Two things bother me. First, Forrester is late to the party and just knocked over my lamp and let my out my cat. Second is the recommendation in the report called Location Based Social Networks Show a Hint of Mobile Engagement, which you can buy here.

“Forrester recommends that bold, male-targeted marketers start testing but that most marketers should wait until they can get a bigger bang for their buck, when adoption rates increase and established players emerge from the fray.”

– quoted from the report abstract.

Conversations and Engagement, Not Impressions and CTR

Since when is social media all about impressions? As someone who constantly encourages clients and prospects to think about the quality of their social media audience before the quantity, I find this recommendation to be rooted in paid media type thinking. This is earned media. We need to switch lenses and look at the audience again.

A Smaller, Yet More Engaged Audience of Influencers

The good news is that while the audience is small compare to Facebook users or Google users, it is growing very rapidly. This audience is also willing to activate. We know that they will fill their social graphs with checkins, offers, badges and other surprises. Their mean household income is $25,500 more than the average US online household, so in theory they have more spending power (assuming they are not concentrated in higher cost of living areas). They rely on their phones for information. They are 24% more likely to look to their phone before they make a purchase, 24% more likely to want to receive a relevant (text) message from a business, 23% more likely to use their phone to participate in a sweepstakes or contest and 22% more likely to text for a coupon or discount. In other words, these people are a marketer’s dream.

This is cutting edge stuff with a ton of potential. We have only seen small pockets of fully integrated campaigns (like USA Today) that uses paid media to drive people to a LBS app to spurn adoption and engage with the brand. Most of the growth is organic, through PR and events. It is still very new stuff and the fact that there are so many large and small vendors in the space is a detriment to more widespread adoption because there is still no de facto standard for checkins, although I think Foursquare has a shot at being it if they keep up their pace and continue to innovate and appeal to and keep the interest of people who are always hungry for more.

I understand that Forrester is a group of analysts and that they need to use their data to make what they feel is the best recommendation for their clientele, but given how smart they are, I would think there would be some suggestions on how to further the industry in the report. They themselves begin the article by calling the industry “nascent”, which is a perfect word, but what about loyalty (their example is Starbucks and a “startup LBSN”, what?)? White labeling opportunities? Contextual recommendations? Usefulness of checkin data? Where’s the future?

The thinking of these platforms is very “What’s next?”. Forrester’s, in this instance, “What’s now?”. My recommendation is to test into these platforms, collect and analyze data on your influencers and engage heavily with those who are engaging with you.

A Pharmaceuticals Analogy

For those of you who have never given big pharma much thought, consider that each time a company discovers a compound that they think will be useful to treat something, the clock starts ticking. In a nutshell, they need to patent the compound before anyone else does, run clinical trials to ensure that the compound will not kill anyone, document the effectiveness and the side effects, run results and literally truckloads of paperwork through the FDA, get the paperwork reviewed and approved and then they can market the drug. [Pharmaceuticals pros know that it is far more complicated than my summary!]

The problem is that patents on the compounds are not infinite and the company needs to get their meds into play for as long as possible before their exclusivity runs out and the generics come in with cheaper versions of the same thing. Insurance companies like to pay the cut rates for the generics. Therefore, a single day can cost a pharma company millions of dollars. This is why the industry is so cutthroat, fast paced and on edge.

I am looking at location based similarly from a “cost of a day” perspective. Foursquare and Gowalla and to a lesser exent Whrrl have enormous potential and also a set of hard problems. Dennis Crowley is on the cover of every magazine and out speaking everywhere to promote the product and that is working. I am not criticizing this nor do I want to spoil his amazing ride,* I just want to remind him and his counterparts of an ever looming threat.

Dennis Crowley steals Burger King's crown

The Giant is Going to Awaken

Facebook has been talking about getting into the location game soon. I thought it would happen at SXSW and I was wrong. It probably would have happened at D8 except that Mark Zuckerberg and company are a tad distracted right now by issues of privacy. I think that Crowley and fellow location based rock star, Josh Williams need to look at this as a stay of execution.

• Facebook has somewhere between 400 and 500 million active users.
• All other LBS combined have around 1/100th of Facebook’s user base
• Facebook has penetrated the main stream who largely still is either scared of or has no idea what a Gosquare is
• We do not have a clear picture of all of the services available on Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Brightkite, etc.
• Automation of services / self serve models do not yet exist or are as slow as molasses
• Business development teams are spread quite thin
• Case studies with ROI are few and far between

What’s going to happen

Here’s what I see happening. Facebook is going to get through this privacy thing. National Quit Facebook Day was a bust because people have no place else like Facebook to go. They have already made privacy easier to manage and now people seem to get that their data is not their own. Blogs like this one have documented what people are asking for in a Facebook alternative and identified the fact that they are going to have to pay for the bandwidth. Rumblings of Facebook entering the location game have been going on for months. Their developers are working on it as we speak and I would bet it is ready to roll out within hours of Zuckerberg saying “Go!” (pending Apple allowing an application update).

Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla

I am sure that Facebook will have all of the features that we like about LBS. They will probably have check ins and specials that are activated by check ins or by loyalty. They will probably have something like a scavenger hunt that unlocks a prize. They will have an element of randomness with their PCP (post checkin page) where you can unlock achievements (badges / pins) or win prizes. (I am supposing all the aforementioned. Do not treat as fact.)

The Top Priority

The thing that the big 3 need to solve before Facebook gets into the game is ease of activation. They need to clearly state how to validate that a location belongs to the business owner and make this a speedy process. They need to tell marketers and brands exactly how to activate. We need to know what are the exact services they provide, what is the lead time and how much they cost. And they need to do this soon because there is really only two good, clean business case on LBS right now, by AJ Vaynerchuk and company at Vaynermedia and another by the Fleishman Hilliard team for Cheverolet.

Facebook will treat this like a revenue stream. Their LBS version 1 will go online with a method of business activation, tiered levels of service and a pricing model. They have the benefit of seeing where Gowalla and Foursquare are succeeding and where they are failing, plus they have the mainstream users on their site who do not need to be convinced to use a new app and build up a new social graph, rather they can just use the one they already have.

There goes the neighborhood

With Facebook on the scene, the openness of data is compromised. The current tools are reasonably open via the API or at least via data providers like SimpleGeo. Facebook’s data is harder to aggregate and will be less accessible. Facebook will be the ones enjoying an increased ability to target their user base and marketers will benefit because they will be able to take advantage of this new data stream as long as they want to use Facebook to do so.

So move quick Big 3! Fix your funnel. Make it clear how to activate. The value of a day for you, like big pharma, is extraordinary.

*I like Crowley. He’s dynamic, smart, confident, funny and a good sport. He has never given me shit for coining the #failsquare hashtag and he is fantastic at answering the hard questions in a public forum.

So I mentioned that I have been food spotting for some time. This means I have a back log of pictures that I want to post and tag in the tool. Some of these are not close to my “current location”. Foodspotting’s iPhone app asks to know where I am and assumes that any food that I am tagging is food that I have just encountered. Well, the food that I want to spot is from Kirkland, WA. So I go to the map.

The blue dot indicates that I am in Boston, so I drag the map over to Seattle.

I then make sure my filters are set to spot foods in the area

then I scan the area for foods to let it know where I am?

AWESOME! I found the absolute best coffee shop on the planet, Zoka Coffee. So now I want to spot something. I want to add a fruit salad to the Trellis Restaurant in Kirkland. I setup my shot. (Isn’t it beautiful? That fruit salad was amazing)

And now to tag it with a location.

Oops. The blue dot is in Watertown, MA so I must be there too. Is there a way to do what I want to do which is to add stuff to the database that is not near me? I get why you are doing it the way you are, so that people don’t add a dead woodpecker to some restaurant in Omaha when they are in Boston.

obviously that’s photoshop

Facebook is Free

The community is complaining about free software, free software that is doing what it says it is going to do. Facebook tells you that they can use your persona to target you and that developers can use it to build applications to serve you. That’s the point. That is how they make money. And let me remind you again, you have not paid a dime for Facebook. The terms of use clearly outline the default privacy. Yes, they change them a lot without asking -WHICH IS TOTALLY SLIMY- but they are pretty good about telling you they changed them. It really is your responsibility to read what you’ve accepted and you do not until someone who has posts something on your wall telling you what they have read. And If you think what they are doing is sleazy, then leave, but first you may want to consider what you would be leaving for.

Do People Want a Facebook Alternative?

Maybe. People say they want more control of their data, but I am not convinced that even Diaspora, the open source, privacy aware, alleged Facebook killer is what people are asking for. This is just based on their video, but it sounds like it is just another version of Facebook, except more righteous and secure.

Ilya from Diaspora says: “No longer will you be at the whims of these large corporate networks who want to tell you that sharing and privacy are mutually exclusive because it will be your node.” Someone has to pay for that. What’s the catch? There’s only $175,121 in kickstarter donations to date thus far. When it collapses under the weight of a lack of revenue model, people will be running back to their free Facebook accounts.

Here is what I think the screaming community means to ask for:

A write once, use anywhere (portable) “digital locker” that carries standard profile information, your content, your locations, your connections and your fully customizable security policy.

There are a host of problems that need to be solved. First major problem is that a W3C-like standard needs to be implemented for the digital locker class and the associated API. Developers need to have something to develop against and a standard convention will make it easy for new developers to understand the possibilities while existing applications bring themselves up to speed.

Money and attention seem to have opened the eyes of Diaspora even wider because they have, according to their blog, decided to implement some new standards like OStatus. But it’s probably just scratching the surface of what they really need to do.

The biggest problem here is that the complainers will need to manage their own security models. There will be default models that can be chosen to pass to any application that you sign up for, but I would bet most people won’t take the time to create and manage security on an application by application basis. It’s not easy.

Also, somebody has to pay for the space you are using. Will it be you?

• Are you willing to leave Facebook for a pay option?
• What has Facebook done to violate the Terms of Use?
• Are you willing to spend the time managing security policies between apps and other people’s digital lockers in your own digital locker?

Checking in. It’s nothing more than a tweet with latitude and longitude and an attempt at standardization. Twitter used to be fairly inane before people started to figure out that they had a lot to say in 140 character. Forrester started classifying everyone in Groundswell segments and people got into a whole tweeting-should-be-intellectual thing, but the truth is that we still want to know where people are, what they’re having for lunch and who they are with. Tools like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Whrrl do that, but they also have more to offer. In other words, there is more to this stuff than just checking in. Are you using “the more”? Let’s start by finding out why we use this stuff and then we’ll see:

Find Our Friends

The is the most obvious reason and all of the apps do this pretty well. One of the apps has a particular advantage in actually providing you with the friends that are closest. FourSquare organizes your friends first by the city you are currently in so that you can perhaps find people you would like to spend some time with. According to Dennis Crowley, one of Dodgeball’s* primary reasons for being was so that he and his friends could find out at what bars they were watching the (choke) Yankee games. When I was in Seattle, I found this particularly useful because it helped me discover restaurants and bars that my friends like and gave me a glimpse into what their daily lives are like.

#wouldbeawesome
A range of ways to organize by proximity. Let us pick which city we want to watch and the activity in our stream that corresponds. Sorting by time is key and we get that by default, but what about sorting by the people who are closest to wherever we are? If the person is a person I trust or want to get to know I can meet them if they are still there or I can check out a place where they have checked in.

Organizing by lists of friends we want to stalk would also be cool.

See What Happens Next

We want to see if we’ll get rewarded. Badges, items, tips and offers are the reason we focus on a particular app. The gaming aspect of FourSquare seems to have made it the LBS of choice, approaching near 1 million active users. Foursquare has offers for mayors and they have recently released the idea of “specials”. Specials are loyalty plays that allow something to happen at a location based on a check in there, but are not necessarily just for the mayor.

I love that with Gowalla, the potential is there to find items of value randomly. That said, it’s usually not very random. I have only found them at a major event, SXSW. The approach of anyone being able to win is cool.

#wouldbeawesome
Gowalla item adoption. We need some case studies. Heresay [blogging, not journalism] in Austin: One Taco in Austin said they saw a 10 to 1 return in terms of buzz. They said that ten people were coming to One Taco and mentioning that a friend got a free taco from Gowalla for every person that actually redeemed.

I am currently trying to make this happen with a client. Stay tuned.

Make Stuff Happen

Gowalla has the clear edge here. It seems to be based on a the premise of Geocaching which is following a series of clues leading to latitude and longitude locations where you find treasure boxes. The boxes contain a log book and a cool item. You take a picture of yourself with the item and post it to a site to let people know you’ve found it and you sign the log book. Sound familiar? Gowalla has trips. The items are pins and the logbook is a checkin at the site and of course you can take pictures.

FourSquare has 2 different philosophies. Their badge philosophy is a lot more random in the way that it can be achieved. Gowalla’s pins come from hitting specific locations, while most of FourSquare’s are based on hitting multiple locations with a similar theme. They are now combatting this with “specials”.

Marketers need to use the trip functionality. Having a scavenger hunt or quest end up at your restaurant or shop, particularly if there are cool things to do along the way will generate serious word of mouth buzz, particularly with twitter and Facebook integration.

#wouldbeawesome
I would love it if Gowalla plugged into Google Maps or Mapquest and gave me the optimal path to complete a trip. My family and I wandered around Harvard Square this weekend trying to find the 11 landmarks and I was able to find most of them, but I had to look at pictures and look around a lot.

Road rallies. Instead of giving away the location, give a set of clues. People who complete the quest get a pin or a prize. Company sponsored quests would be fun, particularly if they ended with you winning something of value from the company. If the injected randomness along the way like things that let teams skip steps or special prizes, the buzz would be enormous. Trips with grand prizes that have already been given could be marked as such so that people can still play the game, but their expectations could be managed. Road rallies are fun, but tough for people to plan. The beauty of them is that they’re a group activity. The driver can drive while the team figures out the clues. Everyone can check in when they get to the destination. Randomness and fun ensue.

Contextual recommendations. I think most people would like to be given interesting offers based on what they do, but this needs to be done in a fashion that keeps things fun versus getting really noisy. One way would be to add a tab that makes it a choice. This way you can look at offers in the area only when you choose to do so, unless of course you want your phone buzzing every time you check in to let you know there’s an offer nearby. Passive contextual recommendations are tricky because you have to allow the phone to ping the LBS to tell it where you are when you may not want to do so. Dennis Crowley himself said that “passive check in is yucky” but then proceeded to tell us about contextual recommendations, so it will be interesting to see how they do it. Whrrl already has a bit of context letting me know that people who go to my current location often go to some other one afterward.

See What is Happening

This is the stuff I think many people are missing. There’s a lot more than a checkin and a tweet to be had from LBS. The services all provide some level of context in the form of text, tips and pictures. [We are told video is on the drawing board, but scaling concerns worry the founders.]

Once again I missed SXSW music. Aside from WOXY dying, that was basically the year’s biggest crime against indie rock. I was, however, able to get some idea of what was happening by checking the SXSW calendar, listening to live broadcasts on NPR, following good folks like Brad Mays and Mike Leis on Twitter. By using Gowalla, I could see some cool things that were happening at the events as they were happening via pictures:

Broken Bells

Muse at Stubbs

These are a few of my zillions of thoughts on this matter. Your turn. Why else do we use this stuff?

The mobile site (not an app) gives a user the ability to simultaneously check in to up to three services: Brightkite, Foursquare and Gowalla.

It's a mobile app versus device app

It’s not all bad, they did bring a much needed search function to Gowalla, but the flow is a tad labored. It feels like there is an extra step.

Gowalla doesn't have search yet, so this is an advantage

It might not be fair to judge yet because it’s just a beta, but I couldn’t give a mayorship at Chuck E. Cheese. This is what I do.The fun of checking in is the PCP. That’s the post checkin page, not a hallucinogen. The PCP gives you tips, tells you if you’ve found an item, scored points, joined a society or become the mayor of a location. Brightkite has always been a slot machine without a jackpot.

This "are you sure" step is weird.

The following URLs Weren’t Available?

• Friendster2.com
• No.fun
• Despera.te

Hooray! Wait, that's it?

The Point of Checkins

Brightkite. Listen. You don’t get it. We checkin not only to tell our friends where we are, but to see what is happening at places and to see what happens next. You do a great job of showing people what is happening with your pictures feature, but you do not give people incentives, particularly with this app. No mayor? No items? That’s just plain lame and even if you intend to add the PCP later, you have done yourselves a disservice but releasing this beta without them. I’m calling callcheck.in http://dont.get.it.

In summary in an effort to save people time, Brightkite is actually creating a fun vaccuum. I would not waste your time with Check.in.

What do you think?

Similar Problems Managing the Funnel

Josh Williams told me that Gowalla is not focused on monetization yet. They have so many ideas for what they want to do with the product that they are focusing all of their resources on building something that is feature rich and usable. Talk to anyone and they will tell you that Gowalla’s user interface is beautiful and elegant. But the next sentence usually is “it really needs search.” Gowalla wanted to try to stay pure and leave it up to the GPS to find every location. Unfortunately, to no fault of Gowalla’s, the GPS on iPhone and Android are not quite there yet. I tweeted a question about the addition of search and the Gowalla team responded by telling me that it will most likely be in version 2.1.

Crowley’s NYU thesis was on Location Based Social Networking. Dodgeball, his first iteration of FourSquare that he eventually sold to Google, was only “10 of 100 pages.” When Google shut down Dodgeball, they decided that the other 90 pages were worth investing time in. The big downfall of Dodgeball was that it did not have the benefit of services like twitter and Facebook. It was all SMS based. Also, there was no real reason to keep checking in. The post checkin experience did not exist in Dodgeball. As Crowley says, seeing what happens after checkin is the “one armed bandit”. It is what keeps people coming back.

Dennis Crowley told an audience at the Pepsi Podcast Playground that Foursquare has no business development people and that everything they have done to date is opportunistic. He later told the Ad Club of Boston that their funnel is essentially overflowing and that they have more incoming emails than they can keep track of. This is the opposite problem of most businesses, but a big problem nonetheless. No organization wants a reputation for being hard to work with.

The app has evolved and the experience at SXSW was based on rewarding people with SXSW specific badges based on going to combinations of places. For instance I got a Piggy (actual name) for hitting up a bunch of awesome BBQ joints. This may be because Foursquare was forthcoming with their roadmap saying that they are actively working on context based pushes, no small undertaking. What is that? Let’s say they know you like BBQ and that you go every Tuesday. If you happen to be in the area of the Salt Lick, Stubbs or Ironworks at that time FourSquare will ping you and let you know that you’re in the vicinity of a place you might like. As Crowley says “Foursquare will let you know it’s time for fun.” They are also working on experiences that benefit loyalists who are not necessarily the mayor.

Flash back to SXSW

When I talked to Williams, I jabbed him by saying that SXSW was the ultimate battleground for Location Based Social Networking. He joked with me (a little) and said “Oh. You’re here to perpetuate that?” There was a soft confidence in his voice and a smile as I explained to him that I was just really curious to see how it all plays out. Williams knew that he had big plans. Gowalla had many giveaways and special items that you could find randomly by checking in. They gave away VIP badges via the app. They gave everyone a virtual Livestrong bracelet [which I forgot to drop at Lance Armstrong's bike shop when I was in his conference room. Damn!]. There were also random items that could be redeemed at local businesses, like a free taco and One Taco. I was given one by a kind soul that I later dropped at Guero’s just for the irony. But that’s the beauty of items in Gowalla. Unlike FourSquare, you can leave items for friends or you can arrange to meet at a spot so you can give them an item.

Checkins Not Guns

Crowley told the Ad Club that there is no Location Based Networking war. “We aren’t looking to squash anyone. We’re all looking for our place in this eco-system. It’s not a winner-take-all.” He told me that FourSquare is focused only on their upcoming scaling challenges. They are very close to (and maybe surpassed by the time you are reading this) 1 million users and they got there faster than both Facebook and Twitter. Crowley says that photos are on the table, but that being bulletproof and scaling is their top priority. “We’re going to hit 1 Million users I said ‘That’s great!’” said Crowley “My engineers said ‘That’s terrible!’”. Having the fastest application that works is more important to Crowley than elegant front ends and additional features right now. “Gowalla and Whrrl has pictures, but they also do not have near the user base that we do.” he said. Basically they have the luxury of being able to scale while watching the other products to see what is working before they implement.

The two CEOs are drastically different. If you liken them to SXSW bands, Josh Williams is more Broken Bells and Crowley? How about Japandroids. They do both say that they aren’t worried about the other one, that they have their own agendas and that there isn’t really a battle for LBS supremacy. I hope that does not give someone else with killer instinct the opportunity to come in and squash them both.

Photos by the Ad Club.

The Cardinal Rule of SXSW

“If something sucks, go someplace else.”

SXSWi is an exercise where you try to drink as much as you can from a fire hose. It’s impossible to consume all of the content and I found conflict in every time slot. I went to SXSW to learn and also happen to have diverse interests so it was really hard for me to decide where I should go. I selected between 2 and 5 sessions in each time slot and made my choice based on how important the content was to what I want to accomplish with my career, personal interests and what people I trust think of the speakers.

On Saturday I went to a 9:30am presentation that was not what I thought it would be. I started checking twitter and found trusted friend, Kipp Bodnar of Hubspot tweeting the applesauce out of Chris Messina’s presentation on activity streams. I hightailed it to the Hyatt at top speed and sat on the right side of the wall and got a very meaningful 30 minutes from Chris. 4/5 stars

Don’t Sweat All of the Details

We are not doing much with Drupal for any of our clients right now, but I have a pretty good command of the platform and found out that expert, Josh Konig was speaking on using Drupal in the cloud. He had a modest sized crowd and gave a presentation that everyone who needed to know something about the cloud could have used. Sure, there were some Drupal specific examples, but it was full of estimation, case study and useful takeaways. Had I gotten hung up on the Drupal piece, I might not have gone to the presentation and it was 4/5 stars.

Be Two Places at Once

Sure Gary Vaynerchuk asked me to come to his session, but it was up against (my brother) Gregory Ng’s session on Attacting Sponsors with a Super Niche Webshow. Gary started at 12:30, Greg was 12:50. So I went to both. Hell, Greg went to both! Greg gave 15 of the most impactful minutes at SXSW. Just ask Justine. She was there.

Don’t Get Stupid Drunk and Miss the 9:30 Session

I said I was going to the conference to learn and learn I did. I was at 9:30 sessions every morning (even the day after drinking enough Dogfish Head, 512 Brewing and Live Oak Brewing to kill a small horse). The 9:30 folks are maybe willing to work a little harder. They know they don’t have the prime slot or the big audience (because most of you could not get out of bed due to still being drunk on Tequila) so they bring the heat to turn up the volume. THE best session I saw was one that I attended simply because I am a music geek. 14,000 songs in 28 days had 100 to 400 level content and it was at 9:30AM. The presenter, Burr Settles, is an (accidental) authority on community creation and management [he's actually a machine learning and data mining wizard], but not a marketer so he ended up with about 40 people. He should have keynoted. Everyone could have benefited from his 4 principles of community and analytics rich case studies.

Leave the Convention Center

The Blippy presentation on publishing credit card data was also great, but it was over at the Radisson so few people made the trek. The point is that SXSW isn’t easy. You do have to work for it. Maybe the people who are complaining aren’t able to work the way I can, I don’t have 100s of people coming up to me so I can move around with relative ease, but I would suggest that if you are not looking for content, do not complain that you cannot find it. It is there.

Oh. Margot Bloomstein killed it with Content Strategy and Baked Goods on day one, but you probably were there because at least 500 people showed up.

Active vs. Passive Sharing

Active sharing requires the user to make a decision to share. They must physically open an application and check in to a location, set a status, upload a picture etc. This leaves holes in the overall experience, but also allows people to protect moments that they do not want to share like the trip Forbidden Fruit or visiting grandma’s house. Active sharing takes time and effort and, some might say “thankfully”, leaves holes in the story.Passive sharing happens on an event. In the example of Blippy, whenever you make a purchase on iTunes, eBay or even with your credit card, the purchase is shared. Graham Nelson revealed today that he bought the BMW of strollers for @twinliving via Blippy.

Graham won an auction and Blippy let us all know. He did not have to go to twitter, login and type HEEEY!!! LOOK WHAT I WON! Blippy took care of everything. It is fun to see what people are spending and it would be cool if this sort of technology could be integrated into sales automation tools, marketing automation tools and expense forms. Blippy-type technology could also be extended to things like medical records, web activity, blog activity, library checkouts and checkins and even your email. It could also be hooked up to devices that people use.

For instance an exercise bike could share the number of miles a person rides, time spent on the machine, calories burned or changes in their heart rate. A person’s vehicle could share speeds, fluid levels, oil change reminders etc. What about security cameras or web cams?There are all sorts of cool ways to mash this data up, but I think that’s a separate post. What about looking at macro level passive streams?

Michelle Feldman shares information on a recent run

Micro vs. Macro

Micro or personal streams are really interesting, but what about looking at activity streams from a public or macro perspective? That is when things start to really get interesting. What if public transportation activity streams were freely available? In Boston, they are. The MBTA decided to make bus, subway and commuter rail whereabouts data public when they became mired in trying to figure out how to economically produce installations, phone numbers or applications.

The result is a series of applications that make it possible for people to track problems with public transportation. So one forward thinking (or desperate) government organization is leading the way for passive sharing of macro level activity. And in reality this is late. Public transportation in the US is largely government owned and supported by tax dollars so it makes sense to have the data readily available, right?

Given that, how about public office spending as a stream? I would follow everyone from selectmen to senators to get an understanding for how they are spending our tax dollars. Political campaign spending would be fascinating. I could see it either becoming more discretionary or even more lavish as candidates would be exposing their moves to the public [including paying teams to analyze the others' data.]

How about payroll? Public payroll for teachers, public officials, police, firefighters and the like would be another interesting stream that would let us know if public people are being properly compensated and if they are getting raises.

What are some useful passive streams that you would like to see?
energy consumption? Maybe taxi and airplane whereabouts? Let’s get a discussion going.

Within 8 minutes, I had accomplished this goal. When I checked into the Austin Bergstrom Airport, I got an offer! I was delighted. I was not sure how many other people had received the offer and knowing that I was on a plane full of social media nerds, I looked around the plane. I did not see anyone jumping and hitting their heads on the cabin ceiling, so I smiled and accepted.

I checked the email and made my way to baggage claim and standing there, holding a sign with MIKE is Josh Williams. He hands me a t-shirt and I try to fight the urge to launch into a zillion questions about the application, their revenue model and surprises for SXSW.

Brad Mays form Chevrolet and jumped into a brand new Tahoe and headed to our hotel. On the way, he told us about Chevy’s plans for SXSW.

This is a great story about a brand thinking about online and offline experience and the payoff of location based social networking promises to go beyond checking in. While this probably will not do much more than create buzz for Chevy and perhaps change a few minds about the ability of American big auto to think creatively, it is a definite step in the right direction.

Chevy has a bunch of interesting activities with Gowalla and QR codes in action at SXSW. If you find a Chevy pin when you check in, you can get some limited edition Hot Wheels at the Chevy Volt recharge station. They staged a big road trip for several content creating teams heading to SXSW, there are Chevy test drives and I am told there are other surprises planned. Now if only they drove people to a community where they could capture and nurture the relationships they are building.