A quick post but just saw something interesting that I needed to write up.
Amongst a couple of others, I was asked yesterday on Twitter for a recommendation for where to get a decent cup of coffee near Victoria Station. Influential UK foodie blogger, Young and Foodish, replied with Flat Cap Coffee, which was new to me. As I’m a burgeoning coffee geek, I decided to add it to the Google Map I’m building to track good coffee bars in London Here’s where it gets interesting:
Google Search brings back, for me, the Foursquare venue page as first result (see image below):
I then go to Google Maps to add it to my map and nothing. Actually, this is an awful results set
Ok, it’s inconclusive and I’m in a rush but interesting none the less because of the following:
Twitter was used for what I call an over the fence request ahead of Search
Twitter replied with somewhere I hadn’t heard of and looked good
Google hadn’t heard much of it, other than bringing back results from Foursquare, Twitter and Blogs
It was nowhere near Google Maps
So, actually I think I’m going to stick with my title as at least in the example Local Social whooped Local Searches ass. Agree, disagree, got some more examples?
Speaking from a biased position, there were many highlights last Thursday night at the LSS@Social Media Week event. But the definite dot on the i that ensured it was a memorable night was when Dr. Bernie Hogan, presented the graphic below.
After Bernie completed his talk, Rebuilding the Collapsed Contexts in Social Media, Bernie performed an analysis of the Twitter API using NodeXL to build a network diagram of all the people who had tweeted with the hashtag #smwLDN.
Click on image for full size
To help us understand it, Bernie included the following notes when he sent over the image for us to publish on the Local Social Summit blog.
This is a twitter network of all people who tweeted #smwLDN
People who ended up retweeted or mentioned by at least 4 others have a thumbnail and label. Color means number of followers – red means lots of followers, blue means few followers.
In the center is one big group, linked through several tenuous connections such as Jeremy Jacobs and mediaczar.
In the upper right is another group with stevebridger and 1000heads.
In the bottom are all the small groups of singletons or dyads who tweeted the tag.
The arrows point outwards showing where tweets went as people mentioned or retweeted #smwLDN. Clearly, its paid off for the organizers to be be active in using their own hash tag as smwLDN has the high number of mentions outwards.
All of the nodes that seem to fan out from a single person highlight someone who has a relatively active audience. Some of these people share an audience, too. SteveBridger and lesanto have a lot of fans incommon (since these fans retweeted or mentioned both of these people). The same can be said for EEPaul and BernieJMitchell.
But of course, this graph also shows that Twitter is a rather thin medium. Social Media Week London had 16,000 followers, and yet the application only picked up 30 retweets or mentions from them (mazi has most herein with 34,800).
Bernie is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and we feel lucky to have had him speak so far at two Local Social Summit events. Amongst other more academic venues, Bernie’s work on Facebook will be featured in the forthcoming “Analyzing Social Media with NodeXL” edited by Derek Hansen, Marc Smith and Ben Shneiderman due in mid-July.
You can find more about Bernie on his Oxford Internet Institute microsite or follow him on Twitter.
To my knowledge only a small number of us have been closely tracking the Local Social Media intersection for a few years. But since Dylan and I organised the first Local Social Summit, it feels like the world has taken notice and Local Social is going mainstream.
The Week that was in Local Social
Below, are some of the main stories from last week that caught my attention.
Yelp gets funding of $100 million. My opinion is that this funding was the plan all along and Yelp played Google to get a solid valuation: a dangerous game to be playing. Greg Sterling interviewed Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman to get some more details on where that money will be going. As the PR on the investment came out during the Apple iPad launch, Henry Blodget’s harsh headline was: Yelp Wins Award For Dumbest Funding-Announcement Timing Ever.
AT&T to launch buzz.com. From what I’ve read, sounds like it’s geared towards mobile and is a standard Local business ratings services with a question function, tied into a friends and family social graph. What I like about this is that it’s innovation from an old school telco.
Twitter has rolled out Local Trends to everyone (& the API). The obvious point is that 3rd party innovation will make something interesting out of this. One possible use is utilising the Local Trends as a solid data source for BI over Local information to determine requirements for things like: Emergency Services and Content.
fully expects Facebook and others to launch "check-in" functionality, making it [a] "commodity by the end of the year."
As I’ve said for a few months now, I’m not that interested in the checkin but I believe the checkout is where this trend needs to be heading. Once that happens, then you’re going to see widespread SMB engagement and things will get interesting in the Local Social games niche.
In Seb Provencher’s required reading deck regarding the Perfect local media company of 2014, which was presented for the first time at Local Social Summit ‘09, checkin is listed as one of the standard features. You can see the video of that lab session below.
We are very happy to announce that on Thursday 4th February, we will be hosting another Local Social Summit event.
LSS@Social Media Week: The Science of Social Media
It could be said that most people have faith that Social Media is more than a new hype bubble. While faith alone isn’t a bad thing, we plan to add some reason as we explore the Science of Social Media
LSS@Social Media Week is brought to you by:
Confirmed Speakers:
Dr. Bernie Hoganfrom the Oxford Internet Institute – Bernie will taking time out from his busy teaching and media schedule to present his latest research into the emerging issue of social information overload and effective methodologies for leveraging online interactions and new media in everyday life.
Social Media Week: The second annual conference will take place between February 1st – 5th, 2010 simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo. The five day conference will explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.
As you maybe aware, post-summit we are planning to release various materials from Local Social Summit ’09 to various open social channels.
First was the decks from the day onto SlideShare. We have just received notification that we are featured on the SlideShare homepage. ( Screengrab below).
Will be interesting to see the impact of that bump vs. the organic growth that was occuring.
Previously this year, we (Dylan and Simon) produced a short case study looking at ROI from using Social Media Marketing to promote a beer festival.
Later today (30th October), we will be conducting our latest experiment. This time we are looking to test the following hypothesis:
Competition and Social Media can cost-effectively drive real world sales and engagement
The experiment will be run from 4pm to 5:58pm at another Beer Festival. We would love to have you join us in this experiment, so if you are able to attend then please feel free to sign-up directly from the Competition page or contact us.
