While everyone was talking about the new Facebook Places application last week, I wanted to wait until I had a chance to actually experiment with it myself and report firsthand back to you on my analysis.  A little bit of historical perspective can’t hurt any analysis either: A few days in social media seems like a few months in real life.  Now that a few days have passed and I’ve had a chance to take the Places application out for a test spin, I realize what Facebook is trying to do: Become the default social aggregator of your information at home or on the go.  We’ve seen them do this by creating a platform and mobile application that helps you keep in touch with and check out what your friends are up to.  They have extended this with the Social Graph API so that you can see what else your friends “liked” as you browse the web, with some companies like Levi’s extending the Social Graph APIs to the extreme.

If mobile and the location-based application are the next biggest thing, instead of reinventing the wheel, Facebook decided intelligently to partner with the leading “check-in” services in Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp to extend their presence with the Places application.  In doing so, they have positioned themselves as the default place to check out where your friends are when you’re outside on the go.  As a result, similarly to extending the Facebook experience to the Web with the Social Graph, they are now extending themselves to location-based services, and in doing so will continue to be a sticky social aggregator.  Here’s my analysis on 3 reasons why this is the case:

1) Places API and Partnerships Extend the Location-Based Social Application

By opening up their APIs as they always do as well as creating partnerships with the leaders in the field of location-based social applications, Facebook continues to position themselves as the aggregator of social information.  I didn’t realize this myself until I started using Places and noticed all of the check-ins that were happening outside of FB on other platforms.  Facebook doesn’t and shouldn’t care whether you use Foursquare, Gowalla, or Yelp to check-in: All of your check-ins on these other platforms will now flow into Places.  Furthermore, with the new Places API, companies like Booyah, the creators of MyTown, are planning to release a new application called InCrowd.  One can only predict that this is just the beginning of companies building upon the Places API.  Why not?  Analysis from a business perspective will clearly show that if you wanted to offer a location-based service, FB is the clear platform to partner with because they potentially give you access to half a billion users.  Not bad, huh?

2) Where are Your Friends?

Recent statistics show that Foursquare and Gowalla have a combined 2 million users.   As with any new Web 2.0 application, the value in the application is only there if a lot of other people are using it.  While a lot of my social media friends are using Foursquare, analysis has proven to me that whenever I check in at a local restaurant here in Orange County, California filled with tens of people I am usually the only one checking in.  Facebook recently hit 500 million members.  Do the math and you’ll come to the conclusion I made: Facebook is where your friends are, not Foursquare, Gowalla, or even Yelp.  Doesn’t it make sense, then, for the largest social media site to aggregate all of these other check-in services so you can truly see where all of your friends are?  You can now see why the partnerships above make sense for each party: Foursquare needs more users for its platform to become mainstream, and Facebook needs active users of location-based mobile social applications.  And, whether we like it or not, we all need Facebook.

3) It’s About Your Friends, Not Places

To further emphasize my point that Facebook is all about your friends, the user interface for Places first shows where your friends are.  I was confused as to how I could go about checking-in from there, until I realized that the “Check-In” button on this initial screen will lead you to the familiar “Places” screen like you have in Foursquare.  It is true in Foursquare that the “default” screen is Friends, but I am always using “Places” first to check-in and then see where my friends are.  The cool thing is that as I write this blog post from the comfort of my home, I can launch the Facebook iPhone application and instantaneously see where all of my friends have checked-in.  Facebook seems to understand that it’s not about the check-in and becoming a “Mayor” but about seeing where your friends are and keeping in touch with them.

Where is all of this analysis going?  Without a doubt, Places will lead to broader acceptance of location-based social applications.  In fact, as predicted, this has already happened: Foursquare has already seen a surge in new signups since Places launched.  And it wouldn’t surprise me if Foursquare actually used the Places API to extend their own platform into the world of FB.  I will personally stick with Foursquare for my actual check-ins while checking up on where others are on Facebook, but one very positive potential from all of this is that maybe people will stop tweeting their Foursquare check-ins and instead realize that all they need to is simply “check-in” to be found on the default social information aggregator of them all: Facebook.

In case you’re still not familiar with Places, here is a video explanation straight from the source:

Where do you think Places is leading us?

Today’s guest blog post about social media strategy for local marketing utilizing Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare comes from someone I met Windmill Networking on My Blog Guest, AJ Wilcox.  I asked AJ to write about the intersection of local Internet marketing and social media strategy, and he surpassed my expectations with this excellent blog post. AJ is the SEO Team Lead over at OrangeSoda, a local Internet marketing firm. He has been in love with Internet marketing for over 3 years, and has overseen over 2,000 SEO accounts. He is married with a 1 year old son and enjoys cars and running.

Your business may be using Twitter, Facebook, or Foursquare to be connected to its customers, but have you considered integrating all three? Each platform has individual strengths that can make your business’s social media strategy more effective, and they have platform integration functions that make it simple.

My expertise is in local, brick-and-mortar businesses, so I’d like to direct my thoughts towards this type of business. As I see it, there are 5 ways to use social media:

• Branding/PR
• Sales channel
• Customer interaction
• Promotions
• Reputation management

Let’s cover each channel in detail and how they can be integrated for the most cohesive strategy.

Branding/PR

You company has a personality that goes along with the brand. You’ve probably contributed to it for as long as you’ve been involved. Social media can be a great way to establish that brand personality.

If your business is the stuffy, “professional” type, then your Facebook profile page should reflect that. Your tweets and status updates should be professional in nature. Everything coming from you is informational and inspires trust and authority. Yes, even tweets can encourage followers to utilize you as a resource. If your company is the fun, personable type, your Facebook page and tweets should follow suit. It’s all about the personality.

Discuss your company goals and strategy with employees interacting with the public through your social media to keep everything on brand. And I’m not really suggesting it. It’s a necessity.

Use social media to establish brand authority by mentioning industry news and showing you are on top of your game. A company that is involved and active in the industry will be a better place to do business than a company that won’t ever evolve.

Sales Channel

Why did you originally start doing social media for your company? My guess is that it was because you thought that somehow you could use it to bolster sales and build your customer base. This is a fantastic use of social media, and it should definitely be used – but be careful not to overuse this channel. Remember that your fans/followers aren’t following you for the pure joy of being advertised to all day long.

Twitter and Facebook are really the keys to this channel. Did you just start selling a new product? Let people in your networks know. I personally wouldn’t let an advertisement tweet or update go out more than once in 5 or so messages. Foursquare will let you put a sticker in your store window to alert customers to the fact that you’re active, so they can get on and connect.

Remember, the wider your social network, the wider your advertising reach. The more of a reason you give potential customers to follow you, the more effective sales channel messages will be when customers arrive.

Customer Interaction

No matter what industry you are in, your customers are becoming more social-media savvy. Your customers will talk about you or to you on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and just about any other platform there is. Being available to respond to your customers’ questions, inquiries, tips, etc. is a great way to build loyalty. Your audience is putting more emphasis on being transparent, available, and savvy. Now is your chance to be there for them. Be real and don’t do automated responses. No one likes dealing with robots.

Think about it. If one of your customers tweets, “This sux, I went to pick up my order and it hadn’t arrived yet,” how about responding to them—immediately—with, “Sorry about your order! Our driver had a truck issue. It should be here at 3:30. We’re sending along a $5 gift card for the inconvenience.”

The customer would be stunned that you were listening and were willing to explain the issue clearly. They may have had a small inconvenience by dropping into the store simply to be turned away empty handed, but now they know it was because the truck was late. Instead of talking about your business as incompetent and uncaring, they leave a comment about your excellent customer service.

Imagine fielding customer service questions like, “How long is that sale going on this week?”, and “how late are you guys open tonight?” Your customers will feel like they are getting personal attention and will be more likely to frequent your establishment.

Promotions

Twitter and Foursquare are fantastic for promotions. Consider doing a coupon, special, or contest with your social network.

Twitter is fantastic for contests and promotions. You can set rules directly related to your tweets, e.g., retweeting your announcement (and thereby invite their network to the promotion) counts as an entry to the contest. That means that every entry to the contest makes their whole network also aware of the promotion. As retweets fly around the twittersphere, thousands of people will end up seeing your promotion, and it’s a great way to build a larger following.

Foursquare is great for in-store promotions. As customers are checking foursquare in your area, a message will pop up saying that someone in their area is offering a special. Upon clicking, they will see whatever special you have set for your establishment. The best part about Foursquare is that the customer is already within walking distance, and any traffic you can build into your store would most likely be traffic that was not planning on visiting your store.

As a business on Foursquare, you also have access to a dashboard to see how often people are checking into your establishment. You also get to see who the Mayor is (the person who checks in to your store most often in the last 60 days), and have an opportunity to reward the mayor with a special offer. The best part of this is that it encourages check-ins by others who want to be the mayor and therefore have to come by more often. Your business profits from the additional traffic clamoring for the mayoral honor.

Reputation Management

It has been said that a disappointed customers will tell 10 people about their awful experience. It is also true that it’s a lot easier to tell more than 10 people over a social media network incredibly effortlessly. Wherever a customer is talking, they will talk about you.

Enter social networks. When your company is being discussed publicly, you have the opportunity to participate in the conversation publicly. Stand up for your business decisions and diffuse angry customers. Remember that the longer a client’s concern goes unaddressed, the more they are going to scream and shout, so address it fast.

There are a wide variety of keyword monitoring tools for Twitter, both free and paid, to help you watch for mentions of your company on Twitter. Be part of the conversation.

Foursquare also allows customers to leave tips to other customers. Watch for negative tips and warnings, and immediately correct the issues that cause negative tips. If you ignore them, they just build up and damage your rep.

Any other social media advice that you can provide for local brick-and-mortar businesses?  Please do share your experiences with us.  And if you’d like to submit a guest blog post on Windmill Networking like AJ did, please contact me!  Thanks!

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Social Media Drives New Business: Six Case Studies (techcrunch.com)
• Event Marketing With Social Media | Social Media Examiner (socialmediaexaminer.com)
• 7 Steps For a Successful Social Media Strategy (socialmediaexaminer.com)

Are you a Foursquare user yet?  If not, you should be.  If you believe in the power of Windmill Networking and being able to physically meet contacts in your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter networks, Foursquare helps facilitate this in real-time at a physical location.  iPhone, Android and Blackberry users should be especially keen on joining and utilizing the real-time-real-location social networking platform because of the phone applications that exists for these popular smartphone platforms.

Foursquare is a simple way to “check in” to a location and to broadcast to the world that you are there.  Other users can then see that you checked in in real-time and decide whether or not they want to visit you while you are at that location.  Of course, there are other ways of using Foursquare, like telling your friends about the latest and coolest location that you found.  But the idea behind a geo-location service like Foursquare is to find (other people) and be found (by other people) in real-time at an actual physical location.

Foursquare has spread virally since it’s inception because they made it easy for you to 1) login with your Facebook connections and 2) connect your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts to broadcast to the world every time you check in to a new location.  This is the root of the potential problem: do you really want to fill your Tweets and Facebook Wall up with broadcasts of where you’re at all the time?

Twitter has progressed a great deal in the past several months.  If you are on Twitter and have found use for it, you already understand that not everyone on Twitter is talking about what they had for breakfast today.  If you are seriously tweeting and trying to make friendships as well as sharing information, chances are you avoid mentioning tweets that no one is interested in to begin with.  Remember, Twitter is about having meaningful communication and sharing relevant information…unless you are a foodie or really DO want to know what someone had for breakfast, you probably don’t mention these things in your tweets.

If you buy into my argument this far, you can see why I personally don’t enjoy Foursquare tweets.  Think about it: just as nobody cared about what you ate for breakfast, I don’t think that people on Twitter care that you are “checking in” to your local Trader Joe’s.  If I am out and want to find someone to hook up with for a cup of coffee and conversation, I’ll check to see where my friends are at on my iPhone through the dedicated Foursquare application.

I don’t want my tweets flooded with real-time location updates from my Foursquare friends.  And I’m not the only one.  Just doing a Google search for “block foursquare twitter” will yield a lot of results, including this tweet from someone who echoes my sentiments:

The funny thing is I feel like I am in the minority on this one.  One of my good friends who I met on Twitter yet have been unable to physically meet in person, Perri Gorman (also known on Twitter as “@BeTheButterfly“), recently wrote a great blog post on Foursquare.  At the end of the post she asked a few power users, including myself, as to how we felt about these “location tweets.”  Of the seven people who commented, I was the only one who disliked them.  In fact, and you can quote me, I said,

“They should be banned. I promised my Twitter followers I would never tweet a Foursquare location and they should call me on it if I ever do!”

So there you have it.  Now that I’ve completed my rant, what do YOU think about these tweets on Twitter?  For or against?  Am I missing something here?   Please do let me and all of my readers know!

Related articles by Zemanta

• How do I stop FourSquare from flooding my Twitter stream? (askowen.info)
• Foursquare’s Growth Not Slowing Down: 725,000 Users, 22 Million Checkins (mashable.com)

Social Media Strategy for 2010

As we start a new year, it is important for all of us to create our own personal social media strategy to avoid all of the social media distractions that exist.  I never think of social media in itself as a “distraction,” but if it keeps you busy to the point that you are doing lots of things that are not related to your social media strategy, there could be a more efficient use of your time.

Determining Your Social Media Objective

First of all, whenever I do a speech on social media, I always begin with helping my audience create an objective, a raison d’etre, for being active on social networking sites.  What is your objective for being on LinkedIn?  For being on Twitter?  If you don’t know why you are doing what you do in social media, you could potentially be wasting a LOT of time.

Creating Your Social Media Strategy = Building Social Media Boundaries

Once you have your objective, you need to create a strategy.  I like to simplify the meaning of strategy as deciding to do what’s NOT important to you.  Look, there are just so many hours in the day.  Unless social media is your life, you also have other important things to do.  So you can’t be spending ALL of your time on social media.  Doesn’t it make sense, then, to start to build your own social media boundaries?  It means limiting yourself to x hours or x minutes of the day to each site or performing each objective on each site.  If you don’t have these boundaries established, more important things in your life could slip through the cracks.  If you’re still not sold on the idea, do what I plan to do this week: time how long you spend each day on each social media site performing each activity.  The results may be shocking.

Social Media Goes Mainstream in 2010: What Does It Mean to You?

It is more important than ever to create your social media boundaries because the amount of user generated content that exists, number of social media connections you have, and number of people that you know that join social networks is only going to continue to increase in 2010.  Think of these facts:

• There are now more tweets than people.  And by looking at GigaTweet, you’ll see that the amount of information being sent out on Twitter alone continues to grow at a rapid pace.
• Facebook alone grew from 100 to 350 million members in just 16 months.  If your friends aren’t on these sites yet asking to friend you, they will be soon!  And as your social networks increase, so will the communication (which is a great thing, but it will take up more of your time).
• There are over 200,000,000 blog sites all trying to grab your attention.  And everyone (including myself) is evangelizing that you should start blogging in 2010.
• New niche social networking sites, like Foursquare and Brazen Careerist, are going to start competing for your time spent on other sites.

This means that there will be more information and more people competing for your precious time you use in social media.  True, one important objective in using social media is the social aspect: keeping in touch with friends, finding new like-minded people, and joining conversations.  But there is also another important aspect of social media: reading the news, researching new information, finding out about new products or discounts, etc.  It is going to start to get crazy because the number of Twitter followers you have as well as the number of Facebook Fan Pages that you will be sent requests to join is only going to increase.  This has a lot of great potential in helping you reach our objective, but it also means you will need to be more efficient with the precious little time that you have.

With the start of 2010, it’s time to erect our social media boundaries and try to stick with them so that we achieve more this year.  To paraphrase the great Tim Ferriss, don’t let Twitter (or social media) own you.

What has your experience been recently?  Do you find it harder and harder to keep up with everyone and everything in social media?  What social media habits have you created to deal with time-management issues?  Please contribute your comment!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Social Media Killing Your Business? (ducttapemarketing.com)
• Living (and Blogging) Better in 2010 (onemanandhisblog.com)