Welcome back to Social Town: Location Based Social Media Update
Jul 13 2010 3:51:24 PMBy Morgan Graham
March 2010:
Remember this? Welcome to Social Town
“To help, we mapped ‘Social Town’ to demonstrate how social channels are no longer about singular entities but an interconnected network– linking both social and non-social channels. Remember: this is an ever changing model. What is true today may not be true tomorrow; we may have to create a completely new infographic in six months.”
July 2010:
Well, we were right. As social media is an ever-changing model, here we are just four months later providing an update to what’s happening in Social Town. Shortly after creating this graphic, Google’s Buzz fell out of the airwaves (I guess people realized it brought no added value) hence why you now see a deteriorating, saddened Buzz on the landscape. Surprisingly, no roads have changed or have been destroyed, but you will notice new spacey additions: Gowalla, Foursquare, and Yelp up there in the stratosphere.
Though these social media channels (we call them Location Based Social Media, or LBSM, as no one has caught on to a defined term yet) were around when we created Social Town, LBSM has recently exploded in both use and market awareness. User bases have nearly doubled in Gowalla, Foursquare, and MyTown (MyTown is another great LBSM, however, we felt Yelp may have more future potential but too new to look at statistics) in the last six months (faster than Twitter). They go hand-in-hand with smartphone users (literally) and geomarketing is creating new communication opportunities for businesses. Yelp, the “odd one”and previously limited to reputation-management and business reviews, has added LBSM to their mix – making it a major competitor.
How does LBSM impact Social Town? As if our city’s streets aren’t complicated enough, we’ve decided to add “space” into our landscape, as LBSM platforms broadcast location-based information “mobilely” (not a word, but you know what I mean) to Facebook and Twitter from users’ exact locations. Foursquare is unique in that users’ check-ins and data can appear in Bing maps with an added application. Keep in mind that like satellites around earth (have you seen this this?!), there is a massive amount of other LBSM’s waiting for one of these suckers to slip up to take its place.
So, what has always been true will continue to be true: what is true today may not be true tomorrow. We’ll update Social Town when the next social revolution happens (perhaps we’ll add an underground network?)
If you’d like to know more about these channels in detail and learn how to mix these into your marketing strategy, check out our blog post on Location Based Social Media and Geomarketing.
Morgan Graham
Social Media Producer | Project Manager
[...] Read more on how Social Town is evolving and expanding into space. [...]