I discovered a new blog last week long before the the writers contacted me. Two of the bloggers wrote me last week to let me know about Local Jacksonville. Basically Local Jacksonville is:
focused on everything having to do with Jacksonville  the city, the culture, the people and the neighborhoods where people live and work.
Local Jacksonville appears to be part of a larger reality organization called Move. The posts have been pretty good, but I fear there is a potential for Local Jacksonville to suffer from a lack of credibility. People may not want to read a blog that appears to exist solely for marketing purposes.
If the authors can develop a true personality and voice an opinion every now and again, it may gain some traction with readers. Otherwise it will be nothing more than a realtor’s brochure to help sell more homes in the city. Local Jacksonville is looking for contributors, which could lend some additional credibility if the contributors come from a diverse background and, again, actually have an opinion.
The USA Today talks about Move.com in it’s article Cool Site, Bad Timing. Apparently there was a huge investment behind the Move.com website. Since the Local Jacksonville
blog is affiliated with Move.com, I can only assume there is lots of money behind the blogging initiative too.
Check out Local Austin. It is almost exactly the same as Local Jacksonville. One thing that does interest me is the Local Jacksonville and Austin are making a genuine effort to identify and contact the popular bloggers in their respective markets. At this time Local Jacksonville and Austin are the only two blogs like this in the network.
This may be a trial run to see if blogging pays off as a marketing tool. Some people may see this as a disingenuous attempt to disguise marketing as blogging. I’ll let you be the judge. They got me to write about them, so from a marketing perspective, maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all.
tags: jacksonville, local jacksonville, move.com
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joeymarchy
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Tony
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Gary Goldhammer
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Dustin
