Over the course of the last year or so, “analytics” has been billed in the digital media press as the strategic frontier for the digital space.  I am taking a course on web analytics this month—guess I’m on the bandwagon!  It’s 8 long hours in a classroom for 3 Saturdays in a row(!).  At least it’s February, and I don’t have to feel like I’m letting the good weather pass me by.  It’s been a good course so far—I’ve just one Saturday to go—and I’ve learned some interesting things, many of which I’ll share with you.  This post will also be helpful to explain the somewhat more technical terms that get thrown about when the digerati (the press and talking heads of the digital world) talk about Google.

“Analytics” is basically the art and science of aggregating, organizing and rationalizing the mountains of data your average website kicks up.  It’s a big part CRM (customer relationship management) within the digital space.  Everything from how site visitors find you, every single action (especially purchases) they take on your site, past behavior of individual visitors, etc.  This data gets analyzed at the single user level, in aggregate and, most powerfully, in segments (i.e., shared trait/behavior groupings).  Website publishers make this data work very hard to ensure that the products, services and content to which visitors are most likely to respond remains front and center on their sites.  Behavior profile-based probability statistics, for example, are key to recommendations that e-retailers like Amazon and content sites like Netflix serve up.  Indeed, the best kind of data for recommending content and products is past behavior.  But first you’ve got to get people on your site, either by a direct appeal or showing up when and where prospective customers are looking.  Let’s turn to that next

A company wishing to market itself can purchase data from information vendors in order to prospect potential customers who match the company’s value proposition. This is approach is largely associated with email marketing campaigns. There are these email list vendors/brokers out there who buy from websites that solicit registrations from visitors as part of their standard course of online interaction with those visitors.  In turn, those websites in turn sell to bundles of emails to marketers, often via list brokers.  Marketers define the criteria for the target recipient pool and work out the scope and structure of their email marketing campaign.  In most cases, the marketer never sees the email addresses that will get used in their campaign.  It’s the list vendor who sends the emails.  It’s only when a recipient takes some self-identifying action in response to the email that the marketer is able to ID anyone.  Nifty, no?  (Well, actually, don’t be too impressed. It’s just the 21^st century version of what direct marketers have done for years by post.)

So that’s one way to get people onto your site.  The other important angle is to be present when prospective customers are looking for sources like you—i.e., in searches.  You may have heard the acronyms SEO and SEM.  They stand for search engine optimization and search engine marketing.  Because Google commands 65% of the searches people do online, SEO and SEM focus heavily on techniques that work well in Google searches.  (An aside: These two concepts are great examples of how entire industries and professions are being built on Google’s dominance—it’s like a Wal-Mart effect.) Yahoo and Bing are the #2 and #3 players in search with about 15% share each.  I’m thinking Google will keep the lead for a long while yet because there are so many services and platforms that directly (e.g., Google AdWords) or indirectly reinforce its dominance.

SEO covers the set of techniques one uses to ensure that page shows up first in the results set that a search on Google, Yahoo or Bing returns (“organic search”).  A site/page’s rank is mostly a function of topical-relevance to the search term—each of the search engines have programs (“bots”) that comb the internet indexing websites for specific identifiers (e.g., page title, tags, identifying descriptors).  Then, the search engine uses that indexed information to serve up search results.  The quality of a website’s information also figures into its ranking. The search results algorithm assesses information quality by the number of sites that link to you. The more other websites point to pages on a website, the more reputable the information on that site will be deemed.

Now, anyone who has used Google and Yahoo More than a few times has noticed a set of results in a “Sponsored Results” section.  It’s frequently the deep-pocketed marketers show up at the top of that section.  Dollars spent per click (‘cost per click’, measured in thousands and referred to as “CPM”) drives the ranking. But for Google, website quality and content relevance also plays a significant part.  Cool that their ad ranking algorithm is designed to also value quality, no?

So that’s a taste of what I’ve been learning.  Good stuff, all.  In reflecting on the class, I can see why businesses are so anxious to make sense of the data, yet so frustrated by the volume of it.  There aren’t universal standards for how internet data gets structured.  And I haven’t even gotten into how social media, app usage and off-line data all intersects with it (yikes!).  Furthermore, there aren’t that many people out there who do internet data analytics well.  Because of these efficiency and knowledge gaps, lots of money will surely continue to go to those who can integrate the data and derive actionable strategic insight from it.

Today, I want to hit my personal favorite concept in today’s digital media space: Augmented Reality (AR).  I feel like it got a lot of attention in the tech and marketing press last spring. 

So, Augmented Reality adds a layer of digitized information to everyday reality.    In a nutshell: Using an internet-enabled device—most commonly a smartphone—you view ordinary things around you on-screen via, for example, a smartphone’s camera and the AR software adds information, images, effects to them. Common Craft has an excellent video explaining this field in simple terms, and you should view it here.

Mobile marketing is one space in which developers have most broadly leveraged the technology for mass consumption.  Type in “augmented reality ads/advertising” in YouTube, and you’ll find plenty of examples. 2011 was sort of the year when, impressed with mobile’s potential to reach individual consumers, marketers starting throwing much bigger dollars into mobile marketing.  So it’s not surprising that AR has progressed in this space particularly.  Click here for a really sightful and fairly detailed article discussing the use of AR for marketing purposes.

The other space in which the mobile+AR combo has caught on is in gaming. You’ll find simplistic formats like this…

…and more complicated ones like this Paranomal Activity multiplayer one.

For applications in which the user is part of the reality that’s being augmented, you need a stationary computer and/or a forward facing camera. The gaming community has been attracted to this approach, whether served up via kinetically-enabled platforms like the Wii or online games accessible on the Web. There is a website whose name escapes me now with pre-school targeted games reminiscent of the certain Wii games that put the child on-screen, interacting with the objects of play.  (Of course, Wii/Kinect may have made the concept obselete, which would explain why I could not find the site even after rigorous searching.)

I personally am most curious about using this technology to enhance static media formats like books. There have been occasional projects over the last couple years in which illustrations or icons in a book become a link to additional content that integrates into the story, telling more about a character, a place or the backstory to a given situation. Now, it’s true that as the e-book format eclipses print as a preferred method to distribute new books, features like this may just become apps that link into the story.  But for now, I think it’s a compelling way to add value (see this example and this example), and I wish publishers would make more frequent use of it.

SO WHAT? - WHERE THIS COULD BE HEADED

I anticipate that augmented reality will most impact future of toys & gaming, brand advertising and location marketing.  On the toys & gaming front expect, for example, to see developers push the envelope on MMOG’s like Paranormal Activity, animation overlays like the Mosquito game and, so long as console-based gaming does not get overtaken by internet-based games, deeper integration of kinetics-driven technology into game-play. I’d also expect this stuff to start popping up in nontraditional places. GM is already working on turning car windows into play spaces.  Add AR capabilities, and you start getting games that interact with the world that is passing by through the window. Or, turning now to location marketing, you get cars that can point you in the direction of a specific retailer or other destination using information displayed on the windowns.  For brand advertising, AR is a way to make every ad a bridge to engagment, whether in the form of content (e.g., via activating icons in print media or apps like Starbuck’s holiday app that rely on product purchase), or activities that bring the viewer into the “purchase funnel” through information & location-based notifications or through virtual “try-ons” that use the consumers face, body, etc.

One last thought: I’m reflecting on all the discussion about face recognition technology being integrated into social networks.  Imagine a world in which you walk into a room, and you hold your phone up to the room and information about the people there pops up.  Networking made easy!………..and creepy.

“Connected TV” has been an emerging concept these last 18 months, and strongly linked to all the buzz about cable cord-cutters.  Roku, Boxee, Apple TV, Google TV….the announcements just keep coming.  But what does “Connected TV” really mean?  Are we talking full blown internet access? (In most cases no.)  And why would one buy one of those devices rather than just connecting their desktop to a flat screen TV by a HDMI cord? (cheaper, but the mountain of cords involved gets tricky….and unsightly!)

“Connected TV” is just short hand for the small club of electronic devices that turn any cable-compatible TV into a computer display.  Roku, Boxee, Apple TV, Google TV and xBox all fall into this category.  Roku, Apple TV and xBox limit the viewable internet content to entertainment-related sources delivered as app channels (e.g., the YouTube app opens to show YouTube content as a channel).  Google TV and Boxee, both of which are much more expensive, are also structured around apps/channels, except one of those ‘channels’ is the internet itself.   Basically it turns your TV into a netbook, so it makes sense that it is priced against that technology.

Yahoo Connected TV is in a class by itself, and the jury’s still out on whether it’s in the special education or the gifted & talented track.  I personally am hoping for the latter.  Yahoo collaborated with select TV manufacturers (Samsung, LG, Vizio, Sony) to develop something that basically takes the notion of Roku & Apple TV and put the hardware inside of the TV rather than an external device.  So you buy the specially enabled TV, and you get selected, entertainment-oriented websites alongside all the standard capabilities you’d expect from any TV.  What’s intriguing about the Yahoo solution is the idea of visually serving up internet-sourced content alongside whatever you’re watching on TV.  For example, sports stats to go along with the Sunday afternoon game; shopping options to buy the outfits you see on that fashionable sitcom you like, airline tickets to the destination they’re featuring in tonight’s travel show.  Very interesting stuff…well, for advertisers anyway!

Connected TV is still a pretty new area of digital media, so a lot of the writing out there on capabilities and long term potential is comprehensive in its scope…..so much so, actually, that I am going to end my commentary here and invite you to explore 3 really excellent resources on the topic.  First, a couple of sites that evaluate set-top and embedded technology options.  Second, the head of Yahoo’s Connected TV did a really excellent, extended blog post on the go forward potential for this field—pretty much the best set of “So What” takeaways one could ask for.

Unlike many of the other topics I’ve covered in this blog, “social bookmarking” as it’s come to be known, is not all that new.  The “social” bit is somewhat of a misnomer as well….but more on that later….

At its core, social bookmarking is a way to organize online information and webpage discoveries.  Picture it: you read something several days back and, now that you need to recall where or exactly how a statement was phrased, you can’t find it.  With bookmarking sites, you’ll never have that problem again.  Delicious and Diigo are the leaders here, and both of these sites have been popular in the research and teaching communities for a few years now.  Delicious allows you to organize the sites you like into “stacks” that are then shareable with people in your social network.  To do this, a user installs a widget on their browser toolbar.  Then, every time you happen upon a page that’s interesting, you just click the widget, assign the page to a stack and you’re done.  The logic is not so very different from certain RSS Readers.  What’s different is that, in order to view the content you’ve tagged, you pop out to the source webpage rather than remaining within an RSS Reader site. 

Diigo is an advanced version of Delicious—advanced because you can actually interact with the content on the page you’re saving.  With Diigo, a user installs a separate toolbar to their browser, and then can use it to add highlights, sticky notes and other forms of annotation to a page.  Basically, Diigo is saving the marked up version of the site to the “cloud” (fancy term for remote servers accessible from any computer).  Groups of people can work in a common set of web pages.  Sharing back to one’s social network is possible, but I gather from user comments that this is not an especially common thing.

StumbleUpon is also classed as a social bookmarking site, but is not for web content organization.  Let me just say that I actually love StumbleUpon because it’s such a fantastic way to discover new sites. It’s like Pandora for the mind.  You give the service some interest areas, be they narrow or broad, and it serves up a succession of websites that you can rate as interesting or not.  It learns from your ratings and makes subsequent selections accordingly.  Only when I’m on StumbleUpon does the term “websurfing” have any meaning.  As you land on pages, you can write a review for the page and/or recommend it to folks in your social network.

So that’s social bookmarking, and a few best-in-class examples, in a nutshell.  Incidentally, there’s nothing ostensibly social about it other than the fact that you can post your activity back to Facebook if you want.  If that’s social, then the New York Times should start referring to itself as “social news reporting”.  I accept that “social” is the new buzzword to get venture capital and media attention, but this feels like a desperate (and, on the merits, unnecessary) attempt to be cool by association…..but I digress……

I’m going to take the liberty of expanding the definition of “social bookmarking” to include services that allow users to track and organize the comments and conversations they’re having across the web, especially on blogs.  CoComment and Commentful are two rather similar examples.  The reach of both sites is only as far as the number of blogs/news sites/etc. that offer them as a plug-in for inputting comments.  New York Times, for example, has its own comment management module with no plug-ins.  A CoComment user commenting on a NYT article would not, therefore, be able to make their comment map back to CoComment.  That said, these sites are cool because they let you track the impact of comments you make, and they offer one more way to keep track of web content you find interesting.  Any  comment made can also post to one’s social network if you’ve enabled CoComment or Commentful to do so.   As for the differences between CoComment and Commentful, CoComment allows members to explore conversations beyond those in which s/he is involved.  On CoComment’s website, a user can see active conversations and jump into the fray if desired.  Commentful allows you to track a more diversified range of content—so, not just blogs or news sites, but also visual content on sites like Flickr.

SO WHAT?

This week I’ve not much to say about this category of digital media, so I’ll keep this section brief and focused on a couple minor opportunities that came to mind as I wrote this:

• Google Scholar and Diigo seem a natural fit for a strategic partnership.  A users’s saved Diigo pages could power suggestions for additional sources, all of which could come from Google Scholar.
• For all those folks out there who are into personal branding for the digital age, CoComment is a good tool.  But my idea is this: there are a lot of sites that don’t offer LinkedIn as a social network plug-in option.  It might be interesting for LinkedIn to work with CoComment and groups like it (e.g., Disqus & IntenseDebate) to let LinkedIn members opt into pulling comments in as an additional activity feed.

Ah yes…the side of the winter shopping season everyone—especially the fashionistas—likes best: when the stores put everything on sale in preparation for the spring.  Since sales are on the brain, I’m devoting this post to the websites and apps that are taking bargain hunting to the next level.

For many ecommerce stoppers beyond their late 20’s, ecommerce is associated with brick-and-morter retailers’ websites and Amazon.  EBay and the occasional flash sale may be as fancy as they get.  Today’s post will be less of a marathon review of the great many big players in digital shopping and more of a casual reflection on how current trends are defining retail commerce of today.  Essentially there are two trends: price transparency thanks to shopping apps and bargain lust brought about by “deal platforms” (i.e., group buy and flash sale websites).

Price transparency. 

• Red Laser, Shopper (esp. groceries), Shop Savvy (by Apple) and Google Shopper use different bells and whistles to accomplish the same thing: make it easy for consumers to verify whether a store offers the best price possible and locate where a lower price may be enjoyed either online or at a nearby location.  Shop Savvy & Google shopper also integrate deal platform offers into a users’ results Amazon Price Check compares goods to the price you might find via Amazon.
• Consumers can also get reviews on specific products while in store via their smartphones using Buzzillions (consumer reviews) and Consumer Reports Mobile (reviews by magazine staff).  No more having to rely on salesperson quality.

Consumers love having these tools, clearly.  But businesses’ operating margins face pressure from price competition.  Countering the effects of increased price transparency requires that retailers and/or manufacturers give consumers a reason to be loyal to them.  Inspiring that loyalty means greater investment in services and product quality. Doing this well requires that businesses tighten their pricing strategy, customer segmentation and shopping experience optimization.  And none of this, of course, is free.

Deal platforms. 

• Group buying sites, of which Groupon is the leader, offer deals by making it worthwhile for consumers to share deals with their social network.  The more people opt into a deal, the better a deal will work for everyone.   For the most part, these sites are not as profitable as the buzz about them—or their revenues for that matter—would seem to suggest.  Major Groupon look-a-likes include Living Social and BuyWithMe (now part of Gilt).
• Flash sales, by contrast, appeal to consumers using scarcity.  For a limited time a limited number of products (usually luxury) become available to a website’s members priced for value.  Even before Gilt and ideeli’s rise to the main stream, these sites were multiplying rapidly, each one more targeted than the last vis-à-vis a particular product/service category, demography or consumer type.  Check out this link to see a complete list of such sites. 

Deal platforms gained popularity in the US as consumers sought to maintain their lifestyles in the face of smaller household budgets during this “Great Recession”. Many observers question the viability of these businesses as the recession effects fade, but I think the bigger question is how lasting their impact on consumer expectations will be.  Various mainstream brick-and-mortar retailers have created flash sale programs for their ecommerce sites, and this has even further bolstered the bargain lust orientation of younger consumers especially. Might flash sales influence today’s 20-somethings’ interaction with retail the way Pandora, etc once influenced my generation’s interaction with the music industry?

The very businesses that provide the deals/goods/services available on deal platform sites have the power to ensure that these sites remain a useful customer engagement tool, but don’t become the basis of a new dimension of consumers’ sense of entitlement.  The key is for business to get smarter about how they use these sites for promotion and sales—specifically, get very clear on where these sites fit into one’s customer acquisition plans, (integrated) marketing strategy and revenue model.  Click here for an insightful discussion on effective use of flash sales for promotional purposes—originally written with the hospitality industry in mind, but has relevance well beyond that—and here for some tips on running a group buy event.  Deal platforms can indeed be extremely effective for customer acquisition and add real value from a social marketing and brand engagement perspective.  But they must be used correctly.

For many Americans, Christmas is primarily a reason to visit family, be charitable and GO SHOPPING!  So, I’ve decided to devote this and the next post to various tools and trends that digital media is bringing to the retail/shopping scene. This week, I’m starting from where it all begins: Money.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT

Digital payment systems are nearly as old as the web itself.  Even the most late-adapting Gen X’er could tell you something about PayPal and the meaning of “https”.  So we’ll skip the online payments stuff and focus on mobile payments, which really is the frontier.  It’s all pretty new, especially on the consumer end of things.  For all the recent news reporting on the likes of Google Wallet, the field remains quite young and there just aren’t that many players out there—so few that it does not even make sense for me to do my normal run down of sites and companies.  So no “Short Story” summary section this time.  You should have no problem reading this post quickly. PayPal, Dwolla, Card Case and (arguably) Google Wallet are the only consumer-facing companies to watch.  Digital Trends has already done a very detailed and easy-to-comprehend comparison of Card Case and Google Wallet, so I won’t reinvent the wheel on that.  Click the link, have a read, and come on back. 

As cool as Card Case sounds compared to Google Wallet, PayPal may be about to blow them out of the water as they roll out their mobile payments program over the coming months.  The PayPal advantage goes beyond its size and experience.  Their system will work off of an infrastructure retailers already know: credit card terminals.  Simply by opting into a software upgrade, merchants can begin excepting mobile payments that customers authorize with a PIN code.  No, it doesn’t have Card Case’s cool factor of just leaving your name, but it also doesn’t come with the training and software challenges inherent to integrating some whole new payment framework.  That will be good news to large scale retailers (which is, of course, where the money’s at).  The PayPal system will also come with all the GPS-driven store locator and deal notification bells and whistles that Card Case offers.  So no, I don’t think it’s looking good for Card Case.  FourSquare’s defeat of Facebook cautions against dismissing the little guy entirely, but Card Case not nearly as established with consumers as Foursquare was when Facebook joined the check-ins bandwagon.

Dwolla is very similar to Card Case from a consumer perspective, but worlds apart from the merchant’s perspective.  Card Case is built off the existing national credit card system that Visa & Mastercard run. Dwolla is actually an alternative payment system altogether. It leverages the national interbank ACH network to connect payments directly between bank accounts.  So that means, they also don’t have the fees for which Visa and MC have lately become so infamous.  Motivated by a transacting-should-be-free-or-damn-near ethos, Dwolla charges just 25 cents for every transaction regardless of size; nothing for transactions under $10. This makes Dwolla quite appealing to small merchants as well as the growing segment of Americans who advocate doing away with credit entirely.   One other bonus to Dwolla (which PayPal also boasts): they’ve used the FB and Twitter Open API to integrate Dwolla into those networks.  This means users can send money direct to anyone in their social network who also has a Dwolla account, either at the time of receipt or thereafter.

On last noteworthy development in the world of mobile payments is QR codes.  What started off in print is jumping to shopping centers and movie theaters and will eventually be just about anywhere else consumers spend money and leisure time.  Marketers are now using unconventional physical spaces to highlight product and invite consumers to initiate purchase with the snap of a photo.  The QR code link takes you directly to a mobile-optimized webpage that features the product and takes you through check out.  Nickelodeon is doing this with holiday product this year, with Toys R Us is handling their purchase execution back-end.

THE “SO WHAT?”

As for where all this will go, as I suggested earlier, Card Case will need to come up with another angle in order to stay alive against PayPal.  By contrast, I think Dwolla can survive PayPal’s entry because of its appeal to a) the small and medium size merchants and b) some Americans’ new found enthusiasm for any means of denying big financial institutions the revenue opportunities to which they are accustomed.

Is there a further frontier for the world of mobile payments more generally?  Yes.  But first, mobile payment platforms need to achieve scale.  There just aren’t very many consumers or merchants who are using this stuff.  If they can clear that hurdle, the growth potential becomes very clear, especially when you consider how it might integrate with existing, scalable technologies/platforms.  I could see this being joined with Apple’s Siri technology so that the iPhone is even more of a concierge, purchasing goods on command with Card Case executing the backend (now that’s the kind of “different angle” I’m talking about!).  I could also see this being used in conjunction with a TV-interactive shopping app like Watch with Ebay.  With that integration, purchasing goods viewed on TV becomes that much more seamless.   Indeed, once someone finds a way to get merchant adaption at national scale (and PayPal is best positioned to pull that off), the possibilities become endless….but I’ll save the ideating for when that day comes!

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, as the case may be!  See you all in the next post due out next year!

Earlier this year, I joined the Foursquare bandwagon.  I had a fine time of it but came away skeptical about it’s long-term viability. I don’t think I’m alone (see Mashable’s recent discussion on the apppeal & market share of check-in, LBS type applications). In any event, reflecting on the experience led me to make this fast-growth sector of the digital space a post: Digital check-ins and the Location Based Service (“LBS”) technology that enables them.

THE SHORT STORY

These days, you can check in to just about anything: places, content, shopping experiences and even people!  Foursquare and SCVNGR “gamify” the comings and goings of urban life by rewarding interactions with places—many of which will be business establishments—and broadcasting those interactions back to other Foursquare members and/or one’s social network.  As its name would suggest, SCVNGR also comes with possible scavenger hunts pre-loaded, and the ability to create your own. Business owners dig these platforms because they help with localized marketing and, with the integration of social shopping players like GroupOn, compels engagement and purchase.  GetGlue is the LBS of the moment for media and entertainment content.  Integrating into all social networks, the idea of GetGlue is to gamify entertainment consumption (i.e., earn points & rewards) for watching and broadcasting your tune-ins to your social network.  Meebo is all about sharing web content with people in your social network.  As you find interesting pages online or using their mobile app, you can click “check in”, add commentary, and share it with all or select individuals in your social network.  Shopkick, which involves checking into a retailer, is Foursquare for the more sophisticated marketer.  The folks at ShopKick work directly with retailers, generally the deep-pocketed, national chain kind, to design gamified shopping experiences that reward steps taken toward a purchase decision.  As for people check-ins, I highlight Hashable.  It is designed for the professional who does a lot of networking.  The program recognizes your location and you enter who you’ve met and under what circumstances (e.g., event name). Later, you can help you track that connection with subsequent entries.

The field is still exploring the full potential of these these check-in applications. To close this post,  I’ll share a few of the ideas I have.

THE LONG(ER) STORY

People are “checking-in” to all kinds of things these days. We hear plenty about location-driven ones like the ubiquitous Foursquare, early entrant Loopt and GoWalla (which FaceBook recently acquired).  You may not have realized, however, that you can now check into content, shopping experiences and even people!

The primary precursor to Foursquare and Gowalla was Loopt.  It was a social platform that had users checking-in to mostly let friends know where they were and what they were up to.  Not entirely unlike GroupMe, I think (see prior post).  They faded from the limelight as competitors entered, Foursquare in particular.  (Sidebar: Foursquare has always had a somewhat commercial edge to it. I imagine, actually, that its creators might have looked at Loopt’s revenue limitations and decided to structure Foursquare to readily integrate commercial interests into the experience….but I could be giving them too much credit!)  Foursquare gamifies the comings and goings of urban life. By rewarding interactions with places—many of which will be business establishments—and broadcasting those interactions back to other Foursquare members and to one’s social network.  Given the focus on places, Foursquare became an obvious favorite of business owners, large and small, for facilitating localized word of mouth and fostering loyalty.  Add the partnership opportunities from the rise of localized social shopping players like GroupOn and Living Social, and you can see how Foursquare quickly became the horse to bet on.  Gowalla is very similar to Foursquare. I’ve no idea why Foursquare became the tool of choice (read here for a lively debate on the matter)….but who cares now that they’ve been swallowed up by Facebook!  One Gowalla feature I personally thought was pretty nifty was the fact that it let users create trips and “treasure hunts” that other Gowalla members can try out. 

SCVNGR has potential to have commercial appeal similar to Foursquare.  But note that the company emphasizes its identity as a game.  Beyond check-ins, there are tasks and challenges to perform at a given establishment or in your town generally.  As for actual scavenger hunts, the program comes pre-loaded with them, and you can create your own too.  Months ago, I might have said that engagement earns users real-world rewards that, unlike Foursquare, are less likely to be tied to the establishment in which they’ve checked in. However, their site now emphasizes the availability of on-location deals.  And, of course, there is that big deal they landed with AMEX.

Get Glue is the LBS of the moment for media and entertainment companies.  Integrating into all social networks, the idea of GetGlue is to gamify entertainment consumption (i.e., earn points & rewards for watching and broadcasting your tune-ins to your social network).  It works well for TV, movies, performing arts, live events and any kind of appointment entertainment.  Broadcasters have started experimenting with GetGlue as another way to encourage tune-in for major broadcast events like season premieres & finales, award shows, etc. SoundTracking is the music industry’s version.  The Huff Post is quoted as saying that if iTunes and Twitter had offspring, it would be SoundTracking.  It is a program that lets users “check-in” to a song they are hearing and stamp that action with time, place, emotion and activity details.  There’s no gamification element, just purely social. 

Meebo, which is all about sharing web content with people in your social network.  It is a well-designed widget (the “Minibar”) you download to your browser as a thin interface visible at the bottom of every page you visit.  As you find interesting pages online or using their mobile app, you can click “check in”, add commentary, and share it with all or select individuals in your social network. Basically, it just makes sharing a little more seamless than the log on + cut-paste + compose update message steps you go through if you’re on your social network. Plus, they’ve tried to introduce a bit of gamification to the Minibar. You get VIP status when you visit and interact with a site frequently. There’s a version of the bar for web content publishers designed to let Meebo users who are on the same site to chat directly.  Very cool stuff.

I’ve put ShopKick and Yelp in the retail check in category since they both have people checking into the purchase experience.  Shopkick is very much a Foursquare-for-the-sophisticated-marketer.  The folks at ShopKick work directly with retailers, generally the deep-pocketed, national chain kind, to gamify the shopping experience.  You use your phone to check into the retailer.  It’s got augmented reality functionality so that users can see where to walk, what to do, etc. in store.  You get points and rewards for taking actions that will lead to purchase (e.g., trying on merchandise), as well as for actual purchases.  The rewards can relate to the store or ShopKick’s own portfolio of prizes. 

Yelp Check-Ins were introduced in January 2010, a logical brand extension and a solid defensive response to Foursquare’s  then-nascent rise.  It aims to facilitate deeper engagement with users who review businesses, while also rewarding their engagement via special offers that a business can to offer those who check-in.  Commentary on an establishment broadcasts to your social networks, but check-in’s do not unless your social network friends opt into notifications.  Earlier this year, Yelp fully gamified the check-in experience by letting frequent patrons become “dukes”, “kings”, “queens”, etc of an establishment based on the number of check-ins.  Same idea as badges and mayorship in Foursquare.

The last category to cover are people checkins.  For this, I highlight Hashable.  This website and app is basically a mobile/LBS manifestation of LinkedIn.  The program recognizes your location and you enter who you’ve met and under what circumstances (e.g., event name).  You can continue to keep tabs of interactions with that individual in subsequent entries.  I describe it as being LinkedIn-like because the company positions as a networking tool, designed to aid professionals in managing contacts.  It used to broadcast encounters back to one’s social network, but users didn’t like that. So now it’s a private, personal tool that only broadcasts if you very deliberately request it to do so.

THE “SO WHAT?”

At the beginning of this post, I said I’d leave the speculation on this field’s long-term viability to the experts, and I’m not changing my mind. But as I wrote this post, I got lots of ideas on how these various programs could be pushed new and interesting directions. So I’ll use this section on takeaways to share.

Idea #1: I see greatest potential for further innovation in location check-in with ShopKick, especially vis-à-vis younger demographics (and especially if they can grow their user base!). TRU’s recent initiative with ShopKick, for example, appears to have been limited to a check-in in exchange for discounts, but not much more.  They could have made the engagement far more interesting, not unlike what ShopKick did for American Eagle several months back.  I could see TRU doing something that has kids exploring and interacting with the store and store product as if the store is one giant playing field or scavenger hunt.

Idea #2: Critics cite low rates of actual, regular check-ins as a big barrier to further growth and traction for most LBSs.  Having used one of these services, I have to agree that the compulsion to check in is just not terribly high unless a person either likes a business so much as to want a status (i.e., “mayor”) or wants deals. Checking-in just to check in holds little charm for the mass consumer.  These programs might work better if they solicited check-ins from the user.  Imagine an integration with something like iPhone4’s Siri that recognized your event or location and asked you audibly or via text if you’d like to check in, give a review, etc. using one of these programs. 

Idea #3: LinkedIn should buy Hashable.  It fits perfectly with LinkedIn’s brand.  The ability to automatically stamp connections with location and event details would really help for connection management.

Twitter, in and of itself, is not that interesting in my humble opinion. The 140 character limit is an issue.  For the casual, social user, it facilitates randome walks through the park that is their mental and emotional life.  For more commercial and professional users, it works out to be a one-way conversation more often than not, not true dialogue.  Afterall, 140-characters is just not enough space to communicate and make an personal/emotional connection—well, unless it’s an emotion of the most visceral sort.    Want proof? Look at how marketers’ tweets lead the user elsewhere whenever they have something truly important to say.  In other words, the tweet itself is not the message; compare that to your average commercial, print ad or even FB page.

I happen to think that what makes Twitter interesting is the immediacy, the “real time-ness” of engagement that it fosters. I think that Twitter works best, therefore, as a plug-in to a larger digital media platforms, or as a forum for consumer participation in live events, crowdsource initiatives, or interactive marketing campaigns.  So that means tweets that feed other, more compreshenive sites/platforms; joint log-in interfaces that allow you to broadcast back to your Twitter followers when you engage in some transaction like registering for an event or giving to some social cause; audience feedback like X-Factor’s vote via Twitter or the Video Music Awards’ use of the bottom third of the TV screen to broadcast tweets about the show; a call to followers/consumers to respond to a question or brand message.  In all these examples Twitter is a plus, an add-in.  So there is a real future, a real value proposition, I think. But it’s driven by the company’s ability to insert Twitter into the right points of the digital media landscape and marketers’ ability to stay focused on its power as a marketing channel to be used in coordination with an overall digital marketing campaign—especially where lead generation, call-to-action/engagement messaging and short-run promotion are concerned.

Last week, BusinessInsider.com held its IGNITION conference in which Twitter’s Chief Revenue Officer talked abou the value proposition and future of the company.  I found that his comments (as well as what he did not say) were generally consistent with my above-articulated viewpoint on the service.  Have a listen.  What takeaways do YOU have?

Click here for video

Developing a following and personal brand using Facebook and Twitter is terribly time consuming endeavor. Think of small business owners and solo entrepreneurs. Where do they get the time? And what about companies that are active on Twitter? Do they have armies of people? How do they keep up? Whether we’re talking individuals or companies, there is a host of tools that are huge time-savers for acquiring followers, communicating to them, and responding to all the chatter. In this post, I’ll talk about those tools.

THE SHORT STORY

There are tools for accelerated follower base building. TweetAdder and Tweet Whistle helps a tweeter find “qualified leads” by searching Twitter for keywords and then automatically follow those who use them. ~30% of those you follow will follow you back. And with the help of TwitCleaner, you can maximize the productivity of your follower base—no need for a bunch of people who don’t retweet you or engage otherwise! As for generating tweets, it’s time-consuming for tweeters to generate regular content and for brand owners to keep track of all the mentions out in the Twitter universe. Hootsuite and Seesmic allow you to schedule tweets and team with others to keep an account vibrant. CoTweet is an enterprise solution geared toward Twitter’s potential as a forum for customer service/engagement. Lastly, to measure the effectiveness of Twitter activity, Twitter’s own advance search service and Tweetscan are to services that brand managers should use together to keep abreast of what people are saying about their brands & products, and what messaging from the company consumers find most engaging, as measured by retweets.

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I went to a conference last week at which I met the guy who started Phizzle, a mobile marketing group that focuses on the sports industry.  Which got me to thinking: the mobile marketing field, though young, is a very cool space and worthy of a post.  So here we are.  Now, there are plenty of good topics to target, but I will start with a basic one: texting.  Before you hit the snooze button, know that texting is not just about quick, grammatically inept messages anymore!  There’s a whole new generation of tools for texting.  And thanks to the wonderful world of apps, as well as (perhaps) the legacy of Skype, you can text to groups, distribute across platforms and even enable chat-room like encounters.  And you thought your blackberry’s email was addictive!

THE SHORT STORY

Here’s involved with the next generation of texting software/platforms…You download an app or visit a website and register using your mobile number or a number the service assigns to you.  You give the service access to your contacts list and/or Facebook friends, and you’re instantly set up to text any of those individuals. Once you’ve registered on one of these services and have some contacts, you can form groups. Group members all communicate via that number and texts appear in an integrated feed that all group members can see.  To pay for themselves, these services either have adds (e.g., TextPlus/TextNow) or charge a download and/or subscription fee (e.g., WhatsApp). Group Me, Fast Society and PingMe kick the group experience up a notch by integrating social networks and GPS location technology. A few of these companies (e.g. CloudTalk) also give users the ability to connect with people they don’t know in a chat-room.

If smartphone adoption continues at the current rapid pace, and if these various texting services can improve their marketing to the general public, these new texting services could become a significant new sphere for social networking—maybe even threaten the market dominance of Facebook and Twitter.  Open platforms like Cloud Talk and PingMe have a WORLD of potential for advertisers, the entertainment industry and website publishers.  For anyone with an hyper-engaged fan base (think sports teams, celebrities, certain TV/film franchises, select causes & political movements, etc.), these platforms can be a vehicle to both establish a community around that fan base and deliver highly personalized and localized messaging to them.

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