Where Local Meets Social

Next week, I will be attending the BIA/Kelsey ILM West conference in San Francisco. As always, they’ve put together a great line-up of speakers. Here are the presentations/keynotes I’m most looking forward to:

Day 1: Monday, Dec. 12

• The opening keynote with Bob Pittman, CEO, Clear Channel Media Holdings. Always interested in hearing from radio station executives, curious about their Internet strategy.
• The interview with Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital.  I want to know what she thinks of “local” and “local/social”. I am also curious about her point of views on local traditional media’s Internet strategy and execution.
• The unveiling of the “Wave XV” of the Local Commerce Monitor. Always a lot of exciting data points.
• The “New Wave of Local Lead Generation” panel
• The “Facebook Next: Leveraging the Platform for Local” panel

Day 2: Tuesday, Dec. 13

• The special comScore Research presentation on “The Data on Local Usage”
• The presentation from Court Cunningham (CEO at Yodle), on “The Top-Level View on Local Sales”
• The afternoon keynote with Matt Idema, Director of Monetization Product Marketing at Facebook

Day 3: Wednesday, Dec. 14

• The fireside chats on Local Media Transformation with Mok Oh, Chief Scientist, PayPal and Bo Fishback, CEO and Cofounder, Zaarly
• The last panel on The Future of SoLoMo

You can get a special $200 rebate if you signup with the discount code SEB

If you want to connect at the event (or in San Francisco), ping me at seb AT needium.com

It’s social, it’s local and it’s called area/code. Michael Surtees of DesignNotes attended the recent PSFK Conference in New York and reported on the presentation done by software services company area/code; “Of all the presenters at the PSFK Conference, the one that shifted my thinking the most in a different light was Kevin Slavin of area/code. They’ve taken the idea of game to the outside of streets. Between the technology, using maps of cities and the social aspect of play mashed together, it was something that really made me reconsider my environment and the role of play. I ran into Kevin briefly after the conference where he gave me his business card. I’m hoping in the next couple weeks to do a blog interview with him – stay tuned…”. Also on DesignNotes, a post on semacodes (that’s the Kaywa reader above), “On Tuesday at the PSFK Conference I saw semacode in action with area/code. A day or two before that I noticed a post from do.palicio.us about semacode too. If you consider that almost every single person has a cell phone and I’m guessing that more than half have a camera with the ability to surf the web. If you combine that technology, semacodes become quite fascinating. More so because it acts as an identifying mark or key that allows a person to collect information with a single click.”.

What it means: There’s still a lot of room to explore the convergence of local + social, we’re just at the beginning.

Found via Streetsblog