Although it is not social media-based, Zipcar is one of our best local consumer internet examples. I like CarbonRally too, as a very young example of local social media-fueled innovating company too. Care.com and RunMyErr come to mind as well. We have to broaden our definition of social media to include the innovative use of those behaviors, tools, and technologies. Not just the creation of platforms and infrastructure/analytics around social media.

Anyway we need more, more, more in Boston, and much of the onus and opportunity lies within the investor community–to get out of its comfort zone. So few investors have really done consumer and social media in their careers. It’s understandably hard for them to trust even deeply experienced teams in these areas…it’s such a scary black box to investors. Success in consumer facing-enterprises can’t be driven entirely with dials and levers–it takes insight and confidence too. Social media does, however, offer amazing customer engagement and acquisition tools to make consumer businesses profitably scale in very new ways. That’s the real opportunity in social media.