I’ve been on holiday for the last two weeks so missed out on the official launch of Facebook Places. Now, as I read more about the long-predicted service, I’m increasingly convinced that it is the move that will really bring location-based social networking to the public at large and will be wildly successful.

If you’ve also been sunning yourself on a beach for the last few weeks then you might want to check out Max’s post which gives an overview of what Facebook Places is all about.

So without further ado, here the reasons why I believe Facebook Places will be big:

1. Location is king

Being social comes naturally to us, but location’s important too. The web might be a fantastically diverse, global and cosmopolitan smorgasbord of people, thoughts and opinions, but increasingly, we all find ourselves coming back to what is going on in our own country, town and neighbourhood. The local web has yet to be won, and with local papers going out of business, the race is really on for this niche. Putting social at its heart makes total sense.

2. The mobile time-bomb

One of the reasons that location is becoming increasingly attractive is the growth in mobile computing. Facebook knows this only too well and has already got a head-start here; Facebook accounts for 45% of mobile web usage in the UK alone! Mobile connectivity makes location based networking possible in a way that just wasn’t when users were sitting in front of a desktop computer. Devices like the iPad will only accelerate this move.

3. The move to real versus online

Perhaps driven by the previous point, I do think that there is an growing move away from connecting with unknown people you might meet online back to connecting with actual connections you know in the real-world. Location lies at the heart of this. You only have to look at the success of local offline tweet-ups to see that the appetite is there to mix online and offline in a localised way. Using social networks as a way to organise and energise our offline lives makes total sense and is a good fit for a network like Facebook where the focus has always been on connecting with real-world friends and family.

4. The chicken and egg argument

Following on from this, the big stumbling block for other location based services like Foursquare has been a lack of users. As with many social technologies, the real benefits don’t become clear until your friends and colleagues are using the service. Foursquare has been pulling in users at a pretty impressive rate, but, as my colleague Louise commented, Foursquare is pretty pointless without other people that you know using the service. Facebook pole-vaults this problem in one swoop as it brings location based features right in front of its 500 million users. Combine points 1, 2 and 3 with 500 million users and you immediately have a winning combination.

5. Monetisation

For me, this is one of the key reasons that Facebook has moved quickly to ramp up its localisation features. The social giant has often seemed to find that monetising its community is a bit of a challenge (despite reports about record share prices). The potential for monetisation when it comes to local services is huge. Foursquare started to make steps in this direction with business services and I can only imagine that barrage of businesses that will be knocking on Facebook’s door trying to get in on the action. Not to mention the potential for localised advertising on the site as well.

BUT…

There is a caveat to all this. The privacy police will be swarming around this move, especially given Facebook’s history here. I don’t actually think the fury that often resonates round the technology industry about Facebook and privacy has actually hit the radar of most of Facebook’s users, but it’s still something that Facebook needs to confront head on and quick.

photo credit: Steve Snodgrass

I’ve been reading about Facebook Places today.  Maybe I’m just a bit of a cynic when it comes to new social media initiatives, but I’m not convinced of its value to me, or a large percentage of the people on Facebook.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m not familiar with location-based services. I’ve been using Foursquare for a while, but the most I’ve got out of it is eleven mayor-ships (hardly something to write home about.)

You see, Foursquare hasn’t changed my behaviour, social life or led me to connect with new people.  In fact, I find myself only really using it when I’m either trying to knock Danny Whatmough off the mayor status at Wildfire HQ, or when I’m on the train and so bored that I check myself into every station on the Waterloo to Guildford line just to give me something to do.

Now I know Facebook starts from a different premise to Foursquare, as users will already have an established network of friends they are actively connecting with and I can see why some people are going to find Places appealing.

But it just doesn’t make sense to me.  I’ve got about a hundred or so ‘friends’, however most of them don’t live anywhere near me at all and I don’t see them regularly. Instead, I use Facebook to keep up to date on their news, share the odd story or look through their latest photos to see how they’re getting on.

So do I really need to know if my cousin has checked into a bar in Northampton? Or if half the people I went to school with are out on the lash in a new bar in Portsmouth’s Gun Wharf? Or whether an old university friend is taking the kids to Bournemouth? The chances of that prompting me to jump in the car and drive two hours to join them are as slim as a slim thing.

So when  Facebook Places comes to the UK, it could be something that I just leave well alone.

After many months of rumours, Facebook Places is the official name given to the social networking giant’s new location-based features.  Currently only live in the US, the service is available via the iPhone app and mobile site with no date announced as to when it will reach other shores.  However, with 500 million users in the bank, it has a built in audience with which the likes of Foursquare simply can’t compete.

By checking in to a venue, users will be able to tag friends, giving them the option of either accepting the location tag or denying it and defaulting to a standard status update mention.  The idea here is that even those without smartphones can be included in the location aspects without introducing complex privacy issues.

Winners and Losers

Interestingly, and perhaps to avoid appearing as the bad guys, Facebook launched the service on Wednesday alongside Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and Booyah (Maker of MyTown.)  These services will have read/write access to the API (currently in closed beta) but the consequences for the location ecosystem are enormous.

Whether as the ‘gameplay’ of Foursquare or Gowalla’s passport, adding value will become the order of the day and predicting users wants/ ensuring you’re securing the right offers for them is going to become an area of massive competition.  At the same time, there are a thousand startups biting at the heels of the bigger services offering their own slant on location.  At this point, it’s still anyone’s to win.

Another step to Web 3.0 (Here comes the science bit)

Alongside the recent advances with Facebook Places, adding this location data to the mix strengthens a brand’s Facebook presence with strong semantically clear links to the real world- an incredible boon for the retail sector in particular.

<< If that last sentence left you scratching you head, check out this video to fill you in on Web 3.0, The Semantic Web. We promise you it’s worth it. >>

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

The result is a Facebook page which can act as the central ‘definition’ of a brand, collating data on its popularity (Facebook Like), location (Facebook Places) and even currency (Facebook Credits.)

When people refer to a brand on social networks, the question is, will they link to the corporate site or simply @Nike? By encouraging the latter, businesses further take advantage of the fact that any reference about the company is unavoidably also addressed to it. This is one of the valuable distinctions which social networks are built on, letting brands better keep track of who’s talking about them and what they’re saying.

And of course, Facebook wins big too by being in control of all this semantic information.  One thing’s for sure, Facebook Places is currently a small part of the big picture but when added to everything else, it only increases the threat to competition like Google.  Unless the big G can up its hit rate on new experiments (Wave, Bing, Latitude), it could soon find itself in a place it doesn’t want to be.

Popular location-sharing service Foursquare has just announced revisions to its privacy settings, no doubt to combat the risk of perception in articles like this from The Guardian where it was depicted more or less as a stalker’s best friend. What’s interesting is that in this case, as with many, the vulnerability was introduced by poor judgement on the part of the user.

As with viruses where behavioural engineering has become the key means of tricking users into activating the malicious code, this is now the biggest threat for the new generation of location-based services.

Arguably, education is the key and with its new “privacy grid“, the company has gone some way to providing a way to clearly understand who can see the information you are sharing.  Whether or not the average user will ever examine this table, on the other hand, is a different matter.

Facing the privacy challenge

Of course, Facebook is supposed to be revealing its own location functionality today so it’ll be interesting to see how the privacy policies match up with those of other services in the area. Especially considering the hubbub that surrounded Zuckerberg and co. earlier this year when they tried to make all profiles public by default.

There’s another conversation to be had here too about the trend of automatic syndication to other social networks. In The Guardian article above, it was the automatic linking with Twitter that actually allowed the ‘stalker’ to hunt his prey.

Sharing without permission

On a more innocuous level, Twifficiency, a service which rates the efficiency of a Twitter account, yesterday showed how badly such default behaviour can go down. Because simply clicking the link and authorizing it to check your account resulted in a tweet, streams were soon full of them, sending the topic trending and abuse hurling towards its creator soon after.

But for better or worse, it’s equally testament to how effective the auto-tweet can be in terms of publicity. One thing’s for sure, there’s a 17 year old Scottish programmer who now has a great line to add to his CV.

Raised stakes

As the real world meets virtual, getting these challenges right isn’t going to be easy and there will be no doubt be further slip-ups in the future. But the big issue is that when things go wrong with privacy settings, we’re not looking just at bug reports but potentially very serious crimes. This should be incentive enough for the odd privacy grid here and there.

Over the last few weeks, one of the most unlikely brands has been on the lips of all social media enthusiasts: Old Spice. Yes, the deodorant brand, which brings back memories of slightly dodgy spells, whiffed when passing older men, has taken Twitter and Facebook by storm following the release of its latest “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” advert.

Ad agency Wieden + Kennedy took the campaign to a new level when it started answering questions posed by fans on Twitter and Facebook with personal video messages. Old Spice put together around 200 video responses, some within minutes of receiving questions from celebrities and laypeople alike.

The stats are impressive: 92,000 Twitter followers, nearly 700,000 likes on Facebook and just over 9 million channel views on YouTube. The brand has seen a 107% increase in sales in the last month.

Most companies throughout the world will be unable to pay for the genius of Wieden + Kennedy and the millions of advertising spend that fueled the initial success (this was not solely a social media campaign), but there are still a number of notable takeaways that brands of all shapes and sizes – B2B and B2C – can use to inform and inspire marketing, and especially social media, activity:

1. Challenge perceptions

Old Spice doesn’t have the greatest brand reputation. But what this campaign cleverly does is ignore previous perceptions and instead challenges them very boldly. In one swoop, consumers will now think solely of ‘The Man’ before any more negative connotations. Changing perceptions takes time, but Old Spice has gone a long way to doing this very quickly.

2. Personalise a brand

Personality lies at the heart of ‘being social’.  This is a campaign with a very strong personality at its heart. As with other advertising driven campaigns like Comparethemeerkat, the central figure is the one that allows social engagement to work effectively.

3. Creativity

This was a very simple idea, but one that was executed in a very creative way. Not only was it funny, it was inventive and quirky. It’s this creativity that succeeded in making it a social media success story, with people throughout the world happy to share it with friends. A great idea, creatively executed will go far.

4. Use one idea in multiple ways

Yet again, this campaign demonstrates the longevity of a great idea. W + K succeed brilliantly in taking a traditional advertising campaign and make it work digitally. It remains to be seen how this campaign will progress as I have no doubt there is still life in it yet.

5. Be social, be personal

Back to the personality theme and this campaign succeed in actually being social, in engaging with fans and followers. So many campaigns are successful in getting that viral element through social channels, but the ultimate goal is for a brand to actually be social itself. The personality of ‘The Man’ enables this to happen easily and quickly.

6. Traditional media can be social

So many traditional advertising campaigns tick many of the boxes mentioned here – creative, viral – but so many of them fail to really use social media to its fullest degree. This campaign manages it and proves that, used in the right way, traditional channels can be integrated with social ones to devastating success.

7. Celebrity can work

Building on from the previous point. it was no accident that W+K targeted internet celebs like Kevin Rose and Aplusk in their response videos. Targeting influencers is nothing new, but it’s not easy. You still have to have the compelling idea to make them sit up and take note.

8. Brevity is key

The responses videos were short, sharp and were more engaging for it. Video really does work online, its an incredibly visual medium, but too often, videos are lengthy and complicated. This campaign is a great case study into how to use video in a way that is engrossing and thereby increases the likelihood of being watched and shared. Creating lots of short videos is so much more effective that simply relying on the one more lengthy advert.