Four Questions on Geosocial with CBC's Nick Jones
Nick Jones is Director of Digital Product Development at the CBC, and he'll be speaking next week about geo-social media at the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver next week.
We caught up with Nick with a few questions on geo-social and the digital space in general.
TV: What are you going to be talking about at the conference?
NJ: I am going to be speaking about geosocial … the convergence of social, local and mobile. In a nutshell, more and more individuals own and user smartphones and other mobile devices that are location aware and social media enabled. The result? Social media sharing is increasingly location and action orientated. Although it does not apply to all business, those with geosocial opportunities for products and services should work to understand, engage in and leverage geosocial to contribute to their success.
TV: How can news organizations more effectively integrate geo-location technologies into their work?
NJ: Location-based awareness and geolocation related to users' digital devices represents a huge opportunity for news organizations to provide customized and highly relevant and valuable news content and related services to users.
For example, imagine a news service that uses your device location activity to identify your regular zone of movement. Most of us have a home location, a transit route and a work location and tend to spend a majority of our time in those locations and moving back and forth between them. Wouldn't it be great if a news service was able to understand this and then provide filtered content for either location and the transit route between? As well, one could imagine that such a service would allow you to tweak or customize the content delivered
News is currently buckshot with some high level filtering. It could be much more customized, local and relevant.
TV: What are the barriers to greater adoption of geo-location centric apps like Foursquare?
NJ: Foursquare and similar location bases services have tapped into a distinct location-content-sharing opportunity with digital users. They have even inspired similar services in other social media (for example, Facebook's Places). So there is clearly something there.
The challenge is that after the novelty comes to an end, the impetus to "check in" becomes pretty weak. Even with the reward systems put into place--becoming the mayor or getting a badge--there is little ongoing value or reward for the activity.
For these types of services to really succeed I believe that they need to provide real world relevance and rewards. For example, I check in and get an update with relevant specials and offers in the surrounding block around where I am located.
I also wonder if the whole check-in thing will be come or needs to become automatic. That is, instead of checking-in, my devices knows I am at Starbucks, checks in and identifies rewards that might be relevant to me, all automatically.
TV: It’s apparent to me that digital rights issues--privacy, copyright and so forth--don’t matter very much to the majority of Canadians. That is, they’re not a high priority when Canadians vote. Will that ever change?
NJ: Digital rights is an interesting question. I think consumers today face a unique and challenging situation from a content acquisition and consumption perspective. First, there are a multitude of "legal" sources of content that is either paid (for example, paid cable TV service) or sponsored (for example, video-on-demand with pre-roll and mid-roll ads). At the same time there is also a plethora of content that is available where it is unclear if it is legal or not: videos on YouTube, music tracks that a friend gives to you, documents posted online. For the average consumer, it is actually pretty hard to determine exactly what is legal or not. They only think they know is that the content is apparently available. I don't know if consumers intentionally disregard digital rights or whether it is just so confusing or grey that it is hard to tell what is what.
Given the demand for it, content is being shared (legally and illegally) between consumers at a growing rate. If legal content is available and easily shareable users will share it. If it is not easily available or shareable in a legal way, they will often find the content in illegal ways. So why not work to make all content that you have available in a legal way that is easy to share? Either pay for it via advertising or offer easy to use pay-per-use models to access the content.
