Category Archives: social community

Neighborhood Transparency

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Tom Skiba, the CEO of Community Associations Institute (CAI), posted a great article on neighborhood communication on the CAI blog, Ungated, last month. He highlights a community in Arizona that is making extra efforts to provide effective and clear communications to their residents.

Cottonwood Palo Verde at Sun Lakes is the HOA in question. The HOA spokesperson, Richard Hawkes, states that they will be working with local news publications in addition to their website, weekly flyer, and TV programming in order to deliver on their promise of open communication.

It’s great to see that HOA boards are so open to the next generation of communication tools. This is the same sort of transparency of communication that eNeighbors is promoting with our web-based service. The eNeighbors tool allows for 24/7 communication to and from any member of the community. We encourage open dialogue between residents and the board of directors. In addition, we take the typical website up a notch. Our service is private and secure. Only the residents of the community can view the site and participate.

More about all the eNeighbors features.

The Small Business Owner Dilemma

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Let’s say I own a restaurant, and I want to run a Google ad campaign where I buy keywords to show my ad to users within a 10 mile radius of my physical location… uhm, nice try.

Urban Mapping posted some insight last week that does an excellent job describing the issues surrounding local advertising — mainly how it fails miserably.

Sure, Google and Yahoo can attempt to deliver your message to a specific geographic region, but if you want targeting any more focused than the general metropolitan area, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.

The portals don’t really give clear data on how exactly all this “we’ll only show your ad to certain users in the country” thing really works. And speaking from experience, if you are local small business owner — good luck getting your keyword buy to only show your online ad to the local residents around your establishment. Most likely, you’ll waste most of your daily budget advertising to people that would never even consider visiting your business based on logistical distance issues, if nothing else. Ultimately, there is nowhere to go for effective online advertising if you’re a small business.

This is where eNeighbors will change everything.

eNeighbors is building the first “bottom up” hyper-local, social network based on where you live. This social network will then provide neighborhood-centric targeting for advertisers to spend their ad dollars more effectively. Instead of Val-Pack coupons, or the typical 1.5% return on direct mail flyers, these small business owners can leverage an online channel to message their service offerings while being confident that the people actually receiving this message live nearby.

Can you imagine the response rate on such a marketing tactic?! I make no predictions in terms of numbers or percentages (yet), but it’s going to be unbelievable! It will literally change the advertising landscape.

Get started by getting your neighborhood online today!

Next Net Neighborhoods

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I wrote yesterday about how we need to start creating the first online network of neighborhoods and in turn drive the value of local advertising for the businesses in our community. Here are a couple of guys already doing that.

citysquares.com
Ben Saren has created a great locally-based online community centered around Boston. Citysquares.com is a local company that brings together local businesses and their consumers. The philosophy is that you enhance local neighborhoods by strengthening the locally owned businesses. Local businesses are what make our neighborhoods unique. Citysquares.com is focused on providing rich, hyper-local content for urban and suburban communities.

Visit citysquares.com

Front Porch Forum
Based in Vermont, Michael and Valerie Wood-Lewis created Front Porch Forum to help people create healthy and vital community within their neighborhoods. Their mission: common sense and a growing body of research tell us that well-connected neighborhoods are friendlier places to live, with less crime, healthier residents, higher property values, and better service from local government and public utilities.

Visit Front Porch Forum

Neighborhood Art Show

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As I was returning my Netflix DVDs this morning, I saw this taped to my mailbox:

Let’s say that I was really interested in this event that was happening in my neighborhood. If I didn’t happen to have my camera with me (which I always do, but I would argue that I’m not normal), I would have to go back in my house and grab a pen and paper then walk back outside and write down all the details of the art show. Then I would have to make sure I didn’t lose that piece of paper for the next 4 days in order to attend the show at the correct time, location, etc.

See what a pain in the rear that was? Now, if my neighborhood was using the eNeighbors service (which we are working on), then these artists could post their art show as a neighborhood event, and not only would I have been notified more effectively via my neighborhood communications, but I would also have all the event info right there on the website and could easily reference it at any time. Furthermore, I could leave a comment on the event page asking questions about the show. I could even tell my friends next door to check out the art show on the site in case they hadn’t seen it yet.

This is the sort of local community activity that is at the heart of what eNeighbors is trying to accomplish. We want people to talk to each other, share ideas, create things and ultimately enhance their lives by feeling more fulfilled in the place where it matters the most — their home.

Social Technographics

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Forrester just released a new research report titled “Social Technographics” that talks about how consumers approach social technologies. “Social Technographics” is the term Forrester has given to what they are outlining as “six levels of participation” pertaining to the users of social networking sites. Charlene Li, one of the authors, has posted some overview info on her blog.

Here’s the breakdown of the participation types.

What I find interesting is that with all this social network craze going on lately, there is still 52% of online users that are inactive on the social space (see image). Furthermore, this group of “inactives” tend to be older women in the baby boomer generation. So, half of the online population isn’t even using social network sites… I smell some serious potential.

Now, I wrote previously about how eNeighbors should be focused on the boomer generation due to the fact that they are the primary homeowners in the neighborhoods we are trying to get online using our service. Let’s think about your average middle-class household in surburban America. Who is the “socialite” in the house? Which parent is running kids back and forth to all their activities most of the time? Who plans the parties and neighborhood events? The term “soccer mom” is not an accident. Additionally, our experience with our current customers shows that it is most often a woman who steps up to proactively get people involved with the neighborhood website and the communications that go along with it. Think about it, our tool is all about talking to people. It’s a pefect match.

If eNeighbors can target this demographic of inactive users (i.e., middle-aged women), an entirely new type of social network will emerge that will have soccer moms conversing online, texting, organizing parties and generally contributing vast amounts of user-generated content. And finally, we all know who really controls the pocketbook in the house too. What if these newly socialized group of women (who already shop online with Target and GAP) start to get comfortable with things like user reviews, ranking content and tagging sites? Watch out guys, the ladies might just knock you off the high-tech pedestal you’ve grown fat and lazy sitting on all these years.

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

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Screenwerk mentions eNeighbors today in a post on Hyper/Micro Local Initiatives. Screenwerk is the blog of Greg Sterling who is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence.

Elsewhere, Front Porch Forum also comments on the eNeighbors new service. Front Porch Forum’s mission is to help neighbors connect and foster community within neighborhoods through email forums.

Why Is eNeighbors Important?

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I was thinking about what it is that we do — Why does eNeighbors exist? What are our goals? Why did we create this web application? etc… You get the idea. Here was my conclusion — the most important thing about eNeighbors is that we promote, facilitate and encourage the following:

  1. Open communication
  2. Sense of place in a community
  3. Public safety

The goal of any social network is to create constant communication between its community members. eNeighbors has taken this concept and pushed it even further. Our goal is to get our users (neighbors) to interact with each other “offline” in the real world.

This interaction of online community members in the offline world is known as blended networking. One of the reasons MySpace has been so successful is that when it first started, it’s original members were drawn together by the music scene. Fans would connect online and then join up at concerts in person. This activity helped build a great sense of place around their favorite bands.

eNeighbors can accomplish this exact same scenario, but rather than a band being the central point of interest, your neighborhood is the primary focus. eNeighbors creates a great sense of place within your community by fostering constant communication and openness in resident conversations not only with each other but also with the board of directors.

The great thing about all this open communication is that it helps to build a safe environment for you and your family. Everyone in the community is informed about what’s going on, and the social awareness is very high. Additionally, in case of an emergency, you are able to instantly alert the entire community.

At the end of the day, we all want to live in a great location with high property values, low crime and good schools. At eNeighbors, we are doing our best to make this happen in your community. After all, we want the same thing for our families.

Learn how to get your neighborhood online with eNeighbors

Web 2.0 Expo 2007

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The 2007 Web 2.0 Expo is going on this week in San Francisco. Tim O’Reilly first coined the web 2.0 phrase back in 2005, and ever since it’s been hip and trendy to start a web 2.0 company. Hey, we did it too.

The expo really does have some great speakers and workshops for all levels of web 2.0 experts. Check out their live expo blog featuring video cam feeds from the PodTech guys.

Newspapers need to take a distributed approach

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It seems that everyone agrees – newspapers must innovate to salvage their business in the age of the Internet.

But what exactly should they do? Jeff Jarvis suggests on “CalacanisCast 23” that newspapers must adopt a distributed approach and accept the fact that they are no longer the single conduit of news that they once were.

But what does that mean – distributed approach?

In my mind a distributed approach means that newspapers would distribute their content across the Internet to whoever wanted to publish it, so long as it came attached with advertisements controlled by the newspaper so they could get paid.

You wouldn’t necessarily go to the washingtonpost.com or wsj.com, but instead, you would visit sites centered around vertical interests like the war in Iraq, or more likely, the latest celebrity gossip.

The content of these sites could be supplemented or entirely supplied by professional journalists. But the sites themselves would be run by individual publishers who could pick and choose what stories to run.

eNeighbors is one publisher that would be interested in taking advantage of professional journalism.

The content on our neighborhood websites is entirely supplied by residents, which would be greatly enhanced by professional journalists in local communities. And what do newspapers do best? Yep, local coverage.

For eNeighbors this would be a perfect marriage to bolster traffic to our site and provide more value to our users.

For newspapers, eNeighbors’ network of online neighborhoods creates a hyper-local platform from which they can distribute and monetize their content without the overhead that they have today. In addition, they could charge more for the advertising since the audience is much more focused.

I’m sure other website publishers would find professional journalism a valuable addition to their site too. Citysearch is another example of a website that could benefit from professional journalism.

As Jeff Jarvis said, you’ve got to ask yourself, “WWGD?” (What would Google do?)