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Thoughts from SMX
By Matthew Berk | October 2, 2007
Am just back from SMX Local & Mobile in Denver. Chris Sherman and Greg Sterling put together a pretty fantastic show, with content that balanced high-level industry insight with discussion of pretty detailed tactical issues, as well.
The day 1 keynote was by Michael Jones, CTO for Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Local Search. It was absolutely thrilling to see the broad range of innovation that’s going on at Google when it comes to thinking about what “place” can really mean. Frankly, it’s humbling to get a glimpse into that world and then head back to the weeds. Thankfully, Michael framed his talk with a great reminder that we all need to think big as much as we can (井底蛙之見).
To help convey the spirit of place, Michael argued over and over, you need to work two axes: broad views to demonstrate context, and narrower views to drive relevance. For example, a Google Earth view of Darfur that shows destroyed villages as far as they eye can see, interspersed with drawings made by surviving children of the actual devastation they witnessed.
To put Michael’s point another way, getting local is about the projection of the axis of context onto the axis of relevance, against the ground of explicit geospatial relations between things. I’m going to do more thinking about that, so stay tuned.
From my panel, ‘Introducing the Local Search Engines,’ I can report a few other interesting bits: The first was a goodly sum of talk about how fragmented the local advertising market is, for both marketers and local advertisers alike. The question to the panel (i.e. to the industry), which I’ll repeat, is “what are we doing to simplify things for the advertiser”? We still need to answer that question.
Greg Sterling started the session off with a bang, repeating an argument he’s made elsewhere: local is important because it’s about spending money. My point, which I’ve been saying since 2003, is that if local is to live up to its fiscal promise, we need to provide products that help consumers decide where and how to spend their money. Simply providing lists of businesses that will take your money is not sufficient; we must help folks make better sense of where to allocate ever large amounts of their local offline spending.
To follow the money, as Greg puts it, local search needs to creep to the upper right on axes that look roughly like this:
Put another way, local search isn’t merely about finding the nearest fish market; it’s about selecting a contractor to remodel your house. Think of the level of consideration involved, and then fold that back on the opportunity to turn searchers into leads and then paying customers.
Topics: Events |
October 5th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
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