This sponsored post was produced by Marc Prioleau, Managing Director of Prioleau Advisors.
The convergence of Social, Local and Mobile (or SoLoMo as coined by John Doerr) generated a lot of excitement in 2011 as technologists breathlessly envisioned these three mega-trends colliding in some sort of cosmic Venn diagram convergence that would rain joy on users, sales on advertisers and money on those companies that connected the two. For the last year, the tech blogs have raced to identify and highlight (pun intended) The Next Next Thing that would bring all this together and unleash the billions of dollars in local ad spend that we (and luxury car dealers all over Silicon Valley) are all waiting for.
A year later, are we there yet? No, not really. While interest in location-targeted advertising is high, spending isn’t. Advertisers have experimented with small buys but have yet spent the big dollars that are forecast for this market. The question on many people’s mind is “What will it take?”.
There may be several reasons, but one has been a failure to communicate, specifically between the service providers and the advertisers. Service provides bring out a series of new innovations that offer check-ins, geo-fences, ambient location and so on. However, advertising folks don’t wake up thinking “I need geofencing!”. They do wake up thinking about reaching new audiences, improving footfall, building loyalty and so on. Until service providers describe their offerings in the language of the advertisers, we won’t see much beyond tepid response.
The good news is that each year we get closer. Three years ago, the gulf between advertisers and services was huge. They just were not talking the same language. Today, we have a lot more data. We’ve seen some things that work and, equally importantly, some that don’t. And we’ve had some brave brands willing to be out there on the cutting edge to figure out how to use location and social in combination to connect with their customers.
And we’re starting to see some of those brands put a stake in the ground and really make social-location a cornerstone of their strategy. We all know the stats about mobile adoption and share of mind. It’s going to happen, but it isn’t as easy or immediate as we’d once thought.
This month’s Social-Loco conference in San Francisco hopes to address some of that narrowing communications gap. By bringing brands and agencies together with social-location service providers, it aims to bridge that divide and move this market one step closer to the potential that many still envision.
Social-Loco: the convergence of the social web, mobile and local-business (SoLoMo)
Social-Loco will dive into social, Location and mobile web convergence, and what that means for the tech ecosystem, brands, agencies and consumers. Learn from real-world successes in daily deals, location based services and advertising, mobile marketing platforms and more. Executives from Facebook, Google, Waze, ATTi, Microsoft and leading investors will address these topics in a highly interactive setting.
Social-Loco: The Future of the Social Location Revolution June 18th, Mission Bay Conference Center, San Francisco, CAhttp://www.socialloco.net
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