I recently visited Toronto for the first time in eight years and got the chance to spend some time with an old friend at his house. Eventually, I perused his main media collections: Books, CD, DVD and Games and this helped me understand how his taste has developed since we last saw each other and gave us a springboard for shared experiences.
This browsing and judging as it were reminded me that this is actually a very common nature and in many ways it’s helped us over the years understand if we’re generally going to like someone or not. If the CD collection had more Kenny G over Miles Davis, you knew it was time to call time and make your departure fairly swiftly.
Heck, even the organisation of media was a big thing. Did you do A-Z by Author, Chaos Theory, or Dewey Decimal.
Actually, a rival in winning my fair wife’s hand lost significant points for his incessant and rather gruff need to re-order her book collection A-Z by Title!
Anyway, this all had me think that actually the demise of physical media is going to have an everlasting impact on this behaviour and I for one am very sad it won’t be long before I will be able to walk into someone’s house, look at shelves and judge that person!
I was recently having a coffee at Dose Espresso, one of the leading lights of the new wave London coffee scene, when I was given a disloyalty card.
A number of the leading lights have come together to create something quite cool.
Get a coffee from each of the places, get a stamp and once complete you can go collect your reward. A free coffee pulled by Gwilym Davies, the current (2009) World Barista Champion.
I think this is a brilliant innovation and so excited it’s done by the SMBs themselves. I’ll be looking for other examples but if you have seen some that you like, then let me know.
Here is a video of a group of Norwegians the card in one day:
As part of my ongoing research into Facebook, I recently connected to Huffington Post – as part of the signup I was told that it’s possible for me to earn badges for my engagement levels with the Huffington Post (see image below).
This is the first example I have seen of Media taking lessons from Foursquare, et al and using Gaming Mechanics in the form of Badges to drive use. Please let me know if you have seen other examples.
Recently, Sensis, the Yellow Pages for Australia, ran an interesting marketing campaign to show the relevancy of the Yellow Pages in the digital age.
In conjunction with a top Melbourne chef they opened a guerrilla/pop-up pizza restaurant for two weeks. The trick was that the location was supposed to be kept a secret and if you could find it you would get a free pizza. Or in their words:
Finding the restaurant is easy, just look it up the way you would any other business from April 12 – April 25 and the pizzas are free.
Which when you read between the lines means: find this Hidden Pizza restaurant on sensis.com.au – which Sensis reports 70% of customers did. But as you can read from some of the deeper local analysis (links below) was because that was the only place (at first) where you could find the address. I say at first because in the age of social engaged consumers it wasn’t long before the business details were being listed across various social media outlets (Foursquare, Twitter, Urban Spoon, etc.)
Sensis are calling this a success, it’s detractors are saying it’s a complete fail because they just don’t get that things have changed in the digital age and it’s a false positive. My view is that the statistics, immediate outcome of the campaign aren’t the important thing here but the fact that Sensis have been able to generate global conversation on the back of a local campaign is. I hope other traditional Yellow Page companies take note and we see other examples coming to a neighbourhood soon.
As a final note, don't bother searching on Yellow Pages for Hidden Pizza as it looks like Sensis have pulled the listing – that looks like a lost opportunity for further engagement to me.
At the recent LSS@Social Media Week event, Carolyn Watt, Managing Director of Yabber, treated us to a fictional near-future account of a day in the life. Kindly, she has allowed us to publish it here.
“I wake up shivering. I yawn. I stretch. “bbrrr”. My portal is already activated because and I am already plugged into ‘the one’, or ‘the network’ and the thermometers already know the temperature had dipped below 21 degrees so the heating has cranked itself up. I scan the screen for email, messages, news and the Newcastle results from last night. “Tweet Manu” I say. I Tweet the Man U manager with commiserations on another defeat. What was life like before voice recognition; bring on thought recognition and give us all some peace!. I forgot to put the bins out last night so Tesco hasn’t replenished my fridge via is chip scanners. At least it will save me money on my rubbish collection. So its lunch at StarBucks. As a sip my Fairtrade coffee I scan the café with my mobile to pick up any latent people based meta data. Hello Paul! The guy at the next table is hot. I scan his social networking profile – 24, the MD of a social media agency, lives in Chelsea. His DNA looks compatible with mine but damn it supports Man U. A text from Jimmy Choo cheers me up as I pass the store. 20% voucher. I video call my best friend to show off my new purchase while Tweeting my love of all things shoes. My mobile phone tells me the Embankment has tailbacks. I drop my solar powered pod car off at the nearest booth and walk video calling my friend in the Priory en route. She looks terrible. She says half the people there are suffering from information addiction and withdrawal and just sits quivering in the corner. Because there’s no need for typing anymore with everything being voice activated I rattle through my to do list, Tweet my lunch order from the electronic canteen, while also voting for a change in the law on tuna fishing. I feel so empowered being able to vote online on an policy by policy basis rather than along party political lines. I check out the interior of my nearest dim sum restaurant, read video reviews, Tweet my friends to see if they’ve eaten there, order my G&T, dinner for 2 and download directions to plug straight into my pod car’s SatNav. I check my mobile en route to see which of my friends are in Soho via my iphone based geometric sensors. I Tweet about the terrible service and do a video review live to discourage anybody else from going. I get 200 responses and a voucher from another dim sum round the corner offering a 50% discount on my first meal. I’m shattered and all the Tweeting in the world doesn’t stop my Jimmy Choos hurting. I go to bed chatting with my girlfriends on video conference about their day. Everything is wireless so I nod off mid sentence, attached to the latest technology from Japan which enables me to download the content of my dreams for interpretation in the morning on what exactly it means to dream about meerkats.
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.
For the people who came along to the LSS@Social Media Week event last night, they were treated to a goody bag of amazing coffee that Stephen Leighton from Has Bean Coffee provided us with. Steve also treated us all with the story of Has Bean and how Social Media is really helping them succeed.
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.
