Last week I attended the Crossview Executive Summit, one of the better conferences for pushing on the future of cross-channel. It’s very intimate by design. During the conference, Jason Goldberg, VP of Strategy and Customer Experience at Crossview, made the case for injecting more “local ” into retailers’ digital channels.

I couldn’t agree more. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to quickly conclude that the best way for retailers to differentiate against Amazon is through the one thing that Amazon doesn’t have – and that’s stores. Turning that blazing insight into action, however, is much harder.

I’ve talked about stores as part of RSR’s 5C’s – the Community C. That retailers need to transform their stores from faceless outpost of the brand into vibrant participant in the community. And I don’t mean by sponsoring a local Little League team or something. I mean, where customers actually know and love their store managers and employees. Where the store becomes a destination for fun, or a problem solver, or a lifestyle enabler, and maybe all three of these things at once.

Desigual and Moosejaw are examples of retailers that are starting to make this kind of impact, throwing parties in their stores and inviting customers. Whole Foods has worked hard to expose the personalities behind the meat counter, the produce section – giving customers a chance to get to know who these people are and what they like, at the store level. A face, a name, a personality – a connection and a genuine, authentic touchpoint for customers.

Jason took it further, by explaining the benefits that accrue on the digital frontier. Google is investing a lot into local, giving it prominent play on search results home pages. And the rise of local-oriented sites like Yelp and Google Places give retailers an extra opportunity to bring their many “local ” locations into the digital realm.

It requires work – claiming all of the Yelp locations of a chain store sounds like a huge headache. And making sure that all of those locations are all listed properly across all of those local sites, with the right address and the right phone number, all in the exact same way so that Google’s monster engine can connect all of these disparate data sources into one single profile on one location – that sounds like an even bigger headache. But, as Jason rightly points out – what’s the address of Amazon’s store in your neighborhood? What’s that? They don’t have one? Huh. Interesting.

But retailers can do even more to hammer home the local store advantage, if they would build actual profile pages for each store. Guitar Center does it. Whole Foods does it. Trader Joe’s has individual store Facebook pages. But if retailers are going to go this route (a powerful boost to your location, especially if you name your page URLs right), then it has to be genuinely local. For example, there’s a Memorial Day parade going on in my grocery store’s parking lot on Monday. I know it’s going to impact the store, but I’m not exactly sure how. Will all of the parking lot be open? What are the hours when the store will be most impacted? Is there a way to get there I should avoid or use?

If I go to the store page and find the usual boilerplate on store hours and departments and blah blah blah, all of the retailer’s efforts to be local just went down the tubes – you’ve blown your credibility with me that I will actually get local information. And guess what? That means local store resources need to get involved if you’re going to have any local credibility. And if you want it to be anything more than half-hearted, sporadic efforts, it’s going to need to be a carved out, concerted job that isn’t going to get subsumed to something else – like staffing a cash register if the store is busy and someone called in sick.

Local is the future of the store. But “going local ” isn’t about buying a technology that lets you set up store pages. It isn’t about having your store claim your Yelp page or set up a Facebook page or a Twitter feed. It means that you can’t turn your employees over every six months, because now you’ll be risking customer relationships. It means the store manager can’t be chained to a desk in the back of the store.

It means, in other words, a lot of change. But if you think about it for even one split second, you’ll realize: what’s the one thing that Amazon will never have? (Forget about Kindle for a moment)

It’s stores.