MY MOLESKINE REMINDS ME that we should continue our discussion about setting up a Good News Zone in South Tipperary--an online community that connects businesses to each other through a flow of events, special offers and ideas that make money. I wrote the ideas down in my Moleskine during the first week of December. The ideas arise out of an evening run by the Clonmel Chamber with two dozen avid listeners. If we expect to deliver results, some of my thoughts will be endorsed by three or four MDs and we'll start exploring some content that could easily fold into an elegant community lifestream. I hope that community effort boosts web traffic, High Street footfall and domestic tourism for the local area. Here are a few things we're considering for our follow-up meeting.
Posterous Shared Space. It would be relatively easy for seven of us to mail content directly to a Clonmel Posterous account. With a little thought, most of that content could form material designed to target goods and services offered by Clonmel merchants. The Posterous content would include a tagged category for local events that also have identities as events set up on Facebook, LinkedIn and Upcoming. All of these critical junctions have subscribeable newsfeeds.
Geo-location I'm a big fan of using Flickr to mark up shared maps because I know Google collates information specified on Yahoo! Maps. I've marked content on Flickr, placed it on Yahoo! Maps, and located it a week later when using Google Latitude. I want to show merchants how to do these things, then pull some of the content into Foursquare's Business API to make it more enjoyable when going places in South Tipperary.
Twitter for Sharing. Why not use Twitter to share curated items? It's easy to squelch the noise if key content has its own hashtag.
The Audio Dimension. I don't think many people know how to market destinations through features in iTunes 9. We're starting to do some interesting things that have attracted visitors to our local area through recommendations that appeared on screen while syncing iPhones. There's effectively an online listening station possible on Blip.fm now. Brian Greene is leveraging that capability exceptionally well.
Share the videos. When making a rough cut of an idea, I normally start with Qik.com or 12Seconds.tv and finish productions by hanging them on Blip.tv and YouTube. There are specific production values that need to be considered with video but starting to tell stories through video would help build a spirit of community development while enticing new footfall into venues.
The adventure begins on Wednesday, 16 December 2009, with a coffee chat on the southern campus of Tipperary Institute.
