Local Social Summit 2011 Conference Report

Local Social Summit 2011
Day 2: Conference Report

Edited by Dylan Fuller & Mike Abeyta | localsocialsummit.com | Published 30 April 2012

Contents
Executive Summary ......................................................................................... 2
Trends & Themes to Watch in 2012................................................................. 3
Local Social Summit ’11 Schedule - Day 2 ...................................................... 4
Day 2, Session 1 – Talk: The First Digital Olympics, London 2012 & the BBC
......................................................................................................................... 5
Day 2, Session 2 – Insights: Science of Social Media: Social Network Analysis
On Facebook Data, with a local twist ............................................................... 8
Day 2, Session 3 - Panel: Café Culture - Innovative SoLoMo Apps............... 10
Day 2, Session 4 – Fireside Chat: A Conversation with Foursquare – We Sat
Down with the 1st European Based Executive @Foursquare ........................ 12
Day 2, Session 5 - Panel: Big Brand Local .................................................... 17
Day 2, Session 6 - Panel: Can Social Media Be Outsourced ......................... 22
Day 2, Session 7 – Closing Keynote: Charting Collection of Connections in
Social Media. Dr. Marc Smith......................................................................... 26
About Local Social Summit & This Report ..................................................... 30
LSS’11 Sponsors ........................................................................................... 31
Local Social Summit 2012: Dates & Information ............................................ 32
Sponsorship Opportunities for Local Social Summit 2012 ............................. 33

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Executive Summary
Please Note: This report covers day two of LSS’11 plus our view of the key trends to
watch in 2012. A previous report covering day one was published separately back in
March 2012 - you can download a copy of the Day 1 Report here or just email the
LSS team so we can email you a copy (Email: info@localsocialsummit.com).

Local Social Summit (LSS) is a conference that explores the intersection of local and
social media. Designed to ensure dynamic dialogue and networking among
conference attendees, the summit features interactive sessions constructed to share
knowledge and find solutions by showcasing innovation, emerging trends and
consumer insights.

The origins for LSS date back to the summer of 2006, at an event focused on the
local search space that was attended by some of the biggest local media players in
Europe, including Deutsche Telekom, SEAT Pagine Gialle, Schibsted Group and the
Irish Times. Subsequently, Dylan Fuller & Simon Baptist founded Local Social
Summit in 2009 as a direct response to requests from media companies and thought
leaders in the local space.

Local Social Summit 2011 (LSS’11) was our third annual event, held in London on
November 9th & 10th. LSS’11 was an expanded event, held over two days, that
included 100 attendees, 40 speakers and six sponsors. We had 16 sessions: three
keynotes, eight panels, two talks, a fireside chat, one brand hackathon and one
seminar on social network analysis. As always, engagement was high and the level
of discourse world class.

Key Learnings:

1. Social media or social networking is no longer over hyped. The “social
web” is transforming how consumers and businesses operate. Businesses
can no longer afford to ignore this paradigm shift.
2. Mobile has truly arrived. The combination of new technologies such as
mobile broadband, GPS and apps together with consumer demand for new
device types (smartphones and tablets) is the driving enabler for local
commerce.
3. Everything is local. Local is not just about SMBs (small & medium sized
business/SMEs) but is also about big brands and regional/national
chains/franchises connecting with consumers at the local level. This has
profound implications for the local and global economy.
4. Location is everywhere. Social is not just about data, trends and ROI (return
on investment), but also very much about people, community and continuous
engagement. Local is what is accessible.

Points for debate/disagreement:

1. Search vs. Social. It’s too soon to settle the debate. No one could agree on
the relative importance of search (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo, IYPs) when
compared to social channels (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp).
2. What now? There is a big question around “what next” for local businesses
after they have signed-up for a social networking service. What do they do
with their Facebook fan page? Who should they follow on Twitter? Should
they join LinkedIn?

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3. In-house vs. outsource. There was intense debate on whether it was
feasible or scalable to outsource social media activities to third parties. This
has significant implications for a large spectrum of companies across online -
including PR, yellow pages, technology providers, publishers and media
agencies of all sizes.

Finally, everyone agreed that there was much left to learn, problems to solve and
huge room for growth for business at the intersection of local, social and mobile.

Trends & Themes to Watch in 2012
 Incumbents are at risk. Many industries are only just catching up to the
social opportunity. Watch for an increase in PR from incumbents and action
from agencies, start-ups and technology companies.
 Data is everywhere. The social/mobile explosion has created the “big data”
opportunity for businesses of all sizes. Location is a valuable and relevant
signal within all that data.
 Consumers demand great user experience. People are living, sharing and
spending locally in new ways every day. “Pull” becomes “Push” and
consumers demand product and services from brands they know and trust.
They want this with the same great user experience they already get from
most good apps.
 Big brand local. Just as many consumer facing product businesses are
shifting spend to direct marketing over time, so too are big brands with local
stores embracing social channels for dialogue-based interactions with their
local customers.
 The rebirth of local. Local moves beyond Groupon, Yelp and Angies List.
 Mobile broadband. 3G and 4G enables the connected consumer, who not
only checks-in and pins products but makes informed buying decisions and
recommendations on the fly via mobile devices everywhere. This trend will
expand and impact everything from groceries to fashion to restaurant to
hotels and more.
 The next Internet arrives. Watch for an explosion in next generation data-
driven social apps and the legislative backdrop in the works (both in the US
and the EU).
 The death of daily deals. Deals move to check-in specials, loyalty
programmes and other smart ways for business to incentivise customers.
 Social outsourcing grows. The outsourcing space is wide open and full of
opportunity for smart service and technology providers. Watch for growth and
innovators from new places.
 The personal algorithm becomes public. Facebook Timeline and other
social data signals have huge potential for transforming how/when/where
consumers access local businesses and buy services, this could impact
everything from daily deals to e-commerce to ratings and reviews.
 CRM moves forward: adding a social and local layer helps to take CRM from
the back office to the frontline. This has implications for how companies are
organised and how CRM is integrated into local platforms.

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Local Social Summit ’11 Schedule - Day 2
Thursday, 10th November, Wallace Space, London.

9:30-9:55 The First Digital Olympics – Tim Plyming, BBC London 2012

9:55 – 10:15 Insights – Science of Social Media: Social Network Analysis On Facebook
Data, with a local twist - Dr. Bernie Hogan, Research Fellow Oxford Internet
Institute

10:15 – 11.00 Cafe Culture: Innovative SOLOMO Apps
Leader: Perry Evans, CEO Closely
Panel: Asaf Rozin, Co-founder & CEO Stampfeet; Stefano Diemmi, MD
Proximitips/Buongiorno; Mike Borras, CEO & Co-Founder Tupalo

11:30 – 12:00 A Conversation With Foursquare – We Sit Down With The 1st European Based
Executive @foursquare Omid Ashtari, foursquare and Greg Sterling, LSS

12:00 – 1:30 - Lunch –
Plus 12:45-1:30 (optional): Seminar in Social Network Analysis, Dr. Bernie
Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

1:30 – 2:15 Big Brand Local
Leader: Mike Weston, SVP/GM Europe Lyris
Panel: Duncan Ogle-Skan, Director EMO Local; Alistair Watts, Head of
Ecommerce at Hand Picked Hotels; Janis Prescott, Social Media Manger at
MINI; Leanne Tritton, MD ING Media

2:15 – 3:15 Can Social Media Be Outsourced?
Leader: Jonathan Ewert, CEO Codero
Panel: Justin Sanger, Founder JoinHere; Seb Provencher, Founder Nedium;
Dennis Yu CEO Blitz Local; Simon Baptist, European Directories; Eric Partaker,
Co-Founder Chilango

3:45 – 4:45 Lecture & Closing Keynote: Charting Collections Of Connections In Social
Media -Dr. Marc Smith, Director of the Social Media Research Foundation

4:45 – 5:00 Local Social Summit 2011 Wrap-up

5:00 – 7:00 - Networking Reception -
Brought to you by The Social Media Research Foundation

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Day 2, Session 1 – Talk: The First Digital Olympics, London 2012
& the BBC

Speaker: Tim Plyming is the Project Executive; Digital & Editor Live Sites in the
BBC’s London 2012 project team. He leads the day to day activity of the ‘Digital
Olympics’ project which is responsible for the delivery of all 2012 content across
digital platforms including online, mobile and connected TV.

Background: London 2012 will be the first tablet Olympics, the first connected TV
Olympics and the first 3D Olympics. The BBC is the host nation broadcaster of all
the Games and has one amazing year planned for 2012. Tim provided LSS'11
attendees with a sneak preview of the BBC’s plans.

Session Summary:
“We’re calling the 2012 Summer Games the first truly digital Olympics, because 2012
is also the year we switch off the analogue signal [in the UK]” explained Tim Plyming,
project executive, digital & editor live sites, BBC London 2012.

2012 Massive Digital Content Year in the UK
But that only tells half the story. As Plyming
explained, the amount of content generated by “… the amount of content
the Olympics is equivalent of six World Cups generated by the Olympics
happening every day for 16 days. is equivalent of six World
Cups happening every day
“In fact, 2012 is a massive year from the start of for 16 days.”
the summer,” he said. “It starts with the analogue -Tim Plyming
switch-off in April, then there’s the Queen’s
Diamond Jubilee in June, when our operation will be four times the size of the one for
this year’s royal wedding [Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding in May 2011].
Then there’s the 70 days of the torch relay, which will be when the Games come to
people outside London, and which will be a huge outside broadcast operation. After
the Olympics there’s a two-week break and then the Paralympic Games. And then
there’s all the events of the Cultural Olympiad. Every outside broadcast truck in
Northern Europe will be in London next summer.”

100% of the Olympic Content Available
For the BBC, the London Games will represent a step change in the amount of
material it broadcasts. “The Olympic Broadcaster creates 3000 hours of television,”
Plyming explained. “For the Sydney Games, we were only able to show 300 hours of
that. By Beijing, we showed half of it. In 2012, our commitment is to allow people to
watch everything live – up to 24 different events at a time – and the internet will be a
broadcast-critical service for that.”

Four-Screen Event
Plyming also explained that the BBC is thinking of the London Games as very much
a four-screen event. “The Coronation in 1953 was the first mass TV event, and there
was one TV per street. 2012 will be another defining moment in the move from
analogue to digital broadcasting. “The heart of it will be the video services. There will
be 24 HD feeds, immediately on-demand. It’s the basis of the iPlayer service taken to
the next level. Then mobile and tablet will be a complimentary experience. Users will

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be able to pull up the commentator information service, and we’ll do video where we
can.”

Content Enrichment – “wiki-Olympic-pedia”
The other big step forward will be the amount of metadata about the Games that the
BBC will make available to the audience for the first time. “The commentator
information service has always been privileged information for the commentary
teams. It’s how commentators know all the statistics and details of the events,”
Plyming explained.

“We’re stripping it out and providing it to viewers, allowing them to pull it up alongside
the video. Then we’ll allow the audience to play with that. It’ll be interesting to see
how all the platforms are used, both separately and together, and it’ll be useful to see
how content trends across those devices. There’s such a huge amount of content
that we’ll be seeing trending as a means of navigation.”

Social Olympics
Plyming is also interested in how social element
will change the content, on top of that, how the
fact that people’s devices know where they are “There’s such a huge
will affect the way the data is sliced. amount of content that we’ll
be seeing trending as a
As well as all the data from the commentator means of navigation.”
information service, there will be a page for every -Tim Plyming
athlete from every country, with all their stats and
all the video of them from the Games, both live
and on-demand.

Local Olympics
Beyond this, Plyming said, are the big screens. There will be 30 of them around the
UK, and the BBC sees part of the role of these screens in reaching out to expat
communities, what it calls “Find the world in London.”

“There will be one million Russians in London next summer, so we’re expanding the
outdoor experience in Hyde Park, allowing communities to watch what they want to
watch across six screens. Half of the 204 competing countries have communities of
more than 10,000 people in London.”

Response to Questions
In response to a question, Plyming said that the BBC would like to do a lot with social
media around the Games, but that it was restricted by the IOC’s concerns about
video leakage. Instead, he said, all the data would be shared and that would be used
to drive people back to the BBC coverage. This led on to a question about
monetisation, which he answered by saying that the BBC was looking to
commercialise “the London story”, what Plyming referred to as “what’s outside the
fence” via the BBC Worldwide. But he admitted that the BBC having sole UK rights
did pose a problem for sponsors.

London’s Impact on Future Olympics
Plyiming sees these Games as a staging post for the future. “It’ll be interesting to
see what these Games mean for next Summer Games in Rio,” he said. “We can try
lots of things and see how they work, and Rio is looking for UK companies to see
how they can help with the 2016 Games. It’s a big opportunity for people.”

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Note: We are unable to share the slides from this presentation.

LSS Insights - Day 2, Session 1:

 London 2012 is the first truly digital Olympics.
 100% of the content will be available. That’s 3000 hours of TV.
 It will be a massive four screen event with HD video at the heart of it.
 All the meta data will be made available plus custom pages for each athlete
making for a very rich and immersive data experience – combined with social
media interaction this should create a real-time Wikipedia for the games.
 This will be a social media Olympics. People will be adding to the official
content.
 There will be a local angle – both in the UK and globally. This includes the
torch relay, outside local screens and how fans interact with the events and
teams.
 London 2012 will show the way for future Olympics. Innovation from London
will lead the way for Brazil 2016.

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Day 2, Session 2 – Insights: Science of Social Media: Social
Network Analysis On Facebook Data, with a local twist

Speaker: Dr. Bernie Hogan, Research Fellow Oxford Internet Institute

Bio: Bernie Hogan is a leader in the capture and analysis of social media networks,
particularly Facebook. He has presented to numerous academic and corporate
audiences, such as VisionBristol, UK Social Networks Association, Microsoft
Research, and Google Europe and has worked with eHarmony, Nokia, and O2. His
work has been featured on the BBC, including both BBC Breakfast and Newsnight,
as well as numerous radio interviews. Last year, he was one of four academic
mentors for Radio 4’s “So you want to be a scientist”. Dr. Hogan is a regular speaker
at LSS events and seminars.

Session Summary:
One of the most fascinating things about online is the ability it gives us to build
networks. And the underlying patterns of those networks make sense, especially
when you can visualise them. So why haven’t they caught on? At the moment,
networks seem to be more useful to scientists than to the public.

People don’t know how to look at a network, and they don’t know what to do with
one. Is that a failing of visualisations or a failing of how people think about
visualisations? People want to be able to find different groups to talk to, but on
Facebook you can’t post to one group and not another.

This might not matter – people try to put on a single persona for any one site, but
that’s not easy because we have different groups of friends on Facebook and we
don’t have a map that shows us how distant people are from each other. All we have
are lists that collapse everyone into the same place, and we have algorithms like
Google’s Page Rank and Facebook’s Edge Rank. What we don’t have is a map to let
us see our own networks. In my work I’m trying to show how that can be done and
the value it offers to individuals.

“So communications devolve to the lowest common denominator, and there
are two possible results. One is polarisation of your network and the other is
self-censorship. In both cases you’re not in control of the message, the
technology is controlling what you say.“
-Bernie Hogan

The concern if we leave things as they are is that we leave people without control of
the networks. When I post on Facebook, I’m not saying what I’m saying directly to my
mum, my boss or my students, but I am saying it in the light of them being in the
audience. So communications devolve to the lowest common denominator, and there
are two possible results. One is polarisation of your network and the other is self-
censorship. In both cases you’re not in control of the message, the technology is
controlling what you say. The engineering solution is to help you split your network
into different groups, but people don’t do this. They end up talking to the lowest

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common denominator. For example, if you’re gay, it’s very hard to come out to only a
section of your network. If you have a way of visualising your network, your view
becomes much more crystallised, but at the moment we’re not using this approach.

Why aren’t there network modes on Facebook, for example a family mode? The
technology should be able to identify most of my family members - they’re all
connected to each other and not to anyone else in my network – and I can help them
the rest of the way. But at the moment there’s an intense amount of cognitive
switching going on. A number of my colleagues are on Facebook and they regularly
post interesting things, but it’s very hard to concentrate on work with such a disparate
feed coming through from Facebook.

 The complete slide deck from this talk is available on Slideshare.

Figure: Our Real-world Networks vs. Facebook Network

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Day 2, Session 3 - Panel: Café Culture - Innovative SoLoMo Apps
Moderator: Perry Evans, CEO Closely
Panellists:
 Asaf Rozin, Co-founder & CEO Stampfeet
 Stefano Diemmi, MD Proximitips/Buongiorno
 Mike Borras, CEO & Co-Founder Tupalo

Panel Background:
The role of customer service in marketing; the use of deals in yield management; and
the need to focus on what SMBs want. These were the main topics of discussion in
the Cafe Culture panel, which brought together three SoLoMo entrepreneurs from
across Europe. We also explored the challenges of innovation in apps development,
how to grow user adoption and what business models are working.

Session Summary:.
Evans began by asking the panellists to introduce themselves and their business.
“Stampfeet is a mobile-based customer loyalty play,” began Rozin. “Online loyalty is
very complex, although the interfaces are getting better. It needs to be more
personalised and more engaging; then you could up-sell, cross-sell and surprise
people.

“We’re working on a loyalty engine that takes the loyalty card onto the mobile phone.
We use QR codes, but we’re also implementing an EPOS add-on, which will allow us
to do basket analysis and in turn increase spend and learn more about a brand’s
customers. At the moment we’re not monetising, but the aim is to charge merchants
on subscription or on a performance basis.”

Next came Diemmi. “Proximitips is a way to connect customers to local shops,” he
said. “We’re starting with the customer viewpoint. We launched on the iPad, then the
iPhone and we’ve just launched on Android, and we already have 30,000
customers.”

The last to answer was Tupalo’s Borras. “Customer service is the new marketing for
SMBs,” he said. “We give local businesses an early-warning system for what’s being
said about them on the web.

“We also recognise that yield management is very important, so we work through
deals and challenges to the merchant’s community to drive business on slow days.”

Evans’ next question was how, when everyone is trying to get the attention of
small businesses, how were the panellists going about it.

Diemmi’s response was that the Proximitips platform is cheap and easy to use.
“You can create a mobile store for £10 a month,” he said. “We’re focusing on large
cities, for example London, and we’re discussing partnerships with directory
businesses.”

Stampfeet’s Rozin agreed that marketing to small businesses is a massive challenge.
“Many SMBs don’t understand these technologies,” he said. “The way we try to
position ourselves is that we’re about retention rather than acquisition. And we try to
scale through distribution channels.”

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Evans then asked Borras what he knew now that he wished he’d known when
he was starting out.

“We started the business from a ‘we’re going to kill Yellow Pages’ perspective,”
Borras replied. “One of the things we didn’t focus on soon enough was the customer
perspective. Then when we got the deal with European Directories we realised that
we needed feedback from local businesses, because both consumers and local
businesses are our customers.”

Evans agreed that it’s a mistake to think that the social channel is close to what
businesses need. Rather suppliers need to look first at the business needs of their
customers. So he asked Borras how Tupalo fits into its partners suites of products.
“I completely agree you need to get out and talk to businesses early on,” Borras
replied, “because people need different things in different markets.”

So Evans closed by asking with whom the panellists were now most interested
in having conversations.

“We’re most interested in directory services, people who have relevant location-
based content,” Diemmi said.

“Local businesses and people with links to then,” said Rozin.

“Potential partners, publishers, data owners,” said Borras. “We’re doing roll-outs in
Germany, France and the US, and Italy is also very exciting for us.”

Company Links:

Stampfeet: Mobile Based Customer Loyalty App - http://www.stampfeet.co.uk/

.c
Tupalo: A place to discover, review and share local businesses - http://tupalo.com/

Proximitips: Hyper local social magazine - http://www.proximitips.com/

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Day 2, Session 4 – Fireside Chat: A Conversation with Foursquare
– We Sat Down with the 1st European Based Executive
@Foursquare

Omid Ashtari, Director of Business Development, Foursquare
Interviewed Conducted by: Greg Sterling

Introduction: Omid Ashtari is the first executive at Foursquare working in Europe.
Foursquare is one of the leading players in the local, social and mobile arena
(SoLoMo). Local Social Summit seemed like a great opportunity to quiz him about
the company’s plans and explore how Foursquare sees itself in the context of the
larger local-social ecosystem.

With more than 15 million users around the world Foursquare has emerged from the
pack of check-in apps and has evolved from a game into a local discovery tool and
merchant loyalty platform. Foursquare is a great example of where all three – social,
local & mobile - come together. Perhaps Foursquare is the king of SoLoMo and
definitely a favourite among the digirati.

Greg Sterling: What is Foursquare?

Omid Ashtari: Our mission statement is that we want to make the real world easier
to use. We do that by building tools for users that help you keep up with friends,
discover what's nearby, save money, and unlock deals. Whether you're setting off on
a trip around the world, coordinating a night out with friends, or trying to pick out the
best dish at your local restaurant, foursquare is the perfect companion.

GS: So it’s a social city guide?

OA: That’s part of what it is, but that definition doesn’t include some of the aspects I
just described like for instance the rewards and money-saving piece.

GS: Money-saving in what way?

OA: We’ve built a bunch of free tools that allow businesses to claim their presence
on foursquare and allow them to upload specials for their customers. These specials
can be good to acquire users for the first time, like for instance get a free glass of
wine on your first check in - Newbie Special - or can be geared to reward loyal users,
like for instance check in 10 times to get a 30% discount if you spend more than £10
- Loyalty Special.

There are many examples for these specials out there, even in London. Just open up
the app, hit explore and search for specials in your vicinity.

GS: You have these examples of daily deals – how are you making that capability
known to small businesses? And how many SMBs do you have signed up?

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OA: We have more than 750,000 merchants that have claimed their location on
foursquare. Our platform has really loyal users, and often they approach the SMBs
themselves. We actively reach out to big merchants and issue case studies, which
will hopefully inspire smaller merchants to use our platform. For us it’s all about
building the right tools for users and merchants right now and once we have it nailed
to push the message out there.

[For small business case studies we liked the one about Dos Caminos, a Mexican
restaurant in NYC.]

GS: Groupon is struggling to complement acquisition with loyalty. Foursquare does
that, but how does the merchant know when a customer reaches the threshold to
qualify for a loyalty reward?

OA: We keep track of that. The merchants set the rules, and we automatically count
up the check-ins. The redemption bit is still sometimes clunky but we are working on
some solutions there, like for instance when you set up a special we create a print-
out to explain to staff what an unlocked special is and so on.

GS: In the beginning, check-ins drove the initial adoption of Foursquare. Then the
novelty wore off. How does Foursquare now regard the game mechanic piece of the
app, and check-ins as a phenomenon, when people don’t care so much about
status?

OA: The check-in is just the start of the journey and, by the way, our check in
numbers have been growing day by day. We are really excited about building tools
for our users that make it easier for them to navigate the real world and one of those
features is Explore: so for example, if you’re in Brixton and you’re looking for a sushi
place, you can set the radius you want to search within, and we can give you
recommendations based on your and your friends’ past check-in behaviour. We
understand that the ‘one size fits all’ search results are not the way to go and were
currently the only ones that give you individual results.

Game mechanics are an important element of our platform and they will continue to
be. Game mechanics alone, however, will not be enough to keep people engaged.
You want to use game mechanics to onboard people and provide some surprising
experiences along the way, but the real value has to be in recommendations, tips,
discovery and specials.

GS: Your biggest competitors are Yelp and Google. How do you see yourselves
against them?

OA: The competitor set really depends on which part of what we offer you look at. In
any case we don’t care too much about what our competition does and just keep
executing our strategy. Google Maps is a great product and I will always use it to find
my way around a city, but to find good tailor made restaurant recommendations for
me on the go, foursquare is certainly the better solution. Just give it a try and see for
yourself.

GS: How are you approaching partnerships via the API?

OA: Our APIs are open and free to use by anyone out there. We have made our user
generated database of more than 30 million places available for everyone to use and
have seen a lot of success with it. Companies like Path, Instagram, Foodspotting etc.

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use it. We also make an anonymized fire hose of check ins available to selected
publishers to write stories or to research institutes to analyze the flow of people in
cities. It’s really interesting to see this data come alive.

[Examples of this data can be found on Flowing City - where we recommend this one
about London – see bleow.]

Greg also opened the conversation to questions from the Local Social Summit
audience.

Question: Is the map of city check-ins available through the app?

OA: No, but you can get check in data for individual locations.

Question: How will you make money?

OA: We’re obviously thinking about that. Most of what we’ve tried – distributing
Groupon’s deals, for example – were pilots. But if you think about it, check-in
behaviour has lots of commercial value. Facebook uses their data for targeting by
interest, Google targets based on intent; I think we have both interest and intent and
it will be easy to monetise that in the future. For instance it will be easy for us in the
future to match the perfect customer up with the perfect business i.e. a pizza store
that doesn’t have enough customers but would pay for getting some people to the
door with a person who is a pizza lover who is hungry and nearby.

Question: Are all check-ins in the public domain?

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OA: We offer the option for people to check in off the grid too – which is a private
check in.

Questions: Has that incentivised people to check-in more?

OA: I wouldn’t know how that has affected our check in numbers at the moment.

Question: Would selective visibility lead people to check in more?

OA: I don’t have the stats. We have 3m check-ins a day, but I don’t know how many
are private. People usually have a small social graph on foursquare, so you’re only
giving your location to a small, trusted group.

Question: Are there applications in different verticals?

OA: American Express is doing something in the US which we hope to bring to the
Europe at some point. If you tie your Amex card to Foursquare, you will have access
to special load-to-card deals. When you swipe your card, you’ll unlock that deal. For
example, if you spend $50, you get $20 straight back on your card. The clunky
redemption problem is thereby solved.

[Foursquare also teamed up with American Express in the US to promote Small
Business Saturday in November 2010 and 2011…]

Question: How about less frequent purchases that have a large element of loyalty
but low frequency, such as car dealerships?

OA: We’ve not really thought about that. But anyone who deals with customers that
they want to keep loyal can use foursquare and even integrate us in their loyalty
program via the API.

GS: What about tradespeople who use Yellow Pages? Roofers, for example. Can
Foursquare accommodate them?

OA: Most of the use cases we’re thinking about are location-based as we don’t want
to pollute the database with too many virtual locations.

Question: Does a phone call to a business count as a check-in?

OA: At the moment, we’re focused on check-ins at physical locations.

Question: Where do you stand on the use of real names versus pseudonyms?

OA: Most people who create a Foursquare account import their Facebook profile into
it. I think that most people use their real names, but I don’t have any data on that.
When we see people using an obviously fake name, we contact them. But we never
show people’s last names on the platform, so you are anonymous to a certain extent.

Question: What is the interface to accept a list of locations from a business that
wants to claim multiple outlets?

OA: Go to foursquare.com/business to see how you can claim venues on foursquare.
It’s pretty straight forward.

Page | 15

Question: What are your growth numbers?

OA: We have 100 employees, 1.5bn check-ins since launch, 15 million users, 600%
growth in Europe last year, 750,000 merchants on the platform, 5m places checked
in to in Europe last year. Urban areas stick out as places of high usage, but we also
see a viral effect all over the map.

[Note: on Foursquare day 16 April 2012 the service announced hitting 20 million
users and 2 billion check-ins.]

Page | 16

Day 2, Session 5 - Panel: Big Brand Local
Leader: Mike Weston, most recently SVP/GM Europe, Lyris
Panellists:
 Duncan Ogle-Skan, Director EMO Local
 Alistair Watts, Head of Ecommerce at Hand Picked Hotels
 Janis Prescott, Social Media Manger at MINI
 Leanne Tritton, MD ING Media

Background:
Much of this year’s Local Social Summit was dominated by talk of SMBs, but this
panel changed focus to look at how big brands are coping in the local social space.
The brands represented directly were Mini, by Social Media Manager Janis Prescott,
and Hand Picked Hotels, by Head of Ecommerce Alistair Watts. The panel was
completed by Duncan Ogle-Skan, Director of localisation-specialist marketing agency
EMO Local, and Leanne Tritton, MD of reputation management company ING Media.

Panel Summary:
Panellists focussed on the new challenges to large brands implementing a local
social strategy, including:
 Customer service vs. promotion orientation
 Tone of messages – formal vs. informal, conversational vs. informative, etc.
 Continuity (when key social media employees leave)
 Control vs. guidelines for employees, including pros and cons of personal
identification

Moderator Mike Weston began by asking the panellists to describe their approach
to social media. Hand Picked Hotels’ Alistair Watt responded first, describing the
challenge the company faces as being to build critical mass in the social space while
respecting the desire of local hotels to manage their own initiatives.

“We used to tell them they couldn’t do social, but
then we realised that it was their passion that was
going to drive our success in social media,” he “We had the realisation
said. “So we started looking internally for social that social is about
media ambassadors.” Watt went on to explain conversations. So we
how the company spent the first 12 months of its tried to engage more on a
involvement in social media creating a Facebook customer service level
page, only to find that no-one posted on the page than a promotional level.”
and no-one responded to the offers there. “Then -Alistair Watts
we had the realisation that social is about
conversations,” he said. “So we tried to engage more on a customer service level
than a promotional level.”

Hand Picked Hotels found that a photo competition resulted in a big jump in the
number of followers. This was followed by a photo and slogan competition that
started conversations. “We’re not making money,” Watt admitted, “but we’ve seen
pockets of success and we now have a community willing to share their involvement
with the brand. We have 3,000 followers on Facebook, which gives us a reach of
150,000 people.”

Mini’s Janis Prescott identified a similar problem to that faced by Hand Picked
Hotels.

Page | 17

“We have 150 dealerships in the UK,” she explained. “That means there’s massive
potential for disparate social presences. We are very protective of our brand, so there
are lots of difficult discussions around how we use social media. We’re a big brand
but we’re still working on our strategy to see how we can make the most of social
media.” One of those discussions, Prescott said, had been around where in the
company social media should sit. “Now we have weekly meetings and we’re trying to
do it holistically. In the long term though, everyone should manage their social media
presence.”

Leanne Tritton of ING Media agreed that lots of brands are struggling with the
question of control in the social media space, because “social media as a tool is the
complete antithesis of control.” “Many brands have just jumped in, but you need to
think of what you’re trying to achieve,” she said. “It’s like a parent talking to a toddler;
parents have rules, but toddlers have no rules.”

Finally Duncan Ogle-Skan introduced EMO as “an agency that works for big brands
in the social space. Our work used to be around the singularity of the message, but
now we concentrate on looking for the right audience for the communications we
have,” he explained. “We’ve also moved much more into training and mentoring,
rather than doing social media for people.”

He gave an example from one of his clients, BMW. Someone in their Park Lane
dealership had spotted a Tweet from singer Lily Allen asking for advice about which
4WD to try, from a shortlist of Mercedes, Volvo and Lexus. He tweeted back
suggesting Allen might like to try a BMW, and then put the singer in touch with the
right person at the dealership to organise a test-drive. Ogle-Skan emphasized that
the case study showed the benefit of the agency’s approach in mentoring the dealer
in how to approach Twitter.

Lily Allen Twitter Case Study – “the tweet stream”:

Page | 18

Tritton agreed, pointing out that the exchange “didn’t use the type of language you’d
see in a brochure”.

“You need to see how the audience wants to talk, rather than talking the way in which
you would want to talk. You need to loosen up your tone of voice,” she said. “Also
we’re completely hung up on measurement, but sometimes there are things you can’t
measure, and you just have to accept that.”

Ogle-Skan finished this exchange by highlighting the fact that, in the Super Social
Business panel on Day 1, the participants talked about social media in terms of
passion rather than performance.

The next question went to the heart of the difference between large and small
companies’ use of social media – how do you scale its use?
“For Hand Picked Hotels, social media has ended up in ecommerce, but I see my
role as creating a structure where people can use it, rather than trying to do it all
myself,” Watt said. “Where we found strong ambassadors within the business,
they’ve helped us to persuade the board of the value of social media by giving us
examples of local engagement. I’m pleased that there are tools that enable us to do
that.”

Watt was then asked whether each hotel has its own Twitter handle. “We’ve
protected the Twitter handles and so on for each of our businesses,” he replied. “But
only a handful of them engage in social media. The challenge is that someone is
enthusiastic, they build up a presence, and then they leave. Continuity is a big
problem.

Mini’s Prescott described a similar approach.
“We didn’t encourage all our dealers to use “Use common sense; be
Facebook,” she said. “They have to be able to do authentic; be personal; be
it and sustain it. We’ve told them it isn’t a job for local.”
the trainee; people have to be given training.” - Janis Prescott
Prescott explained the company had produced a
guide on how to respond: “Use common sense; be authentic; be personal; be local.”

“We’ve said they need to maintain their own Facebook page and Twitter presence.
We monitor what they’re doing and offer advice, but we don’t intervene. But then we
do find that dealers will answer questions directly on our page. It tends to be self-
regulating, though, because these people are fans.”

Tritton picked up on another concern businesses often have, that of staff members
saying inappropriate things on social networks. “If someone can’t be let loose on
Twitter, why are they let loose in the organisation?” she asked. “All communications

Page | 19

issues come back to the management of the organisation. If it’s well run and ethical,
then social media problems can be solved. What companies really need to work on is
their overall levels of trust.”

Looking outside the organisation, will “social media terrorists” ever go away?

Tritton looked on the positive side. “Companies
have always had annoying customers,” she said. “If
99% of your customers know that your product is “Companies have always
good, that will protect you.” had annoying customers.
If 99% of your customers
Watts went further. “By monitoring Twitter, you can know that your product is
sort out complaints as they go out, and stop them good, that will protect
becoming a problem. It’s much better to use social you”.
media as a loyalty vehicle than for promotions.” - Leanne Tritton

A delegate then asked whether the panellists consider clout scores.

“We’re just becoming aware of that,” Watt said. “There are better tools in the market
now, so we can match Tweets to profiles and reach. It’s really important to know who
the tweeters are. “The traditional sales manager role in my business has to change
and evolve. They need to identify key customers through Twitter and respond to
them.”

Perry Evans from the audience asked the panels’ thoughts about some research
recently done in Japan that found that the people representing a brand who used
their own name on Twitter were the most formal, while those who didn’t use a
name and simply represented the brand were the least formal and also got the best
results.

Ogle-Skan agreed that employees not being personally identified encourages a
more informal response, but he argued that this is not always the best approach.
“BMW went for just a company identifier on their tweets, but they also created
personal accounts for the cab drivers they use to ferry people around,” he said.

Prescott said the only problem she could foresee with employees not giving their
names on Twitter was that customers would struggle to get back in touch to the
person they’d spoken to about a problem, especially in a big organisation.

Ogle-Skan echoed the problem of continuity raised by Hand Picked Hotels’ Watt
earlier: “One or our clients had an employee who was a social media enthusiast who
set up a Facebook page. When they left they just shut the page down. The fact that
control didn’t reside within the business or the individual outlet then caused a
problem”

Finally the panel were asked what they thought the rules should be for
employees tweeting about their own brand?

“We set guidelines about being an ambassador for the company,” Prescott said.
“Generally people need to be more savvy.”

Tritton’s view was that these issues are covered by existing employment rules, while
Watt related an anecdote illustrating the problems companies can create for
themselves in this area: “We used to have a group of former employees expressing

Page | 20

negative views about the company on a Facebook page,” he said. “HR wanted me to
shut the page down, but I couldn’t because Facebook is blocked in our company.
The former employees knew it was blocked, so they thought the company couldn’t
see what they were posting.”


 Local branches of national brands must “act locally”.
 It’s increasingly important to identify key customers through Twitter and
respond to them.
 Agencies should train and coach clients in the correct tone and approach to
use on social channels.
 The problem of continuity needs to be addressed (internal social media
enthusiasts may leave, leaving the company with a hole in their social media
strategy.)
 Risk of external abuse must be considered, but companies have always had
annoying customers.
 Guidelines must be communicated to all employees about tweeting/posting
about the brand and how to be “brand” ambassadors.

Page | 21

Day 2, Session 6 - Panel: Can Social Media Be Outsourced
Leader: Jonathan Ewert, CEO Codero
Panellists:
 Justin Sanger, Founder JoinHere
 Seb Provencher, Founder Nedium
 Dennis Yu, CEO BlitzLocal
 Simon Baptist, European Directories
 Eric Partaker, Co-Founder Chilango

Background:
In this debate the questions we explored included:
 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?

Panel Summary:
The subject of outsourcing social media cropped up throughout the summit, but this
panel was intended to address it head on. Jonathan Ewert began by setting the
scene:

“58% of marketers use social media for more than six hours a week,” he said.
“What’s more, the more time you spend using social media, the more you do it.
Social media is already being outsourced, and outsourcing is accelerating as social
media usage becomes more complex. Usage of social media has doubled in the past
12 months, from 14% to 28%.”

“So why is outsourcing accelerating? Is one reason the falling trust in government, or
are we making our own homework?”

According to Ewert, there are three trade-offs brands need to consider:
 Having an authentic voice versus delivering a consistent message
 Having control of the message versus over-control
 Empowering your employees versus unleashing the hounds

“Why did search scale?” Ewert asked. “And can social scale in the same way?”

Justin Sanger’s response was that search is a black box, whereas social has
changed everything. We’re now looking for businesses to get involved, to engage.
That’s the scalability question.”

Ewert then asked what the right qualities are in a platform for outsourcing.

“SMBs need tools that will help them to scale,” replied Seb Provencher. “They need
to optimise the amount of time they spend managing their accounts and optimise
their responses to ‘good enough’. There needs to be software to make all this easier
for the humans.”

Page | 22

But Dennis Yu questioned how big a role software can play. “Social media is about
people. Software doing it won’t be authentic,” he said. “The first step is local
enthusiasm, the second is the introduction of process, and the third is the training
and guidelines that enable real people to do it properly. “The other problem is
resourcing. Companies will have huge call centres, but then hire one person to do
social media.”

Provencher pointed out that, although companies tend to employ small numbers of
social media staff, that doesn’t mean those staff aren’t supported. “This is the front
line, but frontline staff aren’t expected to know everything,” he said. “Even in a
complex operation, they can hand over to an
expert.”
“Where people used to
Simon Baptist meanwhile said he’d come to question a company’s lack
believe that all sectors can outsource their social of a website, soon people
media. “It’s not necessarily right for each will question the lack of a
individual business, but you can succeed through social presence.”
outsourcing,” he said. “Where people used to - Simon Baptist
question a company’s lack of a website, soon
people will question the lack of a social presence.”

Eric Partaker picked up on one of Ewert’s opening points, that the more marketers
do in social media, the more time they spend. “I spend maybe five hours a week on
Twitter, plus we have another person spending the same amount of time on
Facebook. But restaurants are different from typical SMBs; the feedback loop is
expected to be immediate. Also the business is finding its way, so I don’t see any
other way to do this.”

Ewert asked what social media functions could be covered by outsourcing?

Sanger replied that he believed engagement to be highly over-rated. “One-third of
industries are driven by emergency needs,” he said. “You have to keep the customer
in mind; who wants to get constant messages from a supplier, such as a plumber,
who they hope to never have to use again? “There is a massive set of tools
available, but when talking about social media, we’re talking about paying attention to
customers. They’ve moved from being listeners to being participants. For businesses
to succeed, they need to know how to talk to customers at the right moment, and
that’s often not through Facebook. I think we’ve been talking too much about
Facebook here.”

Ewert then raised the familiar spectre of SMBs not properly understanding
social media. “Is there a downside if you don’t understand it?” he asked.

“Every single possible downside,” Yu replied. “There are lots of companies out there
which have a good customer base and they don’t need this. What’s more, you can’t
get the best people to help SMBs, so you’re dead before you start.”

Partaker highlighted how complicated the elements involved in social media are.
“You’re dealing with the most complex variable on the planet – another human being
– and the most complex variable in business – your brand, which is a felt sensation. I
can’t see that relationship being outsourced. If you don’t own it you’ll screw yourself.
The only bit I can see being outsourced is the commoditised bit.”

Page | 23

Provencher argued that in an area such as lead
generation, where his company operates, there can
be a commoditised voice, “because there aren’t “You’re dealing with the
200 w ays of presenting an offer in 140 characters.” most complex variable on
the planet – another
Partaker’s response was that there need to be human being – and the
clear lines drawn around what can be most complex variable in
commoditised and what can’t. “The worst thing is a business – your brand,
commoditised response where a human response which is a felt sensation.”
is needed,” he said. - Eric Partaker

A question was then asked about the quality of the tools that can be used in
the commoditised areas, before and after the conversation.

Sanger replied that he believed that social is about acquisition and retention, two
things that are very separate but which are beginning to clash. “That’s happening
because the customers I’m retaining have the ability to help me with acquisition.
People often think of social from a purely marketing perspective, but much of it is
about customer retention.”

Baptist agreed. “It’s about empowering the super-promoters,” he said. “There’s a
difference between having followers and having a community.”

Partaker reiterated his point from the Super Social Business panel that acquisition
comes organically from retention. “I’m always looking for problems in my business. I
want people to blast us, because I know that when I sort out the problem I’ll get more
loyal customers as a result.”

“The number one goal of business owners is to
get close to their customers,” Sanger said. “It’s “… [in social media] … You
so much better to get close to your existing have to treat the most
customers than to acquire new ones.” influential people
differently,”
Ewert then moved on to another of his starting - Justin Sanger
questions, the problem of entrepreneurs’ time.

What can outsourcing offer an entrepreneur that is worth investing money or
time on?

Provencher was pragmatic, identifying the sweet spot as a cost of between $50 and
$100 a month. And Baptist argued that it is not simply a question of saving time, but
also of making money.

Yu however was sceptical. “The lie in the SMB space is that tools will save you time.
If the tools work you will just end up with loads more relationships to manage. And
the tools are crap anyway.”

Another question touched once again on homing in on the key influencers.

Yu argued that, when everyone’s on social media, companies have to have a way to
prioritise who they speak to. “At the moment it’s being done through PR,” he said. “In
the future it won’t be.”

Page | 24

Sanger observed that the affiliate space followed the 80:20 rule, but said he
expected the split in social media to be even greater. “You have to treat the most
influential people differently,” he said.

Note: Slide deck for this session is available here on Slideshare.


 SMBs will need to continuously evaluate their social presence.
 Software platforms can help¸ but businesses need to have a handle on the
human interaction, and its primary aims, retention and acquisition of
customers.
 Key influencers need to be dealt with differently.
 Total outsourcing is risky, and may result in loss of contact between the
company and the customer.

Page | 25

Day 2, Session 7 – Closing Keynote: Charting Collection of
Connections in Social Media. Dr. Marc Smith

Speaker: Dr Marc Smith, Director of the Social Media Research Foundation

Bio: Dr Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online
communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action
consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded
the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit
devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.

Note: The complete slide deck is available here on Slideshare.

Session Summary:
Society is now very much online. We’re now
swimming in Tweets, replies, like and so on,
and it’s very confusing, because we don’t
see the structure. We only see the next post “We’re now swimming in
or the next Tweet and it just becomes an Tweets, replies, likes and so
overwhelming sea of data. on, and it’s very confusing,
because we don’t see the
But people gathering in social media form a structure. We only see the
type of crowd. In the physical world, crowds next post or the next Tweet
are very familiar and we find it easy to make and it just becomes an
judgements about them. Is it a big crowd? Is overwhelming sea of data.”
it angry? Is it marching? When we look at –Marc Smith
social media, the challenge and the
opportunity is that crowds there are hard to
see, so we’re disorientated.

Making Maps of Social Media. What I’m interested in is making social media
crowds visible, and when we do that, we can see that the crowd pictures vary, just as
they do in the physical world. And 2011 was very much the year of the crowd; there’s
nothing that you can’t get done when you and 150,000 of your closest friends get
together and demand a change of regime.

Social media is all about connections between people (slide 3). All around
cyberspace, wherever people are linking, reviewing, rating, following - doing all the
things I call the internet verbs (slide 5) – patterns are left behind and we can analyse
those patterns. Every time you like, rate, review, follow, you create what we call an
edge, which is a connection between two entities. While that sounds abstract, in
social media, the entities are people and the relationships between them are the
internet verbs.

Creating A Social Network Tool. Our aspiration is to take network analysis the way
word processing has gone. Publishing used to be very complex but now, with word

Page | 26

processing and layout software, anyone can make decent attempt at producing a
magazine. We want to make it easy to look at social networks and see the structures
there, for example hubs (slide 7). Hubs are important in social media, but they’re not
the only structure. There are also bridges (slide 8) and clusters (slide 9) – in the
physical world you see clusters where people gather under banners based on their
sub-community within the crowd. If we take a picture, we can get an insight into the
nature of the crowd and see the structure (slide 11).

Two Key Questions to Answer. What we’re doing is the photo-ethnographic study
of crowds around the internet, and the sociological goal is to answer two questions:

 How many kinds of crowds are there?
 How many kinds of people are there?

Not in a demographic sense, but in the sense of how do people occupy the strategic
locations on the graph. Some people are hubs – in the centre of the graph – and
some are isolates. They’re on the graph but they’re not connected to anyone. If
you’re a marketer responsible for new customer acquisition, isolates are great,
because of all the people in the world, they’re ones who’ve just mentioned the name
of your brand. But if you’re looking to change an entrenched belief about your brand,
hubs are more important, because they have more influence – they are heard.

Figure: Slide 13

The Person With the Most Followers May Not Have The Most Value or
Influeance. Lots of people look at social media and look for the people with the
highest number of followers, but it’s possible to have many followers and not be the
centre of the graph. Conversely, you can have few followers but lots of influence.
That’s typically a bridge, a person who links to another group. So follower count can
lead you astray.

“Lots of people look at social media and look for the people with the
highest number of followers, but it’s possible to have many followers
and not be the centre of the graph.”
–Marc Smith

Page | 27

The key concept is centrality (slide 14). Eigenvector centrality measures how
connected you are to people who are well-connected; it’s how Google’s Page Rank
works.

Betweenness is your bridging score. It’s why two connections can be more powerful
than 200.

Figure: Slide 14

We are now living in a networked society, and we need to be able to look at these
networks, so we need tools. The tool we’ve built, NodeXL (slide 26), aspires to be a
browser for GraphML, a Firefox for networks. It’s a simple way of describing a
collection of connections.

So we’ve built open tools – NodeXL. We’re
working on open data: the NodeXL Graph “.. without that map of the
Gallery allows people to share the graphs network, all you’d know is
they’ve created (slide 28). We would love to that the volume of calls to
see you using the tool, and if you do produce your helpdesk had shot
graphs with it, we’d love you to share them in up, with no explanation
the graph gallery. And we encourage open why.”
scholarship (slide 29). –Marc Smith

Our goal with the graph gallery is to have a
taxonomy of all the types of social media structures, and to be able to identify them,
to be able to say that this structure is typical of a juvenile community, while this is
typical of one that is mature.

Pictures tell stories. Most people are not statistical thinkers. If I only show you the
spreadsheets the graphs are based on, they would be much less compelling than the
graphs, and we wouldn’t be able to come up with the stories we can tell if we see the
images. For example, the balance of clusters and isolates says something about the
nature of the subject, because isolates are people who are not yet part of the
community, and if people are talking about a product, a graph with lots of isolates is

Page | 28

typical of a brand, while one where there are no isolates shows a well-connected
community. So we have a thermometer for “brandiness”.

When social media strategists do social media for a client, their tools are insufficient
to show what they’ve achieved. Only a network perspective can show what’s a brand,
what’s a community, and what’s in-between. This is the only tool we know of that can
show what happens in social media when a marketer runs a promotion, not just in
terms of volume, but in terms of the structure of the crowds around the product.

Using these graphs, we’re starting to understand the different flavours of
social media. We can recognise the different flavours of message boards, for
example. And if we look at a series of graphs of the same message board over time,
we can start to see trajectories. For example, we can recognise the answer people in
a community, for example. You can tell them because they have a lot of outbound
links but very few inbound links. People get answers from them, but rarely reply to
them. So we can see when these people leave, and the number one reason they
leave is because of hurt feelings, because they feel unappreciated. And often the
only thing it takes to get them back is a branded coffee mug; something that makes
them feel appreciated. The amount of money these people can save you in customer
service resources is hugely significant. However, without that map of the network, all
you’d know is that the volume of calls to your helpdesk had shot up, with no
explanation why.

I think of this as a kind of social camera for visualising the invisible crowds in
cyberspace. We’re the Kodak Brownie, the consumer-grade product. And just as
real-world photography gets used in mundane ways for business, we can now use
this cyber-photography for similarly mundane but important tasks.

LSS Insights - Day 2, Session 7 – Closing Keynote:

 Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be used to make the online crowds
visible.
 Every time a user likes, rates, reviews, follows or post a links this creates an
edge. These edges expand beyond to the Open Graph of people to a graph
of interests and intentions.
 The person with the most followers or most retweet may not be the most
important, influential or valuable within any group or community.
 The key is Eigenvector centrality, as this measures how connected a person
is to people who are well-connected.
 Many of the tools that social media strategists are using today are
insufficient.
 Social graphs can become maps that will help guide and create meaning for
business, institutions and governments.

Page | 29

About Local Social Summit & This Report
This report was edited by Dylan Fuller and Mike Abeyta.

You can follow Dylan on Twitter @afullerview. You will find Mike on LinkedIn:
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mikeabeyta

Mike Nutley wrote the bulk of the session summaries. You can find him here on
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/michaelnutley

Thanks again to all our speakers, panellist, moderators and attendees.

Local Social Summit (LSS) was co-founded by Dylan Fuller and Simon Baptist.

Contact details:
 dylan@localsocialsumimit.com
 simon@localsocialsummit.com

Local Social Summit is an independent event for knowledge sharing and
networking that explores the intersection of Local and Social Media. We strive to
educate and inspire with a focus on the cutting edge by showcasing emerging trends
at the intersection of Local, Social and Mobile. LSS is designed for a wide spectrum
of Local Media stakeholders, including publishers, advertisers, start-ups and
investors.

The co-founders would like acknowledge and thank the LSS advisory board for all
their important contributions and time invested in helping make LSS the industry
leading event for local social. As one 2011 participant who goes to more than 20
events in a year globally said: “LSS was the best conference I attended in 2011,
thanks!”

The LSS 2011 Advisory Board Included:
 Greg Sterling – Analyst and contributing Editor for Search Engine Land.
 Seb Provencher - Web entrepreneur and Co-founder Needium.
 Perry Evans – CEO at Closey. Serial entrepreneur.
 Jonathan Ewert – CEO at Codero, proven c-level executive.
 Mike Abeyta - Co-Founder and Director, Akesios Search Analytics.

Thank you advisors!

Local Social Summit can be found on the Internet at the following locations:
 Slide Presentations – slideshare.net/LocalSocialSummit
 Facebook – facebook.com/localsocialsummit
 Twitter – @locsocsummit
 Tumblr - localsocialsummit.tumblr.com/
 YouTube - youtube.com/user/localsocialsummit

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LSS’11 Sponsors
We want to thank our sponsors for their support, input and for being forward thinking.
Without sponsors Local Social Summit would not be possible.

BlitzLocal serves retail and and franchised
companies that need local presence.
http://www.blitzlocal.com/

deCarta is the leading provider of advanced and
comprehensive geospatial software platforms for
today’s cutting-edge Internet, mobile, personal
navigation and enterprise location-based service
(LBS) applications. http://www.decarta.com/
InnerBalloons helps traditional publishing
businesses innovate into vertical and local search
players and help these niche sites drive greater
revenues and profitability.
http://www.innerballoons.com/
JoinHere provides a social engagement platform
that enables businesses to consolidate and
organize their social network.
http://www.facebook.com/JoinHere

Needium is a social lead generation tool for SMBs.
http://needium.com/

Social Media Research Foundation: We are
social media researchers who want to create open
tools, generate and host open data, and support
open scholarship related to social media.
http://www.smrfoundation.org/

If you are interested in sponsoring Local Social Summit 2012 in November
please contact us on email: info@localsocialsumit.com

Page | 31

Local Social Summit 2012: Dates & Information

Local Social Summit 2012 (LSS’12): is scheduled for 14-15 November 2012 in
London. We are confident that LSS’12 will exceed all previous LSS events in terms of
content, engagement, insights, learning and networking opportunities. We are also
working on plans to offer LSS attendees and sponsors additional benefits, so please
stay tuned.

Additionally, London is hosting the Olympics this year, the first truly 100% digital
Olympics. We will be on the front line of this exciting global event and we are sure
that this will be a major topic for LSS ’12.

Topics for 2012 will include:
 SoLoMo Picks up Speed
 Social Travel
 The Connected Consumer
 Insights from London 2012: The 1st Digital Olympics
 Big Brands Local
 Super Social Business - New Case Studies
 Hyperlocal in Europe
 Innovation in Local Social Vertical Apps
 Social Network Analysis
 The Local Facebook Opportunity

Attending LSS’12:
If you are planning to attend LSS’12 the Early Bird tickets are now available here -
http://lss2012.eventbrite.com/

Page | 32

Sponsorship Opportunities for Local Social Summit 2012
“Sponsoring this event gave Akesios considerable exposure and networking
opportunities to both the market influencers and to prospective clients.”
- Ben Barney, CEO, Akesios

LSS is funded by our proud and forward-thinking sponsors who receive visibility as
thought leaders at exhibition/breakout sessions (workshops, labs, the demo zone
etc), networking and other benefits according to their sponsorship level. Sponsors
are selected based upon their ability and desire to contribute to the dialog of the
conference, and to provide the highest value content to the attendees.

Past attendees include people from companies including: BBC, Burger King,
Deutsche Telekom, eBay, Eniro, Facebook, Foursquare, European Directories,
Google, ITV, Lyris, Microsoft, NDS, Northcliffe Media, Nokia, Nomura, Ogilvy
Interactive, Schibsted, Seat Pagine Gialle, Sky, Swisscom, The Toronto Star,
Travelzoo, We Are Social, Yell and Yelp.

Over 60% of the participants are at board or executive decision making level with
titles like: CEO, CTO, CxO, Managing Director, General Manager, Senior Vice
President and Founder.

For more information on speaking and sponsorship opportunities for LSS 2012
please contact us on email: info@localsocialsumit.com

Page | 33

Local Social Summit 2011 Conference Report

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