Earlier this year, we caught up for a social with the charming Andy Ellwood, Director of Business Development for Gowalla, a location-based social media group. For more info about Andy, click here. In these final two clips from our interview, Andy talks about where he thinks social media is going, and discusses how his company, Gowalla, fits into the future. Andy is not the first to suggest that social media has reached saturation point, and is now beginning to contract. He quotes entrepreneur Leonard Brody in calling this contracted social media environment the “Small Room” era. Broadly speaking, this means that instead of using our social media to interact with the entire internet, a space that is growing larger by the second, we will limit our interaction to those people who mean something to us, our friends and contacts. This will also lead to a rise in what is known as curation. Like a curator in a museum, we will arrange and display our thoughts and knowledge for our friends, and these recommendations will shape our online spaces. If this does become the norm, it will become harder for businesses to use social media to advertise. Rather than having a broad receptive audience, companies will need to form actual relationships, and only those that are able to become trusted curators will be able to thrive in the space. With this prediction in mind, Andy’s company, Gowalla, has set out to enable users of it’s location sharing software to tell a story, to share with their friends what a given space means to them, and to impart knowledge about the physical world through social media. It is this peer-to-peer system that forms the basis of Gowalla’s business model. Andy likens it to sharing your passport, with each stamp on the passport coming with a personal story attached. Hopefully, the person reading about where you’ve been and what you’ve done would take away ideas and knowledge, and share that with their friends, and on it goes. Even if the so-called “Small Room” era never comes about in the way predicted, it is still a solid business model for Gowalla, and gives a more personal alternative to the wide-band style of social media use that is predominant today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3YzTw2mjMw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Fev_rDJu4
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