Back in April I quit Foursquare. But I have been using it again for about five weeks or so. The opening of the Tech Square Waffle House kinda got me to open the app again, and I have been on it pretty consistently since. Here's why.
There is value. Somewhere along the line merchants caught on to using Foursquare to drive business. Whether at Marlow's in Atlanta or Simply Splendid Salads in Louisville, retailers are catching on. I bet I have saved over $30 using Foursquare in the past month. In these times being frugal is good for everyone.
No spoilers. Nothing worse then learning via your social network that Spain won 1 - 0 on a corner when you are Tivoing or expecting to catch the late replay telecast of the match. This does not happen on Foursquare. You do not tell people what is happening or what you are doing. You tell them where you are. Foursquare is a great Facebook/Twitter alternative publishing tool. It enables you to avoid your social stream if you need to do so while not completely jacking out.
Social network management nuances. I don't intend to explain this fully but there are certain things that you can do with Foursquare that allow you to manage your social network relationships in a more real world way. You can do things with your more intimate Foursquare network when you are in the same physical locale and communicate them out to your broader networks in a way that keeps all your relationships happy and healthy. That is all I am saying.
So I am back on Foursquare, let's see how long it lasts this time.
Last night Abby and I were having a nice little stroll to dinner when the subject of Facebook came up. I mentioned to her Mark Zuckerberg's reported comments via IM about Facebook users. "They trust me. Dumb f***s."
Don't know if the story is true or not. I do know that Facebook has a pretty aggressive attitude about privacy, one that does not sit well with many users including me. Abby was aghast about the Zuck's comment and asked "so what's the next Facebook?" It's a company that will do two thing well.
Performance was one of the main factors that led to the decline of MySpace. Privacy could lead to the decline of Facebook. The next great social network will perform at scale and treat users and their privacy preferences with respect.
I day or two ago John Mayer infamously quit Twitter. Today I am doing the same thing not so infamously with Foursquare.
I was one of the half dozen or so users in Atlanta and made my first check in last August. Since then I have assembled a host of badges and mayorships. But beyond that I am not getting anything out of it.
Perhaps it is just me. My circle of travel is quite small. The game is not complex enough to remain interesting. It's not as fun as it used to be and the newest release of the application actually requires more clicks and time to check in. Personally I am not getting enough reward out of the app for the amount of effort it requires to remain active.
I hope that Dennis and the rest of the Foursquare team will continue to lovingly improve the service in New York City, but for the moment I am taking my ball and going home. Perhaps I will be back to play again some day.
So Dave Williams of BLiNQ went out to the f8 show in San Francisco and realized that Atlanta needs a group to share best practices related to anything Facebook. So, he pinged me about ATDC sponsoring such a group and low and behold it is so. Should be a great group for developers working on the Facebook platform and companies looking toward Facebook for marketing purposes. Meetings will be held held the 1st Tuesday of every month at 6:30pm. Free pizza and beverages, will be served compliments of BLiNQ. You can join the meetup group here.
A little bit later today at ad:tech and F8 BLiNQ Media is going to announce the beta launch of BAM (BLiNQ Ad Manager) and an investment of $750,000 in the company by advisors, employees, and management.
BAM is a RoR application built by the expert team of Hashrocket. It is integrated with the Facebook Ads API and offers marketers the ability to hyper-target message and engage Facebook users via rich profile data thus driving Facebook advertising performance in new and innovative ways.
Founded by Dave Williams, who previously founded 360i, BLiNQ is operating in a large and rapidly growing market, has revenue traction via an advertising model, and with the launch of BAM has a solid product in the market.
Like all startups this one has a long way to go but it could turn into a rocket.
I have this theory. It's most likely not going to be real popular. But I have this theory. It's a theory about how social media marketing is going to evolve. The theory goes a little bit like this.
Social media is small part of the interactive marketing pie. It's growing fast. But right now it is small. In it's infancy even. A mere $700 million sliver of a $25 billion dollar pie. If you go back and look at Internet ad spending history the entire category was $600 million in 1997. In terms of social media spend it is 1997.
Think about 1997 and interactive marketing. DoubleClick was hot. Yahoo! was hot. Pointcast was hot. So hot that News Corp offered $450 million to buy them.
Google was just a sparkle in Larry's and Sergey's eyes. That $600 in
revenue was nearly all being spent on interactive display advertising. Advertising that was chasing online eyeballs. Social media marketing is a lot like interactive marketing in 1997 from a market development point of view as well. Conversations, engagement, followers, and fans are the eyeballs of yesteryear.
Take a gander at Forrester's interactive advertising spend projections below. Notice anything interesting about it?
I do.
Look at the more mature categories of email marketing, display advertising, and search marketing. It's obvious that search marketing dominates. It dominates because of its direct response nature. What might not be quite so obvious, because you need to dig a little deeper into the underlying numbers, is that a steady state of 70% of interactive marketing spending is being used for direct marketing activities.
My theory on social media marketing is that it is going to mature to a state very similar to other online marketing categories. Most of the growth projected for the social media category is going to be spent on direct response marketing activities. The entire reason interactive marketing has grown is it is more measurable, less expensive, and more revenue focused than traditional media. If CMOs are going to shift their budgets into social they are going to demand the same type of performance.
It's really no surprise that marketers want to invest in activities that are both efficient and measurable. But there is another side of the coin, the side of the social media user. The common wisdom is that social media users don't want to be sold, they want deeper engagement. But no one wants to "be sold" in any medium from mass market advertising to one on one sales. People want to buy.
Regardless, eMarketer recently highlighted a study by Marketing Sherpa that addressed this issue.
Why many users are indeed interested in deeper engagement, the number one motivation why users followed/friended companies was to learn about specials and sales. This supported an earlier study by Razorfish.
Social media users want deals. If marketers are going to be successful they are going to have to give them deals.
Based on their behavior interactive marketers want efficient measurable revenue focused opportunities. Social media users want deals. But them together and you have social media looking a lot like other more mature interactive marketing mediums. Or so my theory goes. But is it just a theory.
Very interested in what the smart marketers and social media users that comprise the readership of FoG have to say about the matter.
Today at the sold out SoCon10 I am giving the presentation you see below entitled "Measuring Social Media ROI: An ATDC Case Study."
The genesis of the presentation is twofold. First and foremost in the summer of 2009 there was a lot of talk about how you could not or should not measure the return of your social media efforts. I do not believe either to be the case. Second, Stephen Fleming become the acting director of ATDC and decided we were going to change strategic direction. He announced this at a Monday staff meeting and wanted it implemented in seven days. That time frame pretty much limited our marketing efforts to online and we exclusively relaunched via social media This provided a great opportunity to demonstrate that social media ROI could be calculated and how to go about doing it.
Social publishing is an interesting area of the Internet these days. By social publishing I am referring to web sites where users can post their original documents and share them with the world. These documents can then be commented on, downloaded, embedded, indexed, ranked, and shared by others. The services are typically integrated with the big three of social media so that with an engaged audience the documents can get fairly broad distribution. Two of the more well known social publishing services are SlideShare and Scribd.
A couple of years ago I waded into social publishing on SlideShare. I uploaded a presentation on the GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition Work. To my surprise the rather ordinary deck garnered hundreds of views. I then put my BarCamp presentation "That's What You Twittered." This much more interesting deck has over 1,000 views. All in all my the presentations I have uploaded to SlideShare have garnered over 8,000 views.
Well during the last makeover of FoG I decided to make some changes to the about section. Specifically I wanted to change the way my formal bio and resume were presented, primarily to make them more of online reputation management devices. Through Marta Kagen's SlideShare presentation, What The F**K is Social Media I had come across her personal site. She had her bio and resume on Scribd. I liked it, it seemed to rank well, so I decided to do the same. It worked. The resume consistently ranks as a top search engine result and has been viewed a thousand times in the last year.
So last Fall when we were doing a major overhaul of atdc.org to fit the organization's new strategic direction, Blake Perdue uploaded eight of ATDC's resource documents to Scribd. Our primary objective is doing so was brand building, to make more people in the startup community more aware of ATDC and the type of things it does. Those documents have had nearly 30,000 reads in just over five months. These reads are being driven by Google search results. The docs are top results on the search phrases executive summary template and positioning statement among others. Strong stuff that is helping to build the brand of ATDC as a leading technology accelerator. We are currently in the process of tweaking the docs a bit to determine how to best use them as online reputation management tools as well.
These experiences demonstrate that social publishing is an effective tool that can work well for both individuals and organizations. You should make it a part of your online marketing mix.
I hate writing appraisals. I like giving them, and believe that the best way to do so is through day to day conversations. I mean if an employee is surprised by what is in a performance review, it really is the fault of the manager. But I hate writing them.
Regardless, as we enter the new year the performance review season is upon us. As I am doing a self appraisal. One of my objectives is to update and implement the ATDC's marketing plan, manage the ATDC's web properties, and write at least a dozen blog articles. Here's how I did.
A new marketing plan was implemented. The new plan focused almost exclusively on online marketing and the use of social media. Evidence of the success of this plan can be seen in traffic to ATDC web properties. Unique visitors grew 38% to 79,950 from 57,741. Page view growth was even more dramatic, increasing to 283,128 from 149,715 an 89% growth rate. Moreover this traffic generated 478 inquiries for ATDC services versus 231 such requests in the previous year.
The change in ATDC strategy required intense focus on managing ATDC Web properties. A new web site to support ATDC's new strategic direction was launched in seven days and three more versions have rolled out since then. I personally wrote 44 blog articles.
SoCon, the Southeast's premier social media and social networking conference is quickly approaching. In its fourth year, SoCon10 will be taking place on January 29th and 30th. The event kicks off on Friday night with a networking dinner at Maggiano's that has been fantastic in previous years. On Saturday things move over to Kennesaw State University for a day full of discussions.
SoCon10 is getting down to brass tacks with its theme of "Enough Theory; Now Show Me the Money and the Love." Keeping with this theme I am leading a break out session called "Measuring Social Media Marketing." The session will be a case study of the relaunch of ATDC, how social media was used in that effort, how the campaign was measured, and how others can use the same methodology to measure their social media efforts.
Should be a lively discussion and a great event. Get yourself registered.
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person on entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
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