Alternate title: Being Indie Doesn’t Mean You Have to Be a Stupid Business Person

XMU is my third favorite source for indie music behind WOXY (RIP) and NPR. I love the ever-changing music, the Download 15 and the endless interviews with great indie bands. I was listening to an interview with a member of the band Mountain Goats this afternoon. I assume it was John Darnielle promoting their recently released “All Eternals Deck”, which you can get for $5 right now (sorry if the deal expired when you read this) on AMZN. I got ripped off by iTunes. I caught the end of the interview, so if it wasn’t Darnielle, I apologize and will correct the post, but I’m going to refer to the speaker as Darnielle because he is the leader of the band and would probably make the kinds of strong statements that I am going to talk about…

Cliche Tired

Darnielle started disparaging twitter, Facebook and tumblr specifically as mediums to release an album. He was attacking marketing. He talked about how using channels that businesses have discovered is tired. He generalized about how businesses do not understand how to use the mediums, manning their accounts with people who only exist to ask people to buy products. He encouraged artists to considered bolting from the channels simply because businesses are on them and that they are becoming another avenue for advertising. Seriously? Testing into new channels constantly is very indie and smart, but leaving them just because others see the value is cliche indie behavior and it is backwards and it has already been done by the likes of Trent Reznor and Edward Droste of Grizzly Bear, the latter of which was using twitter brilliantly and left suddenly and unexpectedly.

Artists: Darnielle’s behavior is so indie cliche.

And he is dead wrong.

The thing that Darnielle is failing to remember is that not only does everyone in social media have a unique presence, but that everyone has a unique experience. We do not all follow the same people and we do not all see/hear/touch/taste/digest the same messages. Mountain Goats have been on twitter since August 21, 2009. They have spent 590 days amassing followers who are interested in creative random thoughts, interactions and their music. And by the way they have been building trust to the point where OF COURSE they can ask their followers to buy their new CD, which they do in this very tweet:

Success is OK

Being indie does not have to mean being a stupid business person. And thinking about how you are going to monetize your music does not mean you are not indie. All it means is that you do not make compromises with your music, style, ideals to get where you want to go. It does not mean you have to throw everything away. It means you need to have a plan and stick to your guns without whoring yourself out to everyone who would throw a dollar at you. Do not throw something away just because some people you do not like get into it. Reinvent it. Keep leading. Keep doing it better.

Guess what? If you do things right and if you are good, at some point the mainstream finds out about you and starts to like you and starts to buy your stuff. What are you going to do? Give the money back? Of course you will not. You will buy some new clothes and equipment that you have been dreaming about. You will schedule a larger tour, make a new album and you will give some money to causes you care about.

In other words, you will succeed, but you will do it on your terms.

PS: File this post under tough love (and buy the album).
PPS: Mountain Goats +10 epic geek points for MtG reference in their album title!

Everyone has been talking about the new phenomenon of group texting brought about by technologies like GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society and even (haha) BrightKite. And if Social Fresh Tampa was any indication, everyone is going to be using these new spin-up, disposable communities to communicate instead of DMing on twitter. This stuff spreads like wildfire. Within minutes of telling one person, 10 people were meeping me.

It is a great way to simultaneously communicate with a small group of people who need to be “in the know”, but what are we really going to call it “group texting”? No. We are markters and tech nerds. We need to have something better. Enter David Armano who accidentally came up with the solution.

David said he was “Groupmeeping”. That’s a little too specific to GroupMe, but since they seem to be an early favorite, perhaps we can shorten that term to “meep”.

meep: /meep/ n. origin: Nerdese / Armanoism 1. a text to a group of people.

meep: /meep/ v. origin: Nerdese / Armanoism 1. the act of sending a group text.

I meep
You meep
We meep
She/He meeps
We all meep
You all meep
They meep

Meep you at SXSW?

We talk a lot about the power of using data to make smart recommendations. Many companies are building technology to set up the payoff if and when a critical mass of people integrate their application into their lifestyle. WHERE is a company that is focused on data first. WHERE does a lot of things. Bringing on customer experience guru Nataly Kogan has changed the flow of the application, ease of use and social content for the better. Now we have a collision of preference data, good user experience, innovators, data scientists and visualizers (like Mok Oh) that is not afraid to take that next step. (to be fair Walt, Dan Gilmartin, David Chang, Jim Caralis, Chris Bernardi, Erin O, Katy Daddaria and a load of others are pretty amazing too)

Try this

Download WHERE for iPhone or Droid [incidentally, I thought this would be fun for the 2 of you who like QR codes]. Ask a nearby friend to do that same.

Search for your favorite restaurants anywhere. If you need to change the location, use the change button on the bottom. Add restaurants that you love to your favorites list and ones you want to try to want to go.

Now go back to the home screen and click the Magic 8 Ball to have it make a suggestion for a place for you to eat.

Now, go to a friend and Bump phones using WHERE.

It will create an intersect of your preferences to find a place that suits you both. Awesome, right?

Let me know how it worked for you and be sure to check out my WHERE SXSW guide too.

Today my friend Uwe Hook told me that the future of location-based marketing was here and that I should give it a try. I am frequent user of a lot of apps, many of which are location-based and new apps come out every day and it takes a lot for me to get really excited about the possibilities. Many LBS are similar, based on check-ins and they give you options about what you do after the check-in.

But what about before the check-in? So far, the only “intent” based application that has stuck with me is Plancast. I agree with the vision of CEO Mark Hendrickson and I think there is a lot Plancast can do to offer companies a chance to improve the experience for his user base if he eliminates the RSVP-for-everything problem and finds a way to integrate with an LBS app like foursquare so that he can check to see the show-no-show rate at events that are plancasted.

Enter Ditto. Capturing someone at a decision point is the purpose of Ditto. In other words, you use Ditto to announce what you are going to do. Jyri Englestrom, founder of the twitter competitor that was sucked up by Google called < a href=”http://www.jaiku.com”>Jaiku. Currently it lets you intend to be:

• At Home
• Working
• Eat
• See Movie
• Coffee
• In Transit
• Go Out
• Event
• With Kids
• Exercise
• Shopping
• Chat

You can intend to do these things at particular locations and you can send your intention to twitter, Facebook and even a check-in to foursquare. Most of the activities let you peel back the onion to add a deeper level of categorization. For instance, look at Home, you can categorize yourself cooking, gardening, online, music, cleaning (see below). Wait, what? Who is going to announce their intent to do these things at home. I think what we are seeing here is a more semantic version of twitter (or jaiku). Instead of clumsy hashtags for categorization, we can overtly and easily click on categories to classify specifically what we are doing. This makes analysis of activities a whole lot easier than searching pure, unstructured data or making sense of (useless) hashtags in twitter. I pinged Dennis Crowley, CEO of foursquare to get his take as I think we were both monkeying around with Ditto about the same time. I think he said it best:

I think that unless Ditto finds a way to get marketers or advertisers to use the purchase intent case to give people incentives to buy, people probably will not use the tool as it was intended. So while Ditto may not end up being used for what the founders intended it to be used for, it could inspire a new way to chat and I can certainly picture some beautiful data visualizations based on how we are using Ditto to communicate. I plan to give Ditto a really detailed look. I like it and I think you will too. Scan this QR code on your iPhone to get it fast and make sure you come back here to tell me what you think.

allen & gerritsen’s new show Tech Interruption debuts at SXSW.

The idea

Last year at SXSW, the social media “elite” complained that the content was not there. Of course that was nonsense. The people complaining did not go to the panels, talks or keynotes for the most part. The ones that did go only went to their friends’ panels. People like Burr Settles, Margot Bloomstein, Gregory Ng and Chris Messina absolutely knocked the cover off of the ball last year. They inspired everyone who came to see them and they validated the existence of SXSW as a cutting edge technology conference.

In response to the comments, I submitted a “Panel About Nothing (You Don’t Care About)”. The panel was designed to

• solve the phantom problem exposed by the social media elite
• eliminate the need to look into a crystal ball and decide what would be relevant months in advance of a panel
• create a panel that the audience in attendance would care about
• provoke conversation about and inform people about the important technology events of the day

The panel, in spite of having the commitment of CC Chapman, Jay Cuthrel and Jenn Van Grove was a victim of the very method that would supply the content to the panel: crowdsourcing. The allen & gerritsen team took the idea and changed it from a panel to a show. We pitched it to a megasponsor and will debut Tech Interruption at SXSW at the PepsiCo stage. Thank you PepsiCo! The show will run daily at approximately 5:30PM and we have some amazing guests and co-hosts lined up.

We need you

Let’s cut to the chase. We are looking for great tech to talk about, but we are also listening. When you have something you want us to talk about, tweet it to the hashtag #techi. We will look at the tweets and we will try to get your topic onto the show Old Spice style.

During and after the show, tweet your thoughts on the points we make during the show to the same hashtag, #techi. We will respond to you and we hope you will also respond to others in the conversation.

Come see us at the PepsiCo Stage at 5:30 daily during SXSW interactive and keep watching for an announcement about when we will be shooting the show on a weekly basis. If you would like to be a guest on the show, please send an email to schneidermike at a dash g dot com. Also watch techinterruption.com for the site to go live any day now!

I took some time off from blogging. I put a moratorium on it in fact because I thought it would help me focus on writing Location-based Marketing for Dummies (with Aaron Strout). It actually did quite the opposite. It created a log jam of ideas and I was forced to throw out fragments of them on a twitter and Facebook. Ann Handley, the co-author of Content Rules reminded me that writing is like a muscle that needs to be flexed or it weakens. So I am back to blogging on my regular schedule which is – “when I have something to say”.

Customer Experience Improvement
This is a buzzword that I have been talking to people about since 2001. I guess it is unfair to call it a buzzword because it is more like a dull hum. And I think I’m the only one who hears the humming. Who ever heard of a humword? The ideas behind Customer Experience Improvement are:

• A uniform experience for customers across each place within a business.

• A richer, more engaging experience for both customers and for the people who serve the customers.

• A template for how to interact with a customer.

• A decision for a customer to be able to interact with a human or decide that they do not want to.

• More information for the customer about menu choices.

• Efficiency for the customer if desired.

• Better offers for customers and prospects

• Online style analytics for online behavior.

The way I drew it up originally was that someone carries an RFID and they scan it when they go into a store, say a Starbucks or a Dunkin Donuts. The card knows their “usual” order and the customer can set that up as a default online if they want. This way when they go in, they do not have to tell anyone what they want, it just happens, their name gets called and they go on their way. Of course they can also have it hooked up to their credit card so they can enable automatic payment. Remember, I drew this sucker up before smart phones. The other thing a person could do was go to a kiosk where they could see the menu. They could scan their RFID (I called it the WAND) and that would let them access the entire menu, similar to the experience on the web. They can order items and the Dunkin or Starbucks can feed them special offers based on what other people with similar tastes like or based on whatever the company feels like pushing.

So Starbucks seems to have this, now but for some unknown reason, they have it in 2 disparate applications that do not talk to one another. It’s possible that two different groups have put applications together or that they are just testing into two different ideas at once fueled by two different teams. At any rate, one application is peanut butter and the other is chocolate. You see where I’m heading with this?

Peanut Butter: Starbucks App

This application allows a user to build and save the ultimate coffee. All of the known options are spelled out in detail. Starbucks cofffee options are sort of unknowns. Sure, people often dream them up, but things like double blend and upside down are not very widely known and might be varieties that people would enjoy. And more importantly something that Starbucks would very much like to measure. I am told that each of these options is available at the register and that they are “supposed” to be entered, but that does not mean that they are. If only there was a way to look at:

* The options I looked at on a menu
* The options I chose to save
* The things I actually ordered
* Popular options by Region, Season, Segment, Customer Lifetime Value

Segment of course is based on things that we can discern from linking twitter and Facebook accounts and mining stream of consciousness data that is collected from them. Everything from age and brands we like to converse with to music and movie preferences could be collected and used to provide a better experience for customers.

Chocolate: Mobile Card

This is where I am confused. This application is essentially just a way to keep your loyalty card on your phone versus having to have it on your key chain or in your wallet. Put these two applications together and you give someone the ability to order and pay before they even get to the Starbucks. Starbucks doesn’t need to worry. They know the person is not in the store. So what if they have to write the person’s name on the cup? If the cup goes to waste, it’s not their problem because they have already been paid. By the way, I got a five dollar bonus for charging my card using the application. That made me happy. That is a free fancy coffee for me.

What I do know is that if they combined these applications and built a simple monitoring screen for the iPad or web, Starbucks could have a very compelling mobile commerce model. I can see that there are a few steps to go in order for it to seamlessly hook into their point of sale system, but they seem to be closer than anyone that isn’t using Aislebuyer to do their mobile e-commerce stuff.

What do you think?

A quick rant on making foursquare analytics useful for a brand. Read from bottom to top.

Gowalla has announced a partnership with Disney that essentially gives them the right to further beautify their application with gorgeous Walt Disney World stamps. It is remarkable and worthy of the highest praise for Gowalla CEO Josh Williams and head of new business Andy Ellwood that they were able to attract the interest of the Mouse and his dominion.  But for all the hype this partnership further underscores the fact that Gowalla is not interested in taking advantage of their most interesting feature, the item.

Gowalla has Zynga-like abilities that they have barely leveraged. One of the main reasons I initially became a Gowalla maniac was their seemingly endless potential to surprise and delight people through the use of random items. These days it seems like only an act of God or Gary Vaynerchuk gets Gowalla to use them.

Gowalla’s “go with” philosophy encourages exploration. It is a virtual passport and a log of where a Gowaller has been, but the  aspect of finding something cool seems to have been lost. Instead popular places have become virtual garbage dumps, full of the worst items that are either way too easy to obtain or are just plain lame. [Aside: I can't get the old Foster's "How to Speak Australian" commerical out of my mind. I picture showing a giant landfill and the Aussie saying "Gowalla" and then cutting to the Foster's can and him saying "Beer".]

Items are useful for the following reasons:

• They surprise and delight people
• They can bring people together to trade them
• They can be a revenue stream
• They can get people to go to places to find, trade or exchange them

Back in the early days, I once found a ride from the airport and nearly lost my mind I was so ecstatic. I also picked up a virtual eyefi card that became a real one and told everyone I knew.

If Gowalla wants to make the Gowalla / Disney experience unique and give the mainstream Disney goer a reason to use it, they should be thinking about  pins. Not Gowalla pins, Disney pins. When you check in to Disney World, you should be given a virtual lanyard. Let people choose what kind they want, just like in real life. Let them choose from some base lanyards and buy really cute ones. We have seen that the Gowalla team has endless passion for design and could continuously breathe freshness into lanyards. Test into whether or not people will pay money for better lanyards with more capacity for pins.

When you someone checks into a ride at a Disney park, randomly give them a Disney pin. Disney could base them off existing pins or make them Gowalla unique. At any rate, make them collectable and most importantly, give some of them real value. Disney is amazing at easter eggs, unique experiences and surprise and delight. Imagine finding a Disney pin on Gowalla that was one of only ten in the world and imagine you could put it on your virtual lanyard, trade it for another virtual pin or perhaps exchange it for the real thing.

Speaking of exchanging, cast members love to trade pins. Why not let them trade virtual pins too? Give cast members smart phones and a Gowalla button that says “I trade pins on Gowalla.”

A Gowalla user can find pin traders by their checkins and go to that place. In other words, Gowalla could make a special Disney experience that allows users to see where pin traders are in the park. They can examine their lanyard virtually and then if they see something the like, go visit the cast member or park guest. Or they can just ask the cast member to see their virtual pins, some of which can be unique and have real value. Gowalla then allows a trade via a phone bump. Once each party agrees, the trade gets Facebooked and tweeted and Disney has yet another unique experience for people.

I can imagine putting codes on select real pins to unlock Gowalla pins with a purchase. I can imagine people buying virtual pins to get special real pins too. The possibilities are endless because it appeals to the collector and the completionist. I can see situations where you find a pin in one park and need to go to another to get the real pin to encourage people to go to more than one park.

Gowalla, you want to lead? Take a closer look at what Zynga is doing with Farmville. The Booyah guys are trying to do it with MyTown, but their virtual items do not do what yours do. They’re too complicated and they do not really translate to real world stuff. They’re more like ad impressions. Your app is simple and beautiful and has the potential to be the most interesting one if you take advantage of items and particularly if you test into virtual goods.

When Aaron Strout, marketer and LBS Ninja approach me to partner with him on Wiley’s location based marketing book, I thought “we are just the dummies.” I am excited to announce that we will be writing “Location Based Marketing for Dummies”. But it’s not like we’re creating the next great American novel. To Aaron’s knowledge, it will be only the second printed book on this subject. Our friend, Simon Salt’s book being the first.

In the book, we plan to cover a broad array of topics including:

• Choosing the right platform(s)
• Building a LBS campaign
• Creating a relevant offer
• LBS as part of your loyalty program
• Integrating LBS with other marketing efforts
• Developing a monitoring strategy
• KPIs and Measurement

Aaron and I have started writing the book already and plan to have the book wrapped up in March of 2011. The book is scheduled to be published in June of 2011. God willing, we’ll start the pre-orders around May. As soon as there is a link up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, we’ll be sure you know about it.

How you can help

If you’re a LBS platform or vendor, we are interested in access to your executives, platform and cases.

If you see a new LBS hit the scene, send @aaronstrout and I a tweet with the hashtag #LBS4D

Keep checking in and letting us know if you discover cool offers, glitches, Easter eggs and any other LBS topic that might be noteworthy.

Tell us if you have specific things you think the book should cover, we are always listening.

And of course, you can read the book!

As always, we thank you for your support and encourage you to keep testing and learning.

When talking about Location-Based marketing, there is an awful lot of talk about ROI and value. It’s a subject that many people dance around because, as with most emerging technologies, the key performance indicators (KPI) are the last things to define and each of them has their own take on what is important. At ad:tech in New York today, an unlikely innovator Murphy USA, unveiled their findings surrounding a large campaign that they conducted using Whrrl. That’s right. The gas station in front of WalMart that sells you gas cheaply and cheerfully is one of the most innovative companies in social media.



For those of you unfamiliar with Whrrl, it is a location based social network designed specifically to get people out of their “social rut”. Jeff Holden, CEO of Pelago, the Makers of Whrrl, also worked for Amazon where he worked on their recommendation engine. Whrrl features several unique features such as societies, society rewards and their real-world recommendation engine which ultimately work together to form the Whrrl ecosystem.

Related
• Whrrl: The Extremely Interesting Post Checkin Experience
• How to Be Active in Whrrl

Societies

People checkin to places and are placed into societies based on where they go. Friends can invite them to join societies based on interests as well. This is how Whrrl segments its users. These societies form communities that make recommendations on the topic the society was formed around. Societies exist for Mexican food, craft beer, Vietnamese food, independant music, sports teams etc. The society model has a mechanism for giving people social capital based on how their recommendations for things to do perform within the society.

Society Rewards

In the words of Whrrl, “Society Rewards” is a social loyalty program designed to close the gap between a brand’s online social media presence and real-world physical presence. It ties together word-of-mouth influence and real-world visits, rewarding people for motivating others to visit a business. Society owners can setup prizes that members of the society can win via a combination of a checkin and winning on a scratch ticket.

Murphy USA Wins with Whrrl

Murphy USA is a large gas chain with 1,086 stores in 22 states. They primarily are located in front of Walmart Supercenters. They are 3 times the national average in fuel sales per store and are also the fastest growing Coca Cola retailer. Casey Petersen, who is in charge of social media for Murphy USA says that no one goes home and googles their favorite gasoline.

Murphy USA is a company who is not afraid to innovate with their marketing. One of their main challenges is learning more about their audience. While their competitors were using traditional, transaction based loyalty programs, Murphy USA turned to Whrrl to invent a new kind of social customer loyalty program. The program is

• Built on prizes
• Designed to drive community
• Desires to activate customers in the real world
• Promote the company through social media via its customers

The Murphy USA Whrrl society launch on July 1, 2010. The program drove customer acquisition as 44% percent of society members had never been to Murphy USA before the program.

Whrrl also drove consideration as 85% of society members chose Murphy USA over another gas retailer because of the Whrrl program. Whrrl is driving loyalty as customers using Whrrl are visiting on average 4X per month where the industry average is 2. Nearly 50% of the Whrrl society is visiting a Murphy USA 6 times per month. The average Murphy USA purchase by Whrrl society members is $30 compared to the industry average of $15.

And finally, Whrrl has exceeded twitter as an influence channel for Murphy USA. According to Petersen the order is:

1. Email
2. Facebook
3. Whrrl
4. SMS
5. Twitter

Whoa.