An interesting article over at the Chicago Tribune give an primer to the newly dubbed SoLoMo sector (social-local-mobile) and asks if the winning strategy is to clone and conquer…

Nice nostalgic flash-back from the MD of Chicago incubator Sandbox, Nick Rosa, on how social got commerce.  ”Commerce was sort of frowned upon in the social phenomenon [back then]. It wasn’t about the business model and whether you sell things, but it was supposed to be about the social need.”  What were we thinking?

Click for enlargeable image.

WordSpy entry for SoLoMo

SoLoMo n. Mobile phone apps that combine social networking and location data. [Social + location (or local) + mobile.]

Example Citations:

“As South by Southwest bears down, we’re seeing accelerated promotion of products that fuse social, local and mobile media (SoLoMo). This follows the success that Foursquare had at SXSW ’09, before quickly expanding to its current 7.5 million users.

This also falls in line with the mobile discovery trend long-espoused in this column. It’s now taking on new forms with growing smartphone penetration, and a Groupon-fueled hunger for the deals infused with apps carrying the SoLoMo banner”.

—Michael Boland, “Discovering the Right SoLoMo Formula,” Search Engine Watch, March 11, 2011

“One of the panel moderators at Social-Loco cited a term coinage by noted Silicon Valley investor John Doerr that’s more useful to understanding what Google is up to than the concept “social” alone: SoLoMo, or social + location + mobile”.

—Thomas Claburn, “Google Defines Social Strategy,” InformationWeek, May 6, 2011

Earliest Citation:

I last wrote about Social Local Mobile Search (there’s a moutful) in October of last year.

—Tony Gentile, “Google buys Dodgeball; SoLoMo gets a parent,” buzzhit!, May 12, 2005