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:

Here is a map of the locations:

View Larger Map

Not convinced that you can get coffee in London, then click here to read an earlier post about just that.

Posted via email from Simon Baptist’s Posterous

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):

From going to Foursquare, I get a map, some tips and the official Twitter account @flatcapcoffeeco.

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:

1. Twitter was used for what I call an over the fence request ahead of Search
2. Twitter replied with somewhere I hadn’t heard of and looked good
3. Google hadn’t heard much of it, other than bringing back results from Foursquare, Twitter and Blogs
4. 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?

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.

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 Hogan from 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.
• Stephen Leighton owner of Has Bean Coffee: http://www.hasbean.co.uk/ – A conversation with the up and coming UK and coffee’s answer to Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library and Crushit)
• Paul McCrudden - from Imagination & #6weeks fame, will share insights and knowledge from how consumers are interacting with brands
• Carolyn Watt, Founder and Managing Director of Yabber, Profero’s digital PR and social media division will be presenting an exciting case study

When: Thursday, 4th February 2010, 6:30pm-8:30pm
Where: The Hospital Club (http://www.thehospitalclub.com/)

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.

More Details & Register:

For more details click here to go to the event page and you can get your tickets through the eventbrite ticket microsite.

Roland Bryan, Director, Strategy at Associated Northcliffe Digital

Roland currently leads digital strategy across A&N’s digital assets under the AND umbrella. He is responsible for identifying opportunities to drive profitable growth across the portfolio through new product development, improved commercialisation, strategic partnerships and acquisition strategy.

He has also recently launched a new pilot in the hyperlocal space, localpeople, which has 50 live sites across the West of England. He is acting as General Manager of this proposition.

Prior to joining DMGT, Roland headed up the content acquisition team at Virgin Media with a particular focus on major channel carriage deals and growing the VOD content offer.

In addition to these roles, Roland previously worked at OC&C Strategy Consultants from 1999-2006 where he rose from Analyst to Associate Partner, leading their delivery capability in European Media. His projects included work on major media transactions such as Formula 1 and Telegraph Media Group and led corporate strategy assignments for Holtzbrinck, Trinity Mirror, BT and ITV amongst others.

Roland was educated at Oxford University, Keble College where he graduated with a Masters in History.

He lives in London.

Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.