You Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Your’s

I once was in a conversation with a local newspaper mogul who laughed at the idea of doing trades. She couldn’t understand how it was possible and what potential value it could have to her corporate newspaper and it’s bottom line.

I’m the one laughing now as it has been hyperlocal marketing techniques such as trade and barter which have helped to give LocalsGuide the upper hand on the hyperlocal marketing battlefield. Take for example the following example this trade arrangement:
{{{gold}}}
Movie Tickets Ad Space Trade
We do an ad trade with our local movie theater every six months, in return we get about $200 worth of movie money. $200 is alot of movie money when each film cost roughly $7 each.

Rather than keep the movie money we reinvest it by giving it back to the members of our social networking online community. These individuals then go out to write movie reviews which they then post online. We then select the most interesting movie reviews to reprint in our printed newspaper. Each reviewer gets two tickets so they can go with a friend and have a good time and have 30 days upon which to post the review on the site.

The end result for is that we utilize our trade with the movie theater to get actual work done. work we would have had to pay for other wise.

There are a ton of other benefits, with this model, not to mention the all around feel good stuff that happens when you print an individuals review for the world to see.

So you see in our situation doing a trade actually works out to our benefit and can be a powerful hyperlocal marketing technique.

Its easy for this type of stuff to happen on the grass roots level where people are close, connected and aware of the relationships we play with one another. This will be the challenge for the corporate world to implement.

Just remember the old saying which goes like this.
You scratch my back and…. I’ll scratch yours.