The local community is ready

Local online communities have not developed at the same level or pace as consumer or business media communities and certainly do not share the same number of success stories. However, the potential benefits of successful, local online communities are clear for both the community itself and the media brand that serves it, and there is a strong case to be made that in the near future the former successes of local yellow pages, newspapers and radio will be reflected in local online communities. The question is – who is going to develop and own the service, and what’s the formula?

The first thing to reflect on is that whilst there is a web-based land-grab going on for the hearts, minds and mouse-clicks of targeted communities, the evolution of online culture and the expectations of the typical user is still in a very early state of transference from print-based consumption. Local newspapers and radio still operate in a relatively ‘push’ based way, although both have always traditionally called on community involvement to some extent.

We believe there is an opportunity for local media to develop local online communities easily and painlessly. firestarter enables online publishers to easily integrate user participation into existent sites, including at the simplest level comments, ratings, polls, reviews, blogs, forums and profiles. firestarter enables local media to introduce local social networking to facilitate introductions and connections between local business people or interest groups.

At the center of the system is a User Dashboard that gives your community an easy way to interact with itself. This Dashboard can enable personalization so that your readers can determine which type of information they want to see when they visit your site, and which services they want to have available.

We provide consultative help and development to all sorts of media companies regarding how to develop strategies to better engage targeted communities using web 2.0 tools and behavior. We can customize firestarter to reflect your goals and strategy, introducing and integrating new services to better engage your user base.

To discuss how we can help your brand evolve, contact us today.