DISQUS

Great post. I'd just like to add to the previous comment; I think one thing that local media consumers need is a specific personal and community context which creates value over and above that which they can get from everyday social interactions within the community.

I live in a town (Oxford, UK) which has very active local community groups. Each group has its own web site and the news on those sites is hyperlocal down to street level. They still get traffic becasue the issues they deal with have a very personal local context for the local residents. These things don't get covered elsewhere. Typical content will be about representations that a community group has made to the local council. They are basically a feeback mechanism.

I am also working on my own hyper-local trading project and I am learning that success with that is very much about building a local context for the content and generating personal as well as community value.

Here's the point I think I'm getting to. At the hyper-local level, the viral, popularist,broad brush social media models start to break down. Local neighbours don't need Facebook/MySpace et al to communicate becuase they see each other regularly in the street or in church or at the PTA. They have a real world context in which they are already socially networked.

To win this crowd and generate value at a community level you must engage with existing community groups and generate value over and above what they can achieve through normal everyday social interaction.

To generate commercial value, you must tap into the value drivers that exist within those community networks and act as an enabler. There's a lot of competition here and the crowd is fickle. Being successful is hardwork and requires a lot more than a simple "invite my friends" tool.