They know where you live

“Who is your best contact?” The woman who had asked the question was staring at me expectantly. To be honest, as someone who usually has an answer for everything, I was a little flummoxed. And this was bad because it was a job interview. I didn’t get the job.

It’s a question that I have found my mind fluttering back to intermittently in the subsequent years. As someone who spends half their time on PR campaigns, it’s partly prudent but, the answer is constantly changing. Essentially it is asking who the first person is you want to tell a bit of news to. Who is the one person you think will be able to spread word fast enough, and effectively enough, about whatever event, exhibition or activity you are up to?

Up until recently I would probably have trilled off a list of national names. But I find myself… hesitating.

This week I have been doing research for a project I’m working on. I’m dipping my toes into a market I haven’t spent time in for several years, and I’m finding it increasingly interesting. The last time I worked in Yorkshire, ‘hyperlocal’ was something the BBC was exploring. It wasn’t yet a mainstream idea and the possibility of it catching on and becoming the principle route by which many of us engage with our local culture and identity was a few rungs further down from a pipe dream.

As our local high streets and town centres have become increasingly homogenised online, our sense of difference and independence is flourishing. Take the city where I live: Liverpool. I read about exhibitions on various sites written by excellent local writers and bloggers, including SevenStreets (with the faintly threatening moniker: ‘We know where you live’), the newly launched Double Negative and Art in Liverpool. It is a small pond and there is crossover, but I find it endlessly fascinating. We all experience culture differently and having several different voices talking about the same event or exhibition only enhances it.

There was a blog on AP not long ago that lambasted national writers for not covering enough in the regions. Largely, for me, that’s about ego. And to be honest the nationals do pretty well. But the local bloggers and writers are a vastly under-utilised resource; they speak to an admittedly smaller but much more passionate market – one that is more likely to be mobilised. Art is often of, by and for its community. If we are local we respond because we enjoy living in the same community. If we travel to visit it, it is often to sample that parallel culture, which might be on the other end of a motorway, on the other side of a mountain range, across a county border.

And so I have made a resolution of sorts: because I enjoy the hyperlocal voices on my own doorstep so much, I want to find out more about the ones on yours. I want to be able to visit a city and discover what is going on by finding a blogger or a local community review, instead of a local tourist board.

This creates logistical issues for any organisation. One, and I got into a rather heated discussion with an arts journalist about this: press previews can be difficult to manage if the gallery space is full of bloggers. Organising a press preview so everyone gets what they need and goes home happy is obviously a priority. Two: some might be snobbish about knowledge. I have always thought the raw, human response of someone in a gallery is as valid as a response based on a wide understanding of art history and context; a civilian response is more likely to reflect the views of the majority of the audience. But both have their place, increasingly so.

One of the key ways to boost visibility of websites, now that Google has changed those pesky algorithms again, is regular fresh content. Bloggers can be inordinately helpful with this – producing a short preview, review or comment on your work makes your website more attractive to visitors as well as search engines. As people become savvier about where their taxes go, and while we are likely to be asking our local communities to contribute more to help keep our institutions going, it makes sense to get that hyperlocal community involved, whether it is writing, taking pictures or just tweeting about what we are doing.

So who is your best contact, and how might they be able to help you reach more people?