I am about to sign the lease and begin my eighth year of living in Somerville. I initially came here to live near friends, and while that’s still a draw, I’ve also become enamored with the community spirit and entrepreneurial culture that pervades the city.  A lot of that is shown through the vibrant arts scene, but local businesses are also strong and well organized here in Somerville, and a lot of that is due to Somerville Local First.

Somerville Local First launched in May 2008 with the goal of promoting local and sustainable economic development. The organization comprises 180 members, 140 of which are locally owned, independent businesses.

Over the course of this year, I’ve become more familiar with Somerville Local First, in part through their print publications and partnerships with local businesses, but also through their presence on the web. Their Twitter and Facebook presences are engaging and informative, keeping me in the loop about what businesses are up to around town and who is new to the area, and their blog – which launched along with their redesigned website last month – has quickly become a compelling and enlightening read. The blog brings together voices from the likes of dog owners, interns, policy researchers and local business owners on topics ranging from a review of a recent garden tour to the phenomenon of “local-washing.”

I spoke with Joe Grafton, the founding executive director of the nonprofit, about the approach that the small organization (Grafton is the only paid employee) has taken to communicating via the web and social media. Acknowledging that the organization can’t do everything or be everywhere at once, Grafton decided to focus Somerville Local First’s online presence on being an aggregator of content from around—and even outside—the city, all emphasizing local, sustainable economic development.

Beside their blog and social media accounts, Somerville Local First has also experimented with group buying (through the pilot Shift and Save coupon program) and plans to eventually devote a section of their website for people to access location-based specials in real-time via their mobile phones.

For Grafton, communicating via the web and social media is all about telling a story and having conversations, and using those engagements to advance the mission of Somerville Local First and support its members.

“I do feel that these channels are valuable and can create change in our community, which is why we choose to invest in them.”

The mission of SLF is to support local and sustainable economic development. How do you see social media supporting that mission?

I was at our national conference in Charleston this year—we’re affiliated with BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economics)—and a colleague and friend from Local First Arizona talked about how she spends three to four nights a week at community meetings talking about Local First Arizona, where we as an organization just don’t have the resources to do that right now. Because we just don’t have the manpower to really manage our program and run the network in addition to doing outward community outreach and storytelling, we look at the web as our way to tell the story 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Lots of Somerville businesses and organizations are using Twitter. How do you, as an umbrella organization of sorts, seek to complement that and promote that?

In the world of new media and especially Twitter, we look at ourselves as content aggregators. There are a number of businesses that are part of our network using different channels – Facebook, Twitter, what have you – and we are the funnel all of it feeds into. What we try to do is provide a steady stream of information from our members to the people who follow us in that mechanism.

We also do different things on Twitter. We use it as a way to convey a message. It’s not just about promotion. Primarily we’re an educational organization. When we promote a business, we’re promoting it because we believe that if people are patronizing that business, the economy is doing better than if they weren’t. We share articles and knowledge with the community so that it’s not just about this promotion from business XYZ, but here’s what happens when you move you money to a local financial institution, or think about where your food comes from. By providing a rich diversified stream of content, what we hope people are following us on Twitter will do is have the ability to really see what’s happening in Somerville. As we think about new media, in a way we’re filling the role of some old media a — letting people know what’s happening in the community, but with a slant around local and sustainable.

Since launching, your blog has showcased a number of voices from across the community, covering a diverse range of topics. How did you go about planning for this blog and shaping its focus and content?

It started with us with really developing an understanding with HubSpot, which is one of the leaders in the country around inbound marketing. We did some education on our own and at that point we’d been using social media to push messages, but we thought, ‘What do we want people to do when they come to our site?’ We had a site which was good enough for a startup but not good enough. We were going to launch a new website anyways.

Our board members, who are running businesses or nonprofit organizations, can’t spend a huge amount of time developing the content. We’re big, big fans of watching what other people are doing, watching what works and copying it. You could look at the types of content and breadth of contributors and see the exact same plan as the Huffington Post. They have a huge number of people who are contributors. Every time someone gets something published there, they share it in their circle and drive traffic to the Huffington Post website and get the message out there. We thought that was a good model to follow.

We have four distinct categories of contributors – staff, board members and interns from Somerville Local First; Somerville Local First members, nonprofits, businesses, what have you; community bloggers and reporters — those are just writers who are interested in local and contribute to our blog from a number of angles; and third-party experts, people who may not necessary be in Somerville but have a very important role to play in the local movement around the country. As an organization that is really trying to be a leader in telling the story through the web, we thought having all these different communities contributing would add to vibrancy and make it more interesting for people to come back and see the content. But it all came out of, we don’t have enough time and resources to make this work, so let’s see what does work and emulate it.

“Local” as a theme is getting a lot of buzz today. How does the web, from your experience, help support the idea of local?

I think it’s so critical. There are a couple of reasons why its important. One of the main reasons is, we’re actually doing such a good job at changing the taste and the values of the customer base in the country that lots of non-local organizations are starting to adopt the wording and messaging around local.

What the web allows us to do is deliver a message that doesn’t have to come through a filter outside of our control. We’re not pitching a news story or article or TV segment that will be processed and delivered through the lens of producers or writers. We’re able to tell the story in a more authentic way and without compromise. I think that one piece is really having authenticity of the message.

Also, I think that maybe I’m an early adopter on this but I think so many people get their news through social media now as opposed to traditional channels, so it allows us to create things that are viral. Every time someone who is contributing to our blog or knows someone whose contributing to our blog sees something go online, that’s an opportunity where they might share that with their network. That may get people in their circle thinking about local and why it’s important and thinking about sustainability. The viral nature of news delivery on social media and the web allows for our message to multiply.

That’s where the real opportunity in social media and the web for us is getting that message virally shared and get closer to a point where the majority of people in our community care about local and there’s demand for entrepreneurs to come in and sell.

The Shift and Save coupons work like a hyperlocal Groupon. How did that idea come about and how successful was it?

Just looking at trends and what’s working in the market. [We asked,] how can we generate revenue for the network but provide a tangible benefit for business members through the website? How can we as an organization use our followers to support our message and support our members and support the organization?

We sold 100 coupons in just over a day, which was a total capacity of what we had to sell. That exceeded our expectation. We’re tracking the data to see whether or not this is actually going to be good for the businesses. I’m actually pretty unsure whether these group buying things are good for the businesses. We’re tracking things like, of people who bought coupons for Sherman Market, how many are new customers? When they bought with the coupon, what was the total order value? In time, we’ll have data to say how much it actually was good for the business. We’re dedicated to the fact that, after our testing, regardless of how much revenue or how quickly we sell, if it turns out the program doesn’t really benefit the businesses, we’re just not going to do it. Ultimately, we’re here to support local entrepreneurs and if group buying doesn’t do it, even on a hyper local basis, then we’re not going to do it.

What’s next for Somerville Local First on the web and in social media?

I do think that we are always striving to have conversations in all of these channels. We’re not just about broadcasting. People are really good at tuning out broadcasting and that’s not what we want to be. We like to ask questions and generate dialogue and have discussion.

We’re starting to get to the saturation point in our web channels with early adopters. We’ve got the early adopters invested in what we’re doing and contributing. As we start going outside of the circle, and group buying is one way we might do that. You’re reaching people not so into local but who are into saving money, and it generates more discussion and points of view.

I keep a strong eye on how we do with interactions and whether people are responding to what we’re posting about. When I look at other pages, I think we do really well but I know there’s a lot we can do. For the next six months, we’ll let what we’ve got roll and continue to try to improve it and keep our eye on trends, looking at location based services and see where the markets are going and do what we’ve done in the past which is look at what other people are doing that’s working and see if we can do that ourselves.