Mark Kolier’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Foursquare’

Stuart Elliot of The New York Times writes the advertising column and periodically has 20 questions about advertising. I decided to come up with a few of my own.

1) Why are there ads in the subway with QR codes displayed when there is no internet service on the subway itself?

2) Would you turn your house into a billboard? http://www.aol.it/rpy8Na

3) How long will it be before urinals in public restrooms carry advertising?

4) Do you watch the screen when riding in the back of taxi?

5) Would you be willing to receive a steady stream of ads on your smart phone if the monthly fees were paid for by the carrier?

6) Which company do you think will last longer – Groupon or Foursquare?

7) If you’ve used a Groupon or Living Social coupon to dine in a restaurant you’ve never before visited – have you ever gone back a second time?

I don’t watch ads when I DVR a television program preferring to fast forward through them as I believe is the case with most people. What percentage of DVR watchers do you think should be counted as having actually watched an ad during the program?

9) Will people continue to patronize online companies that don’t offer a free shipping option?

10) In 2012 will you use Ebay’s Redlaser.com bar scanner or Amazon.com’s bar code scanner to check pricing on in-store items?

I wish you and your family a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah and Joyous Kwanzaa. Oh and a healthy and Happy 2012 too!

Companies who develop a strong Twitter following online have a better chance at increasing sales according to a recent study conducted by Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey – http://bit.ly/tZIZql.

The survey studied the buying habits of fewer than 1,500 people. A fairly good-sized sample and the results were that 50% of people who follow a brand are more likely to buy that brand’s products. The article also notes however that it is not all that easy to get a Twitter user to follow a brand. I would agree with that as I am not one to follow a brand on Twitter although I have done so on Facebook to some degree. In fact only 21% of Twitter users follow brands.

Also significant was the statistic that 75% of people surveyed said the never ‘un-follow’ brands after making a ‘commitment’ to them. Although I don’t really understand how following a brand shows my commitment exactly.

Mashable lists the study’s five main reasons for following a brand on Twitter:

• 64%: I am a customer of the company
• 61%: To be the first to know information about the brand
• 48%: To receive discounts and promotions
• 36%: To gain access to exclusive content
• 28%: To receive content/information to retweet and share with others

The article also noted that Twitter’s follower numbers closely mirror a Facebook study that also found that 56% of users on Facebook who like a brand’s fan page are more likely to recommend that brand to friends while 51% of consumers who like a brand Facebook fan page are more likely to purchase that product. I expect that this comes as no surprise to anyone.

Twitter continues to evolve (check out Simon Cowell’s comments on his personal turnaround on using Twitter as a listening device in today’s New York Times http://nyti.ms/vuE6dT), and personally I find myself following fewer overall people and culling out people I am following if they don’t put out tweets of interest to me. I am following over 900 people and there’s no way for me to sift through that many people’s tweets.

Brands are doing a better job of leveraging social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. For me it starts and ends with what kind of engagement the brands offer, as well as what kinds of offers the brands offer!

But there’s still room for improvement don’t you think?

Having just returned from China and a trip to South Carolina I’ve had to use a mobile phone (it’s a Blackberry Storm) as my primary communication device for nearly two weeks. Although I won’t get into the problems that Research in Motion (RIM) has in general with loss of subscribers and a still paltry amount of applications, I have to report that the BB Storm performed admirably and reliably.

Despite the BB Storm’s limited apps, the ones I have downloaded, I use on a consistent basis. Even the Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter applications worked from my phone while I was in China although access via the hotel’s internet connection from my laptop was denied. I read newspapers, watched videos on YouTube, checked email, used Google Maps to find where I was going and even tried Foursquare (it worked fine but all the locations were written in Mandarin characters so that was a bit tricky).

In recent years mobile phones have been designated as the ‘third screen’. The idea is that television and computers are the other two screens. But in this increasingly fast paced and mobile world a smartphone is no longer a luxury but a necessity for many people – including me. My internet connection in the hotel in Shenzhen was glacially slow, such that at times I just did not even bother trying to do things that I would normally accomplish in a nanosecond here at home. Instead I used my mobile phone.

I also find myself using mobile sites with increasing frequency. In so doing I’ve found that many companies do a poor job of creating a good mobile experience for their customers and prospects. (Full disclosure – our team is building mobile sites for clients so we are attuned to this issue). With smartphone adoption continuing to grow the importance of having a really good mobile site has never been greater and will continue to grow.

I think mobile should be considered the first screen. A mobile phone is within arm’s reach at all times for most people and is likely the first screen people look at each morning.

How about you? Is your mobile phone ever out of sight or access? Is it the first thing you look at in the morning? Are you doing more and more on your smartphone?

Being on the road again in mostly unfamiliar cities I have been using Yelp – www.yelp.com more and more. Enabled with GPS technology on my smartphone, Yelp allows me to search out the nearest coffee shops, wine bars, restaurants and other local places of interest from wherever I am. In fact as I was driving to the airport this evening I wished I could have used Yelp to find the nearest gas station prior to returning my rental car. But texting while driving (or in this case Yelping while driving) is a no-no so I did it the old fashioned way.

Yelp also offers user reviews of the various establishments listed. While the accuracy and unbiased nature of those reviews might be in question, it’s somewhat amusing to read what people wrote about their experiences in the various locations. I thought about how Foursquare links with your friends to check in at locations (and even sends updates to Facebook if you so desire) and it dawned on me that Foursquare and Yelp might be made for each other. I want to find a location for coffee on Yelp, I go there, then check in on Foursquare and tell my ‘friends’. I also can rate the place (something that Foursquare offers in terms of a comment but it is a vastly underused feature), and share that too.

Then the rating has much more meaning since it is going to my selected friends and is not a random posting on how some stranger liked or disliked an establishment. I know nothing about this person save for their name (and photo if they so choose to post that) on Yelp and thus their recommendation holds little value for me or anyone else.

As I have noted in previous posts, Facebook Places has picked up some of the elements of Foursquare but to this point Foursquare has not pulled their link to FB nor has FB dropped Foursquare as a partner.

The combination of Yelp and Facebook would make an attractive property don’t you think?

I’ve been ‘using’ Foursquare’s location based application for about 9 months now. People ask me all the time WHY do I use Foursquare to let people know where I am at a given moment. My standard answer is that in order for me to understand how this technology might be useful I had to be a user and experience it for myself.

Well after 9 months of ‘checking-in’, having received 9 different ‘badges’, being the ‘Mayor’ of no less than 6 different places – including the Acela Club at Citi Field where I have been only 5 times, I am here to tell you that I personally don’t have any real use for Foursquare.

I have received comments from my Facebook friends (you can link your Foursquare status to FB); on different places I’ve been that they went to at one time or another – that’s a little bit cool. But I have yet to ‘check-in’ at a place and have someone nearby let me know that they are in the area and maybe we could get together.

Granted non-20’s people like myself (ok mea culpa I am more than double that), don’t normally go hopping around in the suburbs from place to place and when I am in New York City and check-in most of my Foursquare friends are either not in the city or not going to the same places that I am.

Occasionally Foursquare has offered me a coupon for an establishment nearby to the one in which I just checked-in and I even used a coupon one time just to test it (coffee). But as I wrote in a previous post http://bit.ly/9AWboS Foursquare’s GPS location is not very good and I can often check into no less than 15 establishments at the same time within as many as 1,000 meters (why it’s in meters I have no idea). In fact frequently it says that I am closer to a place down the street than the place that I am actually in.

An interesting article by Todd Woody in the NY Times from October 20 http://nyti.ms/dwjcRh did a nice job in linking Earthjustice – a non-profit law firm, to a campaign in which $ 10 would be donated to protect endangered species by ‘checking-in’ at Foursquare at ‘Earthjustice ad’. Clever campaign but I don’t know if that’s enough of a business model to sustain Foursquare. And now Facebook has been running its own location based platform – Facebook Places.

As far as I am concerned the road for Foursquare leads directly to be acquired by Facebook. And they better do that fast. Time is running out. You can check-in on that.

What do you think?