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March 3, 2011 · Social Media

Check In Where You’ll Be In The Future. Not Where You Are.

Here’s an interesting interview by Robert Scoble with Ditto’s founder Jyri Engestrom. Ditto is like Foursquare for the future. You “check in” to where you’ll be. This lets you do a variety of things, including letting people know where you are headed, so they can meet you there. It also lets you start conversations about what you’ll be doing later today. As an early adopter and long-time fan of Foursquare, the following quote from Jyri’s interview struck me as right on the money. He focuses in on the importance of shifting the moment you check in to before you’ve even left, precisely when interactions with the application that lead to discovery are most useful and have the most potential for changing your behavior. Noodle this…

“What I think makes this more useful than Foursquare is that you’re actually catching people at the decision point before they’ve already settled down, because with Foursquare I usually check in once I’ve already sat down, I’ve ordered my latte, I’m at Kuppa Cafe and I’m, like, I should check in on Foursquare, and then I get a special nearby. What are the chances at that point of me getting up and walking across the street? They’re very low. Whereas this is more about “I don’t know where I’m going yet. I havent decided yet. If you can catch people at that decision point, and then spread it not just for location but do it for movies, do it for music, do it for all different categories of social objects, in my mind that’s going to be a huge hit”

February 18, 2011 · Social Media, Web Strategy

Why Most Facebook Marketing Doesn’t Work

There’s a great article on ReadWriteWeb today titled Why Most Facebook Marketing Doesn’t Work by Peter Yared, who is the Vice President and General Manager of Webtrend Apps. In the article Peter explains why promotions and consistent, lightweight engagement works consistently, and more importantly, why the following strategies generally fail:

Lots of Apps in One Tab
Sweepstakes
Photo and video contests
Like Blocks (where a user has to “like” a Facebook page in order to access a feature)
Extended permissions (asking a user for a laundry list of access to their profile)
Unbranded Apps
Dedicated Facebook Storefronts (He says they work now, but won’t soon)

This section of the conclusion stood out, especially in the context of Peter’s extensive experience with a broad range of approaches:

“Make sure your fans get something in return for liking your page with promotions likes offers for fans that they can easily redeem. The more lucrative the deals offer, the more sharing with friends will happen. Fans want things like exclusive products/services, drastically discounted prices akin to Groupon type deals, and early notification and registration for upcoming events, ideally exclusive to fans. Promotions should make the fan feel like they are a brand insider, not just a standard consumer.

A big secret of Facebook marketing is that it is easy and cheap to drive promotions using ads targeted only at your fans that link to landing tabs that deliver the offer and encourage fans to share to their newsfeed.

A brand on Facebook should be like a casual friend or neighbor and not try to suck people into heavy levels of interaction. What do you do with a friend? Comment on their photos, like their status, vote on their outfit. These types of interactions take seconds, not minutes, and definitely not hours.

A brand on Facebook should offer their users regularly updated, simple to interact with engagement features. Each of the engagement apps should be fully branded, and run in a separate tab with traffic driven from wall posts, newsfeed and Facebook ad units to increase engagement. Start with a personality quiz. Then two weeks later put up a poll. Then try a trivia app. For special events, put up a gifting app for Valentine’s Day, or for the holiday season, a holiday song card.

Some brands, like media properties and well-known consumer brands, get an immediate fan base for this type of lightweight engagement. For the rest, building a fan base on Facebook is no different than building a mailing list in the previous generation of the Internet. It takes consistent engagement, and builds over time.

Methods to accelerate growth include tying Facebook ad campaigns with engagement apps and driving traffic from the homepage. The apps should still be lightweight and fun, with the conversion goal of getting the user to like the brand.

The point is to regularly put up new, fresh engagement features that are easy and fun for users to interact with, that they will want to post to their wall and share with their friends. Then users will interact with your brand just like they interact with their friends on Facebook!”

April 19, 2010 · Social Media, Top Posts, Web Strategy

I’m On A Boat! – How To Use Foursquare To Get 231 People to Check In To Your Restaurant In 1 Day

A few weeks ago, Joe Sorge showed us how he used Foursquare to get a flash mob of 150+ people into his restaurant, AJ Bombers. This Friday, with a little help from Milwaukee’s online community, he pulled together the most successful Foursquare-based event run by a restaurant to date in a 24 hour period, and proved that his Foursquare formula truly works for restaurants, and that it’s repeatable. By the end of the day on Friday, 231 people had checked in at AJ Bombers’s “I’m On A Boat!” badge party, and Joe had done more business at lunch in one day than he ever had. In this post, we’ll share some media and stats from the gathering, discuss exactly what it takes to pull off one of these events, and Joe will share some lessons learned and tips for using Foursquare to drive business.

March 6, 2010 · Business & Entrepreneurship, Community, Social Media, Technology, Top Posts, Web Strategy

Case Study: How To Use Foursquare To Draw A Crowd Into Your Restaurant

[tweetmeme] Restaurant owners are quickly discovering how to use social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and Yelp to their advantage and drive customers to their tables, but there’s a guy in Wisconsin doing it better than almost anyone else.

Joe Sorge, who runs a burger joint in Milwaukee called AJ Bombers, shot me a tweet yesterday to tell me about a Foursquare party they had this week that brought a flash mob of 161 Foursquare users to his restaurant. My eyebrows shot up when I read that number. 161 check ins in one day?! How could that be? There are only about three or four hundred Foursquare users total in Milwaukee?! Over 150 of them were in the same place, on the same afternoon?

When I called him up, Joe explained. They came to earn the highly coveted and elusive Foursquare “Swarm Badge” – something you can only get when 50 or more Foursquare users check in at the same place at the same time. I hadn’t heard of it, but apparently the promise of this coveted Foursquare badge can really draw a crowd.

March 2, 2010 · Community, Cyberculture, Social Media, Technology

Sometimes It IS About The Technology

You know when the technology itself makes the most difference to how much engagement you get on the social web? In the very beginning, when it’s brand new to everyone. That’s when the alpha geeks, the 1% of the people that produce the most content online, temporarily ignore their other social networks to focus all their attention on the shiny new object. For just a few weeks following any major launch, you can build lasting relationships with the true online influencers by being a part of the action as they congregate on the new service in an excited feeding frenzy. If you’re there, and you’re as enthusiastic, helpful and engaging as they are, you’re seen as part of the tribe.

The engagement cycle is almost always the same on new social networks with a lot of hype (Google Buzz is a perfect example). The alpha geeks “follow”, listen and interact a lot early on when the community is still a small, tight-knit group of early adopters. They amass large followings quickly, and while they develop dense networks of influence, they are also less discriminating about who they interact with and “friend” because the frenzy is highly social.

Eventually they all hit a saturation point, though. The numbers get too big, their sense of true community dissipates and the initial excitement wears off. The second the enthusiasm for the shiny object disappears, they start spreading their attention out evenly again on the tried-and-true social spaces where they get a real sense of intimacy and personal connection. That’s why, in the long run at least, the technology doesn’t matter much and why focusing relationships to achieve long-term social goals is so important.

I’ve made these observations from interacting online and joining and leaving social networks for years, but I don’t have any hard data to back this up. It’s just a hunch, so I’m really interested to hear other people’s opinions and ideas on this or get pointers to any good examples. It’s sound long-term strategy to focus on relationships over technology, but if it’s the early adopter crowd you want to notice to you, there doesn’t seem to be a better time to get their attention than on someone else’s launch day. What are your thoughts?

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