Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the crowd has a really good idea about what you do during a given day.  iPhone and Android’s onboard GPS has given way to location based social networks like BrightKite, Foursquare and Gowalla,  which allow you to tell your friends where you are and how often you go there. Location based applications are the next frontier, and in fact are predicted to be next year’s big thing, offering unlimited possibility for communication by geography and, of course, advertising.

My last two sessions at SXSW 2009 featured players in location based social networking. I remember being fascinated by how they approached it primarily because Gregory Ng and I concepted our own in 2007 (prior owning an iPhone and iPhone’s “reliable” GPS).

Applications

Each of the location based apps have the ability to figure out where a person is located.  The user “checks in” to locations, signifying their arrival.  In addition, the user is able to send messages to let people know what they are doing.

BrightKite allows you to post a status update and a picture.



Foursquare gives you points for creating and “checking in” to a location. It also has has a leaderboard to see how you rank against your friends and your city.



Gowalla’s check-ins are similar in that you can post a note, but the app also has quirky little items that you find and leave for others. For instance, I currently have an espresso, a silk robe and a tour bus in my inventory. I am never going to drop that tour bus. That is awesome. You can either exchange items for items left by others, or drop an item to become a “Founder” of a spot. I cannot say that I fully understand the purpose, although Gowalla says that they use the items as proxies for how important a particular place is.



Each application relies on the users to create locations at spots and rewards them for doing so.

Integrations

Each of the services works with Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to connect with friends from those networks and to post notifications. Some might call this oversharing (particularly if you are friends with people on Twitter, Facebook and the Location based network).

Foursquare has recently also announced an API that is will make it even more appealing to the community.

The secret to extension of social applications is the ability to integrate it into a grander scheme. With integration with Twitter and Facebook already functional, the API combined with its game-like addictiveness will give it an advantage over all other LBSNs. BrightKite also has an API, but adoption has been much slower because people simply do not have a lot of incentive to use the platform even though it is probably the best in terms of geo-location. BrightKite needs to evolve and add incentives for use in order to stand up against its competitors and survive.

Advertising Features

Foursquare appears to be the leader in advertising and monetization. I’ve started to see some “nearby special” bannerettes pop up when I am about to check in to a place. Foursquare allows locations to give special deals to mayors. A mayor is the person who has checked into a place the most. This creates a little bit of competition between loyal customers. There’s a great opportunity to generate social buzz and loyalty by being an early adopter.

Who Wins?

The winner is the one who makes money. There are a couple of ways for an organization to do so. One is to be acquired by another organization who is interested in your compelling technology.  The other way is to actually have a business model that makes money. Obviously it is desirable to have both going for you. The winner will also have a very compelling API which will allow them to scale and proliferate rapidly. FourSquare’s looks to be based largely on Twitter’s which has been wildly successful. Foursquare has already begun selling ads that are based on where a person is physically. I have noticed ads when I go to check into a place. They say something like Deal Nearby and offer you a click path to that location with an easy back to your original location. Brightkite has some banner ads that display after you check in to a location. I have not noticed similar features on Gowalla yet.

Behavioral Data and Analytics

The real win here is that location data can be linked to conversations on both the application’s platform and on associated Twitter (and soon perhaps Facebook) streams.  You can get a clear picture of how a person behaves by where they go, how often they go there, where their friends go, how often they meet their friends and what they talk about when they are there - or after they go there. An analytics offering segmented by demographics and interests would be very valuable to marketers.  They would also pay to see analysis of popular places so that they know where to place their ads.

We know where they go and we know what they’re thinking.

Now we just need to get them to buy something.

Given the amount of information we have, I am sure we can find something appropriate to sell.

How effective can social media be in raising money to support a charitable cause? That’s what eight a&g employees and many other social media mavens in Boston and Austin are investigating this November – well, Movember, really.

The Society for New Communications Research & UMass Dartmouth reported in June 2009 that 89% of the top non-profit organizations use at least one form of social media. And Chris Brogan and Julien Smith wrote in their 2009 New York Times best-seller, Trust Agents, of an instance where building community in social media resulted in easily generating in just 2 hours the remaining $500 needed for a Cambodian woman to go to college – driven much by a tweet from Brogan asking followers to chip in a few dollars.

So, we figured, let’s see for ourselves. During this entire month, we’re growing what’s considered somewhat of a lost “art form”, moustaches, in an effort to raise donations to support the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Livestrong Foundation. We’re participating in the largest, worldwide charitable event in support of men’s health: “Movember”. Since 2003, men have raised over $50MM for the cause as they’ve sported furry upper lips for the month of Movember – a moustache is known as a “mo” in Australia, where this cause started.

a&g is championing Team Boston and is going head-to-head with fellow Magnum P.I. admirers from social media mecca, Austin, TX, to see who can raise the most money for the cause – and look pretty slick in the process. We’re using all sorts of means for fundraising – with particular focus on what social media can do.

Have you tried social media to support fundraising efforts? What’s worked? What hasn’t?

We’ll be sure to report on what we learn – we should have some free time by month’s end; our wives aren’t all that big on hanging out with us these days! :{D

To support a&g’s efforts to raise awareness for men’s health and fight prostate cancer and testicular cancer, please visit the Team Boston “Mo Space” page and make your donation online: https://www.movember.com/us/donate/your-details/team_id/10775

For more on Movember: http://us.movember.com/about/

Nearly every panel on Social Media mentions Marcel Lebrun’s team and the Radian 6 platform. With that comes the obligatory mention of the Listen, Measure, Engage methodology. During the MITX Brand Personification #MITXSM panel on September 17,2009, there was mention of the usual tenets of social media:

• Be transparent
• Do not attempt to control the conversation
• Engage

Each of these is riddled with theory versus practice, but the focus for now is engagement.



How do you decide where to engage?
Deciding where to engage should come from two angles. First, you need to decide how you want to represent your brand in social spaces and therefore you should have an idea of how you want to align with conversations that you deem important to you and your success. Important: you need to be willing to allow this to evolve.

Offline your brand is what you say, in online spaces, your brand is what the crowd says about you.

The second angle is listening to the crowd. At #mitxsm, we established that in online spaces, your brand is what the crowd says about you. That means you need to listen to the crowd. They are going to dictate the conversation whether the brand likes it or not. A brand can choose not to participate, but there are consequences to ignoring a conversation with significant participation. Significant participation is not always number of people, it has everything to do with who is participating. Pissing off one influential individual can have a serious ripple effect.

What are the 2 Rules of Engagement?

Respond
A brand needs to speak to the people who are engaging. When someone addresses the brand, it should respond in kind with an honest answer. This is not always pretty. Even brands who are known for engagement like @Jetblue and @SouthwestAir get the occasional hater. [aside: @JetBlue seems to be ignoring a couple of haters. I am talking to them to see why they hate and if the brand has enaged them via DM versus openly]. It’s how you handle the feedback that counts. You can win the haters over or at the very least you can show how you graciously accept them and incorporate their feedback. Both win you points. Your brand may be late to the game because the crowd has already kicked off the conversation on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter etc, but it’s never too late to join.



Provoke
The conversations that you care about may not exist the way you envision them. That does not necessarily mean that the crowd does not care or want to have that conversation. Brands need to be willing to provoke, instigate, antagonize or tease out a conversation. The best way to start conversations is to seek out individuals who would be likely to participate.

What? Well, if your product is adventure oriented, you might seek out people in the extreme sports, mountain climbing, hiking, mountain biking, kite surfing and shark tossing crowds. Then kick off a conversation. If you want to be known as the fertilizer expert, then talk about fertilizer with people who like to talk about landscaping, lawn care and gardening. Do not worry about whether you know people. Jump in. Discuss your views. Push out content that your audience cares about. Debate the merits of your ideas and the merits of the ideas of others in the crowd. Eventually you will make new friends. You will even get to a point where you are meeting people “offline” and while you may start your conversation with a “nice to meet you” handshake, your conversation will pick up where you left off online because you already have a relationship.



Brand can be complex because companies and people are complex. Remember, when these rules apply to both personal and corporate brands. Mine is about social media, measurement, emerging technology, burrito enthusiasm, events, beer (which i channel through an alternate persona) and a little about style. I outwardly do not take myself too seriously but I do take my brand seriously.

@Direct_Tire engaged me today when I was talking about walking to work after dropping my car off for repairs. They got me to respond, but missed a chance to have a real conversation with them after I responded.

If you are a band, engage your fans or engage fans of music that you are paired with in the music genome project (Pandora), but find out what they like beyond your music. Analyze and choose the commonalities and have the conversation stem from there.



Remember, you are now building relationships, not just pushing out content. You can sponsor user generated content to get conversations going as well.

You can create campaigns using outreach programs that give people who like your products resources to create content for you, like Ford did with the #Fiestamovement. Oh and you thought I was just going to dog Ford in this article. Nah. They have made some good moves. And If you’re really feeling bold, engage your competition. That’s a sure fire way to get people talking.

The bottom line is that social media is not for the meek. What brand do you know that has a tenet of meekness? None. Is your brand engaging? What is holding you back?

It was a star-studded group of social media mavens at Harvard, both on stage and in the audience. Presenters included Southwest Airlines Social Media Manager Christi Day (@christi5321), Rebel Industries Josh Levine (@jlevine), and Dominos Pizza Super-Francisee Ramon DeLeon (@Ramon_DeLeon). EMC’s Polly Pearson (@pollypearson) stressed the importance of community as an internal resource, allowing insight into cross-discipline initiatives. And Red Cross Social Media Director Wendy Harman (@wharman) stressed the importance of Twitter as a disaster management communication medium. A very interesting case on a regionally distributed brand personification strategy.

Key themes that reigned throughout the day: Listen to your user base, learn from them, and react accordingly. Perhaps the group was best summed up by the conference’s first Keynote Speaker Stanley Kirk Burrell (aka rapper, musician, and preacher MC Hammer) when he said: in this day and age, “perception has trumped reality, and if you’re allowing somebody else to control the perception of your brand, you’re in trouble.”

Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee), true entrepreneur, famed host of the widely popular Wine Library TV, and fearless leader of “Vayner Nation” hosted a high-octane question and answer session where he offered summit attendees a couple of key messages: “Sweat equity will define winners and losers,” and it is ON YOU to leverage the tools available to you.

The day closed with @garyvee offering to the audience a challenge when he said that “It blows my mind that we’re still debating whether THIS is going to stick. If you have eyeballs, you can make money. You can sell eyeballs. Period. End of story.” How you decide to do it is up to you. Inspiring words.

We found it interesting that all these brilliant innovators came together in the hallowed halls of the Harvard Faculty Club. Marketers and technologists talked about the future of business not at Harvard Business School but in the center of Harvard’s campus on the first floor of one of Harvard’s oldest buildings. Old meets new? Perhaps. But we saw it as a metaphor for how these trends in technology are changing us from the inside out.

Kudos to the Gravity Summit team for putting on a great day. Excellent presenters and good content. And those who couldn’t attend were treated to solid streaming coverage via cnn.com/live.

Some feedback to consider: We’d like to see more interaction between those presenting and the audience. Considering you have all of those social media mavens in a room, we’d love to see more audience participation. And while the day was rich with content, oddly there was too much reliance on PowerPoint as the platform.

A summary video by @needgraphics can be seen here: http://www.viddler.com/explore/KnowItUp/videos/21/.

Photo credits: @gradontripp, http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodguygrady/

It’s widely assumed that golf is played and watched by old men who barely turn on a computer, let alone use digital and interactive media as part of their everyday life.  It’s also assumed that social media has been embraced largely by teens and who want to share pictures and videos and chat about music and dating.

Right?  Actually, wrong on both counts.

The golf industry is highly interactive - 88% are online several times per day and 61% of adult golfers are registered with at least one social networking sites, led by Facebook, LinkedIn, Classmates and MySpace.

And social media is not simply the domain of Millenials and Gen Y – Facebook, YouTube and MySpace are among the top 10 web sites in the US across all age groups.  Twitter has exploded from 1 million to 10 million users in just 12 months and should exceed 20 million by the end of the year.

I recently spoke at the National Golf Foundation Symposium in Chicago where many of the attendees were CEOs and CMOs of major golf brands and companies.  It was clear that most are still trying to identify how social media can best enhance their brand and marketing messages.  The explosive pace of growth and change within social media is also the primary concern causing many golf companies to take a cautious approach to where to begin in this expanding medium.

But a few things were clear to all attendees, golfers are already having social conversations about golf every day, but these are taking place largely in the real world, at the course, over dinner, in the clubhouse – not in the virtual world of social media.

The opportunity for golf brands is to create social media destinations where golfers can talk about their love of the game and these companies’ products and services.  With over 30 million golf fans actively engaged in social media already, isn’t it time for a smart golf brand to give them a home to for those conversations?

At a&g, we think it is, and we can’t wait to help build it.

Twitter is a news source, an early alert system, a social network, a geo tracking tool, an education necessity, a reputation monitoring system, a political campaign tool, a rumor mill, a PR platform, a brand personifier, a help desk, a product review source, a polling system, a direct marketing tool, a classified ad, a sports discussion platform, a tv guide, a celebrity information and communication tool, an addiction, open Instant Messenger, a recipe box, a bookmarking tool, a soapbox, the driving force for social media, an amazingly simple innovation with an [until recently] flimsy revenue model, a virtual place… [your turn]

michael schneider, vice president & director of contributions & groundswell evangelist & technologist & food hacker &  fashionista & arsenal gooner & blogger  & digital before digital & red sox nation member & i’m a mac & i’m a pc.

Marketing is a volatile, amorphous space. Given the nearly constant change, we need to be able to detect movements in market, audience and response.  As a result, it is more important than ever for our clients to have sound methods of data collection, aggregation, reporting and analysis to improve their targeting and optimize processes.  These are the missions of the Contributions Group.

Improved targeting means we can do away with a casting-a-wide-net approach in favor of tactics that encourage social interaction with our brands.  In a world where people are choosing to opt out of messaging that does not resonate with them, we need to make our clients ready when people decide to engage.  This means a shift to more intimate engagement methods and encouraging our audience to both listen to and join the conversation.



I have 13+ years of experience in defining business pains and solving problems using technology, marketing and analytics. The A&G Digital Incubator’s think-tank style atmosphere combined with passions for redefining the boundaries and client success led me to a&g.

I started my career building database driven applications for the one of the world’s premiere hospitals, the Cleveland Clinic.  The opportunity to get my hands on world-class technology projects & management consulting opportunities brought me to Ernst & Young & Oracle.  I built very large operational, marketing and CRM systems for companies like Pfizer, Gillette, Friendly’s, Gorton’s, Ameritech, Smucker’s, Georgia Pacific and Fidelity.



In 2004 I went to work for Hill, Holliday to define database marketing for the agency.  I built award-winning communities for Liberty Mutual; created CRM, segmentation and BI solutions for LPL, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, Cognos and United Rentals; provided marketing automation and modeling strategies to Dell and data warehouse; and a web content management solution for a major telecom.

I have Management Information Systems & Accountancy degrees from Miami University.  At home is quality assurance expert & market research commando  & superwife & supermom & superstar Jaye Schneider.  On weekends you can find us enjoying New England with the kids.  Look for me at MITX and BIMA events and the occasional tweetup or call me at the a&g offices to chat.