Last week I attended Social Loco as a speaker (thank you Mark Evans) and got to hear Ditto CEO Jyri Engstrom sit on a panel called Enabling the Users’ Revolution: from infrastructure to consumer apps. I have been following Ditto since it came out and have been wondering about how it will be used. Some call Ditto “future foursquare” where I prefer to call it “semantic twitter”.

These comparisons are interesting because Ditto is an application that allows a user to announce their intent. One calls is future foursquare because it supposes that you might eventually check in someplace. I prefer semantic twitter because some of the things that you intend to do may not necessarily result in checking in, but are nonetheless very valuable. A user starts by identifying a type of activity by clicking on the “crayon box” at the top. They can then click again to refine their preferences. For instance if you want coffee, you can click the coffee icon a second time and pick that you want a latte. Others can then make suggestions about where you should go or, noticing that your location is attached to your ditto, they can decide if they would like to join you in your quest.

Semantic means structure. Semantic data is expressed the same way every time so that it is easy to analyze and act on. Ditto thrives on making structure easy, but even I was not prepared for what Jyri Engstrom said at social loco. He supposed that if he used Ditto to express that he wanted to go to a restaurant (and I cannot remember which kind he said, so let’s say dim sum) that someone might be able to eventually go to Foodspotting and share a dish with him.

My jaw dropped and the wheels started turning. Why is this brilliant? Sharing a dish from foodspotting is not just sharing a picture or even the name. A dish in foodspotting has a set of common attributes:

• dish name (which is standardized so that each of a certain kind of dish is nicely grouped)
• location
• 4 different rating types
• user who spotted
• guides it belongs to
• comments

The attached data makes the suggestion far more powerful than someone just saying: “Go to Hei La Moon.” With foodspotting the person knows where to go, what people think, what the dish looks like, its exact name, other dishes at the restaurant, other spottings from that person and more.

There are endless possibilities to integrate Gowalla, foursquare, Yelp, OpenTable and more to the application. What would you integrate? Coming up in my next post, a look at a potential business model.

The smart phone among other things is a kick ass camera. Sure, the quality is not as good as most point and shoots and certainly it is no DSLR or 4/3 camera, but it’s improving and we all know it’s not the camera, it is the person behind the camera. iPhones and Droids have put cameras in the hands of some extraordinarily creative people in the places that they need them. And as you well know they have been sharing these pictures on Facebook, Gowalla, Instagram and now– on my latest obsession, Color.

Color is a mobile application that allows you to share photos with people who you are experiencing things with. The magic happens when you push the color logo (that cool thing at the beginning of the article) and take a picture or a video and send it to Color. From here you can share your videos and photos on twitter and Facebook and also with your Color social graph.

The different thing about Color is that it builds your social graph for you. Instead of choosing who you want to be connected to or having Color leverage another already built social graph via twitter or Facebook, it associates you with people who are taking pictures in the location as you. It then adds them to your “diary”. When you click the globe, you can see your moments and the moments of the people who you took pictures with. This means that you have the opportunity to meet people who go to the places that you go to and experience the story from their point of view (assuming that you take some pictures). Once you take a picture with someone, you are following one another. And the 10 second videos load faster than lightning striking your TV antenna (my what?).

The team at allen & gerritsen is all over Color. We have been using it in the office to capture our moments and it gives you a cool idea of what kind of shenanigans we purvey on a daily basis.

This is very interesting stuff. Building social networks based on location is a cool idea. Color has taken the plunge and automatically built networks for people. This could open the gates for other networks to go beyond making suggestions and being a lot more overt about adding people that will add value without asking you. Does that freak you out? How? Why?

Now it’s your turn! Download the app, grab some friends and get them to do the same and start taking pictures together and let me know what you think.

Download Color for iPhone

Download Color for Droid

[Coming back soon]

No question that Yelp’s content network is incredibly robust and that the hive generally does a good job of giving you a decent picture of what you can expect from a business.

But Yelp is not without its problems. In fact, you might actually read an entire review or series of reviews from people word for word and get burned for not doing enough analysis. I call this the “Hamburger Sushi Problem”.

Say you want sushi and that you are a person with a very discerning sushi palette. Well, what if your read reviews about a place that made amazing sushi, got a 4 stars in aggregate and had very positive reviews and stories from most reviewers. You would go there with confidence.

But what happens when it turns out that this place does not live up to your expectations and the sushi, in spite of the descriptions by the people who reviewed the restaurant was in fact terrible.

If you are me, you would dig a little deeper and try and figure out what happened. At this particular restaurant, I discovered that the people who gave the reviews were not at all qualified to review sushi. In fact, all of their other reviews were for hamburgers, burritos and other fast food. This was the fast food lover’s sushi joint. (Most of it was tempura-fied which they failed to even mention)

No question that Yelp has robust content. Here are a few ways that Yelp could help us be even more confident in their reviews from a segmentation perspective.

• Frequency Segment: We need a way to be able to tell if a person has been there more than one time. Checkins may not be reliable enough unless Yelp is willing to pull in Gowalla, foursquare and other checkin systems.
• Cuisine Segment: Segmenting users by the kinds of food they review and love would be extremely helpful. This would tell me how reliable they are in a particular kind of cuisine.
• Influencer Model: The “Whrrl” influencer model would be excellent here. Simply +1-ing a tip or a recommendation can tell people what kind of reviewer this is. You could tell me that people who like sushi like the person’s reviews. I could also tell if this person resonates more with the hamburger or burrito bunch. Not that that’s a bad thing, just that it is true.

What would you do to improve Yelp?

Groupon has acquired the Triangle of Awesome (Seattle) tech company Pelago. Pelago is the maker location-based mobile experience, Whrrl. The terms of the deal were not disclosed to me. Many analysts, bloggers, marketers and business people have been wondering if Groupon would get involved in location or if a location-based company would start putting Groupon-like offers into their system. Foursquare’s official stance is that they are more of a loyalty play than acquisition. Boston based SCVNGR created a separate Groupon competitor called the Level Up which currently have no integration with the SCVNGR app.

For those of you who are just hearing about WHRRL for the first time:

WHRRL gets results for Murphy USA

WHRRL: The Extremely Interesting Post Check-in Experience

The struggles of Whrrl

Whrrl was the LBS geek’s LBS system. The society and influencer models were the dream of many marketers yet Whrrl suffered because the application was a lot for people to handle. There was almost too much to do. I once described it as “too many paths to too much awesome.” I noticed a decline in usage particularly when foursquare released version 3 which “caught up” to Whrrl with their exploration technology.

The Future of Whrrl

My sources told me that Whrrl will cease to exist and that the technology will be used in a new mobile iteration of Groupon.

Location Wars Escalate

Now Groupon has checkins, a segmentation model and a better than serviceable API to add to their deals platform and sales force. If you look at companies poised to compete with them most will first think about foursquare.

I do not think this will trouble foursquare as Groupon has been highly focused on customer acquisition and foursquare has been known more as a retention tool. The big thing that has been missing for Groupon is context. Currently all Groupon deals are served via email, their mobile app or a visit to their web site. They are tied to regions and businesses but not specific places. A new Groupon app with integrated Whrrl technology opens them up to a new world of possibilities. With somewhere between 50 and 60 million subscribers, this should put SCVNGR on high alert. In fact, the next move is a race to integrate 50%-or-better style deals into an LBS application.

Aaron Strout, my partner in Location-based Marketing For Dummies will be discussing this development and his thoughts will be podcasted this afternoon.

What were your favorite Whrrl moments?
What do you think will happen when Whrrl tech meets Groupon?

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?