Creating Hyperlocal Engagement

As you continue to demonstrate your “Insider” status at the hyperlocal level the more comfortable your audience will become with you as a local media / networking source. The more comfortable they become the more they will start to engage with you and the engagement can occur in the following manner.

I call it “Keeping up with the Joneses“, but at the local level.

If you as a local media person are always providing the best and most interesting local information then you become the “Go To Resource” within your community.

Secondly and probably most importantly you begin to “Set the Standard” for how intimately your community will get to know itself and also what it will expect out of knowing itself.

If you know you live in an interesting community can expect you will want to learn more. On the contrary if your community is asleep… it might just stay asleep unless someone wakes it up.

Think about it this ways. If every time you go out with your friends, they are continually sharing new and interesting local things to do, then on some level you are going to be working equally hard to keep up with them.

This is the Keeping Up with the Joneses, and it can occur in the arena of people, places and things. Eventually the audience will desire its own experience. After all members of your community have their own opinions and local favorites, and this is how engagement can occur, but someone needs to set the standard.

Setting the standard and waking communities up is exactly what needs to be done. Traditional Media has dulled audiences around the world into only expecting the same thing over and over again.This is why the hyperlocal opportunity is up for grabs.

If you were part of a circle of close friends who spoke on a regular basis, wouldn’t you expect to know what was going on with each of your friends in an ongoing manner. How might you feel if you discovered that a few of your friends had found a new great restaurant, wouldn’t you want to know?

Sure you would!

Community and local media works the same way. Reporting which is intimate and insider based creates that connection of friend, because a valued source of “local” information is a very important asset to have in ones live. If every time you turned on your local media you discovered something, something valuable, something new and interesting don’t you think you might be a bit intrigued?

On the other hand if every time you viewed your local media, it was cold, distant and boring it actually pushes the audience away and discredits any sort of local connection.

This is important because the audience can intimately know the people, place and things being reported. They have formed opinions or for how these individuals should be valued or represented within one’s community.

If a media agency is simply giving statistic based reporting on community life this not only loses the attention of the audience but will create a distrust for where the loyalty of the media really sits.

Does it care about the community, it’s citizens and small businesses?

Can it support and endorse great accomplishments, or is it a simply another inventory of “outsider information”.

The best story therefore needs to be an “Insiders Story”. An accounting of what life was really like, what the experience was at the truly local level. Sure you can stick to the reporting of the facts but most times the audience is more interested in the experiences of individuals rather than how much the school budget is going to cost this year.

Of course media professional may be working to keep their reporting as independent as possible but the days of sitting on the sidelines are quickly coming to an end.

I think that there can be a good mix of reporting the facts as well as sharing personal experience and opinions which are engaged at the hyperlocal level.

Please post any comments or thoughts below.

This is an excerpt from the guide I am working on about creating hyperlocal engagement and part of upcoming content for the Hyperlocal Training Center. You can sign-up here for a free membership while they still last: SIGN UP