More random musing today. This could be a worrying trend or just a winter blip.

I was setting up a new laptop today. Sorry it’s a boring DELL running Windows 7. Main reason I stayed with Windows is the need to stay tethered to MS Office in a native environment.  I also have an iPhone 4 and also recently added a Chrome Book for use in the kitchen. What was interesting is the small list of software I have installed so far (and in this order):

1. Google Chrome
2. DropBox
3. MS Office
4. Apple iTunes
5. Trend Micro (free 30 day trial) – virus/spyware protection (we hope)
6. Skype

That’s it. Really is that all I need? What else do I plan to install? Not much. Maybe Firefox and SnagIt. I will be adding a plug-in to MS Excel called NodeXL.

This made me start thinking. What other “software” programmes do I use and what else might I install? Here’s all came up with:

Use often (pre installed):

• Notepad
• Windows photo viewer & editor
• Calculator

It seems everything else I use these days is either (A) a website or (B) an app that runs inside a browser using the Cloud – or on my iPhone.  Sure, other people will use special software. And design people and Apple users have a few others. This will be graphics, video and game programmes for the most part, I would guess. But the variety of software we need is actually pretty limited these days in 2012. What is the implication for the major PC software makers vs. app producers? What does this mean for the global economy? More questions than answers come to mind.

This is little bit of self-analysis is interesting. I want to track what I use and how often. There must be an app for that?

It also reminded me of a great presentation I caught at Le Web 2011 given by Forrester’s CEO George Colony titled “Three Social Thunderstorms” (sorry  not George Clooney the actor).  I didn’t agree with the entire presentation and all the predictions, but the point was to give the industry something to debate and a different view to consider.

The video is 22 minutes long, but worth watching – I have embedded below.

I am putting the App+Internet Ecosystem down as one of themes to watch in 2012. The overall 3 “social storms” is also worth keeping an eye on. In my opinion, I don’t see social saturation happening in 2012. Instead I see the connected consumer or user segment causing disruption along with a new wave of social apps, maybe we should call this social 3.0. Here how I would define the 3 versions or phases of Internet social paradigms:

• Social 1.0 = email and blogs (the web was ruled by search)
• Social 2.0 = dead social networks, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
• Social 3.0 = SoLoMo apps (many will run on top of Facebook, Twitter etc and leverage the Social zero-dot-O device called a telephone, now usually called a mobile or cell

My prediction for 2012 – this is the year of social apps that are local and mobile. I say this is going to be a good year for Foursquare despite what Mr Colony has to say.

[this maybe be part 1 of a series x]

Last week I attended the Facebook Developer Garage (Jan-12) event in London. I went along to listen to Dr Bernie Hogan from the Oxford Internet Institute. Bernie is an industry friend and regular speaker at Local Social Summit (an annual event I help organise every year in London). I also went to see what the ‘local’ London Facebook dev community was up to these days and to see if I could spot any trends. I attend the FDGL events about 2-3 times year, but might start attending more in 2012. In terms of 2012, the event was well attended but the vibe was chilled and I didn’t spot any trend beyond the obvious excitement about FB Timeline. I suspect people are just waking up from the holiday season. 2012 is going to be a rocking year for social media, apps and Facebook in particular.

Dr Hogan’s talk was on using Social Network Analysis tools/techniques (SNA) and specifically a tool called NodeXL to download Facebook graphs – individual, for apps and for fan pages. He was inspiring people to use these graphs to gain insights and intelligence. The timing of Bernie’s talk was on the heel of Facebook releasing its own study on how information flows through networks. FB’s study echoed some of the insights from a seminal study by Mark Granovetter  in the 1970’s. It was only back in November of last year that Dr. Hogan suggested to me that the Granovetter  paper, The Strength of Weak Ties (get the full pdf here), was a must read.

Facebook’s data team posted up Rethinking Information Diversity in Networks. Two of the key conclusions from the study is:

The information we consume and share on Facebook is actually much more diverse in nature than conventional wisdom might suggest.

We are exposed to and spread more information from our distant contacts than our close friends.

I am very interested in the science of social media, and more specifically in social network analysis (SNA). I am interested in how we apply this to solving business, political, environmental and community problems. As well as create a better social UEX and a next gen of social apps. My interest is both commercial and for social good. I am starting to think SNA may be one of the key tools to help with a host of issues and challenges. The current “data analysis tsunami” we have around social data appears to only touch the surface with most  talk about influencers, frequency and rank, but not getting into the deeper details of how and where information flow. As well as how to better manage networks as an end users and as a society.

For now I am just absorbing ideas from the Filter Bubble, the FB Study, Bernie’s Talk (embedded below), Mark Granovetter’s  paper and my own field studies. I am trying to mash this up into some rules for Social Business. But first I need more data and these ideas need some time to ferment. I will report back when the brew is ready to share.

BTW – As part of the Local Social Summit event series I am helping organise half-day seminar on SNA in February – you can find our more info and sign-up HERE.

[Note to readers and self: this might be part 1 of a few post about this subject area, let’s see. I took a break from blogging but have intentions to do a bit more posting in 2012 as way to develop my own insights and knowledge. ]

[Cross posted from the LSS blog]

The Search vs. Social panel is another session poised to be a real winner [at Local Social Summit '11]. Well maybe only a winner for one. Our vision is a celebrity deathmatch style smack down from the perspectives of the local business, minus the injuries and blood.

Backing up a bit let us explain a little about the context for this one… By Search we mean search engines, we could just say Google, but we will give the other guys a chance and there is vertical search as well. By Social we could just say Facebook, but there is Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc plus myriad new social services and enabled mobile apps.

The question we want to start off with is from the perspective of a small or medium sized business (SMB) or a local business – some SMBs are not local they might be mail order or services that can be done remotely. We see both of these segments as interesting to explore. Many local and small businesses are investing in social in a big way. Why?

• As a business which of these two channels should you invest your limited time and effort to develop?
• Which will benefit your business the most?
• Which works better search or social?
• Does social offer advantages compared to search?

We admit it will be easy to say “well you need to have a strategy for both search and social.” Or maybe depending on your business type, target market or location one is better than the other. We want to dig into the details and nuance of how search and social are very different. Different in execution and effort required. Different in what equals results (traffic vs. follows). We hope to hear about real examples, ROI and also other attribution models.

Search or social which would you choose if you could only focus on one?

Go here for passes to Local Social Summit 9-10 Nov, in London.

[Note: Cross posted from the LSS blog]

One of the panel sessions we are going to hold at Local Social Summit 2011 (LSS’11) in November that I am most looking forward to is titled “Can Social Media Be Outsourced?” The starting point of the debate will be from the perspective of the small and medium sized local business. The questions we will explore include:

• 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?

However, we are also sure to cover this question from the perspective of the big brand or even better the national/global businesses that have a local store or presence (think of any restaurant chain, for example).

An easy answer to this questions is “YES” social media can be outsourced. There are many companies offering social media services and tools. For a larger or more geographically widespread business it is probably a necessity to outsource some part or even all of their social media activity, yet alone build up social media skills in house. The sheer volume of potential work and a growing number of social channels drives the need for engagement by all sizes of business.

A quick survey of the web for recent posts on this subject found two posts YES and two post NO:

• Why You Should Never Outsource Your Social Media
• Automate the right way
• 5 Reasons Small Business Should Outsource Their Social Media Marketing
• 6 reasons why you should never outsource social media

For this session we have several interesting panellists already lined up. These include Justin Sanger, CEO & Founder of JoinHere and Seb Provencher, Co-Founder of Needium. However, I am pretty sure they will both be in the “YES” camp. If you are in the “NO” camp and want to be the detractor who says “no you cannot outsource your social media” – then please get in touch.

Note: Here is the Agenda for the 3^rd Annual Local Social Summit.

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 …

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

The small invite only Local Search Summit we held last week in Dublin was a success – phew… In some ways is ways better than I expected and in other ways it left me wanting more for the next summit. I am still digesting and will report later this week with some feedback and small insights.

We had 16 people representing 10 companies from 7 countries. The publishers print on-line or offline in more than 20 markets world-wide. The event was truly global. Everyone wants another event – tentatively already pencilled in for Apr-may 08. Watch this space or contact me if you are interested.

This is a personal post… Like the old saying goes “respect your elders” – but often by the time you start to understand what this means it can be too late or even difficult to do it properly. Well, here’s a personal chance for me, in a small way, to show some respect to my father Harry Fuller. He was originally an old media guy working in TV broadcast news in San Francisco (for the likes of CBS and ABC) starting in 1969. However, he definitely gets new media/digital and helped launched innovative web sites for CBS in early 1995! You can see his current short profile on ZDNet where he is blogging today on green technology (ahead of the curve for sure on this subject area!). He also has a quality bird blog and birding web site.

The great news is that he’s getting a lifetime achievement award for his TV career this weekend from the NorCal RTNDA, to you and me this = Radio-Television News Directors Association of Northern California [here's the pdf of the event]. Awesome stuff and very well deserved!