The Perfect Local Media Company in 2014:
A Composite Sketch
Sebastien Provencher
1 Co-founder, Praized Media
sprovencher@praizedmedia.com

Social Media: 2004-2009
Maturity of the blogosphere
Arrival of social Yellow Pages
(Yelp, Qype, TrustedPlaces, etc.)
Arrival of social news (Digg, Reddit, Mixx)
Explosion of social networking
(MySpace, Linkedin, Facebook, etc.)
Growth of real-time media
(Twitter, Friendfeed)

Can We Extrapolate
Future Local Media Features?
Social Media Landscape

Activity Streams
Display internal and
external activities,
some automated,
some human, in a
reverse chronological
order
Aggregation of
activities, content and
reviews
Enabling interaction
on the activity stream
is important (like,
comment, share)

Identity System & Social Graph
Leverage an existing social graph with a friend system
(synchronous or asynchronous)

Status Updates & Real-Time Conversations
Enable status updates and conversations between users
& merchants. Don’t forget conversation threading.

User Content
A basic social building block: ratings, reviews,
comments, blog posts, citizen journalism, etc.

Trends & Top Lists
Trending topics/filters/lists will be needed to organize
content and cut through the noise

Geo-Localisation & Hyperlocal/Neighborhood
Automatic detection of location is fundamental, maybe
to the neighborhood level but is there enough content
in smaller areas?

Questions & Answers
Internet users have a lot of questions and search
engines don’t have all the answers.

Distributed Content,
Features & Business Model (API, RSS)
The Web is fragmented. You need to deportalize your
content and business model and integrate yourself
where local conversations are happening

E-mail
Thought e-mail was gone? Think again. Useful to
provide incentive to come back to your site.

Reward Systems
Human behaviours can be influenced by reward
systems. "Reality is broken. Why aren't game
designers trying to fix it?" - Jane McGonigal

Check-in
Checking in is now a required feature for
mobile local apps

Sharing and Short-form URLs
Sharing is a key social feature and a short-form URL is
now needed to share in Twitter

Community managers
Not exactly a feature but a requirement nonetheless.
Humans are needed to manage your community.
Image source: http://www.pisitoenmadrid.com

Summary
Many interesting new social features
Did I forget any?
Does this create a compelling local media
story?

Thank You!
Sebastien Provencher
Co-founder, Praized Media
sprovencher@praizedmedia.com
http://blogs.praized.com/seb
Twitter: @sebprovencher