Local Social Summit Report No 2 & Trends for 2012

Edited by Dylan Fuller & Mike Abeyta | localsocialsummit.com | Published 30 April 2012

Local Social Summit 2011 Day 2: Conference Report

Page | 1 www.localsociasummit.com | facebook.com/localsocialsummit | @locsocsummit

Contents Executive Summary ......................................................................................... 2

Trends & Themes to Watch in 2012 ................................................................. 3

Local Social Summit ’11 Schedule - Day 2 ...................................................... 4

Day 2, Session 1 – Talk: The First Digital Olympics, London 2012 & the BBC ......................................................................................................................... 5

Day 2, Session 2 – Insights: Science of Social Media: Social Network Analysis On Facebook Data, with a local twist ............................................................... 8

Day 2, Session 3 - Panel: Café Culture - Innovative SoLoMo Apps ............... 10

Day 2, Session 4 – Fireside Chat: A Conversation with Foursquare – We Sat Down with the 1st European Based Executive @Foursquare ........................ 12

Day 2, Session 5 - Panel: Big Brand Local .................................................... 17

Day 2, Session 6 - Panel: Can Social Media Be Outsourced ......................... 22

Day 2, Session 7 – Closing Keynote: Charting Collection of Connections in Social Media. Dr. Marc Smith ......................................................................... 26

About Local Social Summit & This Report ..................................................... 30

LSS’11 Sponsors ........................................................................................... 31

Local Social Summit 2012: Dates & Information ............................................ 32

Sponsorship Opportunities for Local Social Summit 2012 ............................. 33


Executive Summary Please Note: This report covers day two of LSS’11 plus our view of the key trends to watch in 2012. A previous report covering day one was published separately back in March 2012 - you can download a copy of the Day 1 Report here or just email the LSS team so we can email you a copy (Email: [email protected]). Local Social Summit (LSS) is a conference that explores the intersection of local and social media. Designed to ensure dynamic dialogue and networking among conference attendees, the summit features interactive sessions constructed to share knowledge and find solutions by showcasing innovation, emerging trends and consumer insights. The origins for LSS date back to the summer of 2006, at an event focused on the local search space that was attended by some of the biggest local media players in Europe, including Deutsche Telekom, SEAT Pagine Gialle, Schibsted Group and the Irish Times. Subsequently, Dylan Fuller & Simon Baptist founded Local Social Summit in 2009 as a direct response to requests from media companies and thought leaders in the local space. Local Social Summit 2011 (LSS’11) was our third annual event, held in London on November 9th & 10th. LSS’11 was an expanded event, held over two days, that included 100 attendees, 40 speakers and six sponsors. We had 16 sessions: three keynotes, eight panels, two talks, a fireside chat, one brand hackathon and one seminar on social network analysis. As always, engagement was high and the level of discourse world class. Key Learnings:

1. Social media or social networking is no longer over hyped. The “social web” is transforming how consumers and businesses operate. Businesses can no longer afford to ignore this paradigm shift.

2. Mobile has truly arrived. The combination of new technologies such as mobile broadband, GPS and apps together with consumer demand for new device types (smartphones and tablets) is the driving enabler for local commerce.

3. Everything is local. Local is not just about SMBs (small & medium sized business/SMEs) but is also about big brands and regional/national chains/franchises connecting with consumers at the local level. This has profound implications for the local and global economy.

4. Location is everywhere. Social is not just about data, trends and ROI (return on investment), but also very much about people, community and continuous engagement. Local is what is accessible.

Points for debate/disagreement:

1. Search vs. Social. It’s too soon to settle the debate. No one could agree on the relative importance of search (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo, IYPs) when compared to social channels (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp).

2. What now? There is a big question around “what next” for local businesses after they have signed-up for a social networking service. What do they do with their Facebook fan page? Who should they follow on Twitter? Should they join LinkedIn?

http://www.slideshare.net/LocalSocialSummit/local-social-summit-report-no-1-trends-for-2012

[email protected]


3. In-house vs. outsource. There was intense debate on whether it was feasible or scalable to outsource social media activities to third parties. This has significant implications for a large spectrum of companies across online - including PR, yellow pages, technology providers, publishers and media agencies of all sizes.

Finally, everyone agreed that there was much left to learn, problems to solve and huge room for growth for business at the intersection of local, social and mobile.

Trends & Themes to Watch in 2012

Incumbents are at risk. Many industries are only just catching up to the social opportunity. Watch for an increase in PR from incumbents and action from agencies, start-ups and technology companies.

Data is everywhere. The social/mobile explosion has created the “big data” opportunity for businesses of all sizes. Location is a valuable and relevant signal within all that data.

Consumers demand great user experience. People are living, sharing and spending locally in new ways every day. “Pull” becomes “Push” and consumers demand product and services from brands they know and trust. They want this with the same great user experience they already get from most good apps.

Big brand local. Just as many consumer facing product businesses are shifting spend to direct marketing over time, so too are big brands with local stores embracing social channels for dialogue-based interactions with their local customers.

The rebirth of local. Local moves beyond Groupon, Yelp and Angies List. Mobile broadband. 3G and 4G enables the connected consumer, who not

only checks-in and pins products but makes informed buying decisions and recommendations on the fly via mobile devices everywhere. This trend will expand and impact everything from groceries to fashion to restaurant to hotels and more.

The next Internet arrives. Watch for an explosion in next generation data-driven social apps and the legislative backdrop in the works (both in the US and the EU).

The death of daily deals. Deals move to check-in specials, loyalty programmes and other smart ways for business to incentivise customers.

Social outsourcing grows. The outsourcing space is wide open and full of opportunity for smart service and technology providers. Watch for growth and innovators from new places.

The personal algorithm becomes public. Facebook Timeline and other social data signals have huge potential for transforming how/when/where consumers access local businesses and buy services, this could impact everything from daily deals to e-commerce to ratings and reviews.

CRM moves forward: adding a social and local layer helps to take CRM from the back office to the frontline. This has implications for how companies are organised and how CRM is integrated into local platforms.


Local Social Summit ’11 Schedule - Day 2 Thursday, 10th November, Wallace Space, London.

9:30-9:55 The First Digital Olympics – Tim Plyming, BBC London 2012

9:55 – 10:15 Insights – Science of Social Media: Social Network Analysis On Facebook

Data, with a local twist - Dr. Bernie Hogan, Research Fellow Oxford Internet

Institute

10:15 – 11.00 Cafe Culture: Innovative SOLOMO Apps

Leader: Perry Evans, CEO Closely

Panel: Asaf Rozin, Co-founder & CEO Stampfeet; Stefano Diemmi, MD

Proximitips/Buongiorno; Mike Borras, CEO & Co-Founder Tupalo

11:30 – 12:00 A Conversation With Foursquare – We Sit Down With The 1st European Based

Executive @foursquare Omid Ashtari, foursquare and Greg Sterling, LSS

12:00 – 1:30 - Lunch –

Plus 12:45-1:30 (optional): Seminar in Social Network Analysis, Dr. Bernie

Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

1:30 – 2:15 Big Brand Local

Leader: Mike Weston, SVP/GM Europe Lyris

Panel: Duncan Ogle-Skan, Director EMO Local; Alistair Watts, Head of

Ecommerce at Hand Picked Hotels; Janis Prescott, Social Media Manger at

MINI; Leanne Tritton, MD ING Media

2:15 – 3:15 Can Social Media Be Outsourced?

Leader: Jonathan Ewert, CEO Codero

Panel: Justin Sanger, Founder JoinHere; Seb Provencher, Founder Nedium;

Dennis Yu CEO Blitz Local; Simon Baptist, European Directories; Eric Partaker,

Co-Founder Chilango

3:45 – 4:45 Lecture & Closing Keynote: Charting Collections Of Connections In Social

Media -Dr. Marc Smith, Director of the Social Media Research Foundation

4:45 – 5:00 Local Social Summit 2011 Wrap-up

5:00 – 7:00 - Networking Reception -

Brought to you by The Social Media Research Foundation


Day 2, Session 1 – Talk: The First Digital Olympics, London 2012 & the BBC

Speaker: Tim Plyming is the Project Executive; Digital & Editor Live Sites in the BBC’s London 2012 project team. He leads the day to day activity of the ‘Digital Olympics’ project which is responsible for the delivery of all 2012 content across digital platforms including online, mobile and connected TV. Background: London 2012 will be the first tablet Olympics, the first connected TV Olympics and the first 3D Olympics. The BBC is the host nation broadcaster of all the Games and has one amazing year planned for 2012. Tim provided LSS'11 attendees with a sneak preview of the BBC’s plans. Session Summary: “We’re calling the 2012 Summer Games the first truly digital Olympics, because 2012 is also the year we switch off the analogue signal [in the UK]” explained Tim Plyming, project executive, digital & editor live sites, BBC London 2012. 2012 Massive Digital Content Year in the UK But that only tells half the story. As Plyming explained, the amount of content generated by the Olympics is equivalent of six World Cups happening every day for 16 days. “In fact, 2012 is a massive year from the start of the summer,” he said. “It starts with the analogue switch-off in April, then there’s the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June, when our operation will be four times the size of the one for this year’s royal wedding [Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding in May 2011]. Then there’s the 70 days of the torch relay, which will be when the Games come to people outside London, and which will be a huge outside broadcast operation. After the Olympics there’s a two-week break and then the Paralympic Games. And then there’s all the events of the Cultural Olympiad. Every outside broadcast truck in Northern Europe will be in London next summer.” 100% of the Olympic Content Available For the BBC, the London Games will represent a step change in the amount of material it broadcasts. “The Olympic Broadcaster creates 3000 hours of television,” Plyming explained. “For the Sydney Games, we were only able to show 300 hours of that. By Beijing, we showed half of it. In 2012, our commitment is to allow people to watch everything live – up to 24 different events at a time – and the internet will be a broadcast-critical service for that.” Four-Screen Event Plyming also explained that the BBC is thinking of the London Games as very much a four-screen event. “The Coronation in 1953 was the first mass TV event, and there was one TV per street. 2012 will be another defining moment in the move from analogue to digital broadcasting. “The heart of it will be the video services. There will be 24 HD feeds, immediately on-demand. It’s the basis of the iPlayer service taken to the next level. Then mobile and tablet will be a complimentary experience. Users will

“… the amount of content generated by the Olympics is equivalent of six World Cups happening every day for 16 days.”

-Tim Plyming


be able to pull up the commentator information service, and we’ll do video where we can.” Content Enrichment – “wiki-Olympic-pedia” The other big step forward will be the amount of metadata about the Games that the BBC will make available to the audience for the first time. “The commentator information service has always been privileged information for the commentary teams. It’s how commentators know all the statistics and details of the events,” Plyming explained. “We’re stripping it out and providing it to viewers, allowing them to pull it up alongside the video. Then we’ll allow the audience to play with that. It’ll be interesting to see how all the platforms are used, both separately and together, and it’ll be useful to see how content trends across those devices. There’s such a huge amount of content that we’ll be seeing trending as a means of navigation.” Social Olympics Plyming is also interested in how social element will change the content, on top of that, how the fact that people’s devices know where they are will affect the way the data is sliced. As well as all the data from the commentator information service, there will be a page for every athlete from every country, with all their stats and all the video of them from the Games, both live and on-demand. Local Olympics Beyond this, Plyming said, are the big screens. There will be 30 of them around the UK, and the BBC sees part of the role of these screens in reaching out to expat communities, what it calls “Find the world in London.” “There will be one million Russians in London next summer, so we’re expanding the outdoor experience in Hyde Park, allowing communities to watch what they want to watch across six screens. Half of the 204 competing countries have communities of more than 10,000 people in London.” Response to Questions In response to a question, Plyming said that the BBC would like to do a lot with social media around the Games, but that it was restricted by the IOC’s concerns about video leakage. Instead, he said, all the data would be shared and that would be used to drive people back to the BBC coverage. This led on to a question about monetisation, which he answered by saying that the BBC was looking to commercialise “the London story”, what Plyming referred to as “what’s outside the fence” via the BBC Worldwide. But he admitted that the BBC having sole UK rights did pose a problem for sponsors. London’s Impact on Future Olympics Plyiming sees these Games as a staging post for the future. “It’ll be interesting to see what these Games mean for next Summer Games in Rio,” he said. “We can try lots of things and see how they work, and Rio is looking for UK companies to see how they can help with the 2016 Games. It’s a big opportunity for people.”

“There’s such a huge amount of content that we’ll be seeing trending as a means of navigation.”

-Tim Plyming


Note: We are unable to share the slides from this presentation.

LSS Insights - Day 2, Session 1:

London 2012 is the first truly digital Olympics.

100% of the content will be available. That’s 3000 hours of TV.

It will be a massive four screen event with HD video at the heart of it.

All the meta data will be made available plus custom pages for each athlete making for a very rich and immersive data experience – combined with social media interaction this should create a real-time Wikipedia for the games.

This will be a social media Olympics. People will be adding to the official content.

There will be a local angle – both in the UK and globally. This includes the torch relay, outside local screens and how fans interact with the events and teams.

London 2012 will show the way for future Olympics. Innovation from London will lead the way for Brazil 2016.


Day 2, Session 2 – Insights: Science of Social Media: Social Network Analysis On Facebook Data, with a local twist

Speaker: Dr. Bernie Hogan, Research Fellow Oxford Internet Institute Bio: Bernie Hogan is a leader in the capture and analysis of social media networks, particularly Facebook. He has presented to numerous academic and corporate audiences, such as VisionBristol, UK Social Networks Association, Microsoft Research, and Google Europe and has worked with eHarmony, Nokia, and O2. His work has been featured on the BBC, including both BBC Breakfast and Newsnight, as well as numerous radio interviews. Last year, he was one of four academic mentors for Radio 4’s “So you want to be a scientist”. Dr. Hogan is a regular speaker at LSS events and seminars.

Session Summary: One of the most fascinating things about online is the ability it gives us to build networks. And the underlying patterns of those networks make sense, especially when you can visualise them. So why haven’t they caught on? At the moment, networks seem to be more useful to scientists than to the public. People don’t know how to look at a network, and they don’t know what to do with one. Is that a failing of visualisations or a failing of how people think about visualisations? People want to be able to find different groups to talk to, but on Facebook you can’t post to one group and not another. This might not matter – people try to put on a single persona for any one site, but that’s not easy because we have different groups of friends on Facebook and we don’t have a map that shows us how distant people are from each other. All we have are lists that collapse everyone into the same place, and we have algorithms like Google’s Page Rank and Facebook’s Edge Rank. What we don’t have is a map to let us see our own networks. In my work I’m trying to show how that can be done and the value it offers to individuals.

The concern if we leave things as they are is that we leave people without control of the networks. When I post on Facebook, I’m not saying what I’m saying directly to my mum, my boss or my students, but I am saying it in the light of them being in the audience. So communications devolve to the lowest common denominator, and there are two possible results. One is polarisation of your network and the other is self-censorship. In both cases you’re not in control of the message, the technology is controlling what you say. The engineering solution is to help you split your network into different groups, but people don’t do this. They end up talking to the lowest

“So communications devolve to the lowest common denominator, and there are two possible results. One is polarisation of your network and the other is self-censorship. In both cases you’re not in control of the message, the technology is controlling what you say.“

-Bernie Hogan


common denominator. For example, if you’re gay, it’s very hard to come out to only a section of your network. If you have a way of visualising your network, your view becomes much more crystallised, but at the moment we’re not using this approach. Why aren’t there network modes on Facebook, for example a family mode? The technology should be able to identify most of my family members - they’re all connected to each other and not to anyone else in my network – and I can help them the rest of the way. But at the moment there’s an intense amount of cognitive switching going on. A number of my colleagues are on Facebook and they regularly post interesting things, but it’s very hard to concentrate on work with such a disparate feed coming through from Facebook.

The complete slide deck from this talk is available on Slideshare.

Figure: Our Real-world Networks vs. Facebook Network

http://www.slideshare.net/LocalSocialSummit/lss11-science-of-social-media-social-network-analysis-on-facebook-data-with-a-local-twist


Day 2, Session 3 - Panel: Café Culture - Innovative SoLoMo Apps Moderator: Perry Evans, CEO Closely Panellists:

Asaf Rozin, Co-founder & CEO Stampfeet

Stefano Diemmi, MD Proximitips/Buongiorno

Mike Borras, CEO & Co-Founder Tupalo Panel Background: The role of customer service in marketing; the use of deals in yield management; and the need to focus on what SMBs want. These were the main topics of discussion in the Cafe Culture panel, which brought together three SoLoMo entrepreneurs from across Europe. We also explored the challenges of innovation in apps development, how to grow user adoption and what business models are working. Session Summary:. Evans began by asking the panellists to introduce themselves and their business. “Stampfeet is a mobile-based customer loyalty play,” began Rozin. “Online loyalty is very complex, although the interfaces are getting better. It needs to be more personalised and more engaging; then you could up-sell, cross-sell and surprise people. “We’re working on a loyalty engine that takes the loyalty card onto the mobile phone. We use QR codes, but we’re also implementing an EPOS add-on, which will allow us to do basket analysis and in turn increase spend and learn more about a brand’s customers. At the moment we’re not monetising, but the aim is to charge merchants on subscription or on a performance basis.” Next came Diemmi. “Proximitips is a way to connect customers to local shops,” he said. “We’re starting with the customer viewpoint. We launched on the iPad, then the iPhone and we’ve just launched on Android, and we already have 30,000 customers.” The last to answer was Tupalo’s Borras. “Customer service is the new marketing for SMBs,” he said. “We give local businesses an early-warning system for what’s being said about them on the web. “We also recognise that yield management is very important, so we work through deals and challenges to the merchant’s community to drive business on slow days.” Evans’ next question was how, when everyone is trying to get the attention of small businesses, how were the panellists going about it. Diemmi’s response was that the Proximitips platform is cheap and easy to use. “You can create a mobile store for £10 a month,” he said. “We’re focusing on large cities, for example London, and we’re discussing partnerships with directory businesses.” Stampfeet’s Rozin agreed that marketing to small businesses is a massive challenge. “Many SMBs don’t understand these technologies,” he said. “The way we try to position ourselves is that we’re about retention rather than acquisition. And we try to scale through distribution channels.”


Evans then asked Borras what he knew now that he wished he’d known when he was starting out. “We started the business from a ‘we’re going to kill Yellow Pages’ perspective,” Borras replied. “One of the things we didn’t focus on soon enough was the customer perspective. Then when we got the deal with European Directories we realised that we needed feedback from local businesses, because both consumers and local businesses are our customers.” Evans agreed that it’s a mistake to think that the social channel is close to what businesses need. Rather suppliers need to look first at the business needs of their customers. So he asked Borras how Tupalo fits into its partners suites of products. “I completely agree you need to get out and talk to businesses early on,” Borras replied, “because people need different things in different markets.” So Evans closed by asking with whom the panellists were now most interested in having conversations. “We’re most interested in directory services, people who have relevant location-based content,” Diemmi said. “Local businesses and people with links to then,” said Rozin. “Potential partners, publishers, data owners,” said Borras. “We’re doing roll-outs in Germany, France and the US, and Italy is also very exciting for us.” Company Links:

Stampfeet: Mobile Based Customer Loyalty App - http://www.stampfeet.co.uk/ Tupalo: A place to discover, review and share local businesses - http://tupalo.com/

Proximitips: Hyper local social magazine - http://www.proximitips.com/

.c

http://www.stampfeet.co.uk/

http://tupalo.com/

http://tupalo.com/

http://www.proximitips.com/


Day 2, Session 4 – Fireside Chat: A Conversation with Foursquare – We Sat Down with the 1st European Based Executive @Foursquare

Omid Ashtari, Director of Business Development, Foursquare Interviewed Conducted by: Greg Sterling Introduction: Omid Ashtari is the first executive at Foursquare working in Europe. Foursquare is one of the leading players in the local, social and mobile arena (SoLoMo). Local Social Summit seemed like a great opportunity to quiz him about the company’s plans and explore how Foursquare sees itself in the context of the larger local-social ecosystem. With more than 15 million users around the world Foursquare has emerged from the pack of check-in apps and has evolved from a game into a local discovery tool and merchant loyalty platform. Foursquare is a great example of where all three – social, local & mobile - come together. Perhaps Foursquare is the king of SoLoMo and definitely a favourite among the digirati. Greg Sterling: What is Foursquare? Omid Ashtari: Our mission statement is that we want to make the real world easier to use. We do that by building tools for users that help you keep up with friends, discover what's nearby, save money, and unlock deals. Whether you're setting off on a trip around the world, coordinating a night out with friends, or trying to pick out the best dish at your local restaurant, foursquare is the perfect companion. GS: So it’s a social city guide? OA: That’s part of what it is, but that definition doesn’t include some of the aspects I just described like for instance the rewards and money-saving piece. GS: Money-saving in what way? OA: We’ve built a bunch of free tools that allow businesses to claim their presence on foursquare and allow them to upload specials for their customers. These specials can be good to acquire users for the first time, like for instance get a free glass of wine on your first check in - Newbie Special - or can be geared to reward loyal users, like for instance check in 10 times to get a 30% discount if you spend more than £10 - Loyalty Special. There are many examples for these specials out there, even in London. Just open up the app, hit explore and search for specials in your vicinity. GS: You have these examples of daily deals – how are you making that capability known to small businesses? And how many SMBs do you have signed up?

https://foursquare.com/

https://foursquare.com/about/

https://foursquare.com/


OA: We have more than 750,000 merchants that have claimed their location on foursquare. Our platform has really loyal users, and often they approach the SMBs themselves. We actively reach out to big merchants and issue case studies, which will hopefully inspire smaller merchants to use our platform. For us it’s all about building the right tools for users and merchants right now and once we have it nailed to push the message out there. [For small business case studies we liked the one about Dos Caminos, a Mexican restaurant in NYC.] GS: Groupon is struggling to complement acquisition with loyalty. Foursquare does that, but how does the merchant know when a customer reaches the threshold to qualify for a loyalty reward? OA: We keep track of that. The merchants set the rules, and we automatically count up the check-ins. The redemption bit is still sometimes clunky but we are working on some solutions there, like for instance when you set up a special we create a print-out to explain to staff what an unlocked special is and so on. GS: In the beginning, check-ins drove the initial adoption of Foursquare. Then the novelty wore off. How does Foursquare now regard the game mechanic piece of the app, and check-ins as a phenomenon, when people don’t care so much about status? OA: The check-in is just the start of the journey and, by the way, our check in numbers have been growing day by day. We are really excited about building tools for our users that make it easier for them to navigate the real world and one of those features is Explore: so for example, if you’re in Brixton and you’re looking for a sushi place, you can set the radius you want to search within, and we can give you recommendations based on your and your friends’ past check-in behaviour. We understand that the ‘one size fits all’ search results are not the way to go and were currently the only ones that give you individual results. Game mechanics are an important element of our platform and they will continue to be. Game mechanics alone, however, will not be enough to keep people engaged. You want to use game mechanics to onboard people and provide some surprising experiences along the way, but the real value has to be in recommendations, tips, discovery and specials. GS: Your biggest competitors are Yelp and Google. How do you see yourselves against them? OA: The competitor set really depends on which part of what we offer you look at. In any case we don’t care too much about what our competition does and just keep executing our strategy. Google Maps is a great product and I will always use it to find my way around a city, but to find good tailor made restaurant recommendations for me on the go, foursquare is certainly the better solution. Just give it a try and see for yourself. GS: How are you approaching partnerships via the API? OA: Our APIs are open and free to use by anyone out there. We have made our user generated database of more than 30 million places available for everyone to use and have seen a lot of success with it. Companies like Path, Instagram, Foodspotting etc.

https://foursquare.com/business/merchants/casestudie

https://foursquare.com/business/merchants/casestudies/doscaminos


use it. We also make an anonymized fire hose of check ins available to selected publishers to write stories or to research institutes to analyze the flow of people in cities. It’s really interesting to see this data come alive. [Examples of this data can be found on Flowing City - where we recommend this one about London – see bleow.]

Greg also opened the conversation to questions from the Local Social Summit audience. Question: Is the map of city check-ins available through the app? OA: No, but you can get check in data for individual locations. Question: How will you make money? OA: We’re obviously thinking about that. Most of what we’ve tried – distributing Groupon’s deals, for example – were pilots. But if you think about it, check-in behaviour has lots of commercial value. Facebook uses their data for targeting by interest, Google targets based on intent; I think we have both interest and intent and it will be easy to monetise that in the future. For instance it will be easy for us in the future to match the perfect customer up with the perfect business i.e. a pizza store that doesn’t have enough customers but would pay for getting some people to the door with a person who is a pizza lover who is hungry and nearby. Question: Are all check-ins in the public domain?

http://flowingcity.com/visualization/getting-around-london-according-to-foursquare/

http://flowingcity.com/visualization/getting-around-london-according-to-foursquare/


OA: We offer the option for people to check in off the grid too – which is a private check in. Questions: Has that incentivised people to check-in more? OA: I wouldn’t know how that has affected our check in numbers at the moment. Question: Would selective visibility lead people to check in more? OA: I don’t have the stats. We have 3m check-ins a day, but I don’t know how many are private. People usually have a small social graph on foursquare, so you’re only giving your location to a small, trusted group. Question: Are there applications in different verticals? OA: American Express is doing something in the US which we hope to bring to the Europe at some point. If you tie your Amex card to Foursquare, you will have access to special load-to-card deals. When you swipe your card, you’ll unlock that deal. For example, if you spend $50, you get $20 straight back on your card. The clunky redemption problem is thereby solved. [Foursquare also teamed up with American Express in the US to promote Small Business Saturday in November 2010 and 2011…] Question: How about less frequent purchases that have a large element of loyalty but low frequency, such as car dealerships? OA: We’ve not really thought about that. But anyone who deals with customers that they want to keep loyal can use foursquare and even integrate us in their loyalty program via the API. GS: What about tradespeople who use Yellow Pages? Roofers, for example. Can Foursquare accommodate them? OA: Most of the use cases we’re thinking about are location-based as we don’t want to pollute the database with too many virtual locations. Question: Does a phone call to a business count as a check-in? OA: At the moment, we’re focused on check-ins at physical locations. Question: Where do you stand on the use of real names versus pseudonyms? OA: Most people who create a Foursquare account import their Facebook profile into it. I think that most people use their real names, but I don’t have any data on that. When we see people using an obviously fake name, we contact them. But we never show people’s last names on the platform, so you are anonymous to a certain extent. Question: What is the interface to accept a list of locations from a business that wants to claim multiple outlets? OA: Go to foursquare.com/business to see how you can claim venues on foursquare. It’s pretty straight forward.

http://blog.foursquare.com/2011/12/05/spend-10-get-10-more-ways-to-get-cash-and-support-local-businesses-with-foursquare-amex/

http://blog.foursquare.com/2011/12/05/spend-10-get-10-more-ways-to-get-cash-and-support-local-businesses-with-foursquare-amex/


Question: What are your growth numbers? OA: We have 100 employees, 1.5bn check-ins since launch, 15 million users, 600% growth in Europe last year, 750,000 merchants on the platform, 5m places checked in to in Europe last year. Urban areas stick out as places of high usage, but we also see a viral effect all over the map. [Note: on Foursquare day 16 April 2012 the service announced hitting 20 million users and 2 billion check-ins.]

http://blog.foursquare.com/2012/04/16/happy-4sqday-from-team-foursquare-to-you/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/foursquare_active_users.php


Day 2, Session 5 - Panel: Big Brand Local Leader: Mike Weston, most recently SVP/GM Europe, Lyris Panellists:

Duncan Ogle-Skan, Director EMO Local

Alistair Watts, Head of Ecommerce at Hand Picked Hotels

Janis Prescott, Social Media Manger at MINI

Leanne Tritton, MD ING Media

Background: Much of this year’s Local Social Summit was dominated by talk of SMBs, but this panel changed focus to look at how big brands are coping in the local social space. The brands represented directly were Mini, by Social Media Manager Janis Prescott, and Hand Picked Hotels, by Head of Ecommerce Alistair Watts. The panel was completed by Duncan Ogle-Skan, Director of localisation-specialist marketing agency EMO Local, and Leanne Tritton, MD of reputation management company ING Media. Panel Summary: Panellists focussed on the new challenges to large brands implementing a local social strategy, including:

Customer service vs. promotion orientation

Tone of messages – formal vs. informal, conversational vs. informative, etc.

Continuity (when key social media employees leave)

Control vs. guidelines for employees, including pros and cons of personal identification

Moderator Mike Weston began by asking the panellists to describe their approach to social media. Hand Picked Hotels’ Alistair Watt responded first, describing the challenge the company faces as being to build critical mass in the social space while respecting the desire of local hotels to manage their own initiatives. “We used to tell them they couldn’t do social, but then we realised that it was their passion that was going to drive our success in social media,” he said. “So we started looking internally for social media ambassadors.” Watt went on to explain how the company spent the first 12 months of its involvement in social media creating a Facebook page, only to find that no-one posted on the page and no-one responded to the offers there. “Then we had the realisation that social is about conversations,” he said. “So we tried to engage more on a customer service level than a promotional level.” Hand Picked Hotels found that a photo competition resulted in a big jump in the number of followers. This was followed by a photo and slogan competition that started conversations. “We’re not making money,” Watt admitted, “but we’ve seen pockets of success and we now have a community willing to share their involvement with the brand. We have 3,000 followers on Facebook, which gives us a reach of 150,000 people.” Mini’s Janis Prescott identified a similar problem to that faced by Hand Picked Hotels.

“We had the realisation that social is about conversations. So we tried to engage more on a customer service level than a promotional level.”

-Alistair Watts


“We have 150 dealerships in the UK,” she explained. “That means there’s massive potential for disparate social presences. We are very protective of our brand, so there are lots of difficult discussions around how we use social media. We’re a big brand but we’re still working on our strategy to see how we can make the most of social media.” One of those discussions, Prescott said, had been around where in the company social media should sit. “Now we have weekly meetings and we’re trying to do it holistically. In the long term though, everyone should manage their social media presence.” Leanne Tritton of ING Media agreed that lots of brands are struggling with the question of control in the social media space, because “social media as a tool is the complete antithesis of control.” “Many brands have just jumped in, but you need to think of what you’re trying to achieve,” she said. “It’s like a parent talking to a toddler; parents have rules, but toddlers have no rules.” Finally Duncan Ogle-Skan introduced EMO as “an agency that works for big brands in the social space. Our work used to be around the singularity of the message, but now we concentrate on looking for the right audience for the communications we have,” he explained. “We’ve also moved much more into training and mentoring, rather than doing social media for people.” He gave an example from one of his clients, BMW. Someone in their Park Lane dealership had spotted a Tweet from singer Lily Allen asking for advice about which 4WD to try, from a shortlist of Mercedes, Volvo and Lexus. He tweeted back suggesting Allen might like to try a BMW, and then put the singer in touch with the right person at the dealership to organise a test-drive. Ogle-Skan emphasized that the case study showed the benefit of the agency’s approach in mentoring the dealer in how to approach Twitter. Lily Allen Twitter Case Study – “the tweet stream”:


Tritton agreed, pointing out that the exchange “didn’t use the type of language you’d see in a brochure”. “You need to see how the audience wants to talk, rather than talking the way in which you would want to talk. You need to loosen up your tone of voice,” she said. “Also we’re completely hung up on measurement, but sometimes there are things you can’t measure, and you just have to accept that.” Ogle-Skan finished this exchange by highlighting the fact that, in the Super Social Business panel on Day 1, the participants talked about social media in terms of passion rather than performance. The next question went to the heart of the difference between large and small companies’ use of social media – how do you scale its use? “For Hand Picked Hotels, social media has ended up in ecommerce, but I see my role as creating a structure where people can use it, rather than trying to do it all myself,” Watt said. “Where we found strong ambassadors within the business, they’ve helped us to persuade the board of the value of social media by giving us examples of local engagement. I’m pleased that there are tools that enable us to do that.” Watt was then asked whether each hotel has its own Twitter handle. “We’ve protected the Twitter handles and so on for each of our businesses,” he replied. “But only a handful of them engage in social media. The challenge is that someone is enthusiastic, they build up a presence, and then they leave. Continuity is a big problem. Mini’s Prescott described a similar approach. “We didn’t encourage all our dealers to use Facebook,” she said. “They have to be able to do it and sustain it. We’ve told them it isn’t a job for the trainee; people have to be given training.” Prescott explained the company had produced a guide on how to respond: “Use common sense; be authentic; be personal; be local.” “We’ve said they need to maintain their own Facebook page and Twitter presence. We monitor what they’re doing and offer advice, but we don’t intervene. But then we do find that dealers will answer questions directly on our page. It tends to be self-regulating, though, because these people are fans.” Tritton picked up on another concern businesses often have, that of staff members saying inappropriate things on social networks. “If someone can’t be let loose on Twitter, why are they let loose in the organisation?” she asked. “All communications

“Use common sense; be authentic; be personal; be local.”

- Janis Prescott


issues come back to the management of the organisation. If it’s well run and ethical, then social media problems can be solved. What companies really need to work on is their overall levels of trust.” Looking outside the organisation, will “social media terrorists” ever go away? Tritton looked on the positive side. “Companies have always had annoying customers,” she said. “If 99% of your customers know that your product is good, that will protect you.” Watts went further. “By monitoring Twitter, you can sort out complaints as they go out, and stop them becoming a problem. It’s much better to use social media as a loyalty vehicle than for promotions.” A delegate then asked whether the panellists consider clout scores. “We’re just becoming aware of that,” Watt said. “There are better tools in the market now, so we can match Tweets to profiles and reach. It’s really important to know who the tweeters are. “The traditional sales manager role in my business has to change and evolve. They need to identify key customers through Twitter and respond to them.” Perry Evans from the audience asked the panels’ thoughts about some research recently done in Japan that found that the people representing a brand who used their own name on Twitter were the most formal, while those who didn’t use a name and simply represented the brand were the least formal and also got the best results. Ogle-Skan agreed that employees not being personally identified encourages a more informal response, but he argued that this is not always the best approach. “BMW went for just a company identifier on their tweets, but they also created personal accounts for the cab drivers they use to ferry people around,” he said. Prescott said the only problem she could foresee with employees not giving their names on Twitter was that customers would struggle to get back in touch to the person they’d spoken to about a problem, especially in a big organisation. Ogle-Skan echoed the problem of continuity raised by Hand Picked Hotels’ Watt earlier: “One or our clients had an employee who was a social media enthusiast who set up a Facebook page. When they left they just shut the page down. The fact that control didn’t reside within the business or the individual outlet then caused a problem” Finally the panel were asked what they thought the rules should be for employees tweeting about their own brand? “We set guidelines about being an ambassador for the company,” Prescott said. “Generally people need to be more savvy.” Tritton’s view was that these issues are covered by existing employment rules, while Watt related an anecdote illustrating the problems companies can create for themselves in this area: “We used to have a group of former employees expressing

“Companies have always had annoying customers. If 99% of your customers know that your product is good, that will protect you”.

- Leanne Tritton


negative views about the company on a Facebook page,” he said. “HR wanted me to shut the page down, but I couldn’t because Facebook is blocked in our company. The former employees knew it was blocked, so they thought the company couldn’t see what they were posting.”


Local branches of national brands must “act locally”.

It’s increasingly important to identify key customers through Twitter and respond to them.

Agencies should train and coach clients in the correct tone and approach to use on social channels.

The problem of continuity needs to be addressed (internal social media enthusiasts may leave, leaving the company with a hole in their social media strategy.)

Risk of external abuse must be considered, but companies have always had annoying customers.

Guidelines must be communicated to all employees about tweeting/posting about the brand and how to be “brand” ambassadors.


Day 2, Session 6 - Panel: Can Social Media Be Outsourced Leader: Jonathan Ewert, CEO Codero Panellists:

Justin Sanger, Founder JoinHere

Seb Provencher, Founder Nedium

Dennis Yu, CEO BlitzLocal

Simon Baptist, European Directories

Eric Partaker, Co-Founder Chilango Background: In this debate the questions we explored included:

Is it effective for a local business to outsource some or all of its social media activity?

Does it scale?

Is it even ethical?

What process should a local business use to decide the strategy on in-house vs. outsource?

What criteria should they use to choose the right supplier/partner? Panel Summary: The subject of outsourcing social media cropped up throughout the summit, but this panel was intended to address it head on. Jonathan Ewert began by setting the scene: “58% of marketers use social media for more than six hours a week,” he said. “What’s more, the more time you spend using social media, the more you do it. Social media is already being outsourced, and outsourcing is accelerating as social media usage becomes more complex. Usage of social media has doubled in the past 12 months, from 14% to 28%.” “So why is outsourcing accelerating? Is one reason the falling trust in government, or are we making our own homework?” According to Ewert, there are three trade-offs brands need to consider:

Having an authentic voice versus delivering a consistent message

Having control of the message versus over-control

Empowering your employees versus unleashing the hounds “Why did search scale?” Ewert asked. “And can social scale in the same way?” Justin Sanger’s response was that search is a black box, whereas social has changed everything. We’re now looking for businesses to get involved, to engage. That’s the scalability question.” Ewert then asked what the right qualities are in a platform for outsourcing. “SMBs need tools that will help them to scale,” replied Seb Provencher. “They need to optimise the amount of time they spend managing their accounts and optimise their responses to ‘good enough’. There needs to be software to make all this easier for the humans.”


But Dennis Yu questioned how big a role software can play. “Social media is about people. Software doing it won’t be authentic,” he said. “The first step is local enthusiasm, the second is the introduction of process, and the third is the training and guidelines that enable real people to do it properly. “The other problem is resourcing. Companies will have huge call centres, but then hire one person to do social media.” Provencher pointed out that, although companies tend to employ small numbers of social media staff, that doesn’t mean those staff aren’t supported. “This is the front line, but frontline staff aren’t expected to know everything,” he said. “Even in a complex operation, they can hand over to an expert.” Simon Baptist meanwhile said he’d come to believe that all sectors can outsource their social media. “It’s not necessarily right for each individual business, but you can succeed through outsourcing,” he said. “Where people used to question a company’s lack of a website, soon people will question the lack of a social presence.” Eric Partaker picked up on one of Ewert’s opening points, that the more marketers do in social media, the more time they spend. “I spend maybe five hours a week on Twitter, plus we have another person spending the same amount of time on Facebook. But restaurants are different from typical SMBs; the feedback loop is expected to be immediate. Also the business is finding its way, so I don’t see any other way to do this.” Ewert asked what social media functions could be covered by outsourcing? Sanger replied that he believed engagement to be highly over-rated. “One-third of industries are driven by emergency needs,” he said. “You have to keep the customer in mind; who wants to get constant messages from a supplier, such as a plumber, who they hope to never have to use again? “There is a massive set of tools available, but when talking about social media, we’re talking about paying attention to customers. They’ve moved from being listeners to being participants. For businesses to succeed, they need to know how to talk to customers at the right moment, and that’s often not through Facebook. I think we’ve been talking too much about Facebook here.” Ewert then raised the familiar spectre of SMBs not properly understanding social media. “Is there a downside if you don’t understand it?” he asked. “Every single possible downside,” Yu replied. “There are lots of companies out there which have a good customer base and they don’t need this. What’s more, you can’t get the best people to help SMBs, so you’re dead before you start.” Partaker highlighted how complicated the elements involved in social media are. “You’re dealing with the most complex variable on the planet – another human being – and the most complex variable in business – your brand, which is a felt sensation. I can’t see that relationship being outsourced. If you don’t own it you’ll screw yourself. The only bit I can see being outsourced is the commoditised bit.”

“Where people used to question a company’s lack of a website, soon people will question the lack of a social presence.”

- Simon Baptist


Provencher argued that in an area such as lead generation, where his company operates, there can be a commoditised voice, “because there aren’t 200 w ays of presenting an offer in 140 characters.” Partaker’s response was that there need to be clear lines drawn around what can be commoditised and what can’t. “The worst thing is a commoditised response where a human response is needed,” he said. A question was then asked about the quality of the tools that can be used in the commoditised areas, before and after the conversation. Sanger replied that he believed that social is about acquisition and retention, two things that are very separate but which are beginning to clash. “That’s happening because the customers I’m retaining have the ability to help me with acquisition. People often think of social from a purely marketing perspective, but much of it is about customer retention.” Baptist agreed. “It’s about empowering the super-promoters,” he said. “There’s a difference between having followers and having a community.” Partaker reiterated his point from the Super Social Business panel that acquisition comes organically from retention. “I’m always looking for problems in my business. I want people to blast us, because I know that when I sort out the problem I’ll get more loyal customers as a result.” “The number one goal of business owners is to get close to their customers,” Sanger said. “It’s so much better to get close to your existing customers than to acquire new ones.” Ewert then moved on to another of his starting questions, the problem of entrepreneurs’ time. What can outsourcing offer an entrepreneur that is worth investing money or time on? Provencher was pragmatic, identifying the sweet spot as a cost of between $50 and $100 a month. And Baptist argued that it is not simply a question of saving time, but also of making money. Yu however was sceptical. “The lie in the SMB space is that tools will save you time. If the tools work you will just end up with loads more relationships to manage. And the tools are crap anyway.” Another question touched once again on homing in on the key influencers. Yu argued that, when everyone’s on social media, companies have to have a way to prioritise who they speak to. “At the moment it’s being done through PR,” he said. “In the future it won’t be.”

“… [in social media] … You have to treat the most influential people differently,”

- Justin Sanger

“You’re dealing with the most complex variable on the planet – another human being – and the most complex variable in business – your brand, which is a felt sensation.”

- Eric Partaker


Sanger observed that the affiliate space followed the 80:20 rule, but said he expected the split in social media to be even greater. “You have to treat the most influential people differently,” he said. Note: Slide deck for this session is available here on Slideshare.


SMBs will need to continuously evaluate their social presence.

Software platforms can help¸ but businesses need to have a handle on the human interaction, and its primary aims, retention and acquisition of customers.

Key influencers need to be dealt with differently.

Total outsourcing is risky, and may result in loss of contact between the company and the customer.

http://www.slideshare.net/LocalSocialSummit/lss11-can-social-media-be-outsourced

http://tomfishburne.com/2009/07/corporate-twitter.html


Day 2, Session 7 – Closing Keynote: Charting Collection of Connections in Social Media. Dr. Marc Smith

Speaker: Dr Marc Smith, Director of the Social Media Research Foundation Bio: Dr Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research. Note: The complete slide deck is available here on Slideshare. Session Summary: Society is now very much online. We’re now swimming in Tweets, replies, like and so on, and it’s very confusing, because we don’t see the structure. We only see the next post or the next Tweet and it just becomes an overwhelming sea of data. But people gathering in social media form a type of crowd. In the physical world, crowds are very familiar and we find it easy to make judgements about them. Is it a big crowd? Is it angry? Is it marching? When we look at social media, the challenge and the opportunity is that crowds there are hard to see, so we’re disorientated. Making Maps of Social Media. What I’m interested in is making social media crowds visible, and when we do that, we can see that the crowd pictures vary, just as they do in the physical world. And 2011 was very much the year of the crowd; there’s nothing that you can’t get done when you and 150,000 of your closest friends get together and demand a change of regime. Social media is all about connections between people (slide 3). All around cyberspace, wherever people are linking, reviewing, rating, following - doing all the things I call the internet verbs (slide 5) – patterns are left behind and we can analyse those patterns. Every time you like, rate, review, follow, you create what we call an edge, which is a connection between two entities. While that sounds abstract, in social media, the entities are people and the relationships between them are the internet verbs. Creating A Social Network Tool. Our aspiration is to take network analysis the way word processing has gone. Publishing used to be very complex but now, with word

“We’re now swimming in Tweets, replies, likes and so on, and it’s very confusing, because we don’t see the structure. We only see the next post or the next Tweet and it just becomes an overwhelming sea of data.”

–Marc Smith

http://www.slideshare.net/LocalSocialSummit/lss11-charting-collections-of-connections-in-social-media


processing and layout software, anyone can make decent attempt at producing a magazine. We want to make it easy to look at social networks and see the structures there, for example hubs (slide 7). Hubs are important in social media, but they’re not the only structure. There are also bridges (slide 8) and clusters (slide 9) – in the physical world you see clusters where people gather under banners based on their sub-community within the crowd. If we take a picture, we can get an insight into the nature of the crowd and see the structure (slide 11). Two Key Questions to Answer. What we’re doing is the photo-ethnographic study of crowds around the internet, and the sociological goal is to answer two questions:

How many kinds of crowds are there?

How many kinds of people are there? Not in a demographic sense, but in the sense of how do people occupy the strategic locations on the graph. Some people are hubs – in the centre of the graph – and some are isolates. They’re on the graph but they’re not connected to anyone. If you’re a marketer responsible for new customer acquisition, isolates are great, because of all the people in the world, they’re ones who’ve just mentioned the name of your brand. But if you’re looking to change an entrenched belief about your brand, hubs are more important, because they have more influence – they are heard.

Figure: Slide 13

The Person With the Most Followers May Not Have The Most Value or Influeance. Lots of people look at social media and look for the people with the highest number of followers, but it’s possible to have many followers and not be the centre of the graph. Conversely, you can have few followers but lots of influence. That’s typically a bridge, a person who links to another group. So follower count can lead you astray.

“Lots of people look at social media and look for the people with the highest number of followers, but it’s possible to have many followers and not be the centre of the graph.”

–Marc Smith


The key concept is centrality (slide 14). Eigenvector centrality measures how connected you are to people who are well-connected; it’s how Google’s Page Rank works. Betweenness is your bridging score. It’s why two connections can be more powerful than 200.

Figure: Slide 14

We are now living in a networked society, and we need to be able to look at these networks, so we need tools. The tool we’ve built, NodeXL (slide 26), aspires to be a browser for GraphML, a Firefox for networks. It’s a simple way of describing a collection of connections. So we’ve built open tools – NodeXL. We’re working on open data: the NodeXL Graph Gallery allows people to share the graphs they’ve created (slide 28). We would love to see you using the tool, and if you do produce graphs with it, we’d love you to share them in the graph gallery. And we encourage open scholarship (slide 29). Our goal with the graph gallery is to have a taxonomy of all the types of social media structures, and to be able to identify them, to be able to say that this structure is typical of a juvenile community, while this is typical of one that is mature. Pictures tell stories. Most people are not statistical thinkers. If I only show you the spreadsheets the graphs are based on, they would be much less compelling than the graphs, and we wouldn’t be able to come up with the stories we can tell if we see the images. For example, the balance of clusters and isolates says something about the nature of the subject, because isolates are people who are not yet part of the community, and if people are talking about a product, a graph with lots of isolates is

“.. without that map of the network, all you’d know is that the volume of calls to your helpdesk had shot up, with no explanation why.”

–Marc Smith


typical of a brand, while one where there are no isolates shows a well-connected community. So we have a thermometer for “brandiness”. When social media strategists do social media for a client, their tools are insufficient to show what they’ve achieved. Only a network perspective can show what’s a brand, what’s a community, and what’s in-between. This is the only tool we know of that can show what happens in social media when a marketer runs a promotion, not just in terms of volume, but in terms of the structure of the crowds around the product. Using these graphs, we’re starting to understand the different flavours of social media. We can recognise the different flavours of message boards, for example. And if we look at a series of graphs of the same message board over time, we can start to see trajectories. For example, we can recognise the answer people in a community, for example. You can tell them because they have a lot of outbound links but very few inbound links. People get answers from them, but rarely reply to them. So we can see when these people leave, and the number one reason they leave is because of hurt feelings, because they feel unappreciated. And often the only thing it takes to get them back is a branded coffee mug; something that makes them feel appreciated. The amount of money these people can save you in customer service resources is hugely significant. However, without that map of the network, all you’d know is that the volume of calls to your helpdesk had shot up, with no explanation why. I think of this as a kind of social camera for visualising the invisible crowds in cyberspace. We’re the Kodak Brownie, the consumer-grade product. And just as real-world photography gets used in mundane ways for business, we can now use this cyber-photography for similarly mundane but important tasks.

LSS Insights - Day 2, Session 7 – Closing Keynote:

Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be used to make the online crowds visible.

Every time a user likes, rates, reviews, follows or post a links this creates an edge. These edges expand beyond to the Open Graph of people to a graph of interests and intentions.

The person with the most followers or most retweet may not be the most important, influential or valuable within any group or community.

The key is Eigenvector centrality, as this measures how connected a person is to people who are well-connected.

Many of the tools that social media strategists are using today are insufficient.

Social graphs can become maps that will help guide and create meaning for business, institutions and governments.


About Local Social Summit & This Report This report was edited by Dylan Fuller and Mike Abeyta. You can follow Dylan on Twitter @afullerview. You will find Mike on LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mikeabeyta Mike Nutley wrote the bulk of the session summaries. You can find him here on LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/michaelnutley Thanks again to all our speakers, panellist, moderators and attendees. Local Social Summit (LSS) was co-founded by Dylan Fuller and Simon Baptist. Contact details:

[email protected]

[email protected] Local Social Summit is an independent event for knowledge sharing and networking that explores the intersection of Local and Social Media. We strive to educate and inspire with a focus on the cutting edge by showcasing emerging trends at the intersection of Local, Social and Mobile. LSS is designed for a wide spectrum of Local Media stakeholders, including publishers, advertisers, start-ups and investors. The co-founders would like acknowledge and thank the LSS advisory board for all their important contributions and time invested in helping make LSS the industry leading event for local social. As one 2011 participant who goes to more than 20 events in a year globally said: “LSS was the best conference I attended in 2011, thanks!” The LSS 2011 Advisory Board Included:

Greg Sterling – Analyst and contributing Editor for Search Engine Land.

Seb Provencher - Web entrepreneur and Co-founder Needium.

Perry Evans – CEO at Closey. Serial entrepreneur.

Jonathan Ewert – CEO at Codero, proven c-level executive.

Mike Abeyta - Co-Founder and Director, Akesios Search Analytics.

Thank you advisors!

Local Social Summit can be found on the Internet at the following locations:

Slide Presentations – slideshare.net/LocalSocialSummit

Facebook – facebook.com/localsocialsummit

Twitter – @locsocsummit

Tumblr - localsocialsummit.tumblr.com/

YouTube - youtube.com/user/localsocialsummit

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mikeabeyta

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/michaelnutley

mailto:[email protected]


http://www.slideshare.net/LocalSocialSummit

http://www.facebook.com/localsocialsummit

http://www.twitter.com/locsocsummit

http://localsocialsummit.tumblr.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/localsocialsummit


LSS’11 Sponsors We want to thank our sponsors for their support, input and for being forward thinking. Without sponsors Local Social Summit would not be possible.

BlitzLocal serves retail and and franchised companies that need local presence. http://www.blitzlocal.com/

deCarta is the leading provider of advanced and comprehensive geospatial software platforms for today’s cutting-edge Internet, mobile, personal navigation and enterprise location-based service (LBS) applications. http://www.decarta.com/

InnerBalloons helps traditional publishing businesses innovate into vertical and local search players and help these niche sites drive greater revenues and profitability. http://www.innerballoons.com/

JoinHere provides a social engagement platform that enables businesses to consolidate and organize their social network. http://www.facebook.com/JoinHere

Needium is a social lead generation tool for SMBs. http://needium.com/

Social Media Research Foundation: We are social media researchers who want to create open tools, generate and host open data, and support open scholarship related to social media. http://www.smrfoundation.org/

If you are interested in sponsoring Local Social Summit 2012 in November please contact us on email: [email protected]

http://www.blitzlocal.com/

http://www.decarta.com/

http://www.innerballoons.com/

http://www.facebook.com/JoinHere

http://needium.com/

http://www.smrfoundation.org/



Local Social Summit 2012: Dates & Information

Local Social Summit 2012 (LSS’12): is scheduled for 14-15 November 2012 in London. We are confident that LSS’12 will exceed all previous LSS events in terms of content, engagement, insights, learning and networking opportunities. We are also working on plans to offer LSS attendees and sponsors additional benefits, so please stay tuned. Additionally, London is hosting the Olympics this year, the first truly 100% digital Olympics. We will be on the front line of this exciting global event and we are sure that this will be a major topic for LSS ’12. Topics for 2012 will include:

SoLoMo Picks up Speed

Social Travel

The Connected Consumer

Insights from London 2012: The 1st Digital Olympics

Big Brands Local

Super Social Business - New Case Studies

Hyperlocal in Europe

Innovation in Local Social Vertical Apps

Social Network Analysis

The Local Facebook Opportunity Attending LSS’12: If you are planning to attend LSS’12 the Early Bird tickets are now available here - http://lss2012.eventbrite.com/

http://lss2012.eventbrite.com/

http://lss2012.eventbrite.com/


Sponsorship Opportunities for Local Social Summit 2012

“Sponsoring this event gave Akesios considerable exposure and networking opportunities to both the market influencers and to prospective clients.”

- Ben Barney, CEO, Akesios LSS is funded by our proud and forward-thinking sponsors who receive visibility as thought leaders at exhibition/breakout sessions (workshops, labs, the demo zone etc), networking and other benefits according to their sponsorship level. Sponsors are selected based upon their ability and desire to contribute to the dialog of the conference, and to provide the highest value content to the attendees. Past attendees include people from companies including: BBC, Burger King, Deutsche Telekom, eBay, Eniro, Facebook, Foursquare, European Directories, Google, ITV, Lyris, Microsoft, NDS, Northcliffe Media, Nokia, Nomura, Ogilvy Interactive, Schibsted, Seat Pagine Gialle, Sky, Swisscom, The Toronto Star, Travelzoo, We Are Social, Yell and Yelp. Over 60% of the participants are at board or executive decision making level with titles like: CEO, CTO, CxO, Managing Director, General Manager, Senior Vice President and Founder. For more information on speaking and sponsorship opportunities for LSS 2012 please contact us on email: [email protected]


Local Social Summit Report No 2 & Trends for 2012

Business

Transcript of Local Social Summit Report No 2 & Trends for 2012