What’s not to love about Foursquare?

What Is Foursquare?
It is one of many new apps based on Location Based Services (LBS). LBS can detect your whereabouts through the GPS function on your mobile device. Foursquare is a location-based social network where users “check in” and share locations with friends.

So What’s To Love About Foursquare?
Fun & games. Gaming always creates good incentives for engagement.
In Foursquare players are rewarded for their “check ins” by acquiring badges and earning status ranks. If a player “checks in” at one locale more often than anyone else, they become its Mayor. Players then can broadcast their status to various social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

How Does It Benefit My Business or Brand?
1. It is a great tool for generating buzz. Imagine creating a network of brand ambassadors to help increase foot traffic.
2. Creates a wider audience base from actual customers sharing “check ins” with their network of friends and followers.

How Do You Start with Your Business?
1. Register your business on Foursquare.
2. Promote your participation through all channels and most important your digital ones like your website, blog and social networks.
3. Engage the users. Show appreciation to the users who visit your business. A simple thanks is a great start.
4. If you have resources you can engage further with creating loyal fans by mentioning the Mayor each month in your other channels like your website, email newsletter, Fan Page etc. You may also consider adding special offers to incentivizes people to visit your business like check in 4 times a month and get a free coffee.
5. Ideas are endless. It is like a loyalty program but without cards and a lot more flexible and viral. Create a scavenger hunt where users check in at different locations and all participants enter to win a sweepstakes. Event planners and promoters could use it to get people to come out to the big event, check in and be in a drawing to win a prize at the end of the night.

Foursquare seems to be leading in locations (cities) but Gowalla is equally good and gaining very quickly. Foursquare also has recently closed a few deals and partnerships that positition them as a potential powerhouse.

Other Location Based Services (LBS) worth checking out:
Gowalla
Whrrl
Brightkite
Loopt

2 Great Productivity Videos

The only way to exist today as an small agency is to be fast and efficient. Here are 2 videos I had to share.

“Noded“, a book about working with web powered teams, introduced me to this great video from Ryan Carson of Carsonified. Based on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” philosophy, Ryan shows a simplified way to manage tasks using OmniOutliner.

Next is Paul Boag from the podcast Boagworld. The following video highlights how to manage tasks with OmniFocus another Omni tool.

If you like these methods I would recommend reading “Noded” as well as Paul’s other video “My Grand Mac Tour“. Both highlight great techniques and tools for today’s modern worker.

Social Fresh Tampa

I had a chance to attend a local Social Fresh event in Tampa. Social Fresh, founded by Jason Keath, is a one day conference targeted for marketers and small businesses.

The Tampa event had some well known industry speakers like Spike Jones from Brains on Fire and Rick Burnes from Hubspot to name a few. Maggie Fox from Social Media Group kicked things off with an excellent keynote presentation about “The Art and Science of Scaling Social Media”.

What I liked the most was exposure to some great thinkers in my own backyard like Jason Breed (INgage Networks), Mark Meyer (Digital Response), Griffin Farley (22squared), Tessa Horehled (Think Interactive), and John Ludwig (Push). The quality and the range of the work was refreshing.

Since I have been creating strategies and executional plans for clients around social media for the past year I felt like I knew a lot but I did walk away with some the following insights I wanted to share.

1. Create An Ecosystem – I sometimes call it “Your Brand’s Social Architecture” but it is basically the same. Listen and identify conversational hubs. Think about a seamless flow from brand experiences from one platform to another. This is the foundation.

2. A Strategic Plan and A Great Idea – Understand the target audiences’ passion points and develop a launching pad for a direct relationship with your customers by providing interaction and expression. Last, there needs to be a unifying theme to create relevance and value.

3. Measurement – Determine what is a significant value exchange. Is it influence, engagement, loyalty, share of voice, or specific actions or conversions?

4. Test & Refine – Use A/B testing to determine what platforms work for your brand.

The day was full of good tips and practices so I recommend attending if you find the conference in a city near you. It is affordable and the caliber of speakers are always impressive.

Also check out these links:
SPY – a browser based social media listening tool

#socialmedia – a weekly twitter based discussion around “The Business of Social Media”

Listen, Engage & Participate – 3 Simple Social Media Resolutions

It’s a new year, be daring, try social media to round out your existing marketing plan.

Despite what some people think, social media is a valid tool for serious-minded business owners.

Everyone has different marketing objectives and varied levels of experience with social media so we like to take a simple approach to keep things manageable.

In my opinion, these three concepts sum up social media objectives;
LISTEN, ENGAGE, PARTICIPATE.

LISTEN:
Listening is a great place to begin. You’ll gain valuable insight about your customers and your clients.

Start by creating a listening dashboard to begin monitoring conversations that are happening about your business or product. A simple and free way is to use Google Reader (you need a gmail account) or your current RSS feed reader (I use Netvibes).

Next you will need to do a search on Blogsearch.Google for any competitors, keywords or phases that pertain to your business. Based on the results you can subscribe by finding the orange RSS icon, then right-click and copy the link into Google Reader.

Next go to: Search.Twitter and do the same kind of searches and add those too.

For some, a 3rd party solutions like Radian6 and Techrigy maybe a more robust solution. Google is simple and free but may not be the perfect solution for you.

If you need more information I recommend these articles:
Grow Bigger Ears In 10 Minutes
How To: Create a Listening Dashboard for your Organization

ENGAGE:
Ready for more? Engage your audience, offer incentives, provide a platform for people to share and engage. Start a conversation…

Your tactics (application or tools) should offer offer facilitation with the following:
1. Communication
Email or survey tools are the more traditional approach to sharing& gaining information with a group of people. If your looking to go to the next level you could use Twitter or your Facebook Fan Page to send quick text messages to your group and/or customers. Ceo, Tony Hsieh, from Zappo’s insists Twitter and other forms of communication are required for excellent customer service.
2. Collaboration
With the use of polls and other tools it makes it easy to add collaboration to your web site or blog. Utilizing 3rd party tools like BazaarVoice, Rubbermaid discovered that adding customers reviews to their website, increased sales and decrease returns.
3. Education
By utilizing your blog and Twitter you can educate customers on updates and new product offerings. Podcasts and YouTube are great tools for in-depth education. Home Depot has How-To Videos for fixing decks and other projects.
4. Entertainment
YouTube and other video sites are great tools for posting videos for entertainment. Think of your favorite classic commercial. Blendtec produced numerous product demos based on the concept “Will It Blend?”

PARTICIPATE:
Participate back into the conversation. Rectify any negative comments and offer solutions to your followers. Become a “Trust Agent”.

The key is to create value in the last part of the discussion cycle. This is an opportunity to rectify any negative comments and offer solutions or offer a whole new place to interact or become a member.

Depending on your business and customers, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace may be enough or you can venture out with other social media tools like Ning, CrowdVine, and OneSite.

CONCLUSION
Not everyone is ready for the new world of social media but if you take small steps like spending a few months listening you start to understand the whole ecosystem. The ecosystem is changing frequently with new tools and networks to participate in but like learning to swim you just master one stroke at a time and then all of a sudden you realize it is not as daunting and foreign as you thought.

Image: Laurel Papworth & Gary Hayes

Professional Social Networks

Below is a overview of key membership and usage statistics for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter from a great article on Social Media Today. The numbers support how these networks have grown and how influential they are in today’s business.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn has approximately 50 million users worldwide in 200 countries. The membership on LinkedIn is growing at roughly one new member per second. When LinkedIn launched in 2003, it took 477 days, almost a year and four months to reach the first million members. The last million took only 12 days. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

Facebook: Facebook has over 300 million members with 150 million that log in at least once per day. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook are 35 years and older and according to Facebook more than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared across the network, each week.

Twitter: Twitter has more than 32 million members with the segment of 45-54 year olds being the top demographic and 25-34 year olds following closely behind at second. It has been found in other studies that baby boomers and senior citizens are more likely to join Twitter than their grandchildren.

These findings are from The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks study. If you want to learn more I recommend reading the whole article:

The Big Three Social Networks Have Emerged as Professional Networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.