A Fuller View

I’ve been following some of the reports and post from the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media: 07 conference being held out in LA this week. The Local Onliner, Screenwerk and Praized should give you a good flavor of the event.

The Kelsey Group Conferences are high quality and always worthwhile. They are great for business, learning and networking. However, I was reading this post on Screenwerk and it struck a cord with me. I’ve been to a few ILM and other TKG conferences over the past few years but agree that perhaps more on how than why would be good. As someone who has grown up online (vs. coming from a more traditional or offline publishing background) I would even push that statement a little further and say there needs to be more detail into what is working, what is not working and what are the challenges in the local space.

So, I had a thought that maybe it’s the size of the event? I mean no disrespect – TKG events are premier conferences, please attend if you can. However, a bit like social networking (ie, once to big or to general, people look for smaller more elite networks etc) maybe some smaller or even off the radar events are where more in depth and serious discussions are happening and the firmament is starting to brew up some new ideas and innovations? I am sure many of the offline discussions and smaller side meetings at ILM are truly interesting.

I am helping to organize a small but high caliber Local Search Summit here in Europe next week. This will be the 2^nd event this year (the 1^st one was in Munich in April, perfect place great weather and of course beer gardens) and so far they have been largely self organizing. I can’t list the participants at the moment, but can tell you we are meeting in another city famous for beer and that we have 7 top tier publishing groups joining.

The groups attending are generally multi-national and diversified in terms of owning yellow pages, newspapers, classifieds, TV, radio, online and mobile properties. The geographic coverage is more than 20 countries in EMEA and Asia-Pac. The unifying theme is all these companies are committed to online/digital and are using local search to help drive and unify their online strategy. Here is a draft list of topics to be discussed (below) and as you can see there is a significant focus on advertising.

Local Search Summit – draft agenda:

• Local Advertising: what’s working and what’s a challenge
• Advertising: the network oppportunity, ad exchanges vs. ad marketplaces
• The future with mobile and pay-per-call
• SEM Platforms for Local Media
• Mapping
• Semantic Search and Contextual Search
• Local audience. Global language. How Search is extracting context out of confusion.
• The role of directory companies in local search
• The impact of UGC and social networking on Local Search

I will report back from the Summit with some observations and hopefully some new insights in mid-December…