities we cover. By providing this kind of tangible marketing and financial value to the community, owners develop beneficial community relationships that they are leveraged for their own business. We dub this “good will marketing”.

5) Owning a local media asset can propel owners into new business opportunities because it puts them in front of the local business community. Socially Now and Apsides Media Group  are two examples of offshoot businesses that were developed from Breaking News by owners involved in real estate. Many Breaking News systems offer local deals. We actively show owners how to develop these businesses as a commercial service to their community.

In sum, Breaking News revolutionizes local media by providing a simple to build construct that can make anybody a local publisher and ringleader. The Network affirms the idea that future of local media will evolve grass roots, from individuals and community groups.

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:

For more details on Breaking News, please attend our follow on webinar by registering at this link, or contact me by email

Slideshow of webinar:

Problems with Local News Aggregation Technologies

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick recently posed the question “Why haven’t neighborhood news technologies worked out?”

I sure hope someone can nail it. Give me the news about my neighborhood, please... I care about what’s happening in the neighborhood around me and I want to see the fabulous new technologies of open government data, online news syndication, social networking and data mining all put to service to fulfill hyperlocal news wishes and dreams I didn’t even know I had yet.

From the article’s comment stream, it seems news aggregators like Outside.in, Fwix, and EveryBlock have three problems:

1) Local news presented by algorithm isn’t customized to the needs of the reader and therefore, sterile and/or irrelevant.

2) Most local news is inherently uninteresting. Ever watch a local TV station and care about anything about the car wrecks, murders or city council meetings covered? It’s lower grade information that doesn’t enrich or improve our lives as much as the content we generally seek on the web.

3) Aggregated local news lacks the social element, whether it be real reporters or people in the community engaged in local discussions.

1. Local News needs manual curation

The news needs to be right. Fwix often reports irrelevant news; Rocklin is 80 miles north of Modesto, CA (see image)

Engines query for local articles via RSS but they require a human team to identify the best feeds in every city and continually update these feeds. Feeds can be sourced not only from mainstream media, but also blogs, Twitter and other social media links, and eventually Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and other geo-localized media sources as they attain credibility by reaching critical mass of local participants.

2. Local News needs more content

Again, it’s hard to produce content without somebody paying for it. However, there are new producers of local content that haven’t yet made an imprint as local media sources. Civic organizations, local companies and merchants like Whole Foods have websites and blogs that broadcast timely information people want to know about, but may not have RSS feeds for simple aggregation. Companies like Nozzl Media and DataSift are developing ways to aggregate and filter this kind of content. Finally, locals using Facebook groups, Yelp and Foursquare are documenting what’s happening in their city, and their reviews are starting to be included in sites like EveryBlock. People will eventually find where their friends are congregating and which stores are popular through the aggregation of these geolocational systems (see Checkinmedia image)

3. Local news needs personalization

Although some people may like crime reports for their city, all I really want to know about the 1/2 mile radius around where I live is 1) all the daily deals merchants in my neighborhood are offering, 2) what’s playing at the theaters, 3) the Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Safeway circulars, and 4) where all my friends are congregating around San Francisco. That’s it, at least for today. Once the content sources from deals services, supermarket chains and theaters, and geomedia are aggregated, this kind of personalized local portal becomes relevant to daily life.

4. Local News needs to be social

Readers are motivated to participate in social news for two reasons: visibility and content ownership. Just like yesteryear’s “Letters to the Editor”, readers comment frequently on mainstream media news sites like Huffington Post or LATimes simply because they know their input will get read by thousands. News aggregators (like EveryBlock, right image) have a hard time pulling in conversations simply because there is nobody to converse with!

To succeed in gaining participation, hyperlocal news sites need on-the-ground ringleaders in each city to engage their communities and promote participation. But ringleaders need compensation. Fwix and other news aggregators own every city and provide little incentive for others to own and grow content for them. We modeled The Breaking News Network as a kind of franchise that facilitates the creation of a local media resource by individuals and groups in a city, and gives them city/community ownership so they have vested interest to grow their properties.

Patch hires editors for each city who can spur participation in their community, but is currently burdened with a high expense / small revenue model that is under scrutiny by Business Insider among others.

5. Local News needs to be easy to read and digest

The popular Flipboard for iPad validates the concept that people like reading aggregated and personalized news in a newspaper format. Reading within familiar typeset frames is easier than perusing streams of news that characterize news aggregators like Topix or EveryBlock. There’s opportunities for aggregation and presentation technologies like paper.li to make it easier for news to be curated and read in this more reader-friendly format. For example, BreakingSFNews.com (image below) embeds paper.li as another way to read about SF news.

Groupon announced its new Deal Feed that allows consumer to customize and monitor and filter the types of deals and merchants they want to track. The Deal Feed works in coordination with the new Groupon Stores product so that consumers can “follow” the deals from their favorite stores. Yahoo! announced two weeks ago it was building an aggregated deal system with group buying partners including Groupon to present the most optimal deals for its users.

Social commerce is fundamentally answering the consumer question “where’s the deal?” Group buying systems are now being built to do three things:

Reference sources:

Evolutionary Product Development goes into Overdrive

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1. Deals will be everywhere

The “Deal” becomes the currency of local advertising because it is performance based, efficient for reaching the customer and isn’t burdened with the CPM-based campaign costs of traditional commercial or banner advertising.

2. The merchant cost for placing a deal drops to zero

Any merchant can add their own deal to Facebook Places free – see the Facebook Deal video. Groupon introduced their self service Daily Deal system called Groupon Stores only two weeks ago, and charges 10% of coupon value, a deep discount from the 50% fee they have been charging for their Deal of the Day promotion. At zero cost, running a deal becomes a no-brainer for merchants. Note that Facebook states they can reject frivolous or low quality deals so it can create a value-laden brand that can’t be dismissed like those junk mail coupon books we always throw away.

3. Deals = instant gratification

Facebook Deals immediately rewards consumers based on where they are. No need to print out a coupon beforehand. Every mobile app – Foursquare, Yelp, Groupon – will be forced to follow suit with a similar instant rewards program in order to remain relevant.

4. The “Check-In” becomes the proxy for the “Like” button

Simply put, the better the merchant deal on Facebook Deals, the more Check-ins it receives. The more Check-ins, the more exposure the merchant receives. Again, Yelp, Groupon and Foursquare will need to incorporate Check-in deals within their product offerings, but they will have a hard time competing with Facebook’s massive database of users.

Expect a lot of market adaptation from these mobile players to create business models that can coincide with Facebook Deals or work together with Facebook. For example, FourSquare can’t really charge merchants to add Check-in deals now that it’s free on Facebook. They may need to partner with other local deals services, i.e. Groupon or LivingSocial, to help promote their deals within an affiliate arrangement based on FourSquare check-ins (see next point).

5. Deal exposure and syndication becomes the value-add premium

Imagine the day when every local business has a deal up. How do they stand out? Groupon has created two tiers of promotion for their merchants that takes cuts of 30% or 50% of coupon value based on campaign reach:

Facebook is well equipped with targeted Facebook Ads to assist merchants in promoting their deals for a premium. Expect seamless integration of Deals and Ads in future Facebook marketing. Expect Yelp and other local ad-based businesses to create a similar tiered advertising model.

6. Deals open up affiliate opportunities

Everybody craves a deal. But the Deals landscape is very fragmented (anybody who receives loads of coupons and deals in their inbox will attest to this) and will become even more so with new channels like Safeway.com Personalized Deals and mobile rewards apps rapidly coming online (see points 8 and 9).

Deal aggregation systems like TheDealMap that expose every deal on a map and Yipit that emails a list of local daily deals to subscribers are positioned as deals portals to the consumer. Online systems that can connect deals with customers will be rewarded.

7. Local media well positioned for deal syndication and affiliate relationships

Local media outlets – TV, radio, newspapers – have been watching advertising dollars inexorably move online over the past decade. They now have the opportunity to leverage their local consumer brands to connect deals advertisers with their readership. The most innovative media companies will set up their own deals platforms that replicate what Groupon Stores is offering at premium pricing, or just work with Groupon Stores and share revenues.

8. Retailers are setting up their own deals platforms

National chains have the advantage of leveraging their scale to provide services local merchants can’t compete with. My local Safeway knows what I purchase through my shopping card, and can promote deals for items I normally purchase. Simply by clicking the “Add” button, Safeway automatically gives me the discounted “personalized” price without printing coupons.

9. Expect new mobile apps that provide instant discounts at point of purchase

Shopkick and Checkpoints are two mobile apps that provide instant rewards for walk-ins. Compelling the consumer to enter a store is simply an advertiser’s dream.

10. What about local businesses that don’t sell deep discount products?

Will Facebook allow accountants to provide discounted tax services? Probably. Retailers are only a small portion of the local merchant landscape. The new frontier for deals advertising lies in finding innovative and effective marketing methods for professionals, business to business services, and businesses that rely on lead generation, like real estate and auto sales.

We see a new trend in lead generation that connects buyer and seller one on one exclusively and transparently using variations of the Deals format. Most lead generation systems are based on subscription models or pay per lead that serve up leads amassed from capture sites. Consumers provide their contact information with no idea who will call them.

The new lead generation systems will provide an enticing “deal” from a specific company or business professional. More important, these deals are promoted or syndicated through appropriate channels that connect advertiser and customer. The key to the new lead gen system is functionality that allows the advertiser to transparently see who the lead is (it could be a Facebook friend already) and assess whether that lead is worth pursuing. If the lead is worthy, a fee is paid to the syndication channel where the lead was sourced. The new systems are performance based, and will contribute efficiency and far more certainty in the lead generation process in the same way the Daily Deal ensures every purchaser will be a customer for the advertiser.

The recent mainstream media articles demonstrating evidence of Groupon’s shortcomings (including last week’s article) are focused on the consequences of its massive distribution capabilities and non-local presence.

First there was the dodgy fake deals in Brazil, then there was a business owner saying offering a Groupon deal was the worst business decision she ever made, then there was the sketchy photography offer.

One Hyperlocal Solution

Local women’s groups have always had a commercial or community support function in society, and they could easily form group buying engines if they have a ringleader(s) and access to a couponing system. These local buying groups can mitigate the risks that Groupon has been dealing with.

• Deals can be sourced with local businesses from within a women’s network, much more easy now that everybody seems to be on Facebook. Local businesses will appreciate on-the-ground servicing from within their community as opposed to dealing with a Groupon tele-rep based in Chicago.
• Local businesses doing a coupon campaign with a local buying group limits the risk of an oversold offering that Groupon poses. A local buying group will also be more accommodating and flexible, allowing clients to experiment with their ads or run offers on a weekly or monthly basis. Getting on Groupon’s overbooked schedule can be a challenge.
• Fraudulent or unethical businesses can be weeded out simply because everybody in the local business community will know each other.
• The fees paid to a local buying group will likely be less than 50% of coupon face value fees that are generally paid to Groupon. Remember that coupons always reach the same local consumer, so in the long run it’s more economical to pay fewer fees.

Case study: JuiceintheCity.com

JuiceintheCity.com is a great example of a couponing system run by mothers in the Peninsula and South Bay areas of the SF Bay Area. Here is the story from co-founder and CMO Sarah Eisner:

Juice in the City is, in a nutshell, the softer side of Groupon meets Avon. We offer daily deals sourced for moms by moms. Our Avon-like sales force of moms possess local knowledge and are trusted sources for recommending local businesses. We tend to get the deals other deal a day sites don’t (like Cafe Borrone and Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park) because the moms representing JITC are actual loyal customers of local businesses, and potentially already know the owners of these businesses. They care about the businesses and about the experience they recommend to other moms.

Each deal is found and developed by one of Juice’s “Local Business Consultant” moms who creates “homey” ad copy that sells the deal through personal testimonial:

Juice in the City recruits their peers to act as their sales team to source deals.

It’s a grass roots employment opportunity that reflects how the recession changes the nature of work; we’re not working for a company any more, but a group, a cooperative. I found out about Juice in the City simply because a restaurant owner I know related the story of all these couponing services now going door-to-door for sales.

Future of Local Group Buying

The key to developing local group buying systems today is simply access to a group buying application system. This system includes:

1. the group buying application that processes the deals by credit card, fulfills coupon delivery and provides after market support.
2. Tutorials on how to market online coupons to the community (it’s much more effective if one already has a community media presence such as Breaking News)
3. Tutorials on how to sell deals to the community
4. Tutorials on how to create effective advertising

Item #1 is key because it’s the executing technology. The current phase of the group buying industry is surprisingly less than a year old, and there are very few plug and play applications for small business. The solutions can be expensive because more focus is being put on developing enterprise coupon platforms for media and media networks. Items #2, #3 and #4 might draw on the expertise and experiences of a solid management team. Although it seems that the future of local advertising might be every townie offering a coupon deal, I believe those who establish a community media presence will win out.

Related articles:

The problems with Groupon culture

The new hyperlocal opportunities that Groupon spawns