Today I am excited to announce that BIA/Kelsey has greatly enhanced its focus on social media to include dedicated coverage on our Local Media Watch blog and a new Continuous Advisory Service called Social Local Media.

BIA/Kelsey Analyst Jed Williams and BIA/Kelsey Associate Andrew Shotland, a.k.a. the Local SEO Guy, are teaming up to lead our coverage of this fast-growing and complex marketplace.

As you’ve likely read here or elsewhere, there are some astounding facts underscoring our decision to invest in social: More than half a billion Facebook users, Twitter’s exponential growth and, and perhaps most important, the millions of SMBs that are turning to Facebook and other social media platforms to acquire and retain customers.

Our aim in initiating coverage of social media is not to overwhelm you with data, but rather to help you make sense of this fascinating and important market by offering deep analysis, thoughtful insight and grounded recommendations.

So how will BIA/Kelsey approach its social local media coverage? We’ll do it by focusing on two central sets of questions:

1) “How is the social local media landscape evolving, and what are the implications for various players in the space?”

2) “As a media company, agency, SMB, etc., how exactly do I do social?”

The companies we profile, the trends we study, and the analysis we offer will center on answering one or both of these questions. As a result, our social-related blog coverage will assume a variety of forms. Predominant among these will be news-analysis — what’s happening, how does it change the social local landscape, and what are implications for our various constituents? We will also offer case studies, data synthesis, executive interviews, op-eds and other approaches to understanding this evolving space.

Your input and engagement with us, our analysts and each other will be a key ingredient in our serving up the best possible coverage of this dynamic and rapidly changing marketplace. As Jed and Andrew lead our rollout of this exciting new coverage area, they will need your direct and constant feedback to evolve the direction and emphasis of Social Local Media.

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At ILM:10, SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff revealed that his fleet of brand-based online sports communities is now experimenting with high school sports through the launch of a Washington, D.C., trial site (part of DC.SBNation.com) that will “test if the model scales to that level.”

The competition in the digital sports space — with CBS, Comcast, FOX, Yahoo and the ubiquitous ESPN all locking horns — is as intense as the passion of the fans whom these networks covet. That’s exactly why Bankoff has taken SB Nation down an explicitly different path, one that doesn’t try to roll up individual sports communities into larger groups, but instead embraces digital fragmentation by acknowledging that the “Web is topical” and then building 300 different brands around individual teams, leagues and regions.

The crux of the network of blogs is community-driven content from paid bloggers and fan forums built around a “strong partisan focus on sports teams.” SB Nation’s bloggers’ ability to expertly weave a palette of interactive content (original work, social media, community dialogue) drives engagement with the brands, leading Bankoff to extol this as the “highest form of art online.”

As for monetization, don’t say “sponsorships,” a dirty word in Bankoff’s book because of the overt commercial connotation it brings with fans who view community forums as safe havens or private clubs. SB Nation’s value is not in selling, per se, but in “getting people talking about brands” naturally within the gates of the online community.

The company is not currently pursuing any paid-content tiers, whether premium information or gaming (fantasy leagues, sports games).

SB Nation faces ambitious obstacles to scale because of the aforementioned rampant fragmentation and the challenge of simultaneously serving several hundred brands. Bankoff is encouraged, however. He stresses that the latest iteration of the Web makes production and distribution much simpler. As such, SB Nation can add “new sites at low incremental costs and keep quality high.”

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TBD.com, the Washington, D.C., hyperlocal news site branding the online operations of Allbritton Communication’ WJLA-TV and Newschannel 8 under the TBD umbrella, is tabling its local ad network, citing limited advertiser interest.

The site currently has agreements with more than 200 blogs and local sites (up from 120 at launch in August) to link to their work from TBD’s home page. As an extension of this hub-and-spoke strategy, which blends original content with outside linking, TBD formed the ad network so that its sales force could leverage the reach of these content partners for bigger and more targeted buys.

Former TBD General Manager Jim Brady told BIA/Kelsey in September that the hope was that advertisers would see added value in delivering messages to wider audiences, but at geo- and contextually targeted levels (local sports teams or Fairfax County families, for example). At the time, three purely digital sellers were brought on-board to complement Allbritton’s 20-plus member TV sales force.

Early takers were the MLS soccer team D.C. United and the Washington Opera. But according to Steve Buttry, TBD’s director of community engagement, “the advertising aspect of the network has not taken off as effectively as the traffic and linking relationship.” TBD will now consider alternative approaches.

Brady resigned his post in early November after philosophical disagreements with management over future content directions for the site.

TBD is not alone in experimenting with community ad networks. Recently, KING-TV in Seattle, in conjunction with the Seattle Times, developed an online ad network in which the TV and newspaper sales teams market to mid-market clients and agencies across a swath of 28 western Washington blogs. It is part of Belo’s beLOCAL Ad Network, a division of belocalmedia.com.

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Since its origin as an exclusively online newspaper drawing together the work of dozens of community blogs and contributors, The Sacramento Press has since diversified well beyond its pure publisher roots, complementing its core with a local advertising network, a daily deals platform and an emerging social media consulting practice. As a result, cofounders Ben Ilfeld and Geoff Samek are rebranding the company as Macer Media (“macer” is Latin for “lean”). Ilfeld told BIA/Kelsey that it is a natural “evolutionary step” as Macer takes on the broader challenge of “building tools to support local and hyperlocal media ecosystems.” 

The Sacramento Press, the Sacramento Local Online Ad Network (SLOAN), Deal Ticket and social media services will all keep their current names, but will lump together under the Macer Media umbrella. Macer also unveiled formal plans to scale the SLOAN concept to the Bay Area in an initiative it is calling BAPP (Bay Area Publisher Partnership).

Ilfeld said the outgrowth of BAPP is a natural complement to SLOAN that allows the organization to expand its sales force to focus on “regional plays” with larger advertisers and agencies. Though an official number was not given, Ilfeld confirmed that more than 10 local publishers are partnering with BAPP from the outset. His ultimate goal is to “scale across California, region by region.”

SLOAN debuted at the beginning of 2010. Ilfeld noted that it is not yet profitable, but he is buoyed by the fact that the network is beginning to roll up larger campaigns ($2,000 to $4,000 per month) and attract a higher grade of advertiser (regional autos, grocery franchises and the NBA’s Sacramento Kings). SLOAN partners with vertical ad network platform Adify to supply a back-end system that allows for multiple levels of ad targeting (ZIP code, keyword, demo) and enables particular blog partners to opt in or out of particular campaigns.

A new wrinkle to SLOAN, introduced in August, is Deal Ticket, which is Macer Media’s iteration of the booming deal-a-day concept. San Diego-based Deal Current provides the white label for a simple widget to be implemented across network sites. Ilfeld and his team report 3,468 deal sales from more than 60 merchants since launch. The greatest successes have occurred with smaller businesses. In fact, he stressed that Deal Ticket is often offered up as an entry-level product for SMBs. They can then move upstream to sponsorships or other ad products in Macer’s portfolio.

The fastest growing arm of the business, however, is Macer’s consultative social media practice, which conspires with both SMBs and regional agencies to help brands build, tighten and burnish their social presence. With agencies, the work is often more specialized (tweaking existing social assets or running one piece of a multifaceted campaign). Macer CFO Anil Sinha shared that October social media revenues were $14,452, almost 24 percent higher than all of the second quarter (see the graph below for a comparison of advertising sales on The Sacramento Press with non-advertising revenues from social media, Deal Ticket, SLOAN, etc.).

The notion of a media company repurposing itself from publisher to all-purpose advertising and services provider is nothing new. Canada’s Yellow Pages Group recently acquired a number of side businesses to unveil a digital advertising and marketing unit. However, the notion of a local, nontraditional publisher expanding and scaling as Macer Media has charts a path for similar community start-ups to follow.

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SB Nation (Sports Blog Nation) presents a fan-centric, highly verticalized (i.e., local) view of sports from dozens of bloggers. The site has completed a new $10.5 million “C” round of funding, pushing it past the $23.5 million mark.

The new round is led by Khosla Ventures, and includes Accel Partners and Comcast Interactive Capital, which had also invested in earlier rounds. SB Nation has also received funding from Allen & Co. and angel investors such as former AOL executive Ted Leonsis.

The site, which launched in 2003 and now has 290 topical sites and 21 regional sites, is run by former AOL exec Jim Bankoff. AllThingsD reports that the new funds will be used to boost SBNation’s technology platform, its bloggers, mobile, local, advertising sales and a few relevant acquisitions.

Bankoff will be interviewed on a one-to-one basis at the upcoming ILM:10 show in Santa Clara. Investor Michael Yang from Comcast Interactive Capital is also appearing at the event.

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As “the media capital of the world,” New York is rife with daily newspapers, high-culture magazines and lifestyle publications, yet Trevor Sumner says he had “no idea what was going on in my neighborhood. I couldn’t even keep up with restaurants in the East Village.” That lack of district-level information inspired NearSay, a start-up site whose stated goal is to create a “custom neighborhood paper” for readers.

NearSay, cofounded by Sumner and David Pachter eight months ago, is both local and vertical, an important first step in addressing the definitional concerns that bug many hyperlocals. Geographical lines are drawn by district (Downtown Manhattan, Chelsea), with tabbed content categories for each of the coverage areas (local news, restaurants, nightlife, family and more). Readers can opt in to specific content interests for their neighborhood.

The lean, seven-person staff includes no full-time writers. Instead, NearSay relies on an extensive network of bloggers and community activists (city council and community board members, for example) to do its heavy lifting. Bloggers are rewarded with promotion from the anchor site that not only points to their originating work, but also posts full writer profiles and incorporates a “most influential” ranking model to further incentivize. It’s part of NearSay’s mission to build a site “where you find people and content,” Sumner told BIA/Kelsey.

He stressed that a blogger advertising network, in the image of the TBD’s model in Washington, D.C., will eventually sprout, though it has yet to take shape. First business priorities are to build out premium listings through a self-service business directory and to capitalize on the booming online coupons trend through targeted neighborhood offers. This encourages greater personalization of deals and discounts (Tribeca families, for instance) and opens up additional inventory. Sponsorship of particular content and section features is another monetizable opportunity to be considered.

Then there is the challenge of a start-up site being discovered in New York. Just this month, The New York Times launched The Local East Village in conjunction with NYU, and as BIA/Kelsey’s Peter Krasilovsky detailed, Capital New York (currently online in beta) wants to make its mark with a hyperlocal site devoted to highbrow New York culture. Factor in the dailies, tabloids, NY Observer, New York Magazine, Time Out New York and others, and it’s a cluttered marketplace to be noticed in.

Sumner thinks that could actually play to NearSay’s advantage. “The issues is that it’s too cluttered. There is so much noise in New York. It’s a fundamentally different problem that we’re solving.” He hopes that a high recommendation score from early adopters, coupled with the reach of the blogger network, can spread the word about the site, which will expand to all of Manhattan later this fall and into surrounding burrows early next year.

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The Sacramento area is fast becoming Ground Zero for local blog networks. McClatchy’s Sacramento Connect, a project carved from The Sacramento Bee, is a content connector for 70+ area blogs and Web sites. It started incubating last summer and was fully in place by March.

Connect, which is subtitled “best of the local Web,” can be personalized for personal tastes a la Fwix. It primarily offers blogs more visibility and traffic, but there is no payment plan. Connect is also doing some cross-publishing based on the aggregated content, starting with a recently published Happy Hour Guide.

The Sacramento Press-related Sacramento Local Online Ad Network (SLOAN), on the other hand, is a network of 31 local blogs and sites powered by Cox’s Adify, a vertical ad network publisher. It is geared toward providing a cable TV-like regional interconnect among local bloggers to build up a base of advertisers. It gets more than 540,000 unique visitors and 7 million impressions, and pulls in a CPM listed at $18.

Many of the Sacramento area blogs apparently take part in both networks (and many still have not joined either — the Connect team has ID’d 400 Sacramento area blogs). “I think it is an important step for The Bee to take a leadership position in building a healthy local media ecosystem in Sacramento,” says Ben Ilfeld, cofounder of Sacramento Press and SLOAN. “It proves they are serious about collaboration rather than strictly competition.”

Ilfeld adds that his team is currently expanding the concept to the Bay Area, where the Bay Area Publishers Partnership (BAPP) is being developed. “The Bay doesn’t have the same level of clear leadership,” he says. “There is no ‘Sacramento Connect’ option for those publishers. I would like to bring the same technology [it is a meebo widget] to our publishers there on top of our ad network.”

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“A lot of the conversation in blogs now occurs on Twitter and Facebook,” says cofounder Sebastian Provencher. Using social micro blog sites — the “statusphere” — is “so much easier than blogging,” he says. Provencher adds that the new move is not a 180-degree change. The company has been taking half steps toward a Needium-like product since its launch, for instance, adding real-time search.

Needium will specifically offer consumers an outlet to search for explicit things like services and restaurants, or implicit things (“what’s fun in Boston?”). It also gives merchants the ability to respond with offers after their names are “surfaced.”

Ten to 20 categories are initially being launched, ranging from obvious travel-related categories to smaller ones, such as jewelers. A consumer might ask where to fix a broken watch, says Provencher.

Praized, a seven-person outfit based in Montreal, says it will continue to support its original blogs-based “social media stack”for enterprise clients such as YPG and Examiner.com. In addition to supporting licensees, it will also eventually develop a destination site of its own.

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The deal initially covers ten of Gannett Broadcasting’s 19 markets, including Atlanta, Washington D.C., Tampa, Buffalo, Sacramento, Grand Rapids, Little Rock, Portland, ME and Macon, GA. Gannett is keeping the DataSphere arrangement separate from Ripple6, its social media marketing unit, which was recently merged with PointRoll, Gannett’s rich media services company.

Seattle-based DataSphere, which received $10.8 million in funding and is partially owned by Fisher Communications, now has deals with at least five media companies and powers more than 300 local news sites. Among its media partners are Fisher, Raycom Media, Local TV and Hubbard Broadcasting. More than 1,000 SMBs are served by the Fisher sites in Seattle, Portland and Boise. The service had also been tested out on a limited basis by Cowles.

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I recently attended a webinar hosted by SalesBlogcast that featured social media company BizBrag. My reason for attending was to learn how small and medium sized-businesses can take advantage of social media. Based on our Local Commerce Monitor research, 32 percent of SMBs said they plan to use a social site, while 31 percent indicated they plan to place links or ads on social media sites. What previous waves of LCM data have shown is a high desire for social media but lower actual spending, indicating a pent-up demand to spend in this category. My theory has always been that social media is often intimidating to those less familiar with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging and posting news features. All these activities take time and a certain level of technical expertise to manage them while also running a business.

Enter BizBrag. CEO Brian Smith made it his mission to try to develop a single platform where SMBs can manage all their social media activities including e-mail marketing. “With so many social media outlets, with varying ways of inputting data and broadcasting information, BizBrag’s goal was to create an easy to use all-in-one platform. The goal is to help small businesses create ways to draw activity to their Web sites by creating more ways to be found on search engines via blogs, news articles, and social media posts.” Small businesses create a BizFolio that shows all their activity and provides a simple description of the company. The dashboard feature allows the company to create news articles and posts about their company showing them where they can post their information. Enter a news story (Called a Braggit), check a few boxes on where it can be posted, upload an e-mail list, and then hit submit.

BizBrag is two months out of beta and now gaining speed with 1,000 advertisers signed on since going live. Leveraging its social media expertise, BizBrag has been active in working its social media network to get the word out to SMBs. Smith pointed out, “if the pace of inquiries and new advertisers signed on in the last two months is any indication, we seem to have hit the mark with small businesses trying to figure out an easy way to start and manage a social media campaign.”

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