Marketing Pilgrim Published: "Foursquare Pages for Business Now Self-Serve But Will Anyone Notice?" plus 3 more |
- Foursquare Pages for Business Now Self-Serve But Will Anyone Notice?
- Instant Pages Officially Part of Google's Chrome Browser
- For Journalists, Social Media is All Business
- The Latest Thing in Birth Announcements: Facebook
| Foursquare Pages for Business Now Self-Serve But Will Anyone Notice? Posted: 03 Aug 2011 04:06 AM PDT
That's why when Foursquare announced that their business pages were becoming self-serve I had to actually educate myself as to what this meant. Since January of 2010 these pages have existed but the foursquare blog tells of the new option:
The post says that over 3,000 brands have established these pages so I decided to skim through the gallery. The one thing I noticed was a pretty low engagement factor based on the stats shown for many of the pages. I came across the X Games page. I figured that since this event just happened this past weekend and the crowd would be the hipster, young crowd that is like totally dialed into all things Internet-y this would be a good gauge of how these things work. Here's what I found. For the Most Popular options it looks like the X Games used to do some location based action (although not huge numbers considering the 10 million user claim by the service).
Go over to the most recent tab and you would expect bigger numbers because of a growth in popularity and the games just having happened this past weekend. Instead you get this.
So what's my point? Well, this kind of pattern happened a lot when I perused the business page gallery so it makes one wonder just what is the impact of a service like foursquare for a brand? Location based services don't make the headlines that they used to. There were once competitors to foursquare (outside of Facebook and maybe Google Latitude) like Gowalla (remember them?) but the activity doesn't seem to get people as fired up as it once did. Do you agree? Is this just a statement about the popularity of the particular event or of the service? What are you seeing in your business around LBS's? Is there real opportunity there or is this one area where the hype outran the reality, at least for now? If you are interested in exploring this option with foursquare further for your business or organization, you can get started here. Good luck and let us know how it goes.
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| Instant Pages Officially Part of Google's Chrome Browser Posted: 03 Aug 2011 03:16 AM PDT We told you about the beta of this search feature way back in June but that's like a few years ago in Internet time. So that you will always know when something is real or if it's beta, here is a reminder about this search feature called Instant Pages which speeds certain search result pages downloads to literally nothing (because they are pre downloaded before you click on the search result) in the latest stable version of Chrome. Although Google has not bothered to update the video, here it is again for you. What's your take on this feature? Is it useful? Personally, I get a little leery of just how often something like this actually impacts results since Google uses the vague language in the post on the Chrome blog announcing the more permanent addition of the feature.
The phrase "sometimes when you click" doesn't exactly say "This will definitely make your Google search experience better." All this is saying is that Google will pick and choose when they feel that using resources for this feature makes sense to them and you will be glad that it happened that time. Not a lot but sometimes that the way the search cookie crumbles.
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| For Journalists, Social Media is All Business Posted: 02 Aug 2011 02:05 PM PDT They say that all publicity is good publicity so making friends with a journalist who covers your industry is worth the time and effort. (So says this journalist.) Where can you find such an individual? If you have a good social media presence, they'll find you. According to the 2011 Arketi Web Watch Survey, 64% of B2B journalists said they spent more than 20 hours a week online and 21% spent over 40. The overwhelming majority of that time was spent reading news and searching for story ideas. (I'm here to tell you it's so very true.) Where do they get those ideas? Check this out: As you can see, an industry source is the most valuable resource and that's you, the marketer. Press releases and email pitches were only moderately successful. Many email pitches don't work because they aren't properly targeted. I get dozens of pitches a week and some are so far from anything I've ever written about, I have to wonder where the sender got my contact info in the first place. As far as social media, this is one place where Twitter is beating out Facebook. Most likely that's because Twitter is very breaking news oriented and if you follow the key players in your industry, it's easy to spot fodder for a good story. Webinairs also popped up as good sources for journalists. 81% said they find Industry Trend webinairs to be the most helpful, followed by presentations of original research. As for the journalists themselves, 92% said they had a LinkedIn account, more than any other social network. Facebook and Twitter landed at 85% and 84% respectively. Only 20% said they had a Digg account, which shows how far that site has fallen. If you're looking to connect with others in your industry, a relationship with a business journalist is a good thing. Send them news before it breaks, send conference call and webinair invitations, send chocolate. Just understand that everything you send won't automatically make it into the journalist's column. And one final caveat, don't think that your relationship (with or without chocolate) buys you a glowing review when you don't deserve it. Relationship or not, a journalist's first responsibility is to his reader and not his source.
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| The Latest Thing in Birth Announcements: Facebook Posted: 02 Aug 2011 12:28 PM PDT Congratulations, you're pregnant! Step one: tell the father. Step two: update your Facebook profile. Come to think of it, for some people, it might just be the other way around. . . Facebook has added a new option to the family drop-down. It's called Expected: Child and that colon makes me wonder if they're planning on adding other options. Expected: Dog, Expected: Ex-Husband?
On the surface, it's a charming addition. A fun and surprising way to tell everyone the good news. But as one SFGate blogger points out, what happens when the employer you didn't tell sees the change? What if the pregnancy ends badly? Do you really want baby daddy number two to know that you're about to do it again with baby daddy number three? From a marketing standpoint (this is a marketing blog), it's a delightful bit of information. Marketing to parents is big business, so a long list of public due dates is gold, if you can find an efficient way to mine it. Earlier this year, Dashboard Insight published a piece called "The Realities of Social Media Data Mining." The author points out that what you put on your Facebook page, doesn't stay on your Facebook page. Third-party connector apps are designed to automatically recognize not only you, but also any of your friends who visit a particular website. Start clicking "like" on cribs and maternity clothes and the system will connect the dots whether you like it or not. As a marketer, I'm not here to say that data mining is bad. When I was pregnant (long before Facebook), I was bombarded with freebies and coupons which I assumed came from hospital lists, birth records and the parenting magazine subscriptions. We were mining data then, and we're still mining it now. The difference is, now it's so easy, so brainless, that it's easy for people and marketers to overstep. To Facebook users, think twice before selecting the "expected" box. For marketers, if the information is out there, it's fair game. Go forth and offer those free diapers. Most new parents will be happy to accept them no matter how you got their information.
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