HoodFind^TM

…and do some of them even want to?

Although HoodFind has been received positively by the majority of businesses that quickly grasp the value and act on it, there are more than I want to admit of “mom and pop” shops, service providers, restaurants, etc. where there is no real desire to act on new tools that can really help them promote their businesses. Why? The reason seems to be threefold and represented largely by three different groups of local business owners – the Skeptics, the Dabblers and the Feet Draggers.

The first group, skeptical of the value proposition, are followers, not leaders. These businesses prefer to wait and see who else uses the tool, regardless of whether the service is inexpensive, free or clearly valuable. These business types will eventually pull the trigger, but only after the value of the service is reflected in the success of their competitors.

The second group is a mildly bothersome minority, but nothing to sweat over. Comprised largely of people that have wealthy spouses, partners or are “trust-fund babies”, they have a business in order to merely dabble in their hobby, and frankly don’t care about making, or even losing money, as long as the business makes them happy.

It’s the third group that is the most frustrating. These local businesses are in the business to make money and understand the value of the tool, but for one reason or another simply don’t move forward. By dragging their feet, this group shows why it’s clear that local search is in many ways the last great “holy grail” on the internet, and why a lot more than just technology and user-reviews are needed to inspire these businesses to become masters of their own destiny on the web.

I am declaring a necessary new term; Local Long Tail. It combines the terms “local search” with “The Long Tail“, a term famously coined by Wired’s Editor-In-Chief, Chris Anderson (from both his article and book of the same name).

Why is this such an important new term? First, a little background. You likely know that local search means finding a geographic location near you, but the “The Long Tail” is probably unknown to some readers. In a nutshell, the Long Tail Theory holds that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters as long as the store or distribution channel is large enough. The DVD-by-mail company, Netflix, is cited as an example of the long tail. Netflix customers who order more obscure or older DVD titles often outnumber those who rent the current blockbusters. Without getting into too much detail, the long tail is actually the colloquial name for a long-known feature of some statistical distributions also known as Zipf, Power laws, Pareto distributions and/or general Lévy distributions. Such distributions resemble the accompanying graph;

• “The Long Tail” ; The area in green is “the most common or popular” and the area in yellow represents the long tail, “the unknown or rarely requested”. However, the total area of the long tail is actually larger than the green area, meaning, the total number of items/things in the long tail outnumber the “body”.

So, here is my definition of the “Local Long Tail”: The number of goods and services available locally that would interest you - if only you knew that they existed - would collectively outnumber or exceed the goods and services that you currently buy.

The profound take-away here should be the idea that better content on the web through increased community involvement combined with better search technology may considerably alter your purchasing decisions in the near future.

I was recently asked by the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center at DePaul Universityto help give light to the term hyperlocal for an upcoming newsletter. Anxious to blab about a topic close to home, (after all, that word is the raison d’être, of this blog), I jumped at the chance to give a few brilliant comments about hyperlocal that would certainly earn me legions of admirers. Surely, someone who will read the newsletter would recite them verbatim on YouTube, where it would quickly earn 120,000 hits, winning the attention of prominent VCs in the process. So, what were the brilliant comments I gave in the interview? The truth is, I think I flubbed it, so here is my chance to mention three things I should have said:

Comment #1

Search can only be as good as the content that is provided on the web. Sounds entirely obvious, but it’s amazing how often this truism seems to be missed when you read up on search. You can have the fanciest search algorithms in the land, but if the corner shoe store doesn’t post on the internet (or anywhere else except for maybe a sign in the window) that they’ve just decided to have a weekend Cole Haan shoe extravaganza, then that sale is never going to appear in any search results.

Comment #2

“Hyperlocal”, therefore, must start with providing the necessary tools to help catalog and organize constantly changing information at the local level.

Comment #3

Finally, hyperlocal search is about increasing the zoom level of local information. In this context, search offers not only general, often static information such as location on a map and overall rating for a particular business, but it must absolutely address the constantly changing information regarding individual products and services offered by that business. For example, hyperlocal should help you to quickly find an answer on the web or on your cellphone not only to a question like, What’s the highest rated Italian restaurant within 3 blocks from me?, but also; What entrée of that Italian restaurant was just put on special? And is it any good?

So that’s what I should have said. But you know what? Somehow, I think I flubbed it again. My YouTube dream may be officially crushed.