Geolocation apps start to splinter into verticals

This is the second in an ongoing series on the state of geolocation apps, sites and services. Also see:
• Part 1: Are you ready for the place graph?

Target audience: Startups, entrepreneurs, businesses with location-based components, educators, journalists, general public.

In part one of this series we looked back at the early days of geolocation, with Platial kicking off the geoloco revolution in the practically prehistoric year of 2005. Since then, a number of paradigm-shifting startups have already come, gone or been sold, among them fwix, Loopt, Ditto, Blockboard, Everyblock (shut down this month) and the late lamented NextStop and Whrrl.

On Sunday Josh Williams, former founder-CEO of Gowalla and now a product manager at Facebook, penned a great writeup on the early years of the Foursquare-Gowalla death match, spanning 2009-2010, before Foursquare emerged as the King of Check-In Mountain.

Now that the table has been set, what’s next for geolocation? Is it all about Foursquare, Yelp, yawn and go home?

I don’t think so. Instead, we’re seeing geolocation begin to splinter into niches and verticals. And, within a couple of years, geolocation capabilities will simply be baked into our everyday on-the-go lives.

Flavors of location: Travel, recommendations, geo-social & more

In surveying the competitive landscape, I’ve been struck by how diverse the geo landscape has become. We’re still in the expansion, experimentation and buyout phase — before the inevitable contraction, consolidation and hand-wringing phase sets in. Every week, it seems, I hear about a new startup doing something interesting with geolocation. (I still wish Gowalla had pivoted instead of selling to Facebook.)

Navigation apps like Waze and mapping sites (Google, Apple, Mapquest, Bing Maps) are all about location, but they’re too obvious to include here.

So what are the new breed of startups using location information in interesting new ways?

I could use your help in thinking about how to group these startups. Here’s a first stab. Once we have our categories, I’ll drill deeper with a take on what’s working, not working and where the real breakthroughs are. Here goes — see if you can group these differently, and let us know about other notable startups we’ve missed that deserve to be listed here (I’m sure there are dozens!):

Place annotations and discoveries

1Description: With these apps, it’s all about places. Document and tag your city, discover what’s interesting around you, share what you discover with the world or your network. This is an amazing category.

Apps & sites: Now (a just-launched “find fun nearby!” app around real-time events), Sidewalk (“find what you love about your city”), Banjo (social discovery app that lets the user look at what is happening around the world in real time), Urbantag (bought by Tagged, it will shut down March 31), Everplaces (save and share places you love, though the app seems to be chiefly for people to keep track of places privately), EyeEm (a photo-sharing app centered on places), Kullect (share your world), Field Trip (an app that runs in the background and serves up information based on your location), Tagwhat (a feed of hyperlocal content), goGlyph (annotations attached to a location), Trover (find and share hidden gems) and others.

Update: Someone reminded me tonight that I left off AroundMe.

Geo-social

2Description: With these apps, the focus is generally more on the social than the geo. Share geotagged content with friends and share place-based information.

Apps & sites: Instagram, of course, is the photo-sharing app that lets you see what your friends are doing, with the geolocation element an afterthought. Bonfyre lets you capture and share experiences only with your friends. Findery is a location-based note sharing Web app — no mobile app released yet. Highlight, Sonar and Glympse all alert friends that you’re nearby. Facebook Places (social check-ins) and Place+ (buggy app lets you check in to places, share your location with friends) round out the field.

Geo & social travel apps

3Description: An obvious killer use case for geolocation apps is helping travelers and tourists during their travels. Seems like a new travel startup pops up every day.

Apps & sites: TripAdvisor and TripAdvisor City Guides (spun off from Expedia, TripAdvisor is the big kahuna but only has limited social capabilities), Gogobot (travel recommendations from friends and people who travel like you), BagsUp (Australia-based startup offers trusted travel tips from your friends), Like a Local Guide (travel tips from locals, from a startup in Estonia), Afar (collaborative travel guide), TouristEye (Web and mobile travel guide with personalized recommendations), Airbnb (cool mobile app but just offers geo-tagged listings with no info about surroundings) and a gaggle of other incumbents that use geo to some extent: Travelocity, Expedia, Kayak and LonelyPlanet

Recommendation apps

4Description: One of the hottest startup sectors — everyone wants to be the next Yelp, given the lack of personal social networking in Yelp’s offering.

Apps & sites: Yelp (reviews and recommendations), Foursquare (moving past check-ins into recommendations and deals), Zagat (venerable restaurant reviews site bought by Google), Raved (leave raves, share recommendations with friends), Snoox (friends’ recommendations on everything), LiveStar (recommendations from your social network), Citysearch (local city guides), Cityseries (iPad app for restaurants and entertainment), Google Local (reviews from people in your circles), Ditto (now founder-less startup lets you make recommendations to friends), I loves it! (share what you love) and, of course, the spate of both city guide apps and online city guides around the world such as TimeOut or Thrillist (which generally just have online maps). The newest player at the table? Facebook Nearby.

Shared experiences & social streams

5Description: Seems every new startup wants to be the Instagram of video. The vast majority of these are primarily social, with location as an afterthought. We’ll likely see a dozen or more new entrants in the next year.

Apps & sites: Zkatter (social street view — real-time videos of what your friends are doing and where, although it’s marketing itself as a way to preserve memories), Flock (capture and share experiences with friends), LooxcieMoments (capture moments and stream video in real time), Koozoo (see and share live views of places you care about). Old-timers Justin TV (life streaming), Flixwagon Geo (combine mobile video sharing and GPS navigation), Qik and other live-streaming services aren’t really optimized for what I want from social geo. Next2Friends Live has already bit the dust. Other mobile and Web video-sharing apps such as Vine (6-second videos from Twitter), SocialCam (bought by AutoDesk), Viddy, Klip, Telly, Glmps (capture and shae short videos with friends to “relive the moment”) and Recood don’t really have location elements at their core. YouTube Capture may help shake up the game.

Storytelling apps

6Description: Storytelling and citizen journalism is increasingly being done on mobile devices.

Apps & sites: Blurb Mobile (create and share short media stories using your mobile), Mobli (capture and share the the perfect photo or video), Qwiki (turn memories into mini-movies, best seen on iPad), Meograph (create multimedia stories on Web), Rememble (storytelling Web app doubles as a memory aid)

Geo-fencing & keeping track of your kids

7Description: A long-crowded field, a variety of geo apps enable parents to keep track of their children and other family members. Features often include messaging systems, geo-fencing capabilities that send out alerts, built-in sirens and more.

Apps & sites: Footprints, Family Tracker, SecuraFone, NearParent, Lookout, Trick or Tracker and others all help parents keep track of their children.

Time-based apps & memory aids

10Description: One great capability of GPS is to retrace past events. These sites let you do that for your own travels or to see the virtual footsteps of others who have been in the same place before.

Apps & sites: Path is positioning itself as less a private social network and more of a way to “remember life,” which is why I placed it here. There’s also TimeHop (a virtual time capsule that lets you see your photos and updates from this date in the past), Historypin (not-for-profit effort to chronicle our past), Historvius (mapping history), Rewind.Me (capture your experiences), Breadcrumbs (get a timeline of your day and set goals), Do You Remember (will let you post your memories on the Web; geo component uncertain), Placeme (remember where you’ve been)

Neighborhood connections & actions

11Description: No one has yet cracked the local neighborhoods challenge, but geo apps are helping bring people together in local communities for political activities, social activities and more.

Apps & sites: Nextdoor (neighbors can build private websites where they can swap questions and advice and sell used items in these Web-only communities), RedRover (helps parents make play dates and make plans on the fly), NeighborGoods (share your stuff with neighbors) and dozens of similar sites, SeeClickFix (report neighborhood issues and get them fixed)

Augmented Reality & games

12Description: Augmented reality (AR) hasn’t yet come into its own, though the release of Google Glass later this year may help spotlight this category.

Apps & sites: Wikitude and Junaio (AR apps), Wallit (location-based virtual walls that let you start a conversation with locals), Placespotting (an online map game), scvngr (game about doing challenges at places), many others

Local social & mobile commerce

13Description: The holy grail for geolocation apps is local commerce, and we’re not there yet. Here are some early players.

Apps & sites: ScoutMob (local offers, mobile deals), Shopkick (get rewards by walking into a store), the new Craigslist app by Mokriya (neighborhood marketplace), Zaarly (buy from local service providers), Savvi (local discounts), Groupon Mobile and Living Social (offers from local merchants), Zavers by Google (real-time coupons). Other apps, like Foursquare, also offer local deals.

Other geolocation apps

Other apps and sites incorporate location, of course, in dozens of different ways — and we’ll certainly see an exponential growth in these apps in the coming years. Here are a few:

• Foodspotting and other food apps
• Skout (meet new people, hook up) and other location-specific dating apps
• Education, medical, workplace, sports and entertainment apps (I haven’t looked into these sectors)
• Zillow and Trulia and other services to help you find homes for sale, neighborhood information, etc.
• Bundle (how people are spending their money to show you your city in a new way)
• Virtual ownership: MyInchoftheEarth, The Ocean Registry, The International Star Registry

What else? Do these groupings make sense? What would you change or group differently? And what geolocation apps did we overlook? Please add your thoughts in the comments.

The post Location-based services are coming of age (and it’s way more than Foursquare) appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Platial helped pioneer place-based social networking

This is the first of a multi-part series on geolocation startups and services.

Target audience: Entrepreneurs, founders, startups, geolocation services, mobile ad networks, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

For years, entrepreneurs, tech observers and funders have known two things about the geolocation space: It holds an enormous amount of promise, and it’s taking an awfully long time to get there.

Geolocation startups are hot in Silicon Valley right now, from Zkatter, a San Francisco-based startup from British young gun Matt Hagger that wants you to capture and share moments in real time through mobile video, to Findery, the venture-backed San Francisco startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake that wants you to leave notes, media and digital objects for others at specific locations.

What’s my connection with geoloco? For the past half year I’ve been working on a geolocation startup called Placely (register for the beta here). We’re still early in development, so I’ll talk more about our plans for Placely in a future post. But today I think it’s worth doing a quick survey of how far we’ve come (not very) and how far we still have to go as geolocation gets ready for its closeup.

Platial: Giving us an early understanding of what a ‘place’ means

In 2005, the same year I co-founded Ourmedia, the world’s first free video hosting and sharing service (a month before a little startup called YouTube came along), up in Portland another venture was just getting underway. Platial (tagline: “your collaborative atlas”) described itself on its pre-launch website as “a rapidly developing application and community pivoting on the anchors of user annotation, layerability, collaborative mapping, social networking and real world publishing.” Heady times for those of us out to remake the world!

I first heard of Platial when I gave a guest lecture at UC Berkeley six years ago this week (and wrote about it on this blog). Instructor Bill Gannon, former editorial director of Yahoo! News, flashed Platial on the screen as an example of mapping and Web 2.0 collaboration tools. Just after Hurricane Katrina, people had spontaneously begun using Platial to create maps and visualizations of damaged neighborhoods, complete with embedded media.

The very next week, I met Platial CEO Di-Ann Eisnor at the We Media conference in Miami, which I attended after my work editing the seminal We Media report by Shane Bowman and Chris Willis. When Platial closed down in 2010, Di-Ann moved on to a key role at Waze, the real-time traffic app that went out and invented Esther Dyson’s vision of “the ultimate killer app.” Waze’s combination of geolocation, passive collective actions and game elements has made it one of the premier examples of geoloco done right. Last year Di-Ann and I sat down and discussed writing a book about geoloco, but I could never pull her away from Waze to devote enough time to the project.

My involvement with the legacy of Platial (they no longer own the url) came full circle last week when I sat down at La Boheme, a cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District, with Jason Wilson, who co-founded Platial with Di-Ann and CTO Jake Olsen. The word “platial,” in case you were wondering, was a mashup of places and spatial. I expected Jason to describe it as as a social mapping site, but he called it “the first social network around places.”

It started out, he said, as a kind of art project. But when they saw lots of early traction, Meetup.com co-founder and CEO Scott Heiferman convinced Jason to pursue it as a business, and Platial landed funding from Kleiner Perkins, the Omidyar Network, Ron Conway, Tim O’Reilly (of Where 2.0 fame) and adviser Clay Shirky, among others.

To this day, most geoloco startups are focused entirely on commercial businesses — restaurants, hotels — but Jason looks at geolocation in more profound terms. “We began thinking about, What is a place? It could be as small as a corner of a table or as large as a skyscraper or neighborhood.” A wall mural on the side of a building in the Mission could hold as much meaning to someone as an art gallery.

In the end, the mobile ad services needed to sustain a business like Platial turned out to be very slow in the making. (Muses Jason: “Why isn’t Yelp or Foursquare an ad network today? They have all those relationships with local businesses.”) Platial donated its location data to GeoCommons and closed up shop in 2010, with more than 5 million embedded maps being serviced by the site. Jason (@fekaylius on Twitter — born in 2006, by the way) is now working as founder and Experience Designer at OuterBody Labs.

Platial may have been ahead of the market, but it was on to something.

Facebook pioneered the social graph and the not-so-open graph. There’s buzz about the interest graph. And today a new graph is emerging: the place graph. What interesting things will unfold when we layer the social graph on top of the place graph, or the interest graph on top of the place graph?

Imagine meeting new people and making new friends based on similar interests that you discover because they were in the same place as you at a different time, or they shared the same experience as you in the same place at the same time. Imagine a new set of social interactions whose rules have yet to be written around forging new relationships, tracking your digital footprints, defining our own identities based on places we’ve been or aspire to visit.

“That potential is still untapped,” Jason said simply. Yes, a lot of startups are attacking the geolocation space, but no one has cracked that particular nut.

Six years ago this week, Facebook and Yelp were just getting underway, Foursquare and Instagram hadn’t come along yet and the practice of geotagging images through smartphones was just being invented. A revolution lay in wait. Platial used mapping tools as its chief metaphor in helping people ascribe meaning to the places around them. Foursquare would use check-ins. Instagram, feeds of photos. Today dozens of other startups have jumped into the fray. We’re driving the vehicles even while the roadways are still being paved a half mile ahead.

I’ll be chronicling the geolocation scene — I hope with your help — in the weeks and months ahead. It’s still early days, but we owe a hat tip to Platial for helping to chart the way forward.

What do you think holds the greatest promise for geolocation services?

Cross-posted to Quora.

In this series

• Geolocation gets ready for its closeup
• A raft of place-based recommendation apps
• Place-centric social apps
• Annotating and preserving life moments through places
• Travel apps go geoloco

The post Are you ready for the place graph? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Mobile, social, geolocation, big data, marketing — Socialmedia.biz’s strategists eye the future

The social media landscape has undergone enormous changes since the current Socialmedia.biz team of strategists partnered up in 2009. With the end of the year fast approaching, we thought this would be a good time to offer our forecasts into what the next year may hold in store for social media, mobile, social businesses and more. Here are nine fearless predictions — including a look at the current state, predicted future state and our recommendations.

When in doubt, think mobile — and especially tablets

Current state

1While mobile usage has been rising for years and a majority of Americans’ cell phones became smartphones during 2012, tablet usage is now eclipsing the smartphone numbers by threefold in the case of the Apple iPad to iPhone adoption (source: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends). Now, 55 percent of adults access the Internet from their mobile phone, double the rate of what they did only three years ago (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project). Along with bandwidth improvements, visitors increasingly access your organization’s page from a mobile device, with 13 percent of global traffic coming from mobile (source: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends).

Future state

The computing environment – along with our lifestyles – is moving away from the desktop and even the laptop, with users relying more heavily on their smartphones and tablet devices to do business, stay connected and share. Increasingly, even the road warrior is ditching a laptop for a tablet, Bluetooth keyboard and a set of apps to get through the work day or while attending a conference. User expectations are exceedingly high in terms of navigating a site for informational purposes, to complete a task, to make a purchase or a donation. They expect a browsing experience akin to the simple, intuitive navigation found in buying a book on Amazon or the crisp visual experience of inhaling your Facebook stream via the Flipboard app.

Recommendations

Design your site expecting the mobile user in mind. At the top of the page, place a hyperlink to a mobile version of your site. Having an app available for your site is a nice-to-have, but a truly easy-to-navigate mobile site will work for multiple uses and keep your development costs down as you weigh business needs for an app. Make your site swipeable on tablets by using Onswipe, a free service that lets your brand publish content with more of an app-like appearance. (JD interviewed the founder here a year ago.) Another company doing innovative publishing around mobile is ScrollMotion, an inventive New York startup that animates sales, marketing and training applications on the tablet, turning them into more interactive and dynamic content assets. The user experience is enhanced and complex subjects gain more visual elements. No matter what your site is telling or selling, the end user wants to consume and interact with your content in a way that behaves more like entertainment, from a look-and-feel perspective. (To learn more about mobile-related topics, visit Socialmedia.biz’s mobile section.)

A wave of recommendations startups before the big consolidation

Current state

2I just got an iPhone 5 this week, after remaining content with my iPhone 4 for two years and skipping the iPhone 4S and the siren call of Siri (is it too late to join the party, Zooey Deschanel?). But despite the Big Brotherish visage of Apple looming over the landscape, 2012 saw the rise a number of new arrivals on the Recommendations bandwagon, so much so that it’s now officially its own sector. These are the spawn of Yelp, which itself is the spawn of review sites like Zagat.

Future state

With dozens of guns aimed its way, it may be tough for Yelp to shake its rep as the go-to place for untrustworthy reviews from strangers and hucksters. So make way for a new generation of social recommendation sites. I just wrote about the launch of social recommendations engine Snoox (“Recommendations from friends, not strangers”) and only this week heard about another one, BagsUp (“Find the best places to eat … shop … play … stay”). What, no recommendation engine yet on the best place to shack up and have an affair? Maybe that niche will be filled by Trover (a cool little bicurious — Apple/Android — mobile app), Raved, Villij, LiveStar or Stamped (just bought by Yahoo!). One thing’s for certain: There’s no room in the marketplace for another dozen photo-sharing apps.

Meantime, the current champ of geolocation, Foursquare, is working hard to reinvent itself as … ta da! A social recommendations engine! Check-ins and mayorships are so 2010 and will become quaint, even unhip, a year from now. But geoloco is for real and will be huge in the years ahead, so look for Facebook or Apple (dark horses: Microsoft or Yahoo!) to snap up Foursquare by Q4 2013. The only question is whether Dennis Crowley becomes a billionaire or mega-millionaire.

Recommendations

Facebook desperately wants to own the social recommendations space. But so does Apple with its kinda-sexy intelligent agent, Siri. Google, too, wants in, and will increasingly enhance its mapping capabilities not only right up to your business’s front door — but inside the place, too. After all, photo sharing apps are the new Google Street View. And now Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer, smartly bets on mobile and local as the future hope of the dysfunctional behemoth.

While most of us aren’t about to log into Facebook to rave about our latest purchase from Bed Bath & Beyond, we may take a snap of our cool new crockpot with our iPhone 5 or Android, upload it to Instagram and share it on Foursquare and Twitter. Recommendation technology is seeping into our lives through social sharing activities that are becoming part of the invisible fabric of our lives.

Quick! That fabric’s now on sale, for 40 percent off, at Pottery Barn!

Shut up, privacy nuts! Some of us see a benefit in oversharing

Current state

3I have always embraced applications that follow me around. From old man Google Latitude to upstart Highlight, I am always trying to overshare. Checking in on social networks has become commonplace. Facebook, Google+ and many others (thanks, in many cases, to a generous FourSquare API) allow us to log in to our respective social network profiles and identify where we’re at and who we’re with, and then share that with both our friends as well as with the public, should we wish. A couple of startups that have yet to catch on are taking the next step, allowing us to just allow our apps to check us in and share our whereabouts with our friends — or the public — automatically, while the services begin collecting our social data and begin sharing it with advertisers, business partners, etc.

Moreover, once all of this silliness about privacy is finally put to rest and folks learn to trade some of their privacy for convenience and value, there are so many other things that your devices can offer. I recently bought a Nexus 7 tablet with Google Now. Now offers users like me access to what I might need to know right now: what’s around me; how long it’ll take to get to my next appointment and how, based on traffic; what fun stuff is going on around me, and where I might want to get a drink or eat, as well as anything else Google can sort out about me. I have become obsessed with carrying it on me all the time so that Google can spend all of its time stalking me so it can become more and more useful — to me. The same thing is happening to Apple owners as they embrace Siri and other location- and context-aware platforms with calendar, search engine and inbox integration.

The RunKeeper app: automated updates.

Future state

Until now, social stalking software companies have been so afraid of being accused of privacy invasion that they’ve intentionally limited the amount of share one is able to provide with their friends. This will soon end. The value of being able to actively passively share where you are, what you’re doing, even when you’re not going out, is too high to prevent the boldest of us to participate gladly. Even Google Latitude, which allows its users to “automatically check in here,” restricts that share to only fellow chums on Latitude with whom I already have a connection. As more and more applications integrate Google Maps, Foursquare and the like into their social networks (such as GetGlue, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram), giving them the ability to actively and intentionally check-in into the store, restaurant, gym, cafe, and home — but only explicitly and with exceptional intent. We all know that running your GPS on your phone burns the battery, but batteries are getting better and external battery packs are becoming more common, so that barrier will soon fall. One of my happiest personal states is when I’m running or walking and have my RunKeeper tracking my trip and sharing my entire route and performance with not only my friends in the RunKeeper community but also with everyone I am connected to on Facebook and Twitter, including the public.

We Americans are like frogs: We’re easy to boil if you drop us into a nice bath and then bring the water to a roiling boil rather than throwing us directly in to blanch. So Google, Foursquare, Facebook and the like are wooing us over time with tempting morsels, addictive functionality and set-up-and-forget convenience. 2013 will be the year when Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google and Bing will have convinced you to cross-integrate your calendar, email, search history and privacy setting in such a way that there will be a small, easy step — infinitesimal, in fact — toward location- and context-awareness, with opportunities to share everything: what you’re doing, where you are, how long you’ve been there, and whether you’re a regular (the mayor). It’ll happen implicitly, frictionlessly and whether I think about it or not.

Recommendations

While the tide of passive participation and frictionless sharing on social media is a tidal wave and is bound to come to pass, the self-proclaimed privacy police could very well spook Google, Facebook and the rest into hibernation, especially since Foursquare is having business and revenue challenges. Erring on the side of discretion and safety has kept the vast usefulness of location- and context-awareness in a box.

I’ll be honest, I think the real reason why these companies are unwilling to allow us to throw open our doors and windows is because there’s so much information — contextual, location-based, historical, as well as gleaned from search, email, browsing history, and online shopping and orders — that they’re truthfully afraid to reveal how much they know about us.

But without doubt, this will all come to fruition. And once we get over our jitters, we’ll discover how awesome a personal Web valet they can be. The obstacles are not technological but cultural. The coming year will mark a watershed, and privacy will no longer stand in the way.

Making sense of Big Data for analysis, metrics & sales leads

Current state

4According to IBM, every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. But the Big Data challenge isn’t only about the overwhelming volume of data available, it’s about how to make sense of that much data. To date, traditional data analysis tools have been inadequate and infrastructures not robust enough to meet the Big Data challenge.

Though the tools do exist – IBM Big Data Platform, Cloudera and Hadoop for instance – to take on the task, cost and lack of expertise has made it prohibitive for many companies to jump on board the Big Data bandwagon.

Future state

Aside from a lot of hype about investing in Big Data and the data scientist talent shortage, there was relatively little discussion about advances in Big Data technologies in 2012. What we did see in 2012, however, was the rise of the cloud. Advances in cloud computing technology is what will bring Big Data analysis capabilities closer to the mainstream in 2013. IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) cloud services like Amazon Web Services Big Data and Google BigQuery will help close the gap for smaller enterprises.

Cloud technologies offer cheaper and more robust storage options for emerging Big Data platforms, so we are likely to see more of these platforms emerge, and existing platforms bloom.

Recommendations

Though enterprise is still the “big” winner as far as advances in big data technologies and predictive analysis, small- to medium-size businesses can still benefit. There are tools available now that help companies tap into Big Data for real-time analysis, application tracking, business metrics and long-tail sales leads.

Here are a few to keep your eye on:

• Infochimps

• Appfirst

• Bloomreach

And for those who don’t mind tackling a learning curve, there are a number of big data open-source technologies that can also be applied to IaaS technologies like Google’s BigQuery.

Time to reimagine mobile ads as supporting users’ goals

Current state

5Websites and social networks have been seriously gnashing their teeth in 2010-2012 as the “third screen” (mobile) has overtaken the second (computer) in prominence, effectively crowding out the key revenue source: display ads. The sun is setting on interruptive advertising.

Future state

In 2013, mobile advertising revenue will continue to fall, although its collapse is temporarily dampened by the popularity of tablets which, despite having mobile functionality, are usually used to consume data. This makes interruptive advertisements somewhat more tolerable. However, the breakthrough will come to advertisers that realize interruptive ads “do things to people,” so they shift to “doing things with people.” This works by reimagining “ads” as software that supports users (of the device or site) who are engaged in what’s most important to them. Where interruptive ads take away from users, “software ads” support them.

Recommendations

At a minimum, begin implementing the Facebook option on some of your display ads. Even better, get serious by applying agile software development to ad design. Identify users you want to engage and map their workstreams; ask yourself what knowledge or tools you have that could support users in unique ways and design “ads” to deliver the support. Note that this will work only when your firm truly puts users first. This approach will align you with users and distinguish you in 2013 and beyond.

Twitter will reach its zenith, and then begin to recede

Current state

6Social networks continue to be born every few weeks — seemingly every day. That’s fine, but not all of them deserve to survive.

Future state

A new yet-to-be-seen major social network will rise as we’ll watch another one begin to fall. Just as we saw the dramatic rise of Pinterest this year, another major social network will rise from the ashes to become the new social media darling. (MySpace? Probably not.) But in its wake a major social network will begin to fall. I predict it will actually be Twitter. Twitter is becoming less and less valuable.

Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at your blog or website analytics. Isolate the traffic that comes just from Twitter. Notice the bounce rate is much higher than your average and the time on site is much lower than your average. Twitter is becoming more and more useless as a traffic driver as most of the traffic it sends is uninterested garbage. And the noise from Twitter is drowning out the signal. Today the only way to truly consume Twitter is by following hashtags and other searches. But for tent pole events such as the Super Bowl, that’s impossible as there’s far too much content from just a single hashtag.

Recommendations

Twitter’s noise is deafening and it will soon consume itself. So don’t put all of your brand’s eggs in the Twitter basket. Diversify. You should be doing that anyway — especially in a space that sees social platforms rise and fall and come and go so readily.

More businesses will become roll-your-own Community Companies

Betabrand lets customers design and choose which products they make.

Current state

7Mass-produced products are way 20th century, and B2C product firms won’t maintain profitability unless they enable customers’ serious input into what they offer.

Future state

In 2013, the Community Company social business model will break through big-time. The Community Company puts stakeholders in charge of one or more of the firm’s key business processes. Ready examples are Threadless and Betabrand, which let customers design and choose which products they make. Threadless is the most “pure” in that its customers drive the product process, where BetaBrand is a hybrid whose “Think Tank” invites customer input.

Recommendations

Good practices here are creating various roles for stakeholders that are meaningful to them and harmonious with your core competencies. Use a hierarchy of social actions and workstreams to engage stakeholders who have various passion levels. Support each role with (online) tools, functionality and rewards. Design your innovation process to enable increasing stakeholder involvement over time. In the Social Channel, product significance falls in favor of stakeholder experiences when using products. Increase your competitive advantage by aggressively moving to give stakeholders key roles in how your firm works.

Firms will go cross-platform to raise the bar in social business

Current state

8With few exceptions, most firms’ social media processes are primarily organized around platforms, which add some value to stakeholders but leave money on the table. Marketers are driven by metrics, and platforms’ social actions are measurable, even though most are still not tied to real business impact.

Future state

In 2013, firms that want to make impact will jettison their platform-centric mindset, and focus on workstreams. Warby Parker shows how it will be done. They use Twitter to source and respond to the most popular customer service issues, and they digitize responses on YouTube, then provide links to the YouTube videos on Twitter. Note that the videos enable them to be personal, funny and helpful while harnessing massive scale.

Recommendations

To outperform using this technique, you’ll need a taxonomy of “problems” and naming for videos and links that will scale once you have hundreds of videos. You’ll also need some design standardization for videos, so they reflect the brand and become more useful to stakeholders. By no means does this mean they should be formulaic. Note that stakeholders don’t care for platforms; they have problems or goals, and they seek the most expeditious solutions. Firms need to align with them by knitting platforms into seamless business processes to support stakeholders.

In mapping out success, become the solution

Current state

9The Internet is full of advice on how to get more Twitter followers, Facebook fans and blog readers. Each of these “how to” articles are designed to teach you how to become more successful in social media.

Future state

The reality is that the only way to truly succeed in social media is not just be the guy who follows others’ advice, but to be the first in plotting out a roadmap to success. To pull that off, you’ll need to experiment … a lot. We’ll see more glimmers of that innovate-or-calcify approach in 2013. Some companies, such as TiVo, have established a reasonably safe haven for social media experimentation. Their philosophy is to try and try again. If you’re going to fail, fail quickly and cheaply. It’s the mantra of Silicon Valley, where TiVo (perhaps not coincidentally) is based.

Recommendation

The companies that will continue to succeed with social media marketing are the ones that don’t look for proof points on what to do, but rather become the proof points that others point to as markers of success.

What would you add?

Obviously we just scratched the surface of what may lie ahead in the new year. What’s your big, brash prediction for what we’ll see in 2013? Please add your thoughts in the comments below — we promise to respond!

The post 9 social media predictions & business recommendations for 2013 appeared first on Inside Social Media.

If you call yourself a social media marketer and you’re not completely promiscuous about it, you’re not serving yourself, your boss, or your clients. If you’re not constantly downloading new apps or registering for every single new social network, you’re slacking. If you don’t endlessly click YES when it asks you if you want to search for or invite your friends, you’re derelict in your duties. And if you aren’t hooked in to share everywhere whenever possible, you’re not going to understand how all of these connectors, sharing strategies, cross-posting techniques, check-in features, and general spaminess and shamelessness quotients work first hand.

How, then, would you be able to honestly either know about or recommend any of them? Unless you want to be a professional tweeter and Facebooker all your life, you had better know both what’s out there now as well as what’s coming down the pike.

This line of thinking has surfaced because I have gone crazy now that I have my iPhone. I have jumped in with both feet and have explored any and all passions and hobbies through apps and vertical communities. Since I am on a health kick, I have joined just about every social network that allows me to track my food intake, my activity, my workouts, my progress, my calorie burn, my running and biking routes, as well as my general movement and sleep patterns: fitbit, Runkeeper, LoseIt, MapMyRun, Strava, Endomondo, DailyMile, PolarPersonalTrainer, and Garmin Connect.

Each one tracks differently, each one enjoys a different segment of my followers as members, and each one touches me in ways that either pain or tickle me. And, for now, I am keeping them all fed and watered — a little easier because all but RunKeeper allow me to upload data directly from my Garmin Forerunner 305, so it’s not too hard.

And since I am the new owner of a motorcycle, I am the member of the Adventure Rider Motorcycle Forum; and because I am a bouncing baby gun nut, I am a member of GlockTalk, Elsie Pea Forum, Rimfire Central, and the Virginia Gun Owners Forum. So, downloaded loads of forum-reader apps, saw how they share, saw how they allowed me to engaged, and decided upon Tapatalk.

That’s not all. After years and years, I have finally admitted to being a TV addict in addition to every other form of media, including books and movies, so I have joined GetGlue, Goodreads, TV Guide, yap.TV, and BuddyTV as a way of keeping track of shows and movies as well as being able to check in and comment and engage and track hashtags and mentions, and so forth.

Yes, in addition to checking in with Yelp and FourSquare in the physical world, I have even started checking in virtually when I am watching dumbass shit on TV such as 2 Broke Girls, Girls, Veep, Suburgatory, Grimm, et al.

And, whenever I have been given the opportunity to share to my Facebook or Twitter steam, I say YES. And whenever I am asked if I want to find friends who already on there or to even invite a massive amount of my friends via email, I surely do do that — to all of our chagrin. But I do it so I know and I do it so that I always know exactly what will happen if and when I recommend something like that to my clients.

Spend some time exploring new communities of action

What’s more, Facebook and Twitter are not the only games in town. Nor are Google Plus and Pinterest. Or even Instagram. So, in order to make the best recommendation to your clients or to best access your target consumer and customer exactly where they live and spend their time, you need to be aware of all of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-tier communities in addition to the most obvious, most competitive, and most costly 1st tier platforms — both to participate in as well as to build partnerships, sponsorships, prizes, and other tie ins and opportunities. While you might be channeling IBM in that you’ll never get fired for choosing it, a Facebook Page-only campaign is pure laziness.

At a very elite conference years ago, I introduced myself as a syphilitic trucker on the social media highway. No, it’s not funny. Truckers are the No. 1 reason worldwide why heretofore isolated rural villages the globe over are getting sick with all kinds of sexually and socially transmitted diseases. Before, only single-tracks, rivers, and airfields — if anything — connected the most remote points on earth; now, a comprehensive spider web of roads and highways is allowing commerce to reach just about everywhere, both to bring in supplies but also to extract commodities and valuable natural resources.

While that sort of shameless behavior may well have made me quite a few enemies, I am generally patient zero when it comes to turning people on to new communities, new interests, new resources, and new passions. I can’t even tell you how many people are on LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, and Twitter because of me; too many to count had been on MySpace and Friendster before that.

And I recommend you, too, really take the time and energy to get off of Tiny Wings for a little while and spend some time exploring these communities of action, circumstance, inquiry, interest, place, position, practice, and purpose yourself. You can’t be a competent advisor unless you’ve had first hand experience over time. So, go git ’em, Tiger!

The post Why you, too, should be social media slutty appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Hey, Google! Your Google Plus app isn’t anywhere to be found in this ecosystem of social media apps. What’s up with that? Is there a grand conspiracy that is keeping you outside the fold? Or are you just not putting the resources into campaigning with full commitment toward getting included in these apps that I use every day?

At first, I would post or check in separately to Google+, using the photos taken on Hipstamatic or Instagram, but recently I don’t really want to go through the trouble. The longer I use my iPhone, the more temperamental the iOS gets and the longer the latency required to actually post something. So, when I am short on time or with people, I will generally take a quick Instagram and get my Instagram family as well as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, and FourSquare in one shot — sorry Google+.

Convenience will always trump loyalty

So, what’s the theory here? I don’t think that “separate but equal” is going to work long-term. If Google intends for people to jump ship and commit 100% to Google+, then they’re pulling yet another Google Answers, Google Wave, Wiki Search, Dodgeball, Jaiku, and Google Buzz — R.I.P.

So, unless this strategy actually has a semblance of a historical track record of success, I really believe that Google needs to task some of their vetted rock stars and send them out and about into the world in a mad attempt to convince all the designers of the abovementioned apps — and more, across not just the Apple iPhone iOS but also to Windows Phone, Blackberry and Android — to integrate Google+ into their apps immediately because when you’re mobile and struggling with carriers, bandwidth, and operating systems, the path of least resistance always wins, and you Google cats are not making it easy (enough) for anyone.

For what it’s worth, this plea is completely selfish: I really want a little icon I can click when I post from my various and sundry location-aware mobile apps myself. But I have a feeling we’d all be way more likely to integrate the G+ capabilities we already have by virtue of having a Gmail account if it weren’t such a pain in the backside to do anything with Google+ when you’re spending the majority of our time doing other things on our phone besides squatting in the Google+ app.

The post Why can’t I share to Google+ from my apps? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

And that’s because a good number of the people who I may oftentimes take for granted as being my follower count do, in fact, indeed, care about me, my life, and my happiness.

Not only that, but they’re watching and reading, and they’re paying attention — at least when it comes to things that are essential, important, and human.

And I am moved and amazed and feeling a little — a lot — unworthy of such an open and honest sharing of condolences. But, it is like a mirror, right? You received exactly what you put out there.

And even though I am “a bit of a douchebag” according to Klouchebag.com, I have never relegated social media‘s associated social networks to being simply a broadcasting channel. It has always been me, authentic as I can bear without invading others’ privacy.

Yes, my authenticity does include shameless self-promotion and client retweets and marketing and too much “me, me, me, me!” but that’s also very authentically me, too. Zits and all.

I guess that’s why I am only a bit of a douche.

So, for what it’s worth, while the vast majority of my social network empire on Facebook, Tumblr, my blogs, Posterous, Google+, and Twitter don’t pay any attention to my emotional pain or grief, a surprising number do; while a majority of my hordes and legions of followers and friends are just connecting with me in order to talk talk talk talk talk, enough read and watch and “listen” that if there is such a thing as Purgatory that my mum might have needed to get sprung from through prayer, I can guarantee that the amazingly generous outpouring of condolences, prayers, and love for both my mother and me during this time has more than prayed her out and into her Heaven with her Saints, her Lord, and her Lady (so, thanks for that, y’all).

Anyway, I just want to bring some humanity to all of this — but I guess it is all along the same lines of my last post, Don’t Roll Your Eyes at Social Media Influencers, which suggests that behind every “how to manipulate people into buying your stuff and loving you and following you” shortcut, there needs to be something honest and open — authentic — behind it.

It also means that when and if you join social media in a big way as a brand, as a company, as a person who is part of sales, promotion, marketing, or public relations, you need to figure out what your boundaries are and you need to break a bunch of them; you need to go as far as you can in terms of sharing of yourself — and not BS sharing like what you’re having for lunch or FourSquare check-ins at your gym — and then go a little further.

In social media, you will always be rewarded by giving ’til it hurts.

In DC, they like to say “the only things that are in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead aardvarks.” Being too politically neutral doesn’t allow people to like you, though it prevents people from hating you, too.

Too many of us in social media — and especially in digital PR and marketing — play it safe, following the “people in polite society did not talk about politics, religion, sex, or money in public.”

That leaves the weather and the holidays you’ve taken or plan to take and what you did over the weekend, maybe — and, of course, what you’re having for lunch. And social media is littered with that.

And, you can also hide behind retweets, allowing yourself the safety of being bold and brave behind a the plausible deniability of the words you retweet not being your own.

So, though I protected my mother’s privacy — her diagnosis, her sickness, her treatment, her hospital stay — to the end, when she passed, I made a decision to share my loss with everyone within the “sound of my voice” and influence.

I know, I am indeed an operator in many ways and have become maybe too careful and guarded since I do represent clients and so forth, I can tell that I have been trying to pass off easy, simple, superficial things as intimate. That I have been trying to push fast food as real nutrition.

I am grateful and amazed that I have not completely alienated all of my followers and friends in social media — that my voice has not been bozo-filtered, muted, unfollowed, blocked, and defriended by everyone.

But it also reminds me in a very powerful and mortal way that social media is not just strategy or tactic, that social media and all the social networks and platforms are the beautiful and meaningful culmination of men, women, and children — people — engaging with each other in often frivolous and superficial ways but sometimes in very human and powerful — loving — ways.

And I am desperately grateful to have experienced that first-hand.

Thank you.

The post Your followers care about you, but do you care? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Too many colleagues, organizations, and companies are keeping their circles of influencers small, believing it is better to invest limited time and resources on the most influential, the most popular, and the most celebrated. Happens in DC all the time. I’m rocking the latest dinner party, parlaying attendees with my wit and banter, when someone snazzier and trendier enters. Immediately I’ve lost my audience’s attention. The idea easily transfers to Twitter.

Other users focus exclusively on networking within their own space, effectively limiting scope and reach by preaching to the choir. If you’ve invested in running with the A-list, fine; however, that’s an old model reminiscent of old PR, of the golf club, the lodge, and the private club.

The Internet created something that not enough social media consultants and coaches support and advise: the ability to expand circles of influencers, to engage with anyone and everyone. Only recently has the Internet become ubiquitous and global in a real way. Previously, the digital divide was a barrier to not just many Americans but quite a few developing nations becoming part of the global conversation.

The value of the Internet is proportional to the number of connected users. It’s also living proof of Rule 34. No matter how obscure, vertical, or arcane your material may be, there’s an audience for it. Someone will show it love and attention. Online social networks have made all of this even easier to the point where it is becoming less of a potential and more of a promise, an eventuality. In short, there is real value associated with connecting to as many followers and collecting as many “Likes” as is humanly possible. For real effect.

There’s also a psychological benefit of large numbers. I have won contracts and business on the power of five-digit followers on Twitter, which is modest compared to most of my peers. However, for someone who only has a couple-hundred followers, 38,000 is a lot and suggests mastery. To be honest, I wonder how long it will take these “less is more” social media consultants to realize that it’s not good business to dismiss what the client wants out of hand.

Go beyond the top 100 A-listers

A wider and more open-minded audience has more positive effects than we can realize. Quantity and quality can exist together in this town, but if you’re just going to pick one, go with quantity. For some reason, many of my social media and digital PR folks disagree. Abraham Harrison is almost five years old, just a few months younger than Twitter itself, and my experience is that it’s not as simple as all that. While it is possibly essential to have the attention of the top-100 A-list influencers in your space, it is also essential to attract everyone else as well — and I’ll do my best to tell you why.

The network effect is a lot like chaos theory, but instead of butterfly wings, they’re Twitterbird wings. Every cannon-bomb splash that a Twitter account makes in a tweet in a small network might as well not exist. If a tweet falls in the forest and there’s no one around, does a it make a ripple?

Well, when you reach the whales of Twitter, the celebrities and politicians who have followers in the millions, every single decibel is amplified, considered, scrutinized. It’s the playground from which TMZ and even the nightly news chooses its evening victims. These large networks attract both eyeballs and robots. The spiders from Klout and from Google and Bing as well as from the Twitter top lists are constantly spending their limited resources paying attention, retweeting, auto-tweeting, and indexing the biggest prey on the prairie. And the only people and brands who can do this effortlessly are the folks and companies who already bring worldwide fame and fortune to the party.

In a perfect world, you’d target these folks by the millions, increasing your amplitude and maintaining your authenticity because of your popular connections. Because the world is far from perfect, be open-minded about any and all Twitter connections. It’s impossible to gauge all that they bring to the table at face level. But it’s possible to assume that they came to you because they share a scope of interest. It’s possible to assume that their followers share that scope of interest.

When you initiate a theory of anyone and everyone, you really must embrace the chaos. In social media on social networks, you cannot choose your fan — at least you shouldn’t. I am sure the makers of My Little Pony never thought that they would garner a galloping herd of adult men, Bronies, who are superfans of the child’s show. Who could have guessed.

You might engage in a strict narrow cast of your net, pre-filtering your target demographic; however, you really need to let go and let God. Your product, service, book, tool, experience, and catalog may find deep appeal among an entirely new fan base that you never considered or imagine before. How deep are you willing to go?

You very well may have a primary, secondary, and tertiary target market — well done. However, this is the Internet, this is the long-tail! Don’t forget Rule 34. Engage in the thousands and even the millions, if possible, and allow your quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, and denary markets define themselves.

It works, it really does. Give it a go, give it a test, and let me know.

Via Biznology.

The post Twitter success demands both top influencers and everyone else appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Well, as regular readers of this blog know, I am a Cluetrainian. This means I put more trust in the value and impact of the online influencer long tail than I do in the impact of the couple of dozen top influencers that most social media consultants and digital PR teams recommend. This is the Internet, an efficient platform allowing easy access to what’s called the network effect: The value of your social network is dependent on the number of others using it.

While it may well be important to have the top 100  influencers on any particular topic following you on Twitter or Facebook, it is not essential. You can make up for it by attracting, retaining, and activating everyone else. In short, anyone who shares her time, talent, and experience online is an important online influencer and potential brand ambassador for my clients.

How do you get lots and lots of people to follow your brand? Don’t know where to start? First, make sure you share your Twitter and Facebook information everywhere your brand exists in the real world or in cyberia. You could spend months and months developing these lists and groups of followers, encouraging folks to retweet your content and so forth.

Of course, you can always buy loads and loads of Twitter followers, popping you from your current 2,500 to 25,000 within a month. Yes, I said it. You can buy tens and hundreds of thousands of followers both on Twitter and on Facebook. But, I will tell you now that the followers are generally spammy, poorly targeted, and they often bail the moment they decide you’re unworthy.

I know for a fact that there’s a guy in Brazil who will hook you up with thousands of Brazilian tweeters almost immediately for a fee. There are dozens of folks who do it and you just need to do a little searching on Google to find them all. That’s somewhere to start. Once you’ve bought your online friends — lots and lots of them — you have to deliver the je ne sais quois to keep them.

Mind you, just because you’re cheating with the acquisition doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods. There’s still a lot of hard work. If you suck, are salesy, don’t tweet or post very often, or are selfish, all of these thousands of purchased followers will start unfollowing you almost immediately.

You had them until you lost them.

It is sort of like being the opening act to U2: You might have 30,000 folks who didn’t come to see you who are there to see Bono, so there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever buy your album. There’s every reason they should, but you really could make a mess of it — if they don’t, it is your fault as they were your customers to lose. Same thing with buying followers and likes. If the targeting is completely off, if you suck as a host, or if you’re boring or rude, they’re gone — at least the real ones are.

It’s essential to discover everyone and keep up with engagement

Stated simply, the state of the art in social media is still based on old models of public relations where each particular PR agent has a Rolodex and that card represents years and years of personal relationships. Very precious and personal connections, formed and tempered over time, built on trust.

And this very same framework has been mapped directly into social media where many agencies and companies spend all of their time taking their current 25 mainstream media contacts and 25 social media contacts to dinners at Morton’s. There’s not enough budget or time to prospect much further or deeper than that.

Which is a sincere pity.

How can one take an old PR model that only concerns itself with an easy-to-manage elite core of gate-keeping journalists, publishers, and broadcasters and map that onto a new media model? A model that could potentially include anyone and everyone who should decide to commit to starting blogging. Producing content for online consumption, resulting in becoming an online influencer. It’s the circle of success.

In this theory of everyone, in this theory of long-tail digital PR outreach and engagement, it is essential to find viable ways of 1) discovering everyone — because there are potentially a lot of people that show up in your net when you’re being inclusive and indiscriminate, and 2) keeping up — because the amount of engagement explodes when you go from a few thousand to tens-of-thousands, be it curating comments, unfollowing and blocking spammers, checking your direct message inbox for relevant and timely requests or queries, and judiciously checking for retweets, @replies, and mentions and engaging them appropriately and in a timely manner.

Finally, don’t forget to thank everyone online who helps you no matter how “small,” because if you choose to use a theory of everyone in your social media strategy, you can’t be polite, kind, generous, and patient only to the celebrities, you need to be kind and responsive to everyone, all the time.

The post Build Twitter followers using the theory of everyone appeared first on Inside Social Media.

I try to read through my RSS feeds every day. Today I stumbled upon an article by my friend Christopher S Penn, entitled Social media now directly influences search rankings.

It shows that Google is playing Tri-D chess in a world where most companies are mastering checkers:

If you’re marketing something, there’s now a direct incentive to build your network as large as possible among your prospective customers. Size matters.

Long story short: every search you make on Google returns results that are weighted heavily to favor people in your social network, especially those people and brands to have a lot of friends, likes, and followers.

In other words, you can access top organic search engine results for your company, brand, products and services by really diving into social media marketing and eveloping connections, followers, likes, and lists–getting people to like your brand on Facebook or follow your brand on Twitter hasn’t ever just been about brand awareness, it has also become an essential secret weapon for search engine ranking.

You should read Chris’ article for sure, but I have my own example to show how personally-tailored Google search has become

A few days ago a journalist friend of mine popped me a note to ask me if I knew the Rosetta Stone CEO.  I didn’t, however, he thought I must because my name came up twice when he searched for ‘Rosetta Stone” on Google.

See, I blogged for Rosetta Stone for a while and have used their products for years. When I did the same search, I didn’t show on the first page at all. Online, my friend’s world is heavily colored by me.

I showed up because he and I are connected via LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Talk, Gmail, Twitter, and who knows where else.

His search reality isn’t objective at all.  It is being heavily adjusted by the connections he has and will make to other people and brands online. In real time, immediately, to order, based on dozens of tacit connections.

Google isn’t stupid. I won’t show up in all of his web searches–only those that are relevant to what he wants. However, if I have ever written and published anything online that is, in fact, relevant, there’s an excellent chance I will turn up on page one, possibly even if he’s logged out of Gmail.

With the multitude of social network profiles that I possess and maintain, the nearly five-thousand friends I have on Facebook (including the high-caste of many of my friends), the 38,000 followers I have on Twitter, and my 12-year-old blog, my 2,200 contacts on LinkedIn, 3,400 folks on FourSquare, subscribers on FeedBurner, all my content on YouTube, and others, means that Google generally tries to include me in other people’s searches of the Internet, gaming serendipity to the point that I come up as a few of the search results on such a competed-for search term like Rosetta Stone in the Manhattan offices of one of the top global newspapers.

I chose to use this example because I have invested myself so heavily towards building these connections shamelessly. People wonder why I would engage in promiscuous “follow back” on Twitter and maintain the maximum friends on Facebook? Surely I am not special. I, like anyone else, cannot maintain close friendships in excess of Dunbar’s Number of 150 friends.

I have been doing this for myself, for my company, and for my clients, using myself as the most shameless example to prove the concept that having the “right” friends online, following the few “right” people and brands is not only wrong but dangerous.

Shoot for quantity plus quality followers

Yes, get the right followers, but also get as many followers as possible. In a world where people get their search results based on who their friends are and what they’re looking at or doing, you’re going to want to become connected to as many as humanly possible, possibly indiscriminately but certainly promiscuously. The more people you touch via social media and social network connections, the greater the chance that you will always be a top result whenever they do a search in your general direction.

Sure, my level of social media populism is not for everyone because it does take a lot of work, and pursuing the Cluetrain long tail of everyone can surely scare away some of your elite contacts and friends, which it has done, personally, because I do create a lot of content and “noise” to someone who only has 150 friends on LinkedIn, on MySpace, Friendster, and Twitter. I have surely driven them away and hear, “I had to unfollow you because you were the only person I ever saw on my
Facebook wall.” Fair enough. No worries.

While this example is personal, all of these map across to brand beautifully. I am co-founder and president of Abraham Harrison and Google knows that. It is on my Google Profile (you really need to look at this and set this up and try to get all your employees to set their profiles up as well). Google met me halfway when it came to the profile, too, as it was mostly already sorted out for me when I arrived. I just made sure they didn’t miss anything.

This might all seem like Mickey Mouse child’s play but the net effect is that the experience of daily search for tens of thousands of people online tends towards returning content that I have liked, dugg, retweeted, blogged, stumbled upon, thumbed up, shared, starred, emailed, and recommended, including a mainstream media highest-caste global newspaper journalist, and others. Their search reality is strangely influenced by my Internet behavior. That’s powerful. In the attention data game, I am considered a super-node.

In terms of an SEO strategy, this means–and has meant for a while–that simply nailing your site’s information architecture, naming convention, keyword-rich URLs and titles, content, keywords, ALT tags, and link strategy is not nearly enough.

The new secret weapon for Search Engine Optimization is digital Public Relations and Social Media Marketing.

Even more info on this strategy over on Steve Rubel and SEOmoz. Via Mike Moran’s Biznology blog.

Related articles

• Rosetta Stone Jamaican (threesixmix.wordpress.com)
• CEOs of America’s Largest Companies Embracing Twitter and LinkedIn (Facebook, not so much) (domo.com)
• Hummingbird Unleashed (moz.com)
• LinkedIn drives more traffic to law firm websites than all other social media combined (kevin.lexblog.com)
• Visibility & SEO of LinkedIn. (mollycliffe.wordpress.com)
• LinkedIn Made A Bunch Of New Announcements About Its Mobile Strategy (businessinsider.com)
• LinkedIn Debuts New and Updated Apps (newspodge.wordpress.com)
• LinkedIn Made A Bunch Of New Announcements About Its Mobile Strategy (embargozone.com)
• LinkedIn Debuts New and Updated Apps (entrepreneur.com)
• LinkedIn announces Intro, a new service that brings LinkedIn profiles into the iOS Mail app (theverge.com)

The post How to become a super-node in the attention era appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Evaluating the business potential of location-based social applications—is the tail wagging the dog?

If you read any mainstream media or social media sites, you might have started to get the impression that a Foursquare, Gowalla or Loopt application is your only hope to make this quarter’s numbers because check-ins are on everyone’s lips, er, fingertips these days. However, for chief marketing officers of large brands, what’s the real business potential of these apps in 2010? What can they do for your business, and what and where are their limitations?

Below I’ll share some due diligence I’ve conducted for one of my clients and give you some general guidance for using these apps this year. I’ve also included links to the best information sources. First, let’s start with an introduction of geosocial and how it fits into the ecosystem you already know.

A brief introduction to geosocial applications

Geosocial — or geolocation or location-based services or applications — represents an emerging space within the Web 2.0 ecosystem, so I’ll spend a minute here positioning them because their development is moving at warp speed. Geo refers to exchanging information related to your current temporal and physical location via a mobile device. Social applies the now-established bundle of practices called “social networking” to your physical location — interacting with friends or friends of friends.

You might think of geosocial as “situational social networking based on where you are” (and what you’re doing). Many geosocial applications use GPS technology to automatically report the physical locations of their users, subject to their privacy settings. For some quick visuals, see Geosocial Applications and the Enterprise (PDF).

Small niches of people have been active in geosocial, using text messaging, for many years. Progenitor Dodgeball was founded in 2000 and enabled users to SMS each other to report their location, notify them about other people nearby to enable “meeting in real life.” Geosocial applications try to increase opportunities for socializing with existing friends or people users don’t know but have certain things in common, based on each user’s privacy and sharing preferences.

It’s worth noting that geosocial is related to but distinct from geotargeting, which usually denotes serving precise marketing messages to people based on their locations. Citysearch has been doing this since Web 1.0, and current players like Yelp and Facebook are converging into the geosocial space. Google tried to morph its Dodgeball acquisition into Google Latitude, but it hasn’t really worked, and I’ll speculate that they are channeling much of their geosocial energy into Google Buzz.

Some key players

Key players in the space include the following:

• Loopt launched in 2006 and claims 3 million users.
• Brightkite launched in 2007 and claims 2 million users.
• Gowalla was born in 2007 and claims 150,000 users.
• Foursquare launched in 2009 and claims close to 1 million users (with this growth, is it any wonder it receives the lion’s share of the buzz?)
• Twitter shares considerable geosocial functionality, but it’s more generalized and less specific. It launched in 2006 and has 75 million users.

Foursquare and Gowalla began catalyzing the current incarnation of geosocial applications in 2009 when they introduced a gaming element that is very relevant to retail and entertainment. Foursquare and Gowalla users “check in” to pubs, the symphony, SFO, the Cubs game, Bob’s barbecue in his back yard. Checking in broadcasts users’ time/geo location and activity to their friends (analogous to Twitter followers). Moreover, the apps award points and badges to users who meet various check-in criteria. For example, the person who has checked in to a location the most often per time period is designated “the mayor” of that location. Retailers can award free services or drinks to people based on check-in activity.

Most serious businesspeople won’t admit it, but like other people, they secretly like hoarding buttons and badges that elevate them above their peers in some way. It’s like a scavenger hunt game you play with your iPhone, Blackberry, etc. The world’s a playground.

The potential: Emerging opportunity

If your business involves physical locations, geosocial applications represent a tantalizing possibility: People can talk about their presence and share their experience at one of your locations with, potentially, friends of their friends that have the same interest (or thirst). It adds long tail digital grease to conditions on the ground at a retail location. Put another way, it can extend the buying radius of your retail locations significantly because one of my friends is looking at iPads right now, and I’m only 5 blocks away. My friend can share her iPad exploration process with me, fusing social and shopping experiences. I hadn’t thought about looking at iPads right now, but because my friend is there … That also means immediacy, peer pressure and more sales.

However, let’s abstract above retail to see a far more widespread potential. Consider these geosocial use cases:

• Law firm seminars on import/export standards usually attract 30, but when attendees tell their friends, it increases by 50 percent
• Restaurant clients check in for drinks, and their friends can join them “spontaneously” for dinner
• Outdoor equipment retailer gives away climbing gloves to people with a certain number of check-ins; remember, when someone checks in, all their friends know, and friends tend to have similar interests
• University economics forum attracts 33 percent more attendees when attendees check in to the forum
• Ice cream shop gives free Rocky Road sundaes to kids who check-in wearing sunhats between 3:00 and 5:00 this afternoon, dramatically increasing excitement and selling radius
• By the way, Foursquare et al have Twitter and Facebook plug-ins, so check-ins are often broadcast to their users’ larger networks (much to the chagrin of their friends, who often tire of barhopping ordeals)

The reality: This is a VERY small market

Even writing the above paragraphs was exciting because it infuses companionship, immediacy and sales in an exciting cocktail that fuses new digital capabilities with the pleasure of retail’s immediate gratification. There is definitely a place on the Social Network Roadmap for geosocial, and I will undoubtedly be advising clients on geosocial social networking this year; however, I predict that engagements will be very specific and have goals that don’t involve huge numbers. Here’s why:

• Remember Twitter. The degree of excitement and overwhelming media attention vastly outstripped the actual business returns of launching a Twitter account or two. Today, Twitter has 75 million members, but 90 percent of tweets are written by fewer than 10 percent of them, and I’ll wager that geosocial services will follow a similar pattern, although they are easier to understand than Twitter.
• One of the best Mashable articles in ages drives this home graphically: Local’s Long Tail Challenge. For example, here are stats for the top three U.S. cities:
  • New York City has 2.71 percent of the U.S. population, and 13,539 Foursquare users — among more than 8 million population.
  • Los Angeles has 1.24 percent of the U.S. population and 6,206 Foursquare users among almost 4 million.
  • Chicago has 0.92 percent of the U.S. population and 4,618 Foursquare users among almost 3 million.
• In other words, geosocial users are a drop in an ocean.
• There is considerable distortion around geosocial because social media and techie users are very excited and vocal, and mainstream media is desperately magnifying anything that people will read while trying to adopt enough 2.0 to stay alive. Yes, the tail is wagging the dog right now. But he’s right to be happy.

Pragmatic geosocial opportunities in 2010

• Geosocial in Q2 2010 is an excellent example of a highly vocal early market discovering an explosive trend that will develop over the next five years and end up transforming retail. Although the term is outdated now, Web 3.0 used to denote applying “the Web” to physical location (among other things), and geosocial is a key driver.
• Success in 2010 will hinge on engagement sponsors and their advisers forming aggressive but realistic goals that recognize and play off the reality of geosocial users now; you can’t make money this year off of 2011’s user numbers. Or 2012’s. Or …
• On the positive side, you can make focused, modest investments that depend on your knowledge of your target audience’s true motivations (not what you want their motivations to be). Having people who can create excitement, promotions and events that draw geosocial users can certainly increase awareness of your physical locations, products and services.
• For large businesses, awareness will be a more realistic goal than huge sales increases because geosocial users probably represent a very small portion of their total customers. However, if your business is focused on early adopters (i.e. bars, entertainers, events), it can be very relevant now.
• Furthermore, are you following the firestorm over Facebook’s conflict with some vocal users over privacy? (Facebook recently introduced Places, which aims to bring geosocial to the masses.) Privacy will serve as a huge impediment to geosocial adoption by the mainstream market. If your business is grounded in Main Street, be careful not to make geosocial 2011’s tarnished silver bullet.
• The Web 2.0 Adoption Curve is instructive here because it predicts a significant backlash against social networks in 2010: the perceived value of social networks in 2009-2010 is much higher than the market’s competency with using social networks to create relationships that increase revenue. When expectations are higher than the ability to realize them, disenchantment is the inevitable stepchild.

Net-net, you can make money in any market. Successful 2010 initiatives will give current users valid value propositions and motivate them to talk to their followers, most of whom will lurk for the next several years. If you don’t depend on exaggerated adoption, you can succeed and get in front of a trend that is certain to grow.

Sources

Here are some of the most valuable sources I used for diligence on this post:

• Awesome backstory on Foursquare from Wired & Thx @stefanw
• 5 Things You Need to Know About Location-Based Social Media
• Making a Business Case for Mobile Marketing
• King of the Location Based Mountain- Foursquare vs. Gowalla, Loopt, Yelp, RallyUp, Plyce…
• Facebook Friends GPS
• Geolocation 101: How It Works, the Apps, and Your Privacy
• Even more …

Your turn

What’s your experience? Please share your reactions, your personal experience with geosocial apps 0r your business experience.

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