This Week in Social Local Media

We had a big week at ILM East. The conference got under way with David Weinberger focusing on the use of social media by local businesses. In the post, Rick follows the keynote by Weinberger, the author and the senior researcher at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University. Gail Goodman CEO at Constant Contact kicked off the second day with a call for the industry to collaborate.

I did some live blogging at ILM East when Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz spoke about the ticket-selling service riding social media to about $500 million in sales this year.

We also gave details on ILM East panels from hyperlocal to Hotpot to mobile group-buying from Monster Offers.

Here’s what we uncovered this week out there in the socialsphere:

What We Know That You Should Know Too
Lisa Barone gets with Gregg Stewart, Dilip Venkatachari, Ryan Fritzky and Andrew Lovasz to discuss local and social. She packs the post full of stats and useful tidbits. The group shares numbers and insights such as nearly half of people searching on social networks select a local business based on consumer ratings and reviews.

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ILM East: National Advertisers and Local Search

Executives from two well-known brands talked about how they are attacking local, social and mobile in the panel, National Advertisers and Local Search.

Moderator Andrew Shotland walked the two marketing execs through a series of questions aimed at understanding how these companies are using new media options to support their brands and drive leads.

The panelists are:

Elnora Palms, director, local search initiative, U-Haul

Matthew Marko, marketing process manager, Progressive Insurance

Both companies work with large networks of dealers or independent agents, which means accurate data about their locations is a constant challenge.

Here are a few highlights from the dialogue:

How should vendors approach you?

Elnora Palms: “Come prepared. Have an understanding of what we are trying to accomplish. Know we are more than moving trucks. That allows us to say this is a business that seriously wants to partner because they have done the legwork.”

This year, where are you prioritizing your online marketing efforts?

EP: “We manage data in-house. We have centralized all listing and data management. Once data is clean, then we are in a position to look at ad words, getting ourselves out there, but accurately. That was the objective this year. Now partnering to make sure we are managing where we are listed. Our objective this year is a good selection of partners.”

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