Back when I was doing my degree one of my first (and most basic) journalism seminars covered the subject of the ‘five Ws’. It was hardly rocket science, but it is still a fundamental part of journalism and PR and one that is just as applicable to social media.

Until recently social media has been focusing on four of these Ws:

Who – Whether it’s using @tags on Twitter or simply referencing someone on Facebook.

What – The key to most tweets, updates and blog posts.

When – Whether you pay close attention to trending topics or not, nearly all posts are time stamped.

Why – Often the question is ‘why would you post that?’ But it doesn’t take long to find social media avenues jammed with people asking for advice and opinion or in a lot of cases offering it, whether asked for or not.

As 2010 gets in to full swing the social media focus is going to move from the four Ws above and on to the fifth, ‘where’.

Two of the biggest buzz names in social media right now are Foursquare and Gowalla. More than anything they want to know where you are and both look to enter the mainstream as the year moves on.

The idea behind both services is that users (through GPS) earn rewards for being in certain places, offering advice based on where they are or have been. Say you arrive in Japan and want to find a nearby restaurant; services like these will be able to tell you if your friends have been there already and what they thought of them. This is just one example, but as with most social media, the true application of the services are decided by those that use them.

It’s not all about recommendation engines. There is also the fun and addictive (according to some) element of being rewarded with medals and items for visiting certain places. This part of the service is what will gain it mass appeal, where as recommendations could prove the most useful element.

It isn’t just a new wave of applications that is driving the ‘where’ question. Established social media application Tweetdeck recently added geo-tagging to its mobile application, allowing tweets to be mapped. If we go back to ‘snowmaggedon’ in early January the UKsnow hashtag dominated Twitter as the country tweeted about levels of snow and affixed postcodes to them.

As the latest incarnation of the iPhone starts to sell more units, the inbuilt compass should drive applications to use augmented reality, like Wikitude did last year and not only make where you are important, but what direction you’re facing too.

How quickly these services are adopted as marketing tools depends not only on the marketers and PROS but also their uptake by the public. While Gowalla, Foursquare and others are proving hot topics in media circles they will need the same kind of exposure that was lavished on Twitter in 2009 before they can become relevant.  In the meantime, it’s always good to stay ahead of the pack, so why not download some of the most popular now, before BBC Breakfast News starts talking about them.

Gowalla

Foursquare

Yelp

Wikihood

Wikitude

Tweetdeck