Mediarketising

Facebook launched a new program earlier this month in connection with their location-based check-in app, Places. Deals allows businesses to offer discounts to Facebook users when they check in using Facebook Places. For people who have been using Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR, Loopt, and other location-based services, this is not a new feature.

To date, though, this group of people has not been large. According to Pew Internet, only 4% of online adult Americans use location based services (LBS). Compare this to the statistic that 33% of American adults access the Internet from their mobile device and you can see that location-based services have a long way to go toward greater awareness and adoption.

The large majority of people who could be using location-based services are not, and with the introduction of Deals, these services could start to see a serious boost in membership. More users on location-based applications will be good for the social media industry, Facebook, businesses, and, most importantly, consumers.

Facebook’s quick introduction of Deals only a month or two after Places was announced shows Facebook’s real intentions with Places. Facebook wants businesses to register on their site, creating company Places pages. Deals’ explicit focus on adding value to a customer’s experience at a business is one of many features Facebook could have added to Places and, in addition, they could have offered a Tips app for people to provide feedback and advice to others, like on Foursquare. They also could have offered a Create Your Own Scavenger Hunt app like on SCVNGR.

Why would Facebook want to introduce a service that would increase the number of local businesses indexed on Facebook? I believe it comes down to “Likes.”

Facebook’s competitive advantage as one of the dominate forces on the Internet is its database of social connections between people, places, and things, or as Facebook calls it, The Social Graph. This allows Facebook to offer up relevant advertising, friend suggestions, and the status posts you see in your News Feed. The backbone of Facebook’s future is attaching a “Like” button to everything, online and offline.

Many businesses already had a Facebook presence prior to Places, but now, businesses connected to Places add a critical piece of data to Facebook’s databases: Not only are brands connected to Facebook, but individual stores and locations are registered as well. Each new Place added on Facebook is “Like-able.” I believe Facebook uses the check-in as a gateway to offline “Likes.”

Deals could ultimately help shift the title of “LBS King” from Foursquare to Facebook, which raises an obvious question: Should incumbent LBS leader Foursquare and others feel threatened by Facebook Deals?

The answer is no.

Foursquare and other location-based services are creating their services for other purposes, not to amass “Likes.” Foursquare centers around serendipity, SCVNGR around competitive games—and the other location-based apps have their own mission statements. I think Foursquare should be wary of Facebook’s actions on their territory, but not too alarmed (yet).

Originally featured on The Next Great Generation

A few months ago, Twitter rolled out a new part of their service called Promoted Tweets, which are part of two paid media opportunities being offered in a private beta to select clients. The other paid opportunity offered is called Promoted Trends.

Both of these products are our first glimpses into how Twitter will begin to monetize their service from an advertising perspective and the paid media products also offer up a fundamentally new way for advertisers to connect with consumers.

Some clients that have already participated with Promoted Tweets and Trends are Coca-Cola, Universal, and Disney and the results are showing that Promoted Trends offers great visibility and engagement for brands.

Promoted Tweets work quite differently than usual paid media buys (read: online ads). Online ads generally take the form of a disruption to the content one is looking to consume on a specific site. The ads may be fun and interesting, even delightful, but in most cases they do not add value to the content you want to experience. Promoted Tweets changes this paradigm. As Dick Costolo, Twitter’s COO has stated, Promoted Tweets are not ads and I agree with him. They come from advertisers’ Twitter streams and are not separate ads. To clarify, they are tweets, not ads.

Currently, Promoted Tweets only show up in Twitter searches, but we should expect to see promoted tweets coming into our Twitter feeds soon. When we do, they will allow advertisers to ensure that opted-in followers will have a greater chance of seeing their tweet.

I think Twitter has come up with a super-smart idea on how to monetize their service. With that said, what may seem like a super smart idea at first can be gamed and lessen the value the service offers. When Google’s AdWords program started to gain a lot of traction, it seemed like the perfect advertising medium for direct response advertisers.

Search ads are still highly effective, but doing a few searches today on Google or Bing shows it’s clear that the system can be taken advantage of and not all ads are useful. The industry is always getting better, but we have significant room to improve.

Twitter didn’t rush to launch their paid media offering. They took the time to build a robust advertising medium. The information Twitter aggregates gives them a competitive advantage to take their users’ insights and turn them into effective programs for advertising. If Twitter succeeds at doing this with Promoted Tweets, it could be big win for Twitter, brands, and users as well.

Originally featured on The Next Great Generation

The verb “to check-in” has taken on a drastically different connotation over the past 18 months. Checking in has gone from the realm of a person-to -person connection as in “Hey Mom, I’m staying at Tyler’s house for the night. Just checking in with you.” To a person to place relationship as in “Noah Singer just checked into 9th Street Espresso” or how it would appear in Twitter “noahlsinger I’m at 9th Street Espresso http://4sq.com/2kr8jW.” I believe that the latter version of checking in will be how we predominantly think of this verb and will play a prominent part in our social lives as people. Marketers should also take notice and they have since this is an important pillar in branding and spreading messages to your audiences.

Marketing is about finding and influencing people to sell goods or services to . There have been many ways that marketers have gone about doing this: TV, newpapers, radio, billboards, magazines, phone booths, the yellow pages, people’s foreheads, and the list goes on. Enter in the rapid increase of Internet usage and digital devices and these media choices explode. Marketers are able to data mine terabytes of human activity information to personalize messages for each individual consumer, or so the goal is. That Overstock.com ad you see in Grooveshark for a little black dress that you looked at 2 weeks ago is no coincidence. Advertising based on behavioral targeting is not a new thing and will only improve. However, the behaviors we are aggregating data on are changing. Online, always connected technologies like our ever so useful mobile devices are leading this change.

At the vanguard of this change are location-based services (LBS). Some of the more common LBS are foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, CauseWorld, and SCVNGR. All of these services let you check in at certain locations and share this message with your friends on that LBS, Twitter, and/or Facebook. Beyond this shared function they all differ in their unique value propositions and offer different experiences on their platforms. The key here is that people are beginning to create a database of information which shows where they are going and which places they are actively choosing to show an affiliation with. This is awesomely powerful from a sociological point of view and more importantly for marketers, marketing of course! Marketers are using this information to strengthen their connections with consumers through specials for those who check-in at certain locations, by creating journeys/scavenger hunts through these services, and adding more contexts to what their brand stands for through tips about cities and places.

Based off the number of advertisers who are exploring this on foursquare, it is clear that LBSs are a marketing hit but is it appealing to Millennials? I believe this is appealing to Millennials. My first hunch is based off my own group of friends. My friend’s Facebook walls are becoming more and more populated with 4sq.com location links and this trend doesn’t seem to be stopping. My second hunch is that with major universities being some of the first organizations to create LBS experiences, like Syracuse University & the University of Arkansas, that any Millennials not on board, will soon be. Most university students will now be introduced to an LBS when going off to school to help explore their new homes.

In two years from now what will checking in come to stand for? Will we be still checking in with Mom? Friends? Your girlfriend? I’d think no. I believe the way we communicate our location will change. We will still call people to say, “Hey, where are you?” as an ice breaking question but this won’t be the crux of the conversation since this information will be already be known.

Originally featured on The Next Great Generation

Wikipedia defines metropolis as “an important hub for international connections” & no other place in the world connects a diverse array of people like New York which is why New York is the King of Cities. Before you read any further it is important to understand that New York means everything & anything to everyone who has ever stepped foot on this island. My two cents on the city are as subjective as any other New Yorker pulled off the street. This is the greatest thing about New York and what makes New York the King of Cities since everyone’s connections are unique and non-duplicable. And while these hands will paint a particular picture; New York can only be experienced and appreciated in person.

I believe in this since New York City transcends Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Seinfeld’s Upper West Side, or Samantha’s SoHo. While great entertainment, these media only help glorify what a typical NYC experience is like and there is nothing typical about NYC. Part of NYC’s atypical-city nature comes from the mashup of industries whose home is here: Fashion, Finance, Media, & many others. No one type of people dominates the city’s landscape and the result makes for enriching experiences that differentiate NYC than any other city in the world.

For 20-somethings or those in the mindset of a 20-something, enriching experiences are what we strive for. We want to explore. Going to a friends’ friends’ friend’s rooftop party and meeting someone who is doing a job you could never even imagine is common. Experiences like these helps further that exploration and keeps you on your feet as to what’s possible. Then as the night settles over the city and you look out from that rooftop onto the color-lit Empire State Building herculeanly standing over the rest of the city, you understand the immensity you’re caught in and can’t help but smile.

NYC is also known for our non-stop action, always-something-happening atmosphere that begs to be discovered. Not a day goes by that there isn’t a new bar or restaurant that opens up and a new museum exhibit or art gallery that debuts. Subscribing to Thrillist or Urban Daddy keeps your to-do list ever growing and during the summer we all check Vanity Fair’s Summer Guide (pdf) for what’s popular but of course, we all knew of those hot spots anyway.

In addition to the new places that always catch buzz, NYC has more types of places to go than Epcot’s wildest dreams. Exploring the wide array of options is part of the adventure of living here. Whether it’s a Bavarian Biergarten, 5 Shots for $10 bar, Pretzel Shop, Venezuelan Arepas Restaurant, Secret Cocktail Lounge, or a Milk Bar that serves cereal milk ice cream, NYC has it all (and that’s only in the East Village!).

One thing that does connect everything together is that NYC is always changing. Some changes happen over a short period of time, like the mural on Houston Street and some go across generations. The saying may be trite, but the one constant NYC has in its life is change. People are always coming and going and every summer as new college graduates come here, a new influx of people ready to take on the city emerges. At first they stick out in the crowd like a family from Nebraska gawking at Times Square but soon enough they fit right into the thick of things, directing that family to take the F train since that goes down Delancey.

That is the power of New York. No matter if you were a punk, geek, outcast, jock before you came here, once you are here, you are a New Yorker. This is the place where dreams are made of. It is so nice you better say it twice. In short, it is the King of Cities.

Originally featured on The Next Great Generation