In the final Keynote of Web 2.0 Expo, the folks from Topix had a really quick yet eye opening discussion about covering hyper local news across the USA. They created a site that aggregates content for every single area code. Although they were successful with their initial efforts they found that there just wasn’t enough hyper local content to keep the site full of good content. They attempted to leverage the blogosphere to add content but found that even bloggers did not cover all of the nitty gritty local news. Bloggers don’t go to the police station and talk to the media officer every day. This was definitely a challenge to their growth.

In an effort to address this they leveraged social media. By simply adding commenting and building a community around the unique area code based news content they saw a 10X growth in pageviews and overall stickiness. They saw average people (not just the internet elite) logging in and carrying on significant discussions around their own specific and hyper local news. It’s really no different than giving people a new forum to carry on the discussions that happen in and around physical neighborhoods on a day to day basis.

To do hyper local well and to really maximize the monetization potential you MUST leverage the social web and let local people interact with their community networks. Those that do it right will success and those that don’t will miss the boat completely. If you are doing hyper local, you better be doing the participatory web stuff as well.