Hyperlocal: It’s all about engagement

According to the Wall Street Journal’s Wednesday story about LoudonExtra.com, the real reason for disappointing traffic at the hyperlocal site was that its team of architects “didn’t do enough to familiarize itself with Loudon County or engage its 270,000 residents.” Rob Curley, the rock star developer leading the effort for the Washington Post, acknowledged as much, saying, “I was the one who was supposed to know we should be talking to Rotary Club meetings every day.”

If we’ve learned anything from our own hyperlocal experiment at MorristownGreen.com, it’s the importance of that consistent local engagement. The site is built as a collection of blogs written by members of the community, including a local attorney and politico named Paul Bangiola and a jeweller named Bill Braunschweiger.  It’s orchestrated by veteran Star-Ledger reporter and Morristown resident Kevin Coughlin, who spends virtually every waking hour running around town, reporting, recruiting contributors and organizing events.

Kevin is always bursting with ideas to give people in town more ways to share their stories, but one of my favorites was his inspired notion to donate two Flip video cameras to the Morristown & Morris Township Library so residents could check them out and record videos to upload to our site. When it became clear after a couple of months that no one was taking us up on this, he persuaded the library staff to produce a short movie with one of the cameras and then throw a world premier party at the library.

You really had to see it to believe it, but here’s a scene from in front of the library Thursday as the stars of the show arrived and one of Morristown Green’s local bloggers, a psychotherapist named Maureen Tillman, interviewed them Joan Rivers style on a rented red carpet.

And here’s Kevin, the Morristown mogul himself, making his appearance:

The fun continued inside for a couple of hours, and a good time was had by all. But this kind of event, which goes way beyond newspapers’ tradition sense of mission, is hard work — as Kevin’s last-minute scrambling to find a red carpet and film-themed decorations for the library meeting room showed. And it’s critical to success. Yes, you need great coverage, aggressive aggregation, deep databases — a hearty “stew,” as Mark Potts wrote this week — but you also need to be out there, visible and tireless and plugged in.

Rob Curley knows that as well as anyone, as his success in Missouri, Kansas and Florida has proved over the years.  He’ll no doubt find his stroke again at his next port of call, Las Vegas. He’s just a wildly talented dude. But as his experience with LoudonExtra.com showed, it’s not enough to have a great newspaper brand and great tools and technology. If you want hyperlocal success, you have to earn it over and over again, every day.

It’s all about engagement.