Google Local Guides

November 2015 – Local Guides is Google's top contributor program for content creators who share reviews, photos, and other insights about places on Google Maps—making it more useful and accurate for everyone. Following on a soft rebrand in January 2015, in November the program was expanded with a new 5-level point system, a scorecard interface in the Maps app, and more attractive rewards, like 1 TB bonus Drive storage.

The expansion announcement was enthusiastically received by both users and press, with excellent pickup across business, tech and consumer publications, including TIME, The Verge, TechCrunch and The New York Times in the US; and internationally, UK's The Independent, The Times of India, CNET Japan, and Mexico's Excélsior.

As marketing lead, my role was to help craft our positioning in external communications, and to amplify the launch through a combination of earned, owned, and paid media tactics, which I'll elaborate on below.

LoCAl GUIDES SITE

To introduce the program, I led the development of a new website aimed at attracting, educating, and motivating new Local Guides to start contributing to Google Maps. The site features a modern, fully-responsive layout, custom photography, interactive content, and powerful visual storytelling.

*Tips page hero in Japanese—notice the localized app UI in the mobile phone*

The scope of the Local Guides site is also unique, even among Google products, in that it's localized in 42 languages, which, while cumbersome for design, extends our ability to reach a global audience.

Launch announcement

On launch day, we published a post on the Maps blog announcing the expansion, and had it syndicated across a number of Google country blogs and social channels to amplify and extend our press cycle.

DIRECT RESPONSE

To supplement our organic efforts to acquire users, we put into market a global paid media campaign in Q4, activating both on- and off-network channels. On-net: Google Display Network and search ads, AdMob, Gmail sponsored promotion. Off-net: Twitter promoted posts, Facebook newsfeed ads, and direct email/content buys.