A quick rant on making foursquare analytics useful for a brand. Read from bottom to top.
12 albums I loved this year. If you’re an indie rockapotamus or are looking to expand your collection, check these out. I don’t know if these are the top 12. 2010 was a great year indeed and I did not buy every great album. Apologies to Deer Tick, Gorillaz, Tame Impala, Caribou, Real Estate, Tame Impala and Zola Jesus.
12 – Beach House – Teen Dream
Delicious, chillaxing and a tiny bit haunting. There isn’t a bad song on this one.
11 – The National – High Violet
Just like The National only epic-er. You’ll see what I mean. More of the same in a very good way.
10 – Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz
If you’re into Katy Perry and you are looking for one album to step you into indie rock, do not pick this one. This sucker is advanced. The lyrics are brilliant and the style is some kind of cosmic space rock. Best tracks? Vesuvius and Too Much
9 – Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
8 – The Ruby Suns – Fight Softly
This album is so great in the morning if you need a pick-me-up-blast-of-energy-that-sticks-with-you-all-day. You have never heard of them because they are on Subpop. Subpop is too cool for all of us.
7 – Small Black – New Chain
Neon Indian + Black Rebel Motorcycle Club = Small Black. Not quite consistent enough to be in my top 5, but I thought for several months that this could be number one. If you only hear one song: Photojournalist
6 – Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
So many flipping bands with Deer themes, this one is one of the best.
5 – LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening
This is impossibly addictive.
4 -Broken Bells – Broken Bells
Disrespected by every indie blog because of the mainstream coverage, this is the Samuel Adams of indie rock. It’s easy on the ears, it isn’t overly challenging and you can listen to it over and over. Brilliant debut. I hope there’s a followup
3 – Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today
lo-fi and chill with a little bit of 80s reminiscence. This one took a while to blow my mind, but it did. Best Tracks? Round and Round and Can’t Feel My Eyes
2 – Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs – Medicine County
Twisted, country-esque indie brilliance. This one took me about 10 listens to master and that’s a very good thing. Best track? Feet Don’t Fail, Escalator. I accidentally discovered this in a record store in Seattle. I bought after I heard one track and I am so glad I did. I’ve never heard anything quite like them.
1 – The Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
I started off the year in a fight with The Arcade Fire over their ridiculously high ticket prices, but ended it feeling like an ass for missing their show and not paying. I got the disc for $3.99 on Amazon and have listened to it more than any other album this year. That is saying alot given how many spins Holly got. Best Songs? The album is like one giant song. It’s a theme album. Some great videos and experiences to too.
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".]
Gowalla places usually contain items, but the most popular spots have become dumping grounds for uncool and overassigned items that nobody wants.
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.
What if you found this pin the Magic Kingdom but had to go to Hollywood Studios to exchange it for a real one? Would you go?
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.
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.
My colleague Catherine Sheehan, audience intelligence guru, marketer, Harvard alum and thinker guest posts this week. She admitted to me that this post was born a bit out of fear, but also genuine concern that humanity could lose its identity. Because my blog usually posts the reasons why we should go head on into new technologies, I thought it was important to hear the counterpoints. I greatly respect Catherine’s opinion and her desire to begin an important dialogue.
Two weeks ago I was at the Jay Chiat Strategy Festival in Miami, a conference that delivered two days packed with strategic, creative, design, and audience insights shared by some of the best planners in the country (with occasional breaks for sleeping and outrageously priced cocktails at the Delano). Eric Hirschberg, CEO of Activision, was the first person to speak at the Festival, and something about his (very eloquent) speech was still nagging at me as we boarded our flight back to Boston. It wasn’t until I saw someone “check in” on Foursquare when we landed at Logan that I put my finger on it – and this blog post was born:
Hirshberg led off the Festival by declaring World of Warcraft “the best example of branding in the modern world.” He made a compelling argument: World of Warcraft is a “persistent world.” Always on, 24/7. Continues to exist even after a gamer leaves. Impacted and changed by everyone who sets foot on it. But operated by a clear set of rules that every player must follow. Hirshberg closed by advising all brands to follow WOW’s lead, and work towards becoming persistent worlds.
What he didn’t mention is a second category of brands that have already created persistent worlds – location-based services companies.
Three weeks ago Allen & Gerristen hosted GeoM, a veritable who’s who of location-based services. The final, most anticipated panel included Dennis Crowley, Founder of Foursquare and Seth Priebatsch, Founder (Sorry. Head Ninja) of SCVNGR. Both young entrepreneurs have successfully created persistent worlds. Foursquare and SCVNGR are “always on,” accessible on your phone 24/7. Each time you “check in” to a venue your activities and feedback are logged – you make your mark on the world, as does every other checked in visitor. Each application operates by a clear set of rules that guide users.
SCVNGR most perfectly typifies “brand as persistent world”: its goal is to build a virtual “game layer” on top of the original persistent world – our real world.
This is where the notion of “brands as persistent worlds” gets scary – when the lines between brand world and real world become so blurred that you can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins.
An example: SCVNGR offers points when you check into a location, but awards even more points for a “social check-in,” when you check in to a location with one or more friends. If I were watching my friend get excited over extra bonus “social check-in” SCVNGR points, I’d be forced to wonder – did he invite me along because he wants to spend time with me? Or because he wants SCVNGR points? When the lines between brand world and real world blur, motives, relationships, even emotions become suspect. You may be elated when SCVNGR rates your outing as having a high “fun quotient” – but will you stop to wonder whether you’re actually having fun?
For me, the height of the GeoM conference came at an unexpected moment. Dennis was in the midst of explaining several features of his Foursquare application. And I was taken aback when I saw that Seth, sitting directly beside Dennis, wasn’t listening to him at all – he was up there on the stage, typing on his phone. At first I chalked it up to a lack of manners crossed with extreme millennial ADD. But I was floored when, as soon as Dennis finished speaking, Seth looked up and commented: “While Dennis was explaining his application to you, I created an application on SCVNGR.” He had created a SCVNGR challenge specific to our event and location. And he invited the audience (who, incidentally, had just indulged in trays of cupcakes) to sign onto SCVNGR, complete the challenge, and win a chocolate bar.
I then watched in disbelief as at least 80% of the audience immediately looked down at their smartphone/iPad/laptop, pulled up SCVNGR, and began working on the challenge – paying absolutely no attention to another panelist who had begun to speak. What had seemed like a lack of common courtesy a few minutes before was now something much more disturbing. SCVNGR’s persistent world, or game layer on top of the world, or whatever label you give it – had eclipsed the real world. And nobody in the room seemed to notice.
Fundamentally, we all want our favorite brands and products to exist in a persistent world: available on demand. Receptive to our creativity. Permitting us to make our mark and show off to our friends. But we’d do well to remember that the real world is the most persistent world of all – offering more challenges, discoveries, conversations, tear-filled lows, ecstatic highs, and pure analog joy than we could experience in a lifetime. And every so often it deserves our full attention.
Branded worlds, game layers, life-charting apps – they’re cool, fun, and very often useful. But when they become truly “persistent,” they confer a great deal of responsibility to the person engaging with them: knowing when to turn them off.
Jason Keath pointed out that there are some great Mos printed on the world's currency.
What is this Movember thing anyway? Movember is a global organization bent on ending cancer encouraging members to simply grow a moustache during the month of November to raise awareness for men’s cancer issues. While Movember is focused on men’s health issues like prostate and colon cancer, it ends up being much more than that. Movember builds and strengthens communities. Movember is a healthy competition. Movember is a series of networking events and galas.
One of the big competitions this year is the Digital Challenge. Teams from across the United States, Canada and Australia will compete to see which city has the best – uh – Mojo. Last year two teams vied for the title in which Team Boston barely edged Lance Armstrong’s home, Austin, TX. Team Austin and Team Boston’s captains are:
The Original 2
Team Austin : #TeamAUS : Aaron Strout
Team Boston : #TeamBOS : Graham Nelson
You can click on the money to make a donation to Movember.
The challenge was so competitive last year that we have expanded! You can follow and send a tweet to your captain to find out how to join their team, get involved in Movember events or just plain donate a few bucks to the cause. Your money does not need to have a cult of personality with a moustache, you can’t spell money without “mo” so we take all kinds.
US Expansion Teams
Team Dallas : #TeamDFW : Kris Morrison
Team Los Angeles : #TeamLAX : Brian Aucoin
Team New York City : #TeamNYC : Lisa Kolodny
Team Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill : #TeamRDU : Gregory Ng
Team Toronto: #TeamTOR : Sean Moffitt
Team Salt Lake City : #TeamSLC : DJ Waldow
Team San Diego : #TeamSAN : BJ Cook
Team Seattle : #TeamSEA: Damon Cortesi
Team Washington DC : #TeamDC: Justin Herman
Canada Expansion
#TeamYHZ – Halifax – Ryan Joseph @famousfolks
#TeamYUL – Montreal – Eric Robillard @clownonfire and Sara Lomas @drawnin
#TeamYOW – - Ottawa – Allan Isfan @isfan
#TeamYYZ – Toronto – Jeremy Wright @jeremywright
#TeamYKF – Kitchener-Waterloo Karl-Allen Muncey* @cutegecko
#TeamYXU – London Matt Bergmann @creativematt
#TeamYWG – Winnipeg Jason Abbott @jabbs7
#TeamYQR – Regina – David Bellerive @stupidinregina
#TeamYYL – Calgary – Sarah Blue @superblue
#TeamYEG – Edmonton – Chris Labossierre @chislabossiere or Ken Bautista @kenbautista
#TeamYYJ – Vancouver John Ounpuu @ounpuu Kris Krug @kk
Movember Victoria – Andrew Wilkinson @awilkinson
How to get involved
- Lead a Digital Challenge team in your city. Tweet or email me, @schneidermike, to find out how.
- Grow a moustache and raise money to change the face of men’s health by joining a Digital Challenge team.
- Put a Movember twibbon on your avatar http://www.twibbon.com/join/Movember.
- Make a donation.
- Tweet a link to this post or any other Movember content!
Thank you for supporting Movember!
Click on a mo to make a monation.
One of the things I hear most about location based systems is that people want offers. They want to get stuff for checking in. Some people wonder why they do not see a special in every application every place they go. The key to actually receiving offers is building awareness everywhere. Someone has to tell people that location based apps like Foursquare and Whrrl enable this ability quite easily. Dennis Crowley, Jeff Holden, Josh Williams, Seth Priebatsch, Lawrence Colburn (etc) are doing a great job of going around the country and letting people in on the secret. It is important to remember that just because conferences, twitter and blogs like generate dialogue among marketers, technologists and brands, they do not reach everyone. The people who are passionate about LBS (I am probably talking to YOU) need to let businesses know first and foremost that people are checking in to their business. Everyone within the business should be talking to these
- people that care enough about them to go through the process of
- pulling out their phone
- finding the place
- checking in to let their friends and stalkers know that they have done so (which some say is risky)
- sending that information to the Twitter or the Facebook
Whenever I go into the city, I check in on Foursquare and Whrrl (and Gowalla, SCVNGR, MyTown, Pegshot, Yelp and sometimes even Friendster, I mean Brightkite). When I do it, I often ask the employees if they know the mayor, or the ambassador or duke or the person highest on the leaderboard.
I was in New York with Joel Idelson the other day and we went to Pret A Manger to get some coffee before a big meeting. The manager was on the floor making sure that the displays looked perfect. I already had my phone out because I was checking in, so I showed her a picture of “the mayor” and asked “Do you know this person?”.
She said “No, should I? Who is he?”
“He is your mayor. Have you heard of Foursquare?” I inquired.
“My what? What’s Foursquare?” she asked. Even in the Cradle of Foursquare, the villagers are not 100% aware that they are among greatness.
“Foursquare is a tool that lets people check in to your store. They then tell their friends that they are here so that they can find each other. This person is your mayor. That means that they have checked in here more than anyone. They care about you enough to tell their friends that they are coming here and this guy does it the most.” I said.
“Wow!” said the manager. “I need to reward him for that!”
I smiled the biggest smile. She got it immediately. I then told her that Foursquare and Whrrl both allow you to build specials for mayors and regular folks that check in. She was thrilled. The lightbulb went off immediately and I am hoping to find a special at Pret A Manger the next time I go.
We all want LBS to work. We all want offers. We also know it’s not just about offers, but that they make it interesting for the masses. So here is my challenge to you, the early adopter, LBS superhero that you are. When you check into a store, restaurant, coffee shop, or pretzel wagon, flash the picture of the mayor, ambassador or duke in the face of the staff, ask “Do you know this person?” and come back here and let me know how it went. Seriously. I would like the whole story in the comments here or in your own “The Do You Know Movement” post that you link to in the comments.
#dykm
The hashtag is #dykm.
I was in Las Vegas at BlogWorldExpo 2010 last week meeting old friends, making new ones and things were going well until – my belt broke. I only brought one. My pants are two sizes too big. It’s a long story. So I went to Urban Outfitters at the fabulous Mandalay Bay Hotel (honestly, I can’t see myself staying anywhere else in Las Vegas, I loved it there) to buy a new one. They did not have any that I liked so I checked out the t-shirt section because I do not have enough t-shirts. All the while I am holding on to my belt loop so I don’t lose my drawers. I walked through the casino, to the Starbucks, into the convention and back up to the mall with one finger in a loop at all times. Mad mad cool. So there it was, in the t-shirt section – the perfect shirt. I bought it instantly and because they did not have any belts I liked, decided to forego a stupid belt and hold my pants up with my fingers through the loop like an 80s middle schooler until my flight.
Flashback
Flashback 2009, SXSW, a confused @schneidermike from “themichaelschneider.com” goes to the mic to ask the keynote speaker a question.
“I’m @SchneiderMike from themichaelschneider.com” he said.
“SchneiderMike!” says Gary Vaynerchuk.
“So I have this friend-” he said to groans and chuckles from the audience. “-he’s pretty good at a lot of things and is not sure what to focus on and short of going on a vision quest in the desert, taking peyote and finding his spirit guide, how should he decide what to focus on?”
“Do all that shit.” said GaryVee. “I can’t tell you how many projects I have 80-90% finished. Someone could come up to me and mention plastic cups and I could be like ‘plastic cups’ and go off on a three week tangent.”
A Symbol
At that point I decided no longer to worry about labeling myself as a specialist in anything. I decided that it was ok to be good at a lot of things particularly when I have the motivation and ability to get fairly deep in a lot of topics simultaneously. In other words, a ton of passion combined with knowledge. Specializing in the past never really made me happy. Sure, my SQL is better than some people’s English, but my mind is too active for that and I need to be able to think about more than one thing. I will continue to have goals and develop paths to those goals, but I decided that if I stray from the path for a bit or leave it for a new one that I will not beat myself up like I did in the past.
Gary meant plastic cups as something arbitrary, but to me plastic cups now represent always allowing myself the possibility of learning something new, having a conversation with someone about a topic that I am not even the least bit familiar with or carving out time to think about something that I have never even considered – Solo or in groups.
Do you allow yourself time to explore or are you focused on that “one thing”?
The more I talk to people about location and location based services, the more I hear the question: “Why?”. People want me to tell them what the purpose of the check in is and why they continue to check in on one or more location based applications like foursquare, Whrrl, Gowalla, MyTown,SCVNGR, TriOut, Pegshot, Friendster – I mean BrightKite, Facebook and the list goes on and on and on. What is the consumer value? The answer is pretty simple really. You’re either getting value or you are having fun.
Value
You should get something for sharing your data. That’s right. When you tell someone where you are, what you like or what you bought, it makes them smarter about you. Being smarter about you means they can tailor their offers instead of throwing a giant net into cyberspace hoping to catch you. Think about tailoring for a minute. A tailor knows you from head to toe. They carefully measure you so that they can make a suit or dress that fits you exactly. They know your chest size, you arm length and they know a lot more about your crotch than anyone else does. The result is something that fits you – at least until you plow through an entire box of Oreos.
Place is a component of relevance. Getting a tip from Foursquare when you check into a nearby location is fun and cool and a step in the right direction. I really like how Whrrl is focused on learning from what you do with it. In the early versions of Whrrl 3 they toyed around with telling people things like “people who check in to The Rattlesnake go to the Arlington T Station”. Now they take all of that data and use it to make recommendations that you may actually want to do based on Amazon-like technology. Every want, do, check in and ignore tells the model more about how you like to behave and helps it make smarter recommendations about what to do. That said, it also needs people to use it because the recommendations come from the user community. The content is is not mined from Yelp or Google or anywhere else. It’s only as strong as the community.
Gowalla has a unique opportunity that it does not exploit enough. Gowalla has virtual goods. These items are found by checking into places and have real world value. The cool thing about these is that you can pick up a taco that can be redeemed at a place like One Taco in Texas. You can use it yourself or you could choose to drop it somewhere for someone else to find. So imagine you’re Tony Hawk and you have a bunch of virtual skateboard decks. I once got a virtual eye-fi card from Best Buy. This kind of surprise creates buzz and makes people feel good about the brand that left it for them. The effects are short term and could be targeted to places and in theory to certain kinds of people.
Marketers. Location data is another measurement. Take it and create a custom offer. Yes. It takes time to combine data from twitter, facebook and location streams, but when you are sitting in a board room talking about the feedback on offers that were actually relevant to the customer, you will be singing the praises of the data wonks who did your segmentation. Why? Because the people will care about what you’re offering them. Anne Mai Bertelsen and I wrote a paper about the future of loyalty that gives an overview on how we see loyalty and social colliding.
Fun
Checking in is fun. It’s a game. On Foursquare you get points every time you check in and you can battle for checkin supremacy in your city or the mayorship of your favorite package store or donut shop. SCVNGR sends you on treks through places and has you do challenges along the way. Some of these give you real world rewards. For example, SCVNGR created a trek through The Smithsonian that makes going through the museums entertaining and gave people who were really dedicated a chance to win an iPad.
Gowalla partnered with USA Today to put together treks through US cities. These were designed to help people find the coolest (and in some case most touristy) spots . The reward was a Gowalla pin, but I think the real reward was the time people saved in planning because they knew that Gowalla already had scoped out some fun things for them to do.
Marketers need to incorporate fun and value into location based marketing strategies in order to get people to participate. More importantly, they need to take the opportunity to learn about the people who are interested in participating in their programs. Remember, these people have gone to great pains -pulling out their phone, searching for the place, interacting with the content, checking in, doing challenges and sharing these with their social graphs – and getting to know these people, rewarding them, can pay dividends for the brand by creating evangelism and seeding loyalty.
