Connecting social media with the “real world”

One of our speakers, Connie Bensen, wrote a post yesterday about some of the creative uses of social media that are popping up in various places.

There are restaurants now, like Papa Johns, that allow customers to text in an order. Not too shabby. And now there’s apparently a service called gomobo.com that facilitates this kind of text-message ordering for restaurants that choose to sign up for the service.

The ad campaign that Connie points to (”ask restaurants in your area to join gomobo”) reminds me a lot of the way that Facebook initially spread to other universities (”ask your administration to add support for thefacebook.com”). It seems to work well, at least for Facebook.

At the moment, it often feels like social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook are fairly disconnected from the “real world.” Why can’t we use Twitter to check the hours on a local store? Why can’t we use Facebook to check the price differences between the local Target and the local Best Buy?

These types of apps are already beginning to surface on Facebook, and it’s only a matter of time before these two worlds become more interconnected. I’m curious to see how that happens.

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