commbasics

Last week, I said that the real money and growth potential in location-based services is not in people telling the world where they bought their coffee, but with the ability of less public admission of involvement with community.   Most people are not really comfortable having their personal doing publicly broadcast, or at least not being able to control what goes out and who sees it.  This is the potential killer of social media growth.  They will, however, share lots of stuff within a small circle of people they know... and no one else.  This is the market that some social media startups are starting to exploit.   Location-based services are an outstanding way for individuals to support local businesses and non-profits without ever letting the outside world know it's happening.  Within their communities they can share what they support and even compete in game-play for community activism.  As I mentioned, DeHood is putting significant res...

  Social media is not a fad .  It’s here to stay.  But the current incarnation is reaching a saturation point.  Almost everyone who is interested in being connected to a social platform has done so to whatever degree they want.  What is creating a barrier to adoption is the issue of privacy .  Let’s face it.  People are overwhelmed by the amount of data coming at them now.  They are finding subjective and subconscious ways of filtering it out either by ignoring the information or by actively removing themselves from the conversation (e.g. closing a Facebook account) .  This activity, while nascent at present, is the golden-goose kiler for social media.  If people actually start walking away in droves, that’s going to be a problem for a lot of companies.     Now I’ve made it clear that I believe privacy is not really an issue .  It’s something anyone can control if they wish, but the fact is, most people want t...

This post was going to focus, primarily on Dehood , but since writing part two of this series, I fell into a new world of the Social Web companies from all over the world and I have discovered they fall mostly into 5 buckets: sharing stuff rating stuff measuring stuff organizing stuff selling stuff  All of that is great for marketers.  The more people participate in all of that stuff, the more information marketers have on the participants, so it's easy to sell stuff, which is the biggest part of the Social Web.  That's where it leaves a lot of people out of participation because there is so much emphasis on the latter, that the rest seems to be rather manipulative.    That's a big problem because the whole point of the web, in the first place, is to bring people together and the social movement has been co-opted by the sales departments of the corporate world.  If you pay attention to the big players in the Social Web industry -- Facebook...

Last week I started a series on the importance and future of geolocal (also called geosocial) apps and outlined a few of the roadblocks to success including the lack of widespread adoption of the underlying technology (smart phones), holding the interest of the audience, and the lack of community building inherent in the current options.  Today I want to look more into that last problem and how some players are overcoming it. As I said last week, the big benefit of social media is its ability to build communities through the web.  But those communities are, for the most part, virtual.  If you are in Facebook or any other platform, you have a large group of people in your network that you have never actually met face to face.  Yet, you are in contact with them regularly no matter where they are in the world.  you know a lot about them and you have several common interests.  However, try to do that on a local level with social media and you run into a p...