SohoNews10012 - The Social Web and Store-Based Business

SohoNews10012 is a hyperlocal news source reporting news, events, and daily offers taking place in Soho, a neighborhood where we live and work. We launched this news service on Twitter as a realtime testing bed in order to immerse ourselves deeply into a learning process on how Web 2.0 and social networking platforms, could be applied to the needs of neighborhood business. Our strategic interest is to demonstrate the power of the social web to connect residents, workers, visitors, and tourists to merchants, restaurants, salons, sightings, and daily value-based offers. We are learning every day, gathering business intelligence that we can share with our clients, and create an e-commerce business model that is convenient, efficient, and fun.
One interesting finding to date, has been the strong interest by single-store owners to adopt social media in order to secure a competitive advantage for lead generation, and reaching new customers against larger corporate-based brands, who maintain an outpost in Soho, but manage the location more "remotely". The ambient "intimacy" of the social web offers local business owners, more leverage via the Internet, than they have had to date with their websites. The demand by these smaller customers for tutorials, consultation, and updated web design work has been terrific. The benefits are significant. When we speak with store managers in store locations of well known brands, larger entities, we are often referred to the corporate office,
or the PR agency of the brand. This is enabling us to reach a much larger universe of contacts, and enabling us to promote the opportunity for hyperlocal news and e-commerce effectively.
Stay tuned.