Over the past two years, the most powerful broad trend in media is fragmentation and while mass media remains, it is becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the overall media landscape. Audiences have become fragmented – and they have more choices in a fragmented media landscape. Today, our informed customers aren’t happy to blindly consume what mainstream media is feeding them. Instead they want: participation, openness, conversation, community, connectedness & all of that in real time!

The upcoming year we will see increasing opportunities because of this world of fragmentation and the proliferation of media channels. Along with the continuous technology advancements, LOCATION is becoming more important than ever.  In 2010, I think there are 3 “hyperlocal” trends that will grow and re-shape the social & mobile business -

1. Local advertising becoming ubiquitous

WHY: Advertisers have been constantly evaluating and experimenting with new models to bring more relevancy and context to the online ad kingdom. After behavior-targeting & social-targeting getting their debut in 2009, location-targeting advertising models start to emerge. There is a future in hyperlocal, and advertising certainly is a big part of it.

WHAT TO EXPECT: New ad-generating application such as Place Local will get more traction as it automates the ad creation, sales and management. Since local restaurants, retail outlets and entertainment venues are the most popular search categories, we will see local business owners jumping on the bandwagon first. As more companies seeking to take advantage of the growth in local ad dollars, more widgets and apps will be available, creating location-based ads will be easier than ever.

2.  Local media replacing big journalism

WHY: Traditional news organizations faced cutbacks or closures in 2009, by contrast, small and local publications are doing pretty well by serving niche markets. Although the market is smaller, the community is much tighter.  Additionally, Twitter just bought Mixer Lab in an effort to pinpoint the locations of people posting messages on its service. Biz Stone believes that when current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge – everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced.

WHAT TO EXPECT: Those who understand the fragmented media landscape and know how to reach customers cost-effectively will thrive.  Highly entrepreneurial sites that are a blend of community-building and a focus on tech expertise such as Oakland Local will look to fill the gap in news content. On the Twitter side, location-aware tweets will simply be the main source of future breaking news. Remember how Twitter beat CNN on reporting the plane crash over Hudson River? Expect the real-time location-aware updates to substitute big journalism, very often.

3. Local on-the-go searches

WHY: As we know, the majority of smartphone owners in North America are the younger consumers. According to Forrester’s latest Technographic survey, Gen Yers and Gen Xers are 4-5 times more likely to perform local searches than Boomers and Seniors. Those GPS embedded devices have enhanced the mobile search experience tremendously.

WHAT TO EXPECT: In 2010, GPS embedded handsets will become a necessity while mobile-based local search process will continue to evolve.  More web 2.0 sites will translate into the mobile channel; more mobile apps will incorporate maps/destination-search function to extend the usefulness of their core offering. More attention on the location-based social networks and mobile games  Foursquare & Gowalla? You bet,  their service is proving to be more useful by the day. The possibility is endless!

As the location-battle rages on, what you do you keep an eye on?

© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AR, foursquare, gowalla, mobile search, Twitter

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© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: behavior adoption, experiment, Twitter

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Many of you probably have heard of FriendFeed, some of you might have registered, but very few of you have spent the time exploring the possibilities FriendFeed has to offer. I wasn’t part of the early adopter crowd either, but recently I learned what a powerful & unique communication platform FriendFeed could be.

• First thing first, what exactly is FriendFeed (FF)?

Founded by a handful of ex-google employees, FF is a cross-platform aggregator that continuously lifestream the various social activities of those individuals you follow and allow others to follow what you’re doing on the socialweb. It currently supports feeds from more than 60 social sites, ranging from the well-known Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, youtube, Google reader, del.icio.us, flickr to the less well-known Disqus and Zoomr. Pretty much any social media service that generates a RSS feed can be imported. Friendfeed is a way for you to connect with other people through their posts and discoveries on various social websites: you can read the stories they have submitted to Reddit, tune in their favorite music on Last.fm and learn about what they recently updated on Facebook status all in one web page. Additionally, it’s also an interactive network itself where users can comment or reshare people’s stories to continue the conversation.

• Why you should consider using FF?

Back in March 2008, Mashable conducted a poll to learn how people are reacting towards this newly established conversational platform. Near 80% of participants stated it was adding noise to the social fishbowl; only 20% argued that it enriched the conversation. Fast forward 11 months, I’m sure this number is no longer true, proven by the steady growth of the user base and increasing volume of FF evangelists. However, the question remains that in a era when you constantly experiencing information overload, why would you bother with another social site? Hmm…it’s a not an easy case to make, but let’s take a closer look at what FriendFeed can do for you.

If you are a casual user or social media wannabe – FF provides you the most comprehensive way to observe how your friends and those social media thought leaders cruise the social web. Instead of simply subscribing to their blog and following them on Twitter, it gives you more opportunities to interact with them dynamically. If nothing else, at least it’s a stepping stone to relationship building with those you find genuinely interesting or trustworthy. Also, you can join FriendFeed “rooms” which are like mini FriendFeed channels for a specific niche or subject matter. Whether it’s social media or movie reviews, FF enables you to stay tuned by getting realtime streams, opinions and even make more like-minded friends while tracking the news.

If you are a twitterholic – FF might very likely become your new addiction once you give these tips a try. Under FF’s new “find your Twitter friends” feature, subcribing to your Twitter pals is only one click away. Not only can you extend the Twitter dialogue on FF, you can also send the comment back to the Twitter community so the thread is continuous and lives on both platforms. However, I agree with xx , FF is not much of a threat to Twitter, it is actually more comparable to Facebook’s news feed due it’s capability to stream activities to one centralized location. FriendFeed will increase in value as its user base (near 1 million now) expands and may potentially become a competitor of Facebook Connect.

If you are a small business owner or a team lead who is looking for a collaborative tool – FF allows you to easily set up your own private room and replace the traditional mailing list approach of knowledge sharing. The private chat room could be used for brainstorm, sharing links, relevant search feeds, or even broadcast service announcements and the like. Here are some more use cases from Chris Brogan. If you are seeking an integrated knowledge sharing wiki without pulling away from all the social sites your team has been comfortable using, then FriendFeed is the FREE one-stop solution you should consider.

Like all things in social media, you have to swim in the fishbowl in order to truly “get” it. Give FriendFeed a try, I believe you will find its service to be more valuable than what you originally think.

© Yuki Chow* for ViewPoint.Orange, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook Connect, FriendFeed, Twitter

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