Skip to content

net101 blog

efficient social media training for business people

  • net101 social media courses
  • course FAQs
  • course reviews
  • in-house training
  • tim martin – guest speaker
  • about us
  • contact us
net101

Categories

  • Agencies
  • Analytics
  • Apology
  • Blogging
  • Blogs
  • Books
  • Brands
  • Business Tools
  • Case Study
  • Chris De Burgh
  • Cloud Computing
  • Consultants
  • Content
  • Content Marketing
  • Creative Commons
  • Crisis
  • DIY
  • Dumb
  • Elvis
  • Emoji
  • Employment
  • Event Marketing
  • Facebook
  • Fish
  • Fiverr
  • Foursquare
  • Freelancers
  • Google
  • Google Maps
  • Google Places
  • Google Streeview
  • Hashtags
  • Horoscope
  • Horse Racing
  • Images
  • Infographic
  • Instagram
  • Internet
  • Lasagna Recipe
  • Likes
  • LinkedIn
  • Locational Social Media
  • Mango
  • Manifesto
  • Media
  • Misquotes
  • Miss Social
  • Monitoring
  • Moral Teachings
  • net101 Course Material
  • NET:101 Courses
  • NET:101 Workshops
  • Newsletters
  • On Death Watch
  • On Presenting
  • Online Reputation
  • Outsourcing
  • Perfume
  • Pigs
  • Podcasts
  • Posters
  • Presentations & Speeches
  • Private Eye
  • QR Codes
  • Rap
  • Recruitment
  • Resources
  • Retail
  • RSS
  • Satirical
  • Search
  • SEO
  • Shakespeare
  • Social Media
  • Social Media Strategy
  • Social Networking
  • Storify
  • Strategy
  • Syndication
  • Telephones
  • Template
  • Text on Images
  • Titles
  • Training
  • True Facts
  • Twitter
  • Uncategorized
  • Vampires
  • Video
  • War
  • Web 2.0
  • Websites
  • Widgets
  • Wine Industry
  • Workflow

Category: Foursquare

Event Marketing with Foursquare: The 2011 Australian Grand Prix as a Mini Case Study.





Geo-locational social media platforms such as Foursquare may not yet have come of age, but they’re not far off this mark. If you’re associated with the organisation of large public events you need to start getting your arms around this new branch of social media; ideally leading through to a fully mapped promotion and engagement strategy as part of every event.

The 2011 Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne over the weekend was an interesting study through the Foursquare lens. Here are a few observations:


Would the Real Listing Please Stand Up.

4SQ allows transient events to be created and tagged as easily as it does permanent physical locations. 4SQ also has no way of knowing which, if any, is the official listing – anybody can create a one. The platform permits multiple listings created by individuals at different physical locations, or different listing names at more or less the same physical location (this is going to become a bun fight down the line – it’ll be interesting to see how 4SQ mitigates this confusion).

Over the life of the 2011 Melbourne GP, three separate listings were created which pertained to the track and the event:

– ‘Australian FI Grand Prix 2011’
– ‘australian grand prix’
– ‘Melbourne QANTAS Formula 1 Gr…’ (only 30 +/- characters and spaces will display)

It turns out that the second listing ‘australian grand prix’ was most likely the official one – there were two indicators for this:

1. They were offering ‘Flash Specials’

2. GP event staff were registered on their admin page (the function of ‘employee’ 4SQ registrations is so staff can’t obtain the mayoralship and other privileges, but can still check-in).

Unfortunately, this listing was created all in lower case – it didn’t look very official. The ‘Australian FI Grand Prix 2011’ listing with its upper casing and the year displayed looked a lot more like the real deal. The third listing got very little attention throughout the event, but interestingly mentions the principal sponsor, Qantas.

It’s important to note that when a person checks into a 4SQ location (or event) the title of the listing travels through their social networks: 4SQ, which in turn is then commonly sydndicated through to Twitter. If I were an event sponsor, I’d insist on my brand name appearing in the listing title to maximise exposure across the various channels.


Check-In’s

By Sunday afternoon at the height of the race there were approximately 130 people checked in to the unofficial listing, ‘Australian FI Grand Prix 2011’. By comparison, the official ‘australian grand prix’ listing had around 25 check-ins. The Qantas tagged listing had fewer than 10 (if I were a gambling man I’d confidently bet that these numbers will increase 10-20 fold by the time the 2012 Melb GP rolls around).

I suspect that when people are confronted with multiple listings at an event, one listing will get to the tipping point first, and will then dominate – people tend to check in to the listing with the most check-ins (when given a choice people will gravitate to the busier of two restaurants). Additionally, for many 4SQ fans the opportunity to earn a ‘swarm badge’ would certainly have swayed their choice (swarm badges are hard to come by and coveted – they are unlocked when 50 or more people check in at the same place within a certain time-frame).


Flash Specials

The official listing ran a flash special over each of the two days (see below). Specials are a great way to incentivise people do something with a sense of urgency – offers can limited around quantity or time. They also force people to check into the listing to claim the token associated with the special.


Specials Nearby

Several retailers within proximity of the track had their 4SQ specials heavily promoted throughout the weekend. If I had a retail or service business located close to a public event I would put out a hot event related special to drive foot traffic into my store/ bar/ restaurant/ brothel after the event.


Takeaway Thoughts for Major Event Organisers Wishing to Integrate 4SQ into Their Promotional Program

– Create your event listing at the physical location where it’s going to be held, as early in the day as possible (you’ll need to get someone on the ground to do this).

– Put thought into the event title, especially if important event sponsorship is involved.

– Encourage people to check-in via other social media and off-line display materials (4SQ have a range of downloadable and print-friendly marketing collateral to tap into). Also, display the official listing title so people know which one they should be checking in to.

– Get as many people as you can to check-in early in the day to help establish your listing as the most credible one (maybe offer a series of flash specials at the start of the day to get that critical mass happening).

– Offer flash specials throughout the entirety of the event.

– Encourage people to upload photos (on-the-ground prizes could be offered for the best photo/s submitted).

– Encourage other vendors at the event to offer specials – these will show up as ‘specials nearby’ when somebody checks in.

– Create some ‘to do’s for people to check off as ‘done’– and incentivise people to do them, and/or cross promote your other social media channels (see example below)




Follow me on Foursquare…




  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Email
Posted on March 28, 2011April 23, 2011Categories Event Marketing, Foursquare, Locational Social Media, Social MediaLeave a comment on Event Marketing with Foursquare: The 2011 Australian Grand Prix as a Mini Case Study.

Vanguard Social Media: Foursquare and Instagram

 

There are two emerging social media platforms that I’m on-board with: Foursquare and Instagram. At a quick glance they act differently: the first involves ‘checking-in’ or tagging your presence at various physical locations, and the other involves photo sharing. But they do have a lot in common – features and philosophical underpinnings which make up the vanguard of mobile driven social media. Here are a few commonalities:

Smartphones Everywhere
Both Foursquare and Instagram are the children of smartphone proliferation (and now tablets); most of these devices have always-on inbuilt GPS, and are capable of hosting downloadable apps that iteratively improve over time.

The fact that our phone is the one thing that goes almost everywhere we do makes it easy to participate – during our waking hours we are only a few hand movements away from being able to capture an image or tag our location, allowing spontaneous creation and sharing when the moment (literally) takes us.

No Web Required
It is not necessary to interact with Foursquare and Instagram, and most other applications, via the web. Foursquare does have a sophisticated web platform, but most users of the service won’t have ever seen it. Instagram has no web interface, save to alter your account details.

Crowdsourced Geotagging
As these applications become more popular, most of the geo-locational groundwork has been done. It’s becoming a rare incidence that a public or organisational location hasn’t been established already, making it easier for those who follow.

Select Tribes/ Followers
Sharing and filtering takes place on multiple levels. Your inner circle – the people you follow or friend get the full amount of information you want to make available to them. In the case of Foursquare only ‘friends’ can see your last location. In Instagram, only people you allow to follow you are able to see your images.

Community Voting & Surfacing
On Foursquare, tips are associated with each physical location and are voted up by the number of people have ‘done’ the tip. In Instagram pictures are ‘liked’ – the most popular of which are featured on a communal wall.

Customisation
Foursquare allows tips to be posted against public or organisational locations; users and superusers are able to alter the classifications against these locations, as well as adjust their map coordinates. Instagram allows its users to apply various filters and frames to their images.

Social Media Syndication
Both Foursquare and Instagram enable information – a new image, a check-in, a tip, or an event such as a gaining or losing a mayoralship, or gaining a badge – to be automatically or manually shared across other social media platforms such as Twitter, Flickr, Tumbler, Posterous and Facebook.

I’ve Beaten You
In Foursquare there are a number of competitive elements: mayoralships, badges, and a points leaderboard. In Instagram, the competition is based around the cleverness or quirkiness of the images themselves.


As interesting as this latest social media wave is, a more exciting development is what can be potentially done with the growing mountain of individually generated data which is forming around each physical locality.

Every public and organisational location across the globe will eventually be classified and tagged with precise geo-coordinates. Application Programming Interfaces (API) will facilitate the formation of multiple user-generated data layers around each locational point: who has been there and when, images, videos, audio clips, tips, reviews, Wikipedia entries, and Tweets. Further institutional data layers will further enrich these data pools.

 



  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Email
Posted on March 14, 2011October 5, 2014Categories Foursquare, Instagram, Locational Social Media, Social Media1 Comment on Vanguard Social Media: Foursquare and Instagram

Foursquare For Squares?

I’ve overheard a few souls recently write foursquare off as a sort of ‘creepy’ social media development – “I wouldn’t want people knowing where I am all time time” seems to be their main concern. But for anyone who’s actually looked into foursquare – what it is and how it works – or even better, tried it out first-hand, they’d know there’s some serious business level application under the hood.

Firstly, let me say that I don’t use foursquare to hook up with people – that side of things is not really of much interest to me. What I do like however is expressing my indirect, and sometimes direct, loyalty to physical points of interest – businesses, organisations, gatherings – that I share an affinity with.

I leave tips at business locations that both please me and displease me. I read the tips of others – mini peer reviews – they offer some great insights. I also look at the analytics around the people who have checked into my business locations, and follow them on Twitter if they have a connected account (a large proportion do).

I look at some of the really clever promotions businesses are offering the foursquare community to drive repeat foot traffic into their stores, cinemas, branches, malls, markets, museums and clinics.

I even take some sense of pride in being the ‘mayor’ of my local train station (or at least I did until the title was recently wrenched from me – damn you Naughty J!)

You don’t have to be actively engaged in foursquare to pull business value from it. Every business owner with a physical point of presence should accept, or embrace, the fact that they’re probably on the platform already – people are checking in there now, and patron generated tips – the good, the bad, and the ugly – are starting to flow in now (and be syndicated across to Twitter).

Maybe you don’t want people knowing where you are all time time, but they sure as hell know the street address of your business. Like it or not.



  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Email
Posted on November 29, 2010April 23, 2011Categories Foursquare, Locational Social Media, Social MediaTags foursquare, geolocation, net 101, Social MediaLeave a comment on Foursquare For Squares?
Proudly powered by WordPress
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.