I’ve participated in, spoken at, and attended several social media and public relations conferences and roundtables in the past year and the same question comes up to each speaker at every session: What’s the future of social media?
The answer lately has always been MOBILE. I think we can all agree on this.
I continue to add, though, that the second question should be: what else? And the answer is LOCAL.
What do I mean by local? Well, you are always local. And if I’m near you, I’m local too, right? To quote Buckaroo Banzai: “No matter where you go, there you are.”
The mobile users of social media are growing daily. They are not sitting at home or in the office thinking about your brand anymore. Those users are at your locations and want to connect, shout, check in, and tell stories about your brand. Even more, they want to tell stories about your brand specifically at the 123 Main Street location in Anytown USA.
PR Pro’s have a short window of opportunity to take advantage of mobile meeting local. Without proper promotion of what’s happening at your (or your client’s) local outlets, stores, offices, franchisees, or dealers, you are missing the intersection of Social, Mobile, and Local.
So, you’ve already set up Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, and a blog for your brand. Now you must do three things:
1. Set up individual fan pages, Twitter accounts, and blogs for each location.
2. Engage customers (or potential customers) at the local level via any platforms on which they are conversing.
3. Share their content with the rest of your community! A bit of content from a customer regarding the 123 Main Street location of your brand is much more powerful than anything else you can create!
The true power of local PR is delivering results and achieving business goals not by just Tweeting about the brand on a global or national level, but also by keeping friends, fans, and customers informed about events happening at each outlet, store, location, or community.
Social Geek Blog 
Bingo!
The future is more local than mobile; people are looking to the internet and social media to replace the yellow pages and get back to building business relationships with people in the same part of town. Its hyper-local.
For franchise companies, this means letting go of the fear and letting franchisees drive local marketing via social media. Give them localized PR, local websites with unique URLs, local blogs so they can produce a local stream of info and local social media accounts and profiles.
Most companies are just getting a handle on social media; this is very forward thinking and will scare many. My bet is this is where the real return will come from in the next couple of years.
Jack,
Great points. Way to go weaving in Buckaroo Bonzai. You’ve touched on how to make social media relevant. It needs to be local.
Apologies to the folks who live in Southern Cal and the movie ‘Up in the Air’, but I’m creating a new portmanteau . . . SOCAL.
Best,
Stan
@9INCHmarketing
‘The longest and hardest 9 inches in marketing is the distance between the brain and the heart’