The Last Five Feet: The Local Internet Versus Receptionists

“Local” is a big part of the bull case for the web right now, but it’s not rigorously defined. Right now, the fundamental unit of local marketing is the street address, just as the fundamental unit of SEO is the link, and the fundamental unit of social media is the status update.

But this abstraction hides an important facet of social media: these companies can succeed, not just by making it easier to direct someone to a single street address, but by digitizing every possible stage of their interaction.

Zocdoc is a good example of this: it takes about five minutes to log into Zocdoc, find a well-reviewed doctor, and set up an appointment. But the end experience is decidedly non-digital: after giving your insurance and medical information to Zocdoc—you give exactly the same information to each doctor, except through a paper form instead of a web form.

On an individual level, that’s not a big deal, but at a societal level, the cost is massive: Zocdoc gets 700,000 users per month; at five minutes of form-filling per user, that’s 58,000 hours of pointless work Zocdoc could save. Seth Godin would call it pre-digital, but it’s not so much pre-digital as assymetrically digital. We’re one Zocdoc/CRM integration away from making this happen.

And that’s just an obvious way to use web-based information at physical stores. The non-obvious implications could be anything from selling specific appointments rather than undifferentiated visits to closing the attribution gap by crediting physical stores for online sales.

The missing ingredient is that local Internet companies still think of themselves as Internet companies, rather than local marketing companies that use the Internet as a convenient interface. From an Internet perspective, every time a customer gets a form and a pen, it’s a bug. Squashing those bugs will lower the frictional cost of sending people to local businesses; the time dividend from this will accrue mostly to these local businesses, though the web will also benefit.