There really is something to the notion that you can’t beat a local at their own game. Of course there is one way to trump a local and that’s a crowd of locals. No single local can know everything, but together they are a smart bunch. Locals know the small stuff and it’s the small stuff that matters. When locals help locals, big things happen.

What’s more impressive is the locals don’t all need to know each other. I’ve seen people help other people and in the process make friends and connections. I used to believe social media spread things randomly, but having seen the power of the social graph in action, I’m now really convinced of the ability to channel attention within any given locale.

To use Chris Anderson’s expression: locals can “Shine a Light” of intense power. Locals have laser beam focus.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned by way of the following locations.

Adelaide, Northern Ohio, Nashville, West Michigan & Kansas City

And when I compare these communities to other cases, it makes total sense. People don’t see content that does not speak or connect to them. We have highly effective filtering devices inside our brains to reduce the volume of content we consume and care about. We have tunnel vision that focuses on what we care about.

I spoke about this at Social Cuation Summit last week and it clearly resonated with the audience.

Local lists don’t spread beyond local because they are nothing more than background noise to anyone else. Tourists are an exception. Tourists become temporary locals, curious to find and share everything they discover.

Also speaking from experience, people who move to a city, also become passionate learners and sharers about their new locale. They are temporary tourists. Or tourists in transition. I know that’s how I felt when I moved to Kelowna.

My prior post on meaning explored the notion that true meaning only happens when we share. Sharing validates our own human experience. This notion reinforces why locals care so much – sharing validates your own existence. Sharing makes their city matter. Who wants to live somewhere that doesn’t matter. Nobody.

When it comes to local, sharing is a coping mechanism. I know I share what I know with a gift economy mindset. I don’t need reciprocal information and reciprocal sharing, but I often get just that. I get back more than I put in. Sharing is a way to connect and a way to collectively filter the noise. The better content gets shared more.

A question I keep asking: What is a good Chinese restaurant here in Kelowna? I always ask that question, because I don’t have a great answer.

When people vote and contribute to a list, they leave a little piece of themselves behind. They make an emotional investment. They become vested in it’s success, so much so that they come back to check on it’s progress.

With local lists the emotional investment is high. Local lists involve a high degree of self validation.

Research shows lists are both the most viewed content on the web and the most shared.

People enter busy bars and coffee shops. We use people to filter. We use social proof every day of our lives, we just don’t know it. Humans are built to collaborate and share. That’s how we survived. Sharing is a coping mechanism.

As I connect the dots and as I talk to more people and share and combine more experiences, it’s all beginning to make sense.

We all want people to love that we love, because it validates us. Local lists anchor us in our community. They let us share what we know and they also let us fill in gaps in our local knowledge.

Local lists make us smarter and they let us contribute to the collective smarts. We know that adding to such a list is a collective good. A civic act. We know by adding and voting we are contributing, or we should. Inside we do, I believe. We perhaps don’t vocalize, we perhaps can’t explain it, but inside we know.

Local matters.

After our experiences in Adelaide et al, we began to ask ourselves how we could reproduce this. The problem was at the time we were asking the wrong question. We were asking how can we grow Listly, we should have been asking these questions instead:

• how can we become significant in your town?
• how can we help your town feel more connected?
• how can we support the community forming that happens locally and via existing social networks like Facebook?

So here is our first step. We made a list of lists that we’ve seen be effective in other areas, but now we need your help. We need your input on what’s missing. What else should we include? What have your found that works? What lists would you like to make about local life?

Our featured lists on List.ly are covered in a blog post. This week’s lists are all local

Image Credit: library_of_congress via Flickr.com & Creative Commons

Nick Kellet (142 Posts)

Nick is co-founder the social curation platform Listly, that combines crowdsourcing, content curation and embedable lists to drive high-level community engagement, live inside your blog posts. Connect with Nick on Twitter · Linkedin, Facebook and G+ and follow his writing via his other guest posts and on his blogs at NickKellet.com and blog.list.ly