Edelman Digital » geo location

Foursquare Launching Badge Rewards

Lizz Kannenberg — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:37:40 +0000

What’s in badge? Many Foursquare users have been wondering whether or not acquiring all of those colorful circles would ever translate into something tangible, and Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley arrived at the Mashable Media Summit Tuesday armed with an answer.

To combat what Crowley described as “badge fatigue,” Foursquare will begin working with venue and event partners to offer special access, free stuff and other goodies to Foursquare users who unlock sponsored badges.

Crowley applied the new feature at Internet Week in New York, where users who check in at specified venues will unlock a badge that, when shown to bouncers or venue employee at certain Internet Week events, will grant the holder priority access to the event.

The badge rewards announcement comes quickly on the heels of geolocation competitor Loopt’s unveiling of Loopt Star, a virtual rewards program that allows business to offer loyalty benefits to any customers (as opposed to just a “mayor”).

Expanding the benefit of participating in a platform like Foursquare is extremely important, as the novelty of “checking in” over and over with no physical reward will eventually wear off. Additionally, as Foursquare passes the 1.6 million user mark, it’s become harder and harder to earn mayorships at popular venues. Rewarding only the mayor isn’t enough when the race to become the mayor is so crowded.

Being able to earn free stuff or expanded access by flashing a proprietary badge opens the door for Foursquare to be one of the first social platforms to provide users with useful, easily qualified and easily attained real-life value. Instead of paper punch cards or plastic swipe cards than can be lost or forgotten, customers can easily track their patronage and earn rewards through their ever-present cell phones. This finally makes Foursquare badges enticing in more ways than just as shiny digital reminders of a good night out.

Friday Five: Macro Trends To Watch

David Armano — Fri, 21 May 2010 10:36:26 +0000

When we talk about trends in the Digital space it’s easy, even convenient, to start assigning responsibility for that movement to whoever happens to be leading the charge that minute. What’s worth noting is that a trend never really belongs to a platform, it belongs to the people wielding it. With that in mind, I present five macro trends to watch. In these cases, it’s now brands driving much of the innovation rather than resting until a platform mutates itself.

Geolocation Is Bigger Than Foursquare

While Foursquare recently announced an excess of 40 million check-ins and 15,000 new users per day, what’s really worth noting is that location-based initiatives transcend the platform itself. Large brands such as Pepsi (client) have begun experimenting with geolocation initiatives such as Pepsi Loot. This program is designed to encourage consumers to check-in at locations that serve Pepsi beverages in order to earn points, which can be redeemed for items such as downloadable music from Universal Music Group. In addition, McDonalds has announced a partnership with Facebook, which is working on integrating its own geolocation capabilities into the platform. As location-based programs increase in popularity, “where are you?” is becoming the new “what are you doing?”

Real Time Is Bigger Than Twitter

From Facebook’s news feed (which updates as you view it) to real-time analytics tools (imagine if Twitter and Google Analytics had a baby), the Web is increasingly becoming real-time. The implications of this for brands are the opportunities to not only monitor what your customers are saying about you in real time but, in the case of real-time analytics, to be able to see what they are doing on your own domain digital properties. Responding to information and trends in real-time can prevent a negative Groundswell against your brand and even yield insights about your consumers.

Social CRM Is The New Marketing

Social CRM or “Customer Relationship Management“ is a social-media version of “Customer Relationship Management.”

From Altimeter Group:

Social CRM represents a continuing journey by organizations to deliver the right customer experience at the right time. It’s not just about technologies. It’s NOT just about business processes. It’s fundamentally how to and where to reengage with customers in both social channels and the traditional world.

Early examples include @comcastcares on Twitter and Best Buy’s Twelpforce, which harnesses hundreds of “Blue Shirts” who provide customer service via Twitter. Best Buy also does this through Facebook. While in its infancy, Social CRM and the need to integrate legacy processes with social systems is an important trend to monitor and act upon.

Shopping Is Better With Friends

With Facebook’s recent release of its open graph, nearly any activity can involve your friends. Sale.com is one of the first sites to integrate the “like” feature from Facebook, drawing friends toward favorite deals and e-commerce outposts as endorsements fill their personal dashboards. Online shopping is sure to become a more social experience.

Social Media Infrastructure, Scale & Integration

How to organize around social media is becoming one of the industry’s biggest challenges. The issue is part technology (social content management systems), part process (how to respond to a crisis) and part people (training and compliance). Social CMS platforms such as Awareness and SocialTALK offer early solutions to the problem of managing a brand’s content across several social networks. Edelman offers a “belt system” training program for large organizations, focused on ensuring compliance around basic skills. Google recently announced it is hiring a “head of social.” The broader trend is that large organizations are looking to formalize their efforts around social media.

Check-In Or Watch Your Reputation Check-Out

Travis Murdock — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:10:08 +0000

Originally posted on Travis Murdock’s Blog.

Guide to location-based services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, for PR and marketing professionals.

I checked in on Foursquare as I arrived at a networking event the other day and I was greeted with a free drink if I showed my phone to the bartender. My excitement grew when Foursquare notified me that the restaurant across the street had a two-for-one dinner deal. I grabbed some colleagues to go with me. When we finished, I noticed that the bar across the street offered a free appetizer. So, we trouped across the street determined to follow our Foursquare adventure to its end even if we were already full. When we finished we had consumed drinks, dinner and appetizers all for less than $10 each.

As my experience shows, people are willing to give their location if they know they’ll get something for it. JiWire’s Insights report found that 53 percent of people are willing to show their location to get more relevant ads. Nielsen reports that 24 percent of Americans have a smartphone and we know that most of the new models have GPS. Foursquare has rapidly grown to 500,000 users and 275,000 check-ins in one day. Mashable reports that the other location-based check-in game, Gowalla, has about 100,000 customers. Additionally, nearly every user-generated review service is adding location to its mobile app because of its benefits to customers and the hope to attract higher advertising rates.

As a PR or marketing professional it is about time to add location-based services to your marketing mix and reputation management programs. Your customers are already mentioning your brand in these services and their comments are showing up in search results. It isn’t hard to understand that like other social media, location-based services need active engagement and monitoring. Chuck Reynolds daftly details the impact of these services on local search and search engine visibility in this blog post.

Although not sanctioned by the company, there was even a Foursquare Day last month on April 16 (4/16) that fans put together. I know you have a lot to monitor already in the fragmented social media fracas, so here are some tools that can make it easy to keep an eye on public comments on Foursquare and Gowalla. Both Check-In Mania and FourWhere allow you to search for your business and view the shouts and recommendations people leave.

I love to see the updates and advice from my friends as they check-in throughout their day. It helps me find better restaurants and gets me to try new businesses. As a PR person, I’ve seen it create real-time buzz around an event and drive longer-term search engine results. It’s time to check-in on your brand’s reputation before your customers check-out.

Disclosure: JiWire is a client.

Quick Hits: April 15

Amanda Mooney — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:15:15 +0000

105 Million Plus Registered Users, 300 New Signups Per day… Staggering Twitter Statistics From Chirp

During Twitter’s first developer’s conference, Chirp, the team at Twitter shared incredible statistics of its growth since launch. ReadWriteWeb provides a full roundup. Also of note, Twitter has announced several major features including Places, a feature that will allow Twitter users to identify their geo-location, tied to actual “points of interest” like restaurants, museums, etc. However, Twitter’s Ev Williams maintains that they are not looking to compete with Foursquare. TechCrunch provides a roundup of Ev’s keynote here.

“Tomorrow’s News”

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in association with the American Society of News Editors and the Radio Television Digital News Association, released the findings of its “The Future of Journalism” study. Overall, the study revealed that nearly six in ten executives surveyed see the industry moving in the wrong direction; 41% believe it is headed in the right direction. Additional findings include:

Most online revenue sources focus on conventional display and banner advertising.

Six out of ten feel that “The internet is changing the fundamental values of journalism… Their biggest concern is loosening standards of accuracy and verification, much of it tied to the immediacy of the Web.”

75% say mobile apps are “essential or very important”

Mary Meeker Predicts ”Mobile Internet Will Soon Overtake Fixed Internet”

GigaOM reviews Mary Meeker’s latest “State of the Internet” report. Of particular note, Meeker predicts, “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs” in the next five years. She also shares the implications for ecommerce. As Mathew Ingram reports, ecommerce will continue to develop features like

location-based services, time-based offers, mobile coupons, push notifications, etc. In China, the success of social network Tencent proves that virtual goods can be a big business, she says — virtual goods sales accounted for $2.2 billion worth of the company’s revenue in 2009 and $24 in annual revenue per user. Online commerce and paid services made up 32 percent of mobile revenue in Japan in 2008, up from just 14 percent in 2000. Meeker’s report suggests that the rest of the world — which is still below the 14 percent-mark — could see much the same trajectory over the next 10 years.

“For Every Accountant, Hire an Artist”

Christine Huang provides a great roundup of four presentations at the PSFK Conference last week that focused on storytelling. Nicholas Felton’s presentation provided further insight on his experience capturing and quantifying the seemingly insignificant daily details of his life and sharing them with the world. He’s established Daytum.com to help others do the same. Christine says, “Felton’s reports are stunning experiments in tracking and quantifying experience; they serve as proof that even in the most quotidian details of our lives lie poignant patterns, progressions, and a kind of beauty worth noticing.” This reminded me of Clive Thompson’s “I’m So Digitally Close to You” article on “ambient awareness” in social media for the New York Times. It also reminded me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s quote on marriage in Committed and the parallel of what’s so powerful about social media.

Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousands indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody… that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

Playing Foursquare With Dennis Of Foursquare

Suzanne Marlatt — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:04:42 +0000

Earlier today a group of Foursquare employees gathered outside the Austin Convention Center to start an impromptu game of real foursquare. I tried my best to become “king”, but I quickly realized I’m not as talented as I was in fourth grade. I was able to talk to Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley while he was on a break from playing. Watch the video where we discuss the 1 year Foursquare birthday celebration, his badge/check-in status, and his favorite social media tools.