The Local Social Summit which I co-organised with Simon Baptist has been hailed a success despite the rain . The general feedback was that it rated 8 out 10, although I would give it a 7 as there were a few things we will improve next time we run the summit.

Next time I would like to include:

• A vertical/classified panel
• Set of case studies
• Demo zone

Over the next days and weeks we will be putting together some video and deeper analysis of the discussions and insights from LSS ‘09. In the meantime you can find all the slide decks here. For me the “140 character” highlight moment was when Bernie Hogan said:

The death of distance [due to the Internet], ummm NO!

Other blog posts on LSS so far:

• Facebook users talk to just 4% of their online friends
• Volker’s Blurb: Local Social Summit London

Update: Here as link to all the slide decks from LSS ‘09.

Note:  most of this post was cross-posted on the LSS blog.

One of the sessions at Local Social Summit ‘09 (btw – Here’s #LSS09 on Twitter) that I am very much looking forward (all the sessions will be good, but this one will rock) to is an interactive lab session being run by Praized’s Seb Provencher. The session is called: What does the Perfect Local Media Company Look Like in 5 Years Time. This lab should draw upon Seb’s excellent white paper – “I Have Seen the Future of Local Media” – from earlier this year.

At dinner last night we had a lively and interesting discussion with both Seb and Greg Sterling about this topic. The general consensus was that most traditional local media companies are quickly running out of time to start planning for their future. Greg also blogged about our discussion earlier today.

Our discussion around the future of local media seem to echo many trends and predictions that even Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt made last week at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009. The RWW team pulled together this very good 6 minute highlight video chop of Mr. Schmidt’s interview. Here’s the RWW post: Google’s Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years (well worth a read).

Below is the presentation Seb will run through during the lab tomorrow:

I am one of the creators and thus organizers of what is shaping up to be an awesome conference next month in London at the ICA. For anyone interested in the intersection of local media and social networking this is an event not to be missed. The event microsite has the complete agenda and more details…  Here’s an overview of the event:

Local Social is an invitation-only summit for leading media owners (directories, news, TV, radio and social networking), retailers and advertisers who are driving digital innovation in the local and social media space across Europe.  We think this “local content meets social media” is an important area, and one that is under-explored.  The conference will look to open up debate across multiple industry sectors. With a focus on what works and what trends are emerging as local and social media continue to change how consumers engage with brands, content and each other.

The line up of speaker and panelists is shaping very nicely:

• Andrew Burke, CEO Amino Technologies
• Dr Bernie Hogan, Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute
• Greg Sterling, Internet/Mobile Analyst
• Jonathan Ewert, Co-Founder Skepsis Group
• Seb Provencher, Co-Founder Praized Media
• Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO TrustedPlaces
• Dave Ingram, CEO Brownbook
• Felix Petersen, Founder Plazes.com (Nokia)
• James Brown, CTO Cloudmade
• Paul McCrudden, of the #6weeks project fame
• Simon Greenman MD – Online, European Directories

I am particularly looking forward to Bernie Hogan’s (Oxford Internet Institute) talk on Facebook social networks and how to make sense of  it or now in this era of data feed overload. All the panels will be excellent for sure. There is a Social Media Marketing panel that is being moderated by my pal Mike Weston (Sandline blog). And we have the great blogger/Internet analyst Greg Sterling (Screenwerk) running two panels that will be world class.

At last count there were less than 30 spot left at this invitation only event. As a reader of my blog (all 5 of you) consider this an open invite and if you want to attend please sign-up here on eventbrite (and do it quick).

Here’s a glance of the agenda:

Agenda at a Glance -

Keynotes:

• “The Opportunity of Social Media”
• “Making sense of the networked audience: The case of Facebook”

Panels:

• Local Search & Monetisation – The View from Europe
• Local Gets Social – The Impact of User Generated Content and the Promise of Real-Time Search
• Social Media Marketing – The Rules are Changing
• Mobile – The Future of Apps is Bright

Plus a Lab looking at “What does the Perfect Local Media Company Look Like in 5 Years Time.”

Hope to see you there. It should be awesome. In the meantime if you have any questions or suggestions let me know.

Back in March my colleague Simon B and I spent some time promoting a beer festival via social media. We took on this project with the specific goal of experimenting to see if social media, and in particular Twitter, could be successfully leveraged to drive people to a real world event. Cutting to the punch line, yes we were successful.

We have now published a short case study on the results of this social, which you can see below or by going directly to Cheers to Social Media on Slideshare:

One of the key findings was that there is a positive Social Media ROI. For this campaign (or event) we managed to drive:

• 63% of attendees were a result of Social Media Marketing
• £571 revenue per 1 hour spent on Social Media
• £11.41 for each £1 spent (=11x ROI)
• 5.6% total cost of sale for revenue generated by Social Media

We also believe the ROI can be significantly increased by deploying ‘emerging’ Social Media best practices and development of better tools to manage campaigns and review data (ie, a social media analytics work bench).

The primary lesson was that with attention at a premium,  Social Media does indeed provide a great platform to ensure the success of marketing campaigns and in this case a real world event. In particular Twitter and Eventbrite proved cost effective and easy ways to drive awareness and consumer actions (e.g. attendance, footfall, purchases ).

Interesting to note that Facebook underperformed on what we expected. We also found that social media magnifies the value of search, at least for something very time based (ie, event).

For the event microsite we had 3175 unique visitors  during the promotional period and the traffic sources were as follows:

• 61% search (Google 58%)
• 24%-38% social media (*estimated low end of 24% to as high as 38%)
• 4% blogs

As a follow-up – “sort of  real time mini case study” – we are finding that social media again is proving a powerful way to drive awareness and interest in the actual case study!

Cheers To Social Media is currently being showcased on the ‘Business & Mgmt‘ page by our editorial team [slideshare] …

An additional proof point for success if using social media – here’s the screen grab is below.

First off, I am a big fan of LinkedIn. I love the site. I use it tons. It adds value to my professional life. However, LinkedIn needs to start taking the product (or service) a little more serious and start building out more functionality. Here my initial set of suggestions:

1. The news feeds on a users homepage are weak. Make them better. Make them more relevant and please make it possible (or at least abvious) how to customize.
2. Groups – lets take this area and make it a business tool. Add in better email group functions. Add in a private area for sharing docs (maybe a wiki or sharepoint lite). And charge money for the advanced features.
3. The “Who’s Viewed My Profile” section is another one to develop out. Think of it like nano site analytics!

Right that’s enough for now. Does anyone else have suggestions for LinkedIn? If so please post a comment.

I am not sure that this isn’t just a bit of fun for the folks at The Onion. But they may be launching a new social netoworking site called Frrvrr.

Ok, I am now convinced I have to re-start using and posting to Twitter! RWW has a nice piece on ways to have fun with Twitter.

I just couldn’t resist a blog post title with ants and algorithms in it… Anyway, over on Edge.org there is an interesting interview (both text and video) with a biologist — “ANTS HAVE ALGORITHMS – A Talk with Iain Couzin” — about ants and about thier behavour. Worth watching if you have time, even on a Friday evening. I found the quote below interesting on traffic jams, I am also sure we can use ants to help buold models on socail networking…

The reason these ants don’t have traffic jams the way humans would is that they’re related. As I say in every talk, I always refer to these ants as ’she’ and as ‘her’. That is because almost every ant most people see is female, and so they’re related by a genetic determinism called haplodiploidy, which means they’re more related to each other than to their own kin, so of course they function together as colonies.

When we look at the optimization of an ant trail, we can look at what optimizes the benefit for all of the individuals. We also model human crowds, and when we model human crowds, we use a different algorithm entirely; we have a game theoretic algorithm where individuals may minimize their own travel times, but may do so at the expense of others because they don’t necessarily care whether they cause congestion for other individuals.

It a very storming in the UK today – the 1st big one this winter and spring in on the door step. I think there is another storm brewing over privacy and the uses of cookie data (user profiles, behavioral targeting etc) to target ads. I’ll point to 3 pieces that form part of my thesis:

1. AOL trying to get ahead of the curve (smart move, btw)
2. UK start-up Phorm getting into hot water
3. More on the decline of users on social networking sites – I wonder if maybe some people are getting turned off by all the advertising (here’s a previous example I posted) and the spam (although I bet this is a small impact) on social networking sites?
4. This NYT piece also worth a read re: this subject

SAI says they see Google as the least exposed of the big 4. I disagree as the have user data across multiple services (mail, docs, igoogle, etc) and this appears to me that this data is used to help tagret ads. To an end user looks like a profile and looks spooky. All the big players need to have solid PR and education programs in place around privacy and profile targeting (this my generic term fo all user type targeting tied to a cookie).

Simon B on AdViking says he thinks social advertising could be a real thing and a real business model – he even provides a meta algorithm here. I agree only if I can be in control and that the recommendation side gets easier to access. My biggest complaint is that many of social networking sites expect the users to do to much work, = boring. One of my biggest complaints about FB was the lack of usability. Maybe FB + IYP database + Google maps = a better experience?

I disagree with Mr Blodget’s comments on SAI re: 20% time at Google. That just proves that Wall Street analysts don’t get tech innovation or how the Valley works. The 20% is great “life hacking” and I am sure Google still gets 125% from most staff… On a related note this over on Fast Company is cool and well worth read!

• Marissa Mayer’s 9 Principles of Innovation

Plus, worth checking this one on NYT:

• Yahoo Reveals (Some) Details About Its Ad Plans

I added some comments to yesterday’s post on AOL below.

Great video interview with Nicholas A. Christakis on The Edge about his research into social networks (and not just the online variety, but the real social networks offline).

This just in on TechCrunh a rumour that Google may try to buy 20% of Yahoo to block you-know-who. Totally wild.