Thoughts on Local Social Summit 2009

Last week I attended the first Local Social Summit in London - a day aimed at exploring the space where local content meets social media with attendees from a range of start-ups, directories, media companies, advertisers and media owners.

If you're interested in any of this type of stuff then all of the days presentations are available on SlideShare.

The two most insightful keynotes of the day were on a related theme - the impact and usage of social networking sites in comparison to how people, particularly the young, conduct their social lives in the 'real world'.

The first, 'Decoding Friends: A Generation Y View' by Robert Barnard was a research based piece with some interesting numbers:

• 15-29 year olds have an average of 43 online 'friends' based on recent research in UK, US and Canada.
• Only 12% have more than 70 online friends
• Numbers of face-to-face and online friends varies through different stages in life, whereas 'phone friends' remains fairly constant.

LSS'09 Keynote Decoding Friends

View more documents from Local Social Summit.

Following this, Bernie Hogan, a PhD from University of Oxford, presented 'Making Sense of the Networked Audience: The Case of Facebook' which provided some different numbers but similar conclusions:

• A list of 12 reasons why someone might become an online friend with another individual
• "Nearness is now a social property as much as a spatial one"

LSS'09 Keynote Decoding Friends

View more documents from Local Social Summit.

There was plenty of interesting discussion throughout the day and a chance to hear how a diverse range of companies are all moving into the local/social space looking for new revenue stream.

Some particular points of interest from the day:

• "Obama had the same percentage of votes from young people as Bill Clinton - don't overestimate social media"
• Heavy social network users are more likely to use newspapers and are more interested in local news than international.
• MapZen - a free iPhone app coming soon from CloudMade that allows users to easily add points of interest to openstreetmap.
• Yellix - a mobile app to help phone calls, e.g. Live directory look-up of unknown caller numbers so no more unknown callers.

And if you haven't heard about Flutter then you should take a look now:



My input involved a 5 slide presentation on the BBC's local services, a reflection that BBC Local Radio started doing local-social over 40 years ago, and then a lively panel debate on how local do you need to be to be effective and finding the right balance between content providers and content aggregators.