What’s the deal with Foursquare?

Posted: August 16th, 2011

You’ve probably heard of Foursquare or seen a sticker encouraging you to Check-In at your local coffee shop. While some may write-off Foursquare as another social media platform to keep track of, Foursquare has been quietly picking up momentum to the tune of 10 million subscribers. Then yesterday, Foursquare got it’s biggest endorsement yet as President Barrack Obama announced the White House’s official use of Foursquare.

So what is Foursquare? Foursquare creates personalized experiences among friends using location-based technologies within mobile smartphones. The entire goal of Foursquare is to share tips, insights, and deals from the businesses and areas you interact with on a daily basis.

Checking-In on your mobile phone unlocks the tips left by your friends and others for that particular business or area. I could Check-In to my favorite deli and leave a Tip for a particular sandwich that isn’t on the menu, or when running a trail in Stanley Park I could leave a tip for a particular place to get that perfect scenic view. When friends or others check-in to those locations, my tips are automatically displayed to them. My friends can even add these tips to a To-Do List to create their own mini adventures based on my experiences.

Recently, Foursquare launched support for Businesses, called Foursquare Pages. This is where Foursquare becomes really valuable for DMO’s and their members. Pages enables a business or organization to brand the Page to their own graphical feel and display Lists of places that they recommend. So if you decided to follow the Think! Social Media Foursquare Page you would see our List of places around Yaletown we love to go for lunch. Additionally you can see the tips we’ve left at all the locations around the world.

Foursquare Pages are a natural fit for member-based organizations who want to promote the members of their region. The trick is to make your Page appealing so visitors will want to follow it. We suggest providing tips, insights, and deals that only Foursquare users can experience. Luxury hotelier Ritz-Carlton took some of the knowledge from their esteemed Concierges and made them tips on their Foursquare Pages of each property. Their motivation? Take the renown insight of their Concierges and make it accessible to people who love the Ritz-Carlton brand online.

Encouraging members to offer small freebies to customers for checking-in on Foursquare is a great way to build some momentum. A cupcake shop offered an extra shot of icing if customers showed an employee a check-in on their mobile phone. Small items such as an “extra shot of espresso” work best.

Marketing material stating that your business is on Foursquare is a helpful way to remind people to check-in (as they’re thinking about what kind of sandwich they want). A small stand-up at the checkout counter goes a long way. I was buying groceries recently and the display showing my purchase had a graphic stating “Check-in to Foursquare and ask for a free apple.” Smart and simple.

Want a Free Foursquare Window Sticker for your business? Just verify your businesses location on Foursquare and they’ll mail you one. Or, to get Foursquare’s logo to use in your marketing material, visit this link and choose Buttons and Logo’s.

Have you used Foursquare in an innovative way already? We’d love to hear your story in the comments section below.

Tags: business, DMO, foursquare, President Barrack Obama, Social Media
Posted in By Joel Marc, Foursquare | No Comments »

Could Google+ compete with Facebook?

Posted: June 28th, 2011

It’s no secret that Google has been throwing some mud at the wall to see if they can gain traction against Facebook on the social networking front. Namely, Google Buzz which wasn’t a huge success and I’ve been skeptical of Google’s ability to compete against Facebook’s gravity. All of my friends are on Facebook. Plus, Facebook has all of our photographs. That’s a lot of eggs in the Facebook basket. While its possible that we may one day spend less time chatting with our friends and more time working, Facebook is going to have to make a pretty serious mistake for us all to leave. According to their policy, they actually own them.

Google’s recently launched Circles network has me intrigued though. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a great Mashable article that links to some of Googles explanatory videos.

Paul Adams created a very clear presentation about the flaws of existing social networks (ie Facebook) while he was at Google. It explains the importance of privacy to the user. It also explains why the term ‘friends’ is not helpful. In short, he contends that ‘friends’ is too broad and doesn’t allow users to categorize their message by audience. The presentation has been viewed a whopping 670,000 times on Slideshare.

 The Real Life Social Network v2 
 View more documents from Paul Adams

Facebook has a vested interest in complete openness. The network’s model turns on connecting the whole world. They are unapologetically pushing the bounds of individual privacy. As a result, there has been a lot of high-profile resistance to complete openness both publicly and from government watchdogs.

Privacy, and the ability to control it could be Facebook’s Achilles Heel. This is why i’m intrigued by Circles. It’s the biggest weakness in Facebook’s model. At Think!, we believe in the power of passionate communities. These communities center around a common interest and can be simply represented using concentric circles. We don’t believe that the world is one big circle. That’s the old world. We believe that it is one big circle made up of many, many much smaller circles. In these small circles, relevant information is essential and giving people the power to control their message is paramount.

Google Circles lets you categorize people on the way in and on initial appearance its very intuitive and smooth. Facebook Groups goes a little way towards solving the problem. However, many of the privacy settings are well buried, presumably so that people don’t use them. Circles is the complete opposite.

Of course, given their momentum, Facebook could always copy the idea. Interestingly, since he released his presentation and released his book Social Circles, Paul Adams now works at Facebook as their research lead on social.

Tags: Facebook, Google, google plus, Social Media
Posted in By Rodney Payne, Google | 1 Comment »

Social Media ROI in 2 Minutes.

Posted: January 22nd, 2011

I was looking over the new Post Cards Tab on the Cook Islands Fanpage when I saw this post from a fellow traveler. I thought of my friend who is a guru of the South Pacific Region and added her email into my reply.

Julie meet Julie. She thanked me for assisting her. I was happy to. Why most of what social media is about … conversations that help us get information that we are looking for.

This is the reply from my friend who is the travel agent.

Julie's Response

Why not? I try to help my friends in the offline world, why wouldn’t I in the online world, right?

To the Julie’s I hope it all works out. I will keep everyone posted to see if it works out.

It took two minutes. It would have been shorter but it took a minute to find Julie’s work email.

Does anyone else have a similar story?

Ben

Tags: Cook Islands, Facebook Applications, Online Customer Service, Post Cards App, Social Media, Social Media ROI, South Pacific, Travelers
Posted in By Ben Vadasz, Facebook, Social Media | No Comments »

How long does it take to set up social media for a hotel?

Posted: December 29th, 2010

In late November, I (Rodney) conducted a social media workshop in Nelson, BC including Ryan Martin from the Hume Hotel. I recently checked in to see if he’d done anything. Here’s a paraphrase of how much he achieved in just a few weeks:

I’ve set up a fan page, have the hotel wifi being directed to it and I’m working on getting a great landing page with specials to entice people to ‘like’ us. I am also producing a two minute promo video trying to capture the authentic’Hume Hotel Experience’. Emphasizing the experience and all that the building has to offer, 24 hours and not really having to leave… its like one stop shopping! That will be out soon on our site and youtube.

We were already active in responding to our TripAdvisor reviews but in the week after the workshop I had department meetings and informed staff about the site and encouraged everyone to make a personal appeal to customers of the importance of feedback on Tripadvisor. I opened up a business listing account for the Hume and ordered some business cards that have a picture of the hotel on one side and the tripadvisor website on the other side..

The top restaurant in Nelson on Tripadvisor only has 5 reviews so there is a big opportunity for our restaurants to jump all over it. I have been asking customers to go review us, it’s certainly easy when I can email them a link. The Hume is currently the number 2 hotel, second only to a motel that is out of town and I am making it a priority to be number 1!! My new website will have a link directly to the Tripadvisor site as well as our landing page on Facebook and Twitter.

I have opened up a Twitter account and have posted some things but haven’t been as successful with followers and activity. I had a famous dj play here (AC Slater) who tweeted about the Spiritbar but he didn’t hook it up to @humehotel which wouldve been cool. I know for next time to let them know we are there. Maybe I need a separate Spiritbar Twitter account from the hotel, like I have done on Facebook.

We haven’t blogged yet but on our Facebook site, I threw out an open-ended question about our rooftop neon sign to get some debate going…check it out here: www.facebook.com/humehotel It totally worked and had some people saying they thought it was an iconic sign while another hippied called it ‘corporate propaganda’!!! Beautiful.

Great work Ryan! What is your experience?

Tags: hotel, Social Media, TripAdvisor
Posted in By Rodney Payne, Social Media | 1 Comment »

The social media crash.

Posted: September 20th, 2010

Most commentators are focused on the massive boom in social media use. I’d like to pause for a moment and consider a social media crash.

Many businesses have created a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account. Many of them probably aren’t sure why they’ve done it or how it will translate to sales. Most likely the motivation was a fear of competition, just because everyone else is doing it. In the stock market world, they would describe this behaviour as irrational exuberance.

Take a look at this graph of the 1929 crash of the US stock market.

When everyone is hopping on a bandwagon, other people around them climb on too. If there’s no foundation for the increased growth, eventually everything falls apart and the market starts again at a more realistic pace.

I’m sure that when the telephone was first released, people were telephone-happy. They probably called everyone they knew that had a telephone just to see how the thing worked. Could part of the huge growth be from consumers who are intrigued by the novelty of social media? ’Wow that person tweeted me back.’ ’Look at all the people I had lost touch with in my life who I can now find on Facebook.’

Many people have told me recently that they feel like social media is taking over their lives. What happens if people start to cut back and act rationally about social media tools?

Now have a look at this chart of how Facebook has grown.

http://www.benphoster.com/facebook-user-growth-chart-2004-2010/

Does that growth curve look familiar? All it is missing is the down part.

Will consumers become saturated with information? We are getting bombarded through our email inbox, Facebook stream and Twitter Feed. I can never understand how Twitter power users can genuinely follow or develop real relationships with more than a few hundred people. Will people get tired of businesses spamming their social networking presence with irrelevant content?

What happens once we have friended everyone who will let us and we have followed anyone else on Twitter? With a click we can now even check in to tell the world exactly where we are. Surely at some point we will have to become overwhelmed with information, if we’re not already. Maybe people will take stock of what’s really important to them. Maybe we’ll put our computers down and spend time with the important people in our lives. Maybe we’ll leave our computers at work.

If it happens, businesses will get back to the business of using social media properly.

Are you overwhelmed yet?

Tags: compare, comparison, crash, Facebook, growth, Social Media, stock market
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Communities that really work.

Posted: August 16th, 2010

With another resident, I’m an admin for an online community for the new Woodwards apartment building where I live. The community is valuable because we can communicate with everyone and share information very quickly. We’re still trying to get the property manager and developer to come to the table.

I recently started a non-profit organization with Laurel Eastman entirely on a Facebook page. It works because its targeted to an existing community of kiteboarders who are passionate about the cause. It lets us communicate much faster than email.

If I was in the business of marketing cruise ships, I’d start a community for every single cruise that went out. Cruises aren’t for me – I’m not that type of traveler – but my mum loves them. She meets amazing people and they share many days together at sea. People seem to bond when they’re stuck on a boat together. Often they lose touch when the party is over. Why not facilitate a community that allows passengers to connect and stay in touch when the trip is over. People might share photos for all of their friends and family to see and those images may provide inspiration for others to try a cruise themselves. Friends who met on a cruise could plan more cruises together. As a group they could cause each other to book the next cruise. Your product champions could market your cruises to each other, for you. You could go even further and involve past passengers in the brand and ask them what they would like in future cruises.

Hotels and airlines have a tougher time in social marketing because they tend (and I’m generalizing here) not to be as unique or memorable as the travel experiences themselves. Accommodation and flights are often treated as a means-to-an-end rather than an experience in themselves. Generally, a plane flies you from A to B and a hotel provides you a bed. How many hotels have you stayed at where you felt like you were part of a community? How many amazing experiences have airlines provided to you? When you only have a few hours on a flight or at a hotel, the experiences have to be quite remarkable to be memorable. There are always exceptions, where the service is the experience; Jet Blue and Virgin do a great job of this. There are a number of hotels that are the destination themselves; the Banff Springs Fairmont, the Ice Hotel

Why would someone want to join your online community?

Tags: airline, community, cruise, hotel, marketing, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

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