ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of doers and innovators who are transforming and redefining the local space. Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon vice chair/AmEx board member/sports team owner/AOL mastermind), along with keynotes/interviews from Jason Calacanis, Leslie Berland, Jay Herratti, Michael Zimbalist and Michael Silberman.

Other highlights of the two-day event includes a preconference rundown on local search run by Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide; a full plate of top BIA/Kelsey research and forecasts; a special venture capital panel; and innovator panels on social, mobile, deals, video and hyperlocal (the latter co-moderated by Merrill Brown).

KEYNOTES/KEYNOTE DISCUSSIONS
� Ted Leonsis: Owner, Monumental Sports (Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards); Vice Chair of Groupon; board member of AmEx, former vice chair of AOL; author, “The Business of Happiness”
� Jason Calacanis: CEO, Mahalo; investor. Calacanis’ career has been at the cutting edge of local and social media and reflects all the big trends, from his development of The Silicon Alley Reporter to Weblogs (AOL), Mahalo and the creation of TechCrunch50 and Launch.
� Leslie Berland, vice president, social strategy, American Express. Berland’s a major deal maker deeply involved in AmEx’ss mega Foursquare and Facebook deals.
� Jay Herratti, CEO, CityGrid Media. Herratti always gets top rankings at our events. He runs IAC’s super quad of the CityGrid Media Network, Citysearch, Urbanspoon and Insider Pages.
� Michael Zimbalist, VP, research operations, New York Times Co. Zimbalist leads the NYT’s 12 person-research unit. He’s deeply immersed in cutting-edge social, mobile, tablet and video efforts.
� Michael Silberman, GM, New York Magazine Silberman is the mastermind of NYMag’s development of a super set of verticals catering to the “New York state of mind.”

FEATURED SPEAKERS
� Bill Bice, CEO, SpaBoom
� Merrill Brown, Cofounder, MSNBC.com, Court TV
� Jim Douglass, EVP, Cartera Commerce
� Jere Doyle, CEO, EverSave
� Walt Doyle, CEO, Where
� Adam Japko, CEO, Digital Sherpa
� Maria Kermath, Director, New Tech & Sales Apps, AT&T Advertising Sales
� Mark Josephson, SVP, AOL Local
� Charlie Kim, CEO, Next Jump
� John McIntyre, CEO, Pixelfish
� Randa Minkarah, SVP, Revenue, Fisher Communications
� Randy Parker, President, SMB Apps
� Mark Schmulen, GM, Social Media, Constant Contact
� Andy Slater, VP, Digital Agency Sales, Katz 360
� Andrew Shotland, Publisher, Local SEO Guide
� Christopher Tippie, CEO, FindNSave
� Darren Waddell, EVP, Product and Corporate Marketing, Reply.com

Join hundreds of senior level local executives at ILM East for the local community’s best networking and insights. You can register here for earlier bird rates.

Internet Pioneer Ted Leonsis

CBS plans to build deeper local online content by commissioning specific local topics for articles from thousands of writers at Examiner.com. Both parties were mum about whether revenue sharing is involved but did note that writers will receive a payment plan different from the one they get on Examiner.com.

Leonard Brody, president of Clarity Digital, which is Examiner’s parent company, told BIA/Kelsey the economics of the deal will make it profitable for both companies. Examiner has been approached by many media companies to lend its editorial resources. While such loaners of editorial resources aren’t likely to become a dominant revenue stream, “you may see us do a few more of these,” he says. CBS, for its part, is free to also work with other content aggregators and developers.

CBS brings to the table a network of 15+ city sites, such as CBS Denver, CBS Los Angeles, etc. Some sites have had customized Examiner.com content since Dec. 5. “It is a great showcase, and brings great reach for content. It also provides strong credibility via the CBS brand,” says Brody.

While Examiner’s content for CBS will have some branding elements on it, the intent is not to bring people to Examiner.com, Brody emphasizes. It is CBS’ audience. CBS Local Media President Ezra Kucharz adds that the deal with Examiner is “a great way to augment our great content in local markets.”

Some cities have unique professional communities that make them a company town with its own media. Washington D.C., of course, is a government town, well served by Bonneville’s WFED-AM. Similarly Huntsville, Alabama, is a space town; Los Angeles is a movie town; New York is a finance town. Each has its own media.

The medical community, of course, has lots of company towns that are centers of research, investment and specialization. Tapping into that is MedCity Media, which is headquartered in Cleveland (i.e., The Cleveland Clinic).

Among its products are MedCityNews, a local, business-oriented medical news/citizens journalism feed that is available for syndication by local media, and MedCity Life, a local city guide that “targets business travelers, the local medical industry and anyone who wants to be around the medical industry, including potential employees and future medical students.”

The company has set up local sites in a number of medical hubs, including Cleveland, Research Triangle Park, the Twin Cities, Ann Arbor, Boston, Chicago, Madison and Pittsburgh. It is being advised by interactive news pioneer Merrill Brown, among others.

Local medical news is correctly driven by the medical business — there isn’t much that is local about local medical health beyond allergies. But the city guide especially intrigues us. Each city guide has an editor who researches the local venues, events and culture. MedCity Life’s basic concept is that “stakeholders know the business reputation of our medical cities, (but) they are less informed on the work-play-life aspects of these markets.

“They don’t know which bars and events naturally attract their peers,” notes the collateral. “That’s why Akron’s Doc’s Who Rock event is in there; and why we mention one of Minnesota’s main med-tech eateries, The Good Day Cafe; and why we pay tribute to Leonard Medical School in Raleigh, the first black medical school in the Deep South.”

Groupon gets much of the credit for “making coupons cool again.” But it’s the smartphone, with its inherent social, geo and touch capabilities, that may make them cooler than ever. By “cooler,” we mean discoverable and relevant.

The St. Petersburg Times believes there is no better way to unlock the city than through the mobile device. As a result, it has jumped into the space with “Things-To-Do,” an iPhone coupon application built around a deep database of local shops, venues and events.

Digital Sales Manager Maryann Balbo presented the app at NAA mediaXchange and underscored that ad-as-content is a difference-maker in enabling effective, pure-play advertising platforms to layer on top. For St. Pete, the database “populated with local content” provides the foundation on which the app operates.

From there, users can search by neighborhood, ZIP code or through a “near me” button that leverages the phone’s GPS. They can subsequently earmark favorites to create personalized lists and can click-to-call for reservations.

The most compelling value is found in user opt-ins that trigger push coupon notifications for timely, geotargeted deals. Once a user chooses a local outlet as a favorite, permission is granted for the business to send marketing offers. These can be leveraged by the merchant to promote a special, deplete an item or motivate other desired consumer actions.

For these businesses, the double hook is a low price point coupled with a simple interface. The Times uses a fixed-price model without bidding or keywords. The platform is self serve, allowing merchants to “send out their own messages in real time from any device.”

Balbo has already seen rapid acceptance of the app, with 18,000 downloads in the first 60 days. She points to marketing. The news organization is utilizing all of its products and outlets to promote “Things-To-Do,” including point-of-purchase materials, window decals, bill stuffers and event marketing. Businesses reap the benefits of this holistic approach, which not only prompts downloads, but motivates users to use the “favorite” functionality to truly make the app their own.

Citysearch is getting into the deals space, offering a mix of curated daily deals, coupons and other offers from providers such as Groupon, The Dealmap, Restaurant.com as well as from its own base of thousands of advertisers. CityGrid advertisers may also participate.

The service, similar to The Dealmap and 8coupons, is mobile-oriented. It is launching with iPhone and Android versions. It will also be available on the Web, leveraging Citysearch’s 15 million monthly unique visitors.

“Deals by Citysearch” de-emphasizes the Citysearch brand, which is in small type. The idea is to avoid confusion with the core brand and its city guide and review offerings, says JP Bedoya, senior director, product, Citysearch. He notes that the service has been in development for several months and is built on top of the CityGrid API, which is soon receiving a major upgrade.

Users can personalize the menu for up to 15 favorite categories, and also set deals by proximity. Deals can be printed from the website, shown to merchants on phones, or printed out from iPhones using AirPrint — something that Bedoya says is much improved in its upcoming release.

Deals and offers from other providers are initially emphasized, with Citysearch receiving a piece of a piece of any action. But Bedoya anticipates that Citysearch will do very well when it begins to add offers to its ad offerings. Homegrown advertisers can simply add the deals and offers to other advertising that they typically buy from the company on a flat fee, cost-per-click basis. “We are making it very simple, “ says Bedoya. He emphasizes that the company is putting deal quality above immediate revenue concerns.

CItysearch’s JP Bedoya is being featured on the SuperForum on Deals and Offers at ILM East, which takes place in Boston March 21-23.

Local.com has dramatically upgraded its destination site, with soft colors, an excellent user interface and renewed focus on three core categories — “business,” “coupons” and “events.” The categories are clearly aimed at driving organic traffic from its intended audience of women and mothers.

The site is geotargeted to automatically provide local listings and features. Listings can also be easily featured on users’ Facebook pages. Business Listings, meanwhile, include dropdown subcategories on top of core sections (restaurants, health & wellness, home services, pro services, activities, pets).

“It is a 180-degree turn around” from the prior site, says CEO Heath Clarke. He noted that the effort was very resource intensive in terms of people and money.

The destination site accounts for half of Local.com’s revenues. It is strategic to the company for a number of reasons. The new version is intended to bring in more advertising based on its “abundant fresh content to enrich your life” commissioned via Octane Expert, a division within Octane 360, Local.com’s recently acquired SMB services company.

Octane, setting off on a similar path as Demand Media and MerchantCircle Content Studios, can develop articles (i.e., “How to Prepare Italian Food”) for $8 to $15, and sell an array of advertising related to it.

Local.com’s new coupons section comes from The Dealmap on the local level, as well as (largely) retail ads from ShopLocal and national ads from Savings.com and Coupons.com. Events come from a partnership with Eventful.

In a discussion with paidContent, Patch President Warren Webster discussed Patch’s check list of 59 variables that the site uses to determine which new towns it enters, including a first cut that consists of town population between 15,000 and 75,000; having better than average school scores; and better than average household incomes and voting penetration. A second cut includes qualitative characteristics such as civic “walkability” and the presence of an active business community.

While the site hasn’t focused on revenues to date, Webster told paidContent that it has had some experimental advertising, including banners ads and business listings that can be upgraded into advertising. It also has had some geotargeted national advertising for campaigns such as Pepsi Refresh. The site also plans to syndicate the data it is collecting on local communities to marketers.

There has, of course, been a blind assumption that if AOL is investing, then hyperlocal is finally ready for prime time. It is too early to come to that conclusion — witness The New York Times’ pullback a few weeks back from The Local, its aborted hyperlocal effort.

But AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s consistent and vocal support for Patch, which he founded in 2007 as a side project when he was at Google, is definitely seen as validation for multimillion-dollar investments by others. These include other news-centric town site nets such as Main Street Connect; content creator sites such as Examiner.com; and city sites that break out neighborhood info via ZIP codes such as Allbritton’s TBD.com in Washington, D.C., Citysquares and various newspaper efforts.

Hyperlocal commerce sites such as MerchantCircle, DataSphere, Matchbin and ShopCity should also be seen as part of the mix. So should sites that have hired human writers to supplement local news feeds, such as HelloMetro and Yahoo Local. Event sites such as Zvents and Eventful are also part of the mix, as are sites that have a lot of events and local in them, such as Center’d and AmericanTowns.

City guides that are more metro-oriented, such as Citysearch and Yelp, should also be part of the mix, as should social directory sites such as YP.com, Local.com and MojoPages.

So, what’s the prognosis? We certainly like what we see at Patch. The town sites are attractive; they invite interaction and have a good “human” feel — some more than others, often based on how long the town site has been open. The longer, the better.

The aggregation of events is good and so is their mapping. There is also some intriguing video that draws people in. I especially enjoyed the contentious town meeting in my hometown of Chappaqua, N.Y. A lot of the infrastructure is more economically produced by central resources.

But in truth, Patch’s success or failure won’t ride so much on content and feature differentiation. Fifty million dollars is a lot of money. But it represents the scope of the project, not the individual sites. You wouldn’t go to a Patch community such as Westport, Connecticut, and say it stands head and shoulders above other local alternatives, such as Hearst’s Westport News, Main Street Connect’s The Daily Westport or Westport Now. Patch’s young and enthusiastic reporters are sometimes better (or not better) than their young and enthusiastic reporters.

What Patch’s ultimate success really rides on is changing local user behavior so that people feel compelled to check out the local patch at least a couple of times a week. It has to be a bigger swath than the older home owners who make up the primary audience of community weeklies — it’s got to be everybody. And then they’ve got to sell SMBs from the directory level on up — much of the effort probably riding on self-serve. And then they’ve got to get the geotargeted national advertising going.

Patch hopes to get over the hump by having enough of a footprint in its communities to begin marketing in a major way, perhaps, I speculate, on TV and radio and online. For sure, it is an exciting effort, and no one should dismiss it out of hand. In fact, AOL is spending the money and making the effort that could, in theory, save local journalism and hyperlocal commerce for everyone.

ShopCity, a storefront and marketing platform for SMBs, hopes to jumpstart its reach via a new “City Manager” program that allows local media partners to secure local URL rights owned by ShopCity (i.e., ShopMountainView.com) and market its services. City Managers, who handle sales and marketing as well as community relations, share revenues from storefront and marketing sales. They will also get a piece of the action from ShopCity’s community marketplace and upcoming daily deal feature.

One example of the program is ShopCorona.com. In this case, the SoCal city’s economic development division actively helped to market the platform to SMBs, greatly simplifying the city manager’s job — and winning an 80 percent participation rate among local businesses.

Embarcadero Publishing, a seven-title Bay Area group, is ShopCity’s charter media partner, having secured the rights to ShopPaloAlto.com, ShopMountainView.com and ShopMenloPark.com. Embarcadero has also begun actively soliciting support and business participation, landing partnerships with the chambers of commerce and municipal governments in all three cities, and ramping up for a September promotional campaign.

This summer, the Silicon Valley publisher hired a bunch of college kids to canvass the business community, showing off business profiles with a dedicated ShopCity iPhone app. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” says ShopCity CEO Colin Pape. “Small businesses really identify with our ‘shop local’ message and we’re generating a lot of goodwill by providing them with a complimentary profile page and online storefront.”

In other ShopCity news, Pape says the site is also building out its new national local shopping portal via ShopLocally.com, a URL it recently acquired.

The latest attempt to make hyperlocal a sustainable reality came today with Allbritton Communications’ launch of TBD.com, a hyper metro site for the Washington, D.C., area. Allbritton, which has sunk “under $5 million” into the project to date, hopes it will grab hold of the D.C. audience in the same way that its Politico has done with political types — simultaneously via the Web and TV, where it takes over the slot formerly held by Allbritton’s former News Channel 8.

I’ll say right off the bat that I like it a lot. Although I had the opportunity to visit the newsroom with other members of the BIA/Kelsey team about six weeks ago, I got my first glance at the site today. My takeaway? It’s fun, useful and totally up to date with social and mobile media.

Most important, it seems like something I’d probably read (and watch) every day if I still lived in D.C. It just seems natural and un-self-conscious — completely opposite D.C.’s staid (and untrue) image as a stuffed shirt of a city and other hyper metro sites that I won’t name here but that make NPR seem wild and crazy.

The site integrates, a little, with Allbritton’s WJLA TV, and it is co-located with the WJLA newsroom. You’ll see the WJLA programming schedule and its landmark weather reporters Doug Hill and Bob Ryan headline the weather page, for instance.

But it has a totally separate identity, helped by a dozen writers led by former Washington City Paper Editor Erik Wemple. As Wemple notes in a public letter: “One of them writes nothing but lists. One is all over pedestrian life. One holds politicians throughout the region accountable. Three carry a year-round obsession with the Redskins. Three are covering some of the fastest-developing communities in the region. Three are the final authority on all things arts and entertainment.”

The entire site will eventually ramp up soon to about 50, including the TBD News team carried over from News Channel 8, and six community reach-out staffers.The site also seamlessly integrates with 129 D.C.-area bloggers and picks up news from all the D.C. sites, including The Washington Post, and also from WJLA competitors such as WTOP-AM. And much of its substantial neighborhood news comes via a news filter that sorts by ZIP code.

It has also taken some unique approaches that only time will tell will pan out, such as TBD TV, the “companion” channel that takes over from News Channel 8, the 24/7 news channel that had been featured on cable and dish services throughout the metro area. It features programs that sometimes borrow WJLA personalities (i.e., The Arch Campbell Show) but also has begun to produce some of its own unique offerings (i.e. Capital Golf Weekly).

The site was initially slated to launch at the end of August. It is obviously up early — the testing URL leaked and they decided to roll with it. Consequently, the mobile apps (i.e., All Over the iPhone, All over the Android and All Over the Mobile Web) aren’t ready yet, although they’re being promoted, and there is a lot of content that you’d expect to see that isn’t there (i.e., high school sports) and exurban content. It is possible that they’re leaving the tough (and expensive stuff) for the thinning Post to cover.

But we know there are plans to do other things that will be totally innovative if they pull them off, such as having local bloggers for the site featured on the local news when there is a hot breaking story (i.e., the fighting among 70 teens at L’Enfant Plaza Metro station the other night).

The advertising strategies also aren’t fully unveiled, and the site will obviously focus on building up an audience first. Currently, you’ll just see some run of site ads such as Belfort Furniture and contextual tile ads, such as The Washington Ballet under arts, and McCrea Heating and Air Condition under weather.

Will this site ultimately be self sustaining? That’s the big question. It is expected to lose up to $2 million a year as it gets going. But if the site maintains its promising start, the local dollars should theoretically follow. Another question is whether the TV companion will take off.

In the course of writing this post, I was chatting about the site’s debut with hyperlocal pioneer Rob Curley, who ran The Post’s ambitious hyperlocal strategy two years ago before moving on to Greenspun Communications’ Las Vegas Sun. Curley was very enthusiastic about the site’s design. The amazing thing is that they probably showed that sites are more likely to win with a TV station as a partner than a newspaper, he said. That’s food for thought.

The Sacramento area is fast becoming Ground Zero for local blog networks. McClatchy’s Sacramento Connect, a project carved from The Sacramento Bee, is a content connector for 70+ area blogs and Web sites. It started incubating last summer and was fully in place by March.

Connect, which is subtitled “best of the local Web,” can be personalized for personal tastes a la Fwix. It primarily offers blogs more visibility and traffic, but there is no payment plan. Connect is also doing some cross-publishing based on the aggregated content, starting with a recently published Happy Hour Guide.

The Sacramento Press-related Sacramento Local Online Ad Network (SLOAN), on the other hand, is a network of 31 local blogs and sites powered by Cox’s Adify, a vertical ad network publisher. It is geared toward providing a cable TV-like regional interconnect among local bloggers to build up a base of advertisers. It gets more than 540,000 unique visitors and 7 million impressions, and pulls in a CPM listed at $18.

Many of the Sacramento area blogs apparently take part in both networks (and many still have not joined either — the Connect team has ID’d 400 Sacramento area blogs). “I think it is an important step for The Bee to take a leadership position in building a healthy local media ecosystem in Sacramento,” says Ben Ilfeld, cofounder of Sacramento Press and SLOAN. “It proves they are serious about collaboration rather than strictly competition.”

Ilfeld adds that his team is currently expanding the concept to the Bay Area, where the Bay Area Publishers Partnership (BAPP) is being developed. “The Bay doesn’t have the same level of clear leadership,” he says. “There is no ‘Sacramento Connect’ option for those publishers. I would like to bring the same technology [it is a meebo widget] to our publishers there on top of our ad network.”