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Yes, this is a post about location services, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Ever dabbled with LastFM? If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a platform that talks to your PC / phone / iPod and keeps a record of all the music that you play. Over time, as it gathers a nicely rounded picture of your tastes, it recommends other music for you to listen to that it thinks you will like, usually very effectively.

In true narcissistic web 2.0 fashion, (or 3.7, or whatever we’re up to now), one of the most enthralling things about LastFM is the ability to look back over your data, seeing which artists you listened to most over the last year, or which tracks rocked your socks last month and so on.

Once you get into the habit of peering at yourself through the LastFM prism it doesn’t take long for you to become a little self-conscious about your listening habits.

Did I really listen to Sophie Ellis-Bexter for 6 consecutive hours last Monday?

Oh god, the ‘Too Fast, Too Furious’ soundtrack is showing up in my stream…

With the knowledge that your tastes are now openly displayed to the world you may well find yourself curating your listening habits to present the most edgy / cosmopolitan / intellectual / clued-up version of yourself you can muster.
Nothing much new there. Who hasn’t hastily rearranged their CD collection in anticipation of impressing that date who’s coming over for the first time?
John Coltrane and Bach mysteriously find their way to the fore, while Linkin Park and Maroon 5 are banished to the outer darkness. A lovingly crafted public image is not a recent invention.

But what if your LastFM page, or indeed your home CD collection, consisted of only two albums? Imagine seeing page after page of LastFM data that consisted of nothing but the same handful of songs endlessly rotating. Showing anyone that your musical taste verged on the binary would put you, in terms of cultural, emotional and intellectual pioneering, somewhere just south of Jim Davidson.

Yet this is almost exactly what a vast swathe of foursquare users are experiencing right now, but with location data rather than music.
One of the best and worst things about the location-based social network is that it demonstrates just how unadventurous life is for the vast majority of us.

Don’t take my word for it, look through your FourSquare friends and see how many of their histories consist of train station / office / train station, day after day, broken up only by the occasional check-in at a Starbucks.
Hell, look over your own history – it’s probably you I’m describing.

foursquare does a really great job of highlighting to us just how mind-numbingly routine our lives can be; the location-based equivalent of listening to nothing but The Lighthouse Family.

An unpleasant truth is that we often change ourselves only when we are suddenly embarrassed by a facet of our lives of which we were previously unaware. There’s nothing like seeing a photo of yourself taken at an unexpected and alien angle to get you into that weight-loss program you’ve been meaning to get on with.

Just like viewing the mundanity of your musical taste with LastFM and taking steps to broaden it using their recommendation engine, there’s a real opportunity for location networks like foursquare, (and let’s not forget the recently-launched, yet currently rather boring Facebook Places), to inject some adventure into our usual routes without our having to become polar explorers.

How nice would it be if, once foursquare gathered enough data on your travels to establish that you’re falling into a routine, it suggested a point of interest based on the path between your two most-travelled check-ins that required you to take a very slight diversion to experience it. Maybe only a ten minute diversion…hardly any effort at all, but enough to introduce a tiny little glitch of colour into the otherwise beige matrix of your daily traipse.

Imagine getting out at Totteridge & Whetstone tube station for the 10th day in row, but instead of heading east and going straight home your location software nudges you and lets you know that just 200 metres west is one of London’s oldest trees, standing at an impressive 2,000 years old.

Worth taking a small diversion for? Yes, probably, when it’s not raining.

By making location services more active and disruptive rather than the relatively passive data receptacles they are at the moment they will be able to combat fatal check-in fatigue and encourage us to have less of a ‘two-album’ repertoire of personal location data.

Why submit data to a service when it’s not going to make much of a discernible difference to your life? Staring at yourself in a mirror is only entertaining for so long – after a while you want to feel like there’s a different person looking back at you.
Many people love LastFM for exactly this reason – they see a real-world, positive disruption feeding back into their lives from the data they submit and, most cruically, it’s personal to them.

Like so many other massively multiplayer online games, the points, badges & mayorships of a network like foursquare are most fun to the people who got in early. For the average adopter, trying to catch up with this elite can appear to be an almost insurmountable task, whereas feedback and positive disruption powered by a recommendation engine defined by your own personal actions remains infinitely, well…personal.

We see it all the time, and now it heads to Twitter : “There’s Too Many People Here Syndrome”.

You know the place, that little bar that was once hip, and then everyone found out about it, it got busy, all the early people weren’t recognised as “being there first”, so they decided it wasn’t very good anymore. And it happens all the time on the net – Usenet groups, IRC channels, forums. And now Social Media Snobs are leaving Twitter in numbers as they believe popularity and credibility are mutually exclusive, and even if they can prove they were “here before you” it doesn’t change the fact that something that was once “their special thing” is now part of the mainstream.

But allow me to offer a counterpoint: what if it’s not snobbery? There have been significant studies in the area – the Dunbar Number, made popular by Gladwell’s Tipping Point, states than around 150 contacts is as many stable personal relationships our brains can manage. So it could be argued that as the number of people visiting somewhere increases, the chance for our brains to process all these people is reduced.

I’d love to know your thoughts – snobbery or science? And could this diagram be bettered in anyway?

(With credit to Diesel Sweeties for the original “Music snobs” idea, go buy his stuff!)

Recruitment time here at Outside Line, as we’re looking to add another all-star member to our Marketing Team. We’re looking for a Social Media Marketing Executive, who’ll help plan, execute and track social media campaigns for the many interesting brands within our roster.

In our heads we’ve got an idea of the person we want, and it’s less to do with on-the-job experience and more about passion for social media and “super geek know-how”.

If Twitter and Facebook are like water and oxygen for you (or someone you know) please take a read of the job spec and get in touch.

Ok.. so I will be coming back to this when I have had a chance to fully consider my response but the report by Knowledge Networks seems to be a perfect example of a lack of genuine understanding of the medium. 

I think this statement says it all… 

“Obviously, a lot of people are using social media, but they are not explicitly turning to it for marketing purposes, or for finding out what products to buy. It’s really about connecting with friends, or connecting with other people,” says Dave Tice, vice president and group account director at Knowledge Networks, and the top analyst behind the report. “What we’re seeing is that word-of-mouth is still the No. 1 most influential source, followed by TV.”

Ok so if WOM is number 1 and Social Media is great at connecting with people then how about we use social media as a means of creating advocates and generating positive word of mouth… oh hang on, thats what real social media marketeers are doing.

I haven’t read the research in full yet or had time to digest it so I reserve the right to apologise if i have all this wrong but  I am guessing that what the research predominantly focuses on is classic advertising style executions in social spaces, which isn’t social media marketing!

More soon.

In a previous life I was a counter jockey in a independent record shop. Before I started there, I was a huge fan of Electroclash music, and not much else – I’d been a bit of a BritPop kid, but had discovered the Manchester club scene and now listened to nothing but noisy/shouty dance records made by people in Shoreditch. And then I started working in the shop with a group of people, all who had their different backgrounds, their unique tastes, their personal music histories, and through this I became exposed to all manner of new music. And after 3 years I left with a broader knowledge of music than I could ever have imagined.

So what’s this got to do with the price of fish? Well yesterday, myself and Dan headed down to our first Measurement Camp, a London-based monthly meet-up of people interested in tracking social media activity. And I couldn’t help but think back to my days in the record shop. I think most of the strength from the event comes from the disparate backgrounds of those attending – PR types, digital nerds, market research companies, search engine optimisation people, analytical data-fiends – all coming from their specialist areas to the fertile ground of social media, and bringing their own tried and trusted tools & techniques to be shared around.

Case in point? “Net Promoter Score” is a measurement beloved of clients, which aims to track how word of mouth is allowing positive customer satisfaction to spread. And combined with a digital approach to tracking popularity on social networks (Facebook fans, Twitter comments, blog posts) this can show whether a product’s postive messaging is “dripping down” from the creators and experts to the family and friend level. An approach which combines the best of different worlds.

And it’s interesting to hear the deep-rooted issues in areas which you might only dip in and out of during your day job. A SEO expert told me that “Linking up search and social media is the way forward thinking companies are going, and social media can help me create a footprint I know Google are gearing their algorithms towards”. These nuggets of insight are  probably all over the internet, if you go searching for them. But to get them from sitting opposite 5 new faces from 5 different fields is a perfect chance to expose yourself to fresh thinking.

See you all next month. I’ll bring my iPod.

More great shots like the one above at @hyku’s Flickr page – looks like that massive lens was worth lugging over from the US!

The public domain is exactly that – once you say something, it’s out there, and you’d better believe people are ready to find it. Case in point? @omgamandaa updated her Twitter stream asking for help in tracking down a place to download Adventureland, a new Miramax comedy. Miramax dropped her a Tweet back gently asking her to take the moral high ground, and tagging the FBI into the conversation. And after she decided to call off the torrent-hunt, they proceeded to offer Amanda two free tickets to see the movie at her local cinema.

This is great example of a brand using social media properly, not being afraid to tackle a thorny subject and winning fans online. Good work.