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.
Local Social Summit is very excited that Stephen Leighton owner of leading UK coffee roaster, Has Bean, has agreed to come speak at LSS@Social Media Week on 4th February 2010.
We are planning to have a conversation with Steve about how as an artisan coffee roaster he is utilising a proliferation of Social Media channels to build engagement with his customers and the coffee community in general.
In reality, we’re fanboys of Steve (and without saying the amazing coffee Hasbean brings back to the UK) and would be happy if he just comes along and shares his wonderful passion for coffee and with that his direct trade approach with growers (actually, here’s hoping we get some of that because when you think about it, that’s still Local Social). Regardless of what Steve talks about, our hope is that those who come along toLSS@Social Media Week will agree with us by the end of the evening when we say, we believe Stephen Leighton is coffee’s rising answer to Gary Vee.
To get a taste of why we think that, here’s a video from In My Mug, Steve’s weekly video show:
To fully get an understanding of how Steve is using Social Media in furthering the success of Hasbean, we suggest you:
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.
Was recently watching Bernie Hogan’s (embdeded below as a Playlist) talk at Local Social Summit ‘09.
Afterwards found this piece from the Onion News Network, which being a Friday, hopefully you will agree highlights some of the problems with being a friend of your Mom on Social Media.
