Mobile Is The New Local - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBlogger

Ed Martin's full live coverage from the Television Critics Association tour is available exclusively to corporate subscribers of the Jack Myers Media Business Report. For more information visit www.myersreport.com.

We've been hearing about the importance of mobile technology for so long, it seems like the future may never arrive.

But sure enough, just when you get tired of waiting... bang! The future shows up. It's here. Today.

Think about how much local has changed in the past 20 years. It used to be that we lived in communities. We voted in local elections. We shopped in local stores. We hung out with our neighbors and nearby friends.

Now, we're on the move. We fly to meetings. We gather with like-minded enthusiasts on Web sites. We connect with far away family and friends on Skype and Facebook.

Simply put, the one constant in our lives is no longer place, but rather us. Local is where we are. And the things that matter, both physically and virtually, come to us.

Which is why we're rapidly becoming a world in which the so-called third screen (the mobile phone) is actually the first screen. For many teens and young adults, that day has already come.

The emergence of what I'll call 'Situational Local' may be pegged to the South By Southwest Festival in 2007. It was there that thousands of cellphone-toting young people found Twitter and lit up the brand new mobile social network. Using the hashtag #SWSW, folks who had arrived from around the country and around the world could be in immediate contact, a 'pop-up' social network that created an instant and connected local digital community using mobile technology. Once South By Southwest was over, the moment that created this local hot spot ended, and folks moved on. Today you can hardly go to an event that doesn't promote a mobilized social community. 'Local' becomes a digital space that facilitates connections, interaction, and community. But the 'place' that used to be physical is now digital, and mobile devices are the connecting point to the digital 'space' that allows the local community to emerge. Yes, the Web matters too - but imagine Twitter without mobile; it's simply not as compelling. The fact that mobile tech allows the community to come to us, to be where we are at the moment, is the single most compelling thing about the pop up local environments.

But is that it? Is local now a movable feast of gatherings and instant social networks? Hardly.

Mobile makes local content relevant again. Because where you are at the moment deeply impacts what you're interested in and what is relevant. If you're in North Carolina, the fact that the town of Nantucket has outlawed dogs on the beaches from 8am till 8pm during the summer is irrelevant. However, if you've just landed on the island with your family and your faithful hound, knowing this could save you a ticket and some unnecessary embarrassment. Today, news needs to know both who you are and where you are in order to help you find the signal in the noise. In fact, most content wants to know where you are. For instance, movie trailers. Wouldn't you rather see the ones nearby first? How about traffic info? It only matters if you're stuck in it or driving toward it. Weather. Politics. Sure, some politics transcends your local interests, but other than global issues, most politics is meaningful to folks who live or work in the town or city served by that political body. In fact, hyper-local news about a given community may be intensely interesting as you find yourself near it. Haven't you ever heard fire truck sirens and wondered what was going on? Try searching for that information -- you'll never find it. But mobilized content around emergency services could easily alert you to what's going in the place you are now. Situational Local Content is by its very nature targeted, topical, and relevant. It's news and information about your world - where you are NOW.

And finally, all of this makes you think about advertising.

The current advertising world is all about ambushing consumers. Radio, TV, billboards, buses all look to catch you where you are. The problem is, this shotgun approach is noisy, and tends to create 'shut off' consumers who glaze over as Madison Avenue yells ever louder. Situational Local Advertising turns this upside down. If you're biking across the Brooklyn Bridge you may well want to know were the nearest bike shop is, or the nearest outdoor cafe, or a place to recharge your cell phone. Your needs are local - but you're not going to sign up for a Brooklyn Blog or read a Brooklyn Website. Your mobile browser knows where you are. So, a mobile search for Bike Shop returns geo-targeted data. Advertising that embraces mobilized local targeting is likely to be highly relevant, resulting in offerings that solve problems rather than annoy and ambush. I'm not suggesting the "Hi Steve" ad model from "Minority Report." You need to add Seth Godin's 'Permission Marketing' element to make Situational Local Advertising work. You need to opt in to information by sharing your location and trading that privacy for data. Ambush local mobile marketing is creepy and wrong. Permission localized mobile marketing is friendly and good.

Oh, one last thing. Devices. They no longer suck. The iPhone 3GS is a very good early mobile computing platform. Expect the Kindle, the new Apple tablet, the unannounced Fox Digital something, and more to quickly make local content consumption pleasant and useful. The content, the network, the devices. It's all happening now.

Mobile is the new Local.

Local isn't a place, it's you. Your interests, your friends, your family, your job, your hobbies, your world. Where you stand at any given moment is the single most powerful filter of information you can have.

The Web is full of data. The Web is full of news. The Web is full of tweets, blog posts, images, video, and people. What matters to you right now is most likely a subset of where you are right now.

Mobile is the new Local. I promise.

Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO and Co-Founder of Magnify.net - a fast-growing video publishing platform that powers more than 50,000 web sites, media companies, and content entrepreneurs to aggregate and curate web video from a wide variety of web sources. Currently Magnify.net publishes over 50,000 channels of Curated-Consumer Video, and is working closely with a wide variety of media makers, communities, and publishers in evolving their content offerings to include content created by, sorted and reviewed by community members. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, and well known innovator in the field of user-generated media production. Rosenbaum Directed and Executive Produced the critically acclaimed 7 Days In September, and his MTV Series Unfiltered is widely regarding as the first commercial use of Consumer Generated Video in US mass media. Steve can be contacted at steve@magnify.net Follow Steve Rosenbaum on Twitter: www.twitter.com/magnify

Read all Steve’s MediaBizBlogger commentaries at Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBlogger.