Linking Online and Local

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

Linking online and local
Bringing 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.

CAVEMAN_92223/

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.

STEVEGARFIELD/

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

JAGGEREE/

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

JAGGEREE/

Footfall

You need high footfall for where you build your physical presence

JAGGEREE/

Attractive, informative shopfront

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

Entices

Engages

Informs

Teases

Invites

JAGGEREE/

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

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

JAGGEREE/

Events

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

HANNAHDONOVAN/

Friends’ recommendations and knowledge

JAGGEREE/

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.

JAGGEREE/

Friendly, useful, knowledgeable staff

JAGGEREE/

Signage and signposting

JAGGEREE/

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.

SEIER/

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.

ROB-SINCLAIR/

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

SEIER/

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.

JAGGEREE/

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

QUINNANYA/

Why?

JAGGEREE/

Geography online used to be hard.

QUEERDOOD/

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.

CAMKNOWS/

Geographical queries used to be hard

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

JAGGEREE/

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.

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

SECRETLONDON/

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...

SECRETLONDON/

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

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

JAGGEREE/

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.

WALLYG/

Why did we do this?

Why did we do this?

We wanted to answer one very basic type of question.

WALLYG/

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...

WALLYG/

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.

QNR/

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

JAGGEREE/

Local is experiential

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

JAGGEREE/

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

JAGGEREE/

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

JAGGEREE/

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.

ALLABOUTGEORGE/

Local news and local advertising

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.

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...

SHAWNMICHAEL/

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

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

LOOP_OH/

Simply filling a void till something better
comes along

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.

Local + intent

Local + intent has lots of potential,

Local + intent = location + search

Where can I play tennis?

Local + intent = location + search

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

JAGGEREE/

Location based services

In part powered by 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

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: Annemcx
Fancy 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

CHRISSCHOENBOHM/

We all live at a point in time and space

The key thing about local services is this inescapable truth

HTTP://BERGLONDON.COM/
PROJECTS/HAT/

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.

CAVEMAN_92223/

What can we learn from the old world?

JAGGEREE/

Findability

make sure your content/business is findable

JAGGEREE/

Footfall

put your storefront where traffic is

JAGGEREE/

Attractive, informative shopfront

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

Daily Mail

JAGGEREE/

Enticing offers

coupons and offers are both enticing and a data
collection mechanism

SOVIETUK/

Social proof

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

JAGGEREE/

Events

JAGGEREE/

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

BREWBOOKS/

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

JAGGEREE/

Stock

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

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

JAGGEREE/

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

JAGGEREE/

Flow design

DNORMAN/

reduce friction wherever it may be

JAGGEREE/

don’t be afraid to create new hybrid spaces

IAIN/

learn from each other, bring offline and
online teams together

JAGGEREE/

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

JAGGEREE/

it’s always about people, and where they are

RAWHEAD/

Thank you...
chris.thorpe@jaggeree.com
http://blog.jaggeree.com/
@jaggeree

Linking Online and Local

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