Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

I went to Open Coffee here in Helsinki today. It was nice to sit down with a bunch of people you don’t know and talk shop. One of the topics that was brought was this trend of presence sensitivity in mobile phones. The idea is that your phone offers you information based on where you are, either via GPS, cell tower triangulation or even Bluetooth. Wired had a so-so article about hyperlocality a while ago that offers a rundown on how the future might shape.

There are some pretty cool trends in this field, for example Wi-Fi coming to cameras and other gadgets via cheap memory cards and of course Nokia is making moves towards this field with their acquisition of Naviteq. Also, geotagging seems to be working on Nokia phones now (got the link from Ville), so look for more from Finland’s big blue in this field.

I have no doubt that hyperlocal information is very much in our immediate future, but what I’m not so sure about is we’re going to act in this future once we get there. The Wired article to me reads as a typical techie’s wet dream where the human factors of such technologies are completely ignored. Most scenarios about hyperlocal information describe people wandering around cities while constantly being delighted by a nonstop push of information on restaurants or shops through their mobile phones. While I think some people might even enjoy this in some instances, I think traveling is about discovery and searching for unique experiences.

Brandchannel had an excellent article on the upcoming trend of exclusivity in social networks, which is well worth a read. Those of us who’ve been on Facebook longer than three months probably agree with the notion that once the gold rush to the site started, the place just hasn’t been the same anymore. You get invites to the dumbest of causes or applications (trust me, I’m guilty of sending out a few!) from friends and now most of them get the “ignore” reaction immediately. Sami N described that “Facebook apps are in general the 21st century equivalent of direct mail”, which I think is very accurate. I read a study for my thesis called “Dynamics of Viral Marketing” (which I can’t link here, sorry) that shows how rapidly word-of-mouth loses its effectiviness once the network becomes too active in its recommendations and if the network is not “tight” enough, meaning the connections between its participants are not meaningful enough. It’s a scary thought, if word-of-mouth goes, what’s left for marketers? Walling your social networks and getting to pick your friends are gonna be key in the future, or at least getting to organize your friends into different clusters with different access.

So how does this relate to hyperlocality? Well, unless the suggestions you get from your mobile phone display some sort of exclusivity, I think they are going to be ignored. I mean who wants to “discover” a shop that has been discovered by pretty much everyone? People don’t come home from New York and rave about their visit to Macy’s, it’s about the small boutiques in Brooklyn and the like. Some people might make a point of it to check if a café or small shop is NOT geotagged before patronizing them. So unless companies like Nokia manage to build some sort of exclusivity to the hyperlocal recommendations you get, I think their potential will not be fulfilled.

As Ville so eloquently put it in tonight’s Open Coffee, in the future people are going to be willing to pay for NOT being connected. If hyperlocality and social networks in general are driven by technology instead of human behavior, I’m afraid that his need for disconnectedness will hit us faster than we might think.