I had a lot of fun this week reporting a story about PremierGuide’s new functionality. Though the new features were interesting, what was much more fascinating to me was the trend toward integrating social networks and local search platforms.
I spent a lot of time talking about this with PremierGuide President and CEO Malcolm Lewis and the Kelsey Group’s Greg Sterling. Lewis talked about his wife’s interest — when making purchasing decisions — in obtaining the opinions of her Palo Alto/Menlo Park Mother’s Group. (Why am I completely unsurprised this group has a Web presence?) He outlined a scenario in which his wife could filter local search results based upon the recommendations of other mothers in the group. This idea makes complete sense and absolutely serves an important consumer need. (Note: the PremierGuide demo site is at loqal.com)
Sterling pointed out other sort of under-the-radar companies based upon this concept, like Judy’s Book (which he said was founded by the same person who started Abuzz, which was later sold to the NY Times) and InsiderPages.com, an idealab company. There’s also local-i, which we wrote about in ClickZ News a while back. (Former Jupiter Research analyst Matthew Berk is involved in this one. Thanks, Niki, for the tip.)
Needless to say, achieving a critical mass of regular users and reviewers is critical to the value proposition. Yahoo! is working on this. Note today’s blog entry about Yahoo! Local, which exhorts users to submit reviews:
We think merchant and user communities can be very helpful in providing fresh, accurate content.
To that point, a way to help build out the content on Yahoo! Local, is to submit a review of your own, like my eloquent write-up on Sal?s Pizzeria in Mamaroneck NY.
Not only have we gotten a ton of restaurant reviews ? people are submitting reviews on just about anyplace or anyone. I?ve seen reviews for dentists, auto repair shops, even the local dry cleaner. We?ve received thousands of reviews already, and in general, they?ve been very informative.
Yahoo! obviously has a good chance — because of its sheer volume of traffic — of getting these user reviews rolling along. Super local players, like local newspapers or yellow pages players (PremierGuide’s target audience) have a good chance here, too, as users are accustomed to going there for information about local merchants. Craigslist, needless to say, has a very loyal audience and a lot of user trust. How will this all play out? Don’t know… just watching and waiting and continuing the conversation.