linking online and local

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Linking online and localBringing people and business to wherever you are

Hallo, guten tag, Ich heisse Chris.

Tut mir wirklich leid, mein Deutsch ist nicht so gut, so jetzt, ich glaube, ich werde in Englisch zu sprechen.

I’m a technologist and consultant,

This means I make things, mainly on the web, sometimes not and also help people to think about new technologies and ways of being a business in our increasingly connected world.

I think the two go hand in hand well. Often it’s hard to totally see what technology is currently enabling without getting your hands onto and into it.

I’ve done lots of work around data for people like The Guardian and the UK government and I’m part of the founding team of a startup which is blending location, and local with data and metadata, which is the sort of service I’m going to talk about today.

There are big opportunities. Your customers, the people who everyone says are going online and spending more of their life online, are also very much in the physical world.

This will in my opinion always be a place where many transactions have to take place. What I want to talk about is how we smoothly move people from online to offline, and how local is one of the key interfaces for this.

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The Old World

In all cases we need to learn more about the physical world, in order to move over tried and tested and successful business practices.

Moreover we need to do it to look at how we best interface between local and online.

How to drive people to physical spaces and once they’re there, how best to engage them and take some of that engagement back online.

What we should be aiming for in my opinion is a continual back and forth where lines blur more and more.

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Key things to a successful local presence...

So what can we learn about local presences now... there are some simple basic rules that I’m sure you all know and I’m preaching to the choir about

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Findability

Location, location, location is still a good adage, and as we’ll see later it has an important online equivalent.

Wherever you are, you need to be found easily and recognised instantly


Footfall

You need high footfall for where you build your physical presence


Attractive, informative shopfront

You need an attractive and tempting shopfront, something that does one or many of the following

Entices

Engages

Informs

Teases

Invites


Enticing offers

If you’re selling you’ll want to bring people in with offers, either for things that they want or with offers that make them feel that you’ll be the place where what they want is both available and affordable

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SOVIETUK/

Social proof

Social proof is important too... when looking for quality, people will always want to eat at a restaurant with a queue, more so if their friends are in the queue


Events

Events are a good way of making a space where people want to come back regularly

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Friends’ recommendations and knowledge


Stock

You’ll want stock, both to be displayed, touched, looked at. It’s important for the customer to imagine how it would be if they owned one.


Friendly, useful, knowledgeable staff


Signage and signposting


Flow design

You’ll want the flow from seeing an item to knowing how to buy it to be easy

It’s the same in the new world

I’ve not run through these to teach you to suck eggs or to claim that I’m an expert on real world retail design.

When designing online services I like to spend time thinking about and studying what happens in pre-existing spaces that are successful and that people inhabit.

The more natural and familiar you can make the online experience and the more you can fit your patterns around those you see in the offline world the more successful and obvious it will feel. We’re still at a stage where more people have grown up without the internet than with it and we always need to be mindful of this.

This is why I spend time studying physical experiences, be they newspapers, or stores, or galleries or just the built environment.

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It currently feels hard to search around where you are or where you’ll be.

This statement feels very true though.

Almost more so than in the real world of a few years ago somehow.

Local along with many parts of life were more siloed then. The local papers, the local yellow pages, local knowledge. You knew exactly where to look

You were of course less empowered if the local knowledge you wanted wasn’t the local you lived in... I’m not saying we should burn the internet or throw our work shoes into it’s gears and machinery.

What I’m saying is that we need to think more carefully about how we do local search and make journeys easier.

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Finding a hotel in Berlin

One particular real world process I’ve been going through of late which feels harder than it should be is finding a hotel with good reviews near somewhere in a city I don’t know well.

Now I know this is better than it used to be pre-internet, but it feels very hard considering we’ve had the web for nearly 20 years now

It should be easy, thanks to great mapping I can now visualise the topography of where I’m going

And social recommendations from peers and people I trust make the randomness and pot luck go away

I have more information that is constantly up to date than I had before.

I can even check out availability, see pictures of the hotels and their rooms, I can translate the page with the click of a button and get a passable translation

But the information doesn’t pivot around location things.

The three window copy and paste shuffle

To find where the hotels are in relation to where I’d want to be I have to do a strange multi window copy and paste dance... I know which hotel chain I like, it should be easier...

Do they have availability? Is it close enough?

These questions are foremost in my mind, Berlin is quite big, yet not a sprawl like London, I’d ideally like to walk to where I’m working, am I far away from the train station where I arrive, am I on the opposite side of town to where I’m working and where the airport home is.

Some of these bits are very soluble with the copy and paste dance... but it could be so much easier with just some simple, efficient and cheap solutions

Why do travel sites not have map navigation?

Why do hotels not publish availability and pricing to maps?

It’s starting to happen, but it’s still not quite there... I can’t show you a travel version of what I’d love,

But I can show you this work of genius from Mike Migurski of Stamen.

When it’s easier to find out which the bad parts of Oakland around you are bad at specific times of the day for specific criminal offences than it is to find a hotel from a chain you like within walking distance of a part of Berlin you realise the future isn’t here yet.

You may be waiting for your jetpack or levitating hydrogen fuel cell powered car

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It doesn’t have to be that way anymore

Mapping, location, local are all within our grasp and through a lot of change and investment in the industry are relatively cheaply implemented.

But most businesses haven’t caught up yet to the advantages of online + local


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Why?

Geography online used to be hard.


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Flat static maps

Such as Streetmap from about 1998, pre Google Maps.

Back when maps looked liked pixellated unreadable versions of paper maps

Allegedly smart phones

This was the first phone anyone saw as being remotely messainic, until you actually used one. It was the future, but not really the one you’d hoped for.

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Geographical queries used to be hard

It used to be until very recently really rather hard and computationally expensive to run geo queries.


Out of date centrally curated data stores

And the centrally curated and often costly to buy gazeteers of data were often out of date by the time they were available.

It’s not surprising that local and geo were considered hard and that social was an easier route to user centricity.

Not the case anymore

Geo investments are beginning to pay off

Over the past few years many firms have made considerable financial and technological investments which have turned online geography and truly local services into not just a possibility but a tangible and lucrative reality.

Interactive maps as interfaces and surfaces for data

Interactive maps can now become surfaces for data and interfaces of exploration

HTTP://BLOG.JAGGEREE.COM/POST/926948818/FIRSTPLACES-A-PROTOTYPE-THING-FOR-DIGITAL-INCLUSION

Maps as a commodity

it’s so simple to create and embed scalable accessible printable geography now that we’ve made it a part of a new service we’re launching in October as part of Get Online week

Truly smartphones

Smartphones really are smart now

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Location detection in the browser

and location detection in the browser

HTTP://WWW.SIMPLEGEO.COM/

Geographical queries now SaaS

we can now buy geoinfrastructure from people like SimpleGeo, it’s rentable...

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Co-created and user/business self curated data

and we now have co-created datastores such as Gowalla, FourSquare and Facebook Places, which along with Google Places are starting to be semi-officially and officially curated and populated by businesses

ART FINDER

ART FINDER

ARTFINDER

ART FINDER

ART FINDER

I’d like to tell you about a startup that’s trying to do something very local about a field which isn’t renowned for being all about data... art

Artfinder, which I’m part of the founding team of, is creating the last.fm for art.

Finding art you love around you


Art is all around us, and we often don’t know it. We’re privileged to have this luxury, but often we have a passing knowledge of galleries and in particular what lies within them. Often you think the National Gallery may not be for you if you like modern art, yet it has many contemporary works and works which have influenced the artists you like.

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Why did we do this?

Why did we do this?

We wanted to answer one very basic type of question.

I’m in New York, and I have some time to kill and I really love Monet’s, where are they?


You could ask a local, you could search online, if your tastes were more esoteric than Monet you’d probably be very luck to find anything. You would be more likely to have a serendipitous encounter with an article in a newspaper.

By knowing your tastes we can also recommend art around you too...

I never knew I liked Mondrian, tell me more about this, and also what other art is here I may like?


for example we have some image recognition technology which can tell you within a gallery more about a work you like, just by you taking a picture of it, but it can also build up recommendations and by knowing what else you like and what else is in a gallery it can become your knowledgeable friend who knows the gallery well and can tell you what else you should see.

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Learning from abandoned shopping carts

This sort of data analytics becomes incredibly powerful in online offline situations that local typifies so well... it turns out there’s so much we can learn from abandoned shopping carts

coremetrics has been at the forefront for a while of taking web analytics quite a bit further... they have a solution which Diapers.com, a baby stuff emporium, has been using.

It looks at things people put in their shopping cart and then abandon, in the case of Diapers.com they think it’s often because of distraction from children

“e-mails sent to browsers who did not purchase items in their cart had a 48% higher open rate and 78% higher click-through rate than e-mails from any previous campaign. In addition, the net conversion rate for these abandoned shopping cart e-mails was 6.5%, which is 129% higher than any previous campaign...”

From the September 29, 2008 Issue of DMNews

the results are quite astounding in the response rate when these people are emailed about what they’d abandoned

CoreMetrics is now enabling this in the real world too.

If customers who have abandoned carts online and are picking up items reserved online, the sales staff can ask them about if they’re still interested in those items and can recommend the items that people who abandoned things most buy in that sector.

CoreMetrics has been starting to move this into hybrid online offline spaces with some clients, it’s a fascinating model

Local is experiential


And it relates to one really fascinating element about local, it’s experientiality...


this is my favourite juxtaposition of adverts... an Android phone on three and a Kindle.

Both touchable tactile objects, deeply personal, both adverts with different calls to action.

The Three advert’s first call to action is about visiting stores, where live handsets and models can be found.

The Kindle’s call to action is about buying online


Do I or don’t I want one?

But for a while now I’ve had a question about the Kindle I haven’t been able to easily answer


How does it feel?

It all comes down to this

It’s hard to know, I’ve used the Kindle app on my Mac, on an iPad, an Android phone and an iPhone, I still find books easier to read.

However now having played with a friends I’ve ordered one. Ironically the case for it arrived yesterday, there’s no estimate for the actual device.

It’s clearly a problem though, or an opportunity, depending on the point of view. It was announced the other day that Best Buy is joining Target and Staples in the US in stocking the Kindle.

Local news and local advertising

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We can’t really think about local, or even think about devices such as the Kindle without thinking about local news which is in well documented decline, in many ways sadly.

For many years local news was the heartbeat of a community and a way in which targeted information and advertising was delivered. It gave advertisers one very important thing.

Locally qualified customers

Local qualification is not enough.

But in many ways local qualification isn’t enough...

Local + intent

You need to know about intention too... local news advertising never did that precisely.

It supposed if you read the paper that you might want to buy a car from a local car dealer, that you may want to apply locally for a job. It doesn’t really know your intention...

So why is local Direct Mail (Junk Mail) growing?

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But it may know more about local than the direct mail that currently seems to be replacing it

Simply filling a void till something better comes along

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Direct mail locally feels like it is a mechanism that is temporary, the absence of local advertising in papers to a younger demographic than their readership has lead to indiscriminate letter box drops

Data as the new marketing

there are some new mechanisms that can significantly outperform

Getty Images uses metadata alongside images placed into Google Image search as a direct engagement technique which looks at intent. The intent to use an image.

If you click on them you get taken to a Getty Images place where you can buy that image to use... I nearly did, but they only license the images for certain uses and making a presentation wasn’t one of them.

And you can look at this and say, well of course they use metadata, it’s their business.

But then you stop and think, only ten or so years ago the way you bought stock photography...

Was a bit different. You looked through a catalog or paid the image agency to look for images for you. How often now do you receive a catalog or a flyer or see an advert for Getty Images.

Rarely I’d say, if ever... interesting, we’ll come back to that in a bit.

If you click on them you get taken to a Getty Images place where you can buy that image to use... I nearly did, but they only license the images for certain uses and making a presentation wasn’t one of them.

And you can look at this and say, well of course they use metadata, it’s their business.

But then you stop and think, only ten or so years ago the way you bought stock photography...

Local + intent

Local + intent has lots of potential,

Local + intent = location + search

Local + intent = location + search

Where can I play tennis?

Where can I swim?

Untapped growth in local online advertising

many reports suggest that there is an untapped growth in local online advertising...

a sector which is predicted to grow 26% to $20bn in the US alone this year

Location based services


In part powered by location based services

Location based services

I know Google Places will be talked about later so I just wanted to dive into Foursquare a bit

bookmarking the real world

mention chrome to phone

The growth both of Foursquare and another interesting component of the local ecosystem Groupon is exceptional this year.

While not showing the exponential hockey stick curve there is strong linear growth in this sector which is often seen in the later phases of early adoptor phases before the inflection point into mass market

Groupon

Keynoir

It’s getting easier to make location based services and location based things

For example last year I went on walking holiday to Austria, but turned it into a fundraising event online for a charity.

I underpacked obviously. Especially on holiday and especially on the technology I was supposedly on holiday from.

And I built an Android app that sends a GPS position up to a server so that people could see where I was. This was partly so I could just put my phone in my pocket and just walk and yet people could follow along and sponsor.

from: AnnemcxFancy a virtual Sunday morning stroll in Austria?@fourwalks is doing it for @childsi here http://four.walks.at/ it's great stuff to follow!

I also noticed that people were starting to talk about it, which obviously helped the fundraising.

I was very touched when one of our MPs, Tom Watson tweeted about how geeks can bring distant events into your living room.

Location is such a key part to storytelling, which in turn is a really key part of fundraising. We’ve now scaled up some of these things to tell the story of several of the charity’s volunteers climbing Kilimanjaro

We all live at a point in time and space

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The key thing about local services is this inescapable truth

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Bend the services you produce around the user

And instead of bending a user around a set of constrained services which don’t quite work for them we should aim to bend our services around their needs

One of my favourite simple examples of this is this lovely site. It does exactly as you’d expect, it tells you where your nearest owls are.

Recently I was asked to think about how to make NHS infection data more pertinent and personal

Recently I was asked to think about how to make NHS infection data more

I’ve just been asked by the GLA to look at how we do this for all diseases in London hospitals so you can look at things such as the effects of people not vaccinating children and localised disease outbreaks.

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What can we learn from the old world?


Findability

make sure your content/business is findable


Footfall

put your storefront where traffic is


Attractive, informative shopfront

ensure every search landing point is full of relevant information and new relevant destinations

Daily Mail


Enticing offers

coupons and offers are both enticing and a data collection mechanism

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SOVIETUK/

Social proof

we live in the world and era of pointing at things, make sure all of your things can be pointed at


Events

create unique reasons for people to return to physical and online spaces, invite with meaning


HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/HANNAHDONOVAN/

Friends’ recommendations and knowledge

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allow and encourage social to flow in and out of your online/offline experience

engage your community when they start pointing at you and associating themselves with you


Stock

open up inventory systems, make less reasons for wasted journeys and improve chance of impulse

purchases


Friendly, useful, knowledgeable staff

make your website the true edge of your brand online, help it hand off to real people


Signage and signposting

lead people around your location, before, during and after their visit



Flow design

reduce friction wherever it may be

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don’t be afraid to create new hybrid spaces


learn from each other, bring offline and online teams together

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online and offline are not just yet another add on for each other


it’s always about people, and where they are


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Thank you... [email protected]://blog.jaggeree.com/@jaggeree

linking online and local

Technology

localbringing people

physical world

important online equivalent

im sure

successful local presence

local presences

physical presence

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