I went to see the Mariners last week with several friends, and through Twitter we discovered that we were sitting just a few rows away from Brad Nelson, the guy behind the @Starbucks twitter account.
This is a result of local relevance, which is totally different than topical relevance. On the internet, you’re not automatically confined to geographical space.
It used to be that if you opened a business, you and your clients were subject the laws of physical space: if you wanted to serve customers outside a general geographic area, you had to either open up another store or go into the mail-order business.
If you open a business online, there’s no inherent geographical limit for who can reach your site. This means that you can go for topical relevance in your product instead of local relevance. Subject that used to be the province of national publications are suddenly up for grabs. Why not be the word-wide expert on medical research and innovation?
Just remember that you can’t do both at the same time. Either your audience is topical, or local. Try to do both, and you’ll dilute yourself.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I disagree on your last point, Jason. I think there’s a place for topical and local relevance in the same site.
Important local information often gets lost or buried on niche sites with no geographical boundaries. Users and advertisers also may find greater value in making offline connections that are both topical and local.
At least, that’s my theory. It’s one of the reasons I launched Northwest Navy News. There are lots of other national sources for news, resources and social networking related to military families. I just felt like it was tough to find the information and make the connections that matter here in the Puget Sound area.
I have a feeling this is true of other topics. Just because you’re not confined to a geographic space online doesn’t mean that kind of relevance for is lost for people with shared interests.
Elaine – I think you’re right. What I had in mind when I wrote that the problems with “inclusive” targeting.
So, for example, there’s a market for people who want to hear about Seattle news, and there’s a market for people who want to hear about Microsoft.
You CAN build a news property around people who want to hear about Microsoft news relevant to Seattle (excluding those who want news about “Seattle, but not Microsoft” and those who want news about “Microsoft, but not Seattle.”)
By contrast, I think that if you try to serve all FOUR groups at the same time, you dilute your content; people who want to read about Seattle, but not Microsoft, will abandon a news outlet that writes about Microsoft, even though they ALSO write about Seattle…
Did that make sense?
That definitely makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.