Going Hyperlocal

Apr 20 2008 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

Robert Carroll (of Clickability) also pointed us to Philly.com, the online “extension” of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He used this as a great example of going hyperlocal: effectively handling local events and catering to each individual community (physical community, or interest/hobbyist groupings). This was a way for traditional printed news media to survive competition from Craigslist.

I think Robert was only partly right.

The problem is that Craigslist already has the community built-in. That is part of the Craigslist “brand”.

There is a local-to-Philadelphia Craigslist. You can generally specify your location (e.g. Fairless Hills) when you create an ad. There is no search-by-location on the Philadelphia version unlike the one we have here for the San Francisco Bay Area (you can search by south bay, north bay etc). But I think that is just a question of server resources.

If you were into discussion-based communities, Craigslist does it too, albeit in a very 1990s usenet-newsgroup kind of way.

The only missing item in the Craigslist portfolio is persistent user-generated content like blogs, articles etc. So if a new media organization is going hyperlocal and sees Craigslist as a competitor at the local level, then it will want to focus on these things that Craigslist does not have or does not do well at.

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The Craigslist Police

Apr 16 2008 Published by Ben Chong under The Daily Geek

Craigslist or Craig’s List is a free, online classified ads website that is eating the lunch of traditional printed classified advertising.

The first time visitor might be tempted to think that you can find anything on Craigslist. Just like on Ebay (famously illustrated by that scene in Men in Black 2). Nothing is further from the truth.

Craigslist is a pretty small outfit so employees themselves don’t do the policing.

Instead, the site depends on the “community” (i.e. users) to “flag” inappropriate ads.

To put it unkindly, the community police are like your nosy neighbor. You know, that guy down the street who is always peering through the window blinds and who calls city hall every time you park more than 18 inches away from the curb? I used to have a neighbor like that and he denounced everyone living in the street to the point where he had no more friends. During  WWII, these people would have denounced young Jewish girls to the Nazis.

The good thing about Craigslist, is that they use a democratic system for removing posts. They don’t depend on complaints from just one single, cranky person. Instead, a post needs to be flagged many times before it can be removed. Which is nice. I wished the San Jose city hall would do that.

Obviously, to be removed, a post needs to violate posting guidelines. I had a post removed once and it was in violation of some very obscure rule which even the Craigslist community forum folks had trouble figuring out. Which goes to show that some people need to get a life that is outside of memorizing Craigslist posting guidelines…

Anyway, the reason for this post is that I found out the office hours of the community police.

Some Craigslist newbies tend to put up the same car ad multiple times, listing them as being sold in different cities/counties in the SF Bay Area. This violates one of the posting guidelines: thou shalt not put up multiple posts to sell the same item within X hours.

At 7am this morning, I found multiple violations which had not been removed. Wow!

At 7.45am, the posts had been removed.

My guess: folks wake up at 7+ in the morning, turn on their PCs, make coffee, skim Craigslist. And start flagging ads for removing.

So if you are a newbie advertising on Craigslist, put up your ads early in the morning. Preferably before 7am.

The problem is: the people you are targeting probably keep the same hours as the Craigslist community police…

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