Facebook Places: 36 Hrs Later
Well its been 36 hours more or less since Facebook announced their new Places features, and a solid day in which I’ve been able to get it working on my iPhone. So I wanted to post a quick follow up.
- first of all if you don’t already read The Next Web and their coverage of location, you really should… they did a lot of posts on Facebook Places, full of great insights. I thought the one titled “Why I deleted foursquare for good” was particularly good. That and pretty much all of Greg Sterling’s Screenwerks blog are great sources of info Read more
Facebook Places
Ok, well it’s been just over a year since FourSquare launched at SXSW 2009, and within days afterwards I am sure naysayers were saying, yeah that’s great but just wait till Facebook launches the same thing, and they’ll be toast. Well yesterday was that day…yesterday Facebook announced Facebook Places.
I am sure the details of what IT is will be reported all over the web, so I won’t go into all those details here… but I watched the video of the conference announcing it and major kudos to ex Socialight’er Michael Sharon (product mgr for Places) for what seems to be a nice well thought through execution… someone like Michael obviously “gets it” more than anyone, and I think that the feature will be a huge hit.
As a pretty passive user of Facebook, the thing I enjoy about it the most is the ability to easily keep tabs on friends… Read more
MoLo, Happyface and the Local Business
I must admit that after about a year I am beginning to run out of steam as a Foursquare user… it felt like the damn thing was down most of last week whenever I was looking to check in somewhere and I’ve also begun to use both Gowalla and MyTown more regularly, so the sheer amount of checking in and the fact that I don’t go to that many new and interesting places is beginning to take its toll. Read more
Placecast Match API
Ask a geo nerd, or Angelina Jolie, about where they are and they may geekily come back with the Latitude and Longitude of the location, but for the rest of us it’s a more imprecise description… “uh at the Mickey D’s next to the Exxon”. To McDonalds corporate that may be store #1245, to on campus students it may be the ‘ickdonalds by the dorms’ to area residents it may be the McDonalds by the university and to Google Maps it may be the business at 4151 North Central Expressway. All the same friggin place.
Now in the olden days when you just bought a printed foldable map this didn’t really matter much, but nowadays in the modern inter networked world of digital maps and folks creating a dizzying array of new services helping connect people with locations, it matters more. Now within a single stand alone application like say a TomTom navigation device there is probably not much thought put into what you name a place, but in the web2.0 world where interoperability and information sharing reign, everyone needs to know what location everyone else is talking about when someone is talking about the business at 4151 North Central Expressway.
Hot Potato: for Events and Social Couch Potatos
Well unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have no doubt noticed all the buzz about Foursquare and Gowalla coming out of SXSW and Where 2.0 this year. It seems that location based mobile social networking and check-ins were all the rage there this year. There have been no shortage of followers with folks from Yelp and Facebook expected to join in on the check-in mania.
Another up and comer in this area, with a new twist, that is beginning to get some press is a company called Hot Potato. Here is where they fit in:
What they do: They create an online social network around the dimensions of “here” and “happening now”. Facebook has people at its center of gravity and Yelp has places (mostly businesses) as theirs. Folks like Foursquare and Gowalla have seen the value of connecting the two with gameplay around the places where people go.
A closer look at ALikeList
The buzz around the local business review market seems to be friggin out of control these days. I half expect to walk into my local grocery store tomorrow and pick up a copy of the Star with a grainy photo of a Yelper making out with Angelina Jolie on the cover!
It’s not that I don’t think local review content is important, really, it is. It’s just that this type of stuff has to have been some of the earliest content on the Internet, I am sure some of the early messages across ARPANETwere something like “took Molly to Surf Shack on Wilshire after switch testing last night, fish tacos were keen”. It just seems like sometimes it just takes FOREVER to not make much progress in Internet land.
You have to give Yelp a lot of the credit for the current surge of interest, not only is it a pretty valuable service, but the Google + Yelp deal that never happened, and now the Yelp business practices lawsuits have kept them on the front cover of the business section for a while now.
So if you wanted to reinvent this baby one more time, what might you do? Well let’s check under the hood of Alikelist.
Presence at Place of Sale (PAPOS) The New Click Rate?
So if you’ve followed the news in the mobile social networking world recently, first we had people like Yelp introduce “check in” and word that Facebook has the feature on its way, then Foursquare struck a number of big media deals which has kept the mobile location aware world on the front pages of the trade press with thoughts about new ad models focused on cost per check in.
Well after giving it a bit more thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the industry needs a more broad “presence at place of sale” (PAPOS?) metric that could capture all the events where a person actually walks into a brick and mortar retailer and that action is recorded by any available means.
The PAPOS could then be looped back into the marketing ecosystem serving as the click or conversion rate for all advertising, both on and offline, targeted at driving brick and mortar foot traffic. Read more
What Best Buy Could Do In Mobile and Location Marketing
I was going through my Twitter stream the other day and noticed a few tweets referencing Foursquare involving BestBuyCMO… Foursquare is undoubtedly getting a ton of press these days, and much of it for good reason… it’s new, interesting and fun, and has a lot of potential and implications for marketers… and did I mention it’s getting a lot of press these days.
As cool as FourSquare is, why stop there… Mr. Best Buy CMO, if you’re listening here is what I think would be a more comprehensive way to use mobile and location data in your business: Read more
Foursquare, Facebook, Yelp and the Battle of the Check-ins
In case you missed it a few weeks back Yelp announced that they were adding a check-in feature to their service where visitors to retail establishments can check in and let others know where they’re at, or have been. Well today on the front page of the Silicon Alley Insider is a post reporting that Facebook too is working on a similar feature.
NYC based Foursquare has undoubtedly been the leader in this area and their success seems to be attracting a lot of imitators.
Here are some thoughts on the importance of check ins and the ensuing pile on we’re about to see of folks adding on the feature. Read more
Placecast Teleconference, Mobile and Retailers
I listened in on the Placecast teleconference yesterday, talking about mobile technology driving retail foot traffic. There were some interesting points brought up during the discussion, a few of the most relevant:
- Consumer don’t mind giving away location as long as they get something valuable in return and they gave permission
- Texting is replacing emailing among the younger generation. Like receiving commercial email, receiving commercial texts is not seen as an intrusion as long as it was relevant and consumer gave permission
- In terms of ad delivery, location provides increased relevance… interestingly no one mentioned the consumer predisposition for acting on advertising when out and about… which I think is probably most important
- Going off and building an iPhone app is not for everyone. It’s expensive ($100k is not atypical) and overall smartphone penetration is not at scale. It makes sense for some demos more than others. Good old SMS is cheaper, easier and already at scale.
With respect to mobile meets retail specifically one of the panelists Kathryn Koegel from Primary Impact Research made mention of how consumers were often using mobile devices while IN STORE to get additional product information and reviews and to do price comparisons on the items they were shopping for. Read more
