The Smalltown Blog

Smalltown Chosen as Featured Blog

Smalltown was listed Saturday as a TypePad Featured Blog. Thanks TypePad!

What is Smalltown?

In an effort to understand how Smalltown is perceived, I often ask our users "What is Smalltown?" These are the three most common answers:

     - Smalltown is like Craigslist, only better.

     - Smalltown is the online Yellow Pages on steroids.

     - Smalltown is MySpace for local businesses.

It's tempting to describe new things by comparing them to familiar things, but the result is often misleading and can short change the new idea.

If Smalltown is described as a better version of Craigslist, will local merchants understand that they can post videos about their businesses at Smalltown?

If Smalltown is the next generation of the Yellow Pages, will users know that they can ask their neighbors for advice about local matters, such as "Can anyone recommend a good guitar teacher?"

And if Smalltown is MySpace for local businesses, will a local business owner discern the importance of the feature that allows a Smalltown Webcard posting to be attached to any other Webcard, creating an entirely new online "word of mouth" social advertising that doesn't exist at MySpace?

Describing Smalltown as "MySpace for local businesses" paints about 30% of the picture, but it sure would be great if we had an answer to "What is Smalltown?" that paints the whole picture. Our marketing materials say "Smalltown is the local web where merchants and their neighbors post, discover and share everything about their town." I think that's accurate, but is it compelling and complete?

I'd love to hear more from our active users and casual visitors. How would you describe Smalltown in a sentence or two? I'll send a dozen delicious Sibby's Cupcakes to the most interesting answer.

- Hal Rucker

A Good July

July is known to be a difficult month for local media sales. This summer there was a double-whammy because the Fourth of July fell on a Wednesday, making the whole first week of July a challenging time to sell. But I’m thrilled to post that our sales team sold 30% more Webcard months in July than they did in June. In addition, 85% of our revenue for July is coming from annual contracts. This helps with our cash flow and gives us a whole year to prove to our customers that their listing on Smalltown is paying off.

We haven’t achieved the proverbial hockey stick growth yet, but considering we hired our sales team just a few months ago, we’re well on our way to cracking the code. Our innovation, a new type of Web presence called a Webcard posting, is resonating with local merchants whose local advertising needs are not addressed by a traditional website.

"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

- Hal Rucker