I’ve talked a couple of times about the small insight I’ve had into the whole “social media thing”, really as an outsider getting peak behind the curtain.

Part of tonight’s dinner discussion turned into the use of location services. It seems only about a quarter of smart phone regularly use a location based application (Yelp, Google, Vegas Mate and so on) to get recommendations based on their location. I found that number surprisingly low, it’s one of the things I find most useful about my iPhone.

The next logical step is to turn it into more of a push rather than pull system. Enter check-in apps such as Foursquare. At the moment only a tiny fraction of smartphone users, something like 3-4%, use check-in apps to broadcast their location.

While I don’t use Foursquare or any of the similar services, I’m just not that interesting, but location broadcasts regularly show up in my twitter feed. And lets not forget, I’m in geek central today and this group is not a particularly representative it comes to these things.

So, what does a push location application like Foursquare give you? It connects you people you know in the same general area and gives you a chance to connect.

Tonight a couple of people who joined us found out about what was happening at Mesa when someone they follow checked in on Foursquare. This led to a Tweet and they changed their plans to join us. There is a lot of enthusiasm for that sort of location-based app and finding out more about them is on my CES to do list.

Within the social media community the use of location checking in is fairly high, and I think this brings us to one of the issues, people who consider themselves “Social Media Insiders” forget that not everyone does it their way.

It’s this navel gazing I talked about here.

There are significant differences between how people inside and outside SM (and as I said, I consider myself outside, being allowed to peek behind the curtain) use the tools that are available.

Facebook is primarily a network of your friends, people come to it with different interests. I don’t do Facebook much, but I’m getting that puts me in a minority. The reasons I don’t really do Facebook are almost all around intellectual property ownership.

Twitter on the other hand is something I do use and find very useful. It fills a slightly different role. It’s more about sharing subjects with people that interest us, rather than Facebook where the same level of news amalgamation does not happen.

The third thing is blogs, clearly I blog, and I blog in more than one place. I subscribe to both Social Media and non-SM blogs, and the way people outside SM use blogs is different. The best way I can put it is less information sharing and more story telling. A close friend used his blog to record his year long cycle adventure across the US and North Africa.

It’s about how people use the Internet, the differences between people using it to connect and people who are trying to make an impact or perhaps even a living out of it. Inside the Social Media world people get wrapped up in how it’s used by the industry (navel gazing), rather than how the real world uses it.

And the real world is where the majority of people, and therefore a majority of the customers are.

I’ve been thinking about this, and have some thoughts that are not fully formed yet. Tonight helped put some of them into some order, but I’ve along way to go until they are really coherent.

The real answer lies in asking other people. My first step in this was setting up a meeting with the head of social media at work next week, it promises to be interesting. I’m intrigued as to how return on the Social Media investment is being measured and the effectiveness of certain campaigns.

There has been a lot of talk of brand loyalty being reinforced through social media, but what does that mean in the real world?

Does my local Thai restaurant look at their Yelp ratings? (I just did they are pretty good, and I agree). I’ve no idea if the local coffee hut has a Facebook page, but if they do has it been worth the effort? When I go to the vineyard to pick up my wine selection next month I’ll ask what value they get from their rather active twitter feed.

The bottom line from these incomplete thoughts is Social Media has to have an off-line real world impact if it’s to provide any value to real world customers.

With out adding this value it really is a bunch of people telling each other how awesome this all is. No added value for the customer means they don’t need it and that makes it really difficult to monetize anything.  Maybe I’m just too cynical in the cold light of day.
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Related articles

• Foursquare – we know where you are (russellimrie.wordpress.com)
• Wondering about Social Media? (relylocalnewbritainberlinct.wordpress.com)
• Watch Out for Social Media Potholes (socialmediatoday.com)

The origin of the Boxing Day holiday goes back a long way. The downstairs staff would get the day off after serving their masters and guests on Christmas day. One version is that the staff would get their Christmas bonus, still known by some in the UK as the “Christmas Box”.

Where ever the name comes from there have been football games on boxing day for many years. Starting with the first year of the league in 1888 when Preston North End‘s beat Derby County 5-0. By the way, Preston North End went on to win the first League championship.

Ever since then there have been a full list of Boxing Day fixtures. Typically they are local derby games, while Woking played Farnborough, 20 miles away Chelsea took on West London rivals Fulham.

Woking have been averaging 1400ish so far this year, yesterday they had a crowd of just over 3000. Clearly Boxing Day fixtures are seen by many as an excuse to get out the house for a few hours. And perhaps take the chance to swap leftover turkey for a pie and a pint in the pub before hand.

Today I went to London to meet some friends for lunch. I did this last year and arrangements were similar: downstairs bar the Hard rock Café sometime around one.  Lunch was good , stories told, laughs shared and beer drunk.

In addition to lunch I spent a couple of hours in the Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Every time I visit I find a new artist whose work I like, and today it was Lynn Leeson. there were a couple of interesting pieces. Once again I sure many people know who she and are shaking thatir head at my lack of knowledge, I really don’t think I’m that much of a philistine, but it’s just how it is.

This is just about my favorite piece of art anywhere, Whaam! by Roy Lichtenstein. It’s part of the permanent collection of the Tate Modern, it’s a gallery I can spend many hours wandering around. There was an Gerhard Richter exhibit going on, it’s art on a large scale and rather good.

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Related articles

• The best exhibitions of 2012 (telegraph.co.uk)
• Slick art sponsorship: BP and the Tate (guardian.co.uk)

Yesterday I had a spike in visitors, mostly through a couple of links, however somehow the following search terms (and both the terms and the spelling used are genuine) led people to davekean.com, and I’ve no idea why their particular journey ended up here.

• Tripping on LSD
• Tripping on LSD at borobudur
• mail man Everett
• Trodden town rang its cobbles
• Scientific things that can be produced
• Keaith chegwin anal
• Made to exhibition
• Good packets casey
• Nordic godess next
• Landrover 90 dashboard
• Hohoho in japanese
• Portscum timber (had to throw that in)
• kyoto baroque station
• where are my curtains?
• Hill movember
• Lightweight concrete plinths

I really hope people found what they were looking for (including their curtains) and that the cobbles were rang if that’s what they wanted.

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