Foursquare Launches First Advertising Campaign

Foursquare launched its first outdoor advertising campaign yesterday in hopes of educating non-users that the mobile application is more of a personalized local search and no longer a check-in service.  The main purpose of this campaign is to drive awareness of the new Foursquare.  A couple months ago, Foursquare splits its core business into two applications - Swarm, the application where users can check in to places and see where their friends are, and Foursquare, the application to discover new places.

This six-week campaign will appear in bus stops, train stations, and phone kiosks in Chicago and New York, and at bike share stations in Chicago.  The company was not allowed to advertise at bike share locations in New York because Citibank is the program's exclusive sponsor.  This is the company's first advertising campaign in an attempt to simultaneously rebrand Foursquare and jumpstart stagnant user growth.

Foursquare decided to launch this outdoor campaign after Seamless and Venmo reported that their outdoor campaigns were successful in driving app downloads. Foursquare COO Jeff Glueck said the company hopes the ads will display how Foursquare can be used by anyone. Each ad has two people with contrasting tastes having an encounter, Glueck said.

As an avid Foursquare user, it will be interesting to see the results of this branding campaign.  I am probably one of the top users of Swarm out of my entire community.  However, I mainly use Swarm to check in to places and rarely use the search function to find localized places.  I personally wouldn't use the Foursquare application so it will be interesting to see how the NYC/Chicago community responds to these outdoor advertisements, and whether the campaign will be successful.

Source: http://digiday.com/platforms/check-foursquares-first-advertising-campaign/ 

How apps and social media are changing the restaurant industry

It’s all down to mobiles, apps and social media and restaurants are faced with a new wave of reviewers sitting right there in their restaurant every single day of the week. Add in the fact that improved Internet connections and an increasing amount of restaurants, cafes and bars now offer free WiFi and consumers are sharing all sorts of things on their mobiles to their social networks. What is important for restaurants to realize is that this sharing is not always going to be to one particular network, meaning that unlike the old days where they could reply to every review or fix it with a free bottle of wine, every consumer could now be reviewing their main course in real time and sharing it with thousands of people on multiple platforms. The best way to fend off bad reviews is of course to cook amazing food and provide superb service and the upside is that restaurants doing that will benefit from massively powerful word of mouth like never before but the challenges remain…Ten years ago the restaurant industry was simple. Once every couple of months a food critic would come along and you would cook your best food and await the review in the newspaper with baited breath. Then restaurant review sites came along and changed all that. Anybody could leave a review but they were mostly biased and for the most part the system didn’t work that well. Now things have changed completely.

Traditional Social Network Apps

Most people share their experiences both good and bad from restaurants in a very ad hoc basis on traditional social networks. Load up Twitter or Facebook and it wont be long before you see somebody either sharing a photo of their lunch or a mini review of the restaurant they are sitting in. Although many venues will have their own Facebook page most of the conversation will happen away from that page on users’ own profiles. The important thing to remember here is that users trust their friend’s reccomendations more than anything so a good or bad review on these sites could instantly shape the opinions of hundreds of people. I’ve seen people say certain things on Twitter for example that has made me instantly boycott that restaurant.

Photo Sharing Apps

People love sharing photos of food. There is a certain amount of “Hey look at the delicious food I’m eating and you are missing out on” and also that food photographs especially well. Add in the fact that most people in a restaurant will now have a high powered camera on their phone and people are getting snap happy every time they go out. Log on to the likes of Instagram and you will instantly see a huge range of food dishes from all the people you follow. When done correctly these can act as little advertisements for your restaurant but yet again the restaurant will probably have no idea who or when photos are being taken so the only real advice here would be to make the food as presentable as possible at all times.

Location Aware Social Review Sites

It wasn’t not that long ago that people used to have their meal and wait until they got home to leave a review once they had time to let it all digest. Now with apps like Yelp and Foursquare people can leave reviews in real time from within your restaurant. Serve up a lousy starter and somebody could have left a review with a picture before the waiter has even cleared the plates. With more and more apps allowing you to tag reviews to specific locations this is going to become an increasingly important channel as consumers trust their peer’s reviews more than anything.

Food Specific Apps

These apps are for more hard core foodies but are starting to be used as a way to discover new places to eat. Foodspotting is a great example.

A Billion Restaurant Reviewers

Restaurants used to wait with baited breath for the well known local restaurant reviewer to turn up and there used to be a handful of them per country who would influence the opinions of many via magazines and newspapers. The world has changed and now anybody with a blog, Tumblr, Facebook account or Yelp app is a restaurant reviewer and the pressure is always on. Their audience might not be as big as a traditional restaurant reviewer’s but with billions of people carrying around smart phones within the next couple of years restaurant reviewers will be everywhere. For the end consumer this will only be a good thing. The cream will rise to the top and instead of restaurants producing their very best food for VIPs and restaurant reviewers they will have to be on their guard every single second of every day. Once again technology is bringing a whole new level of transparency to the world and that can only be a good thing.

New Fourquare Feature: Radar

We're in an interesting era of content explosion in the mobile/digital world - as we get our hands on more info, recommendations, suggestions, reviews and deals, it seems that apps are constantely trying to notify us when there's something better or more exciting we could be doing. This trend is continued with Foursquare's newest feature - Radar.
Radar tells you what's going on around you and pushes those notifications even when the app is off. This assumption is that you'll want to be reminded to check out this new restaurant, or that your friends are meeting nearby. Foursquare really needs to get this right, because if the notifications aren't contextual, personalized and helpful, this could be the most annoying app feature I've ever heard of.

As we continue to evolve in the information overload space, it puts the onus on apps/mobile features to really curate content, as opposed to just blasting out whatever the last advertiser told them to.

Check out more detail here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/12/foursquar-radar/#comment-box

After the Final: Foursquare Redux - How to Cheat at Foursquare

Since every member of the class has now had a chance to pronounce and speculate about the future of Foursquare's business, this article on how to game the system to get points and badges is particularly timely.

It will be interesting to see how many early adopters stick with Foursquare, or whether check in fatigue turns out to be a reality. Chances are, it will all depend on whether real, tangible rewards begin to be developed beyond the badges and points.

FourSquare and Bravo

FourSquare and Bravo have announced recently a new joint marketing effort, where Bravo viewers would be encouraged to use FourSquare in Bravo related locations.

There is no mention of actual money changing hands here, and I actually assume this deal is more about generating awareness for FourSquare and getting some hip image for Bravo, as well as increasing viewer engagement.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/foursquare-partners-with-bravo-tv/

This deal looks like a win-win for the short term. FourSquare will literally get some TV commercials, Bravo will self promote and appear innovative.

In the long term, however, FourSquare would have to try harder in its effort to monetize its service properly. Joint efforts with cable TV networks, as cool as they are on paper, will not sustain them forever.

Jonathan Shulman

Foursquare lets people know where you are...even burglars.

Foursquare is a location based application that acts as a social network with gaming elements mixed in. The purpose of this game is to "check-in" when you arrive at a venue such as a restaurant or a bar, letting everyone in your network know where you are. As a user, once you check into a venue a certain number of times, you are awarded a badge for that venue, letting everyone in your network that you frequent that establishment. The service has been growing quickly as of late, as the application currently generates a million "check-ins" per week.

While it is clear that Foursquare is on to something with their location based social game, a few concerns over privacy have arisen in the last few weeks. In fact, a recent application launched in the app store called "Please Rob Me", which according to TechCrunch is "a stream of updates from various location-based networks that shows when users check-in somewhere that is not their home. The idea, of course, is that if they’re not home, you can go rob them."While this application is more about poking fun at the movement towards location based applications, it does bring up a serious question about privacy. Unfortunately, a potential byproduct of letting a broad group of people know of your whereabouts is the possibility that a member of that group could use that information for nefarious purposes.

I think a possible reaction from this negative publicity could be a pullback in how far people choose to extend their social networks. During the Facebook craze of the last few years, the tendency has been for users to "friend" as many people as possible in order to create a large network. However, the introduction of location based platforms may put a new premium on privacy and control. Users may start to decide that it is not smart to tell a group of 500 or 1,000 people where they are eating, as the downside in that situation may outweigh the upside. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out but I think this notion of privacy within a social network will start to become even more of hot button issue with the roll out of applications like Foursquare.

Amazon, Foursquare, etc.

One day, someone will take a picture of me and they won't need to ask my name because they will in one minute receive an email identifying my name, affiliation, and probably address. If this person is interested in me, they won't have to go to Craiglist's Missed Connections, they will cold call me. If this person is a stalker, I will experience one of those Bruce Willis futuristic psycho-thriller situations. That day, effectively, is now.

Amazon has introduced a video recognition feature where you can take a picture of any object, send it to Amazon, and within minutes receive that product, as listed on Amazon, and a one-click step to ordering that product. Crazy.

And in other news they are putting Kindle on the Blackberry. One more step in the right no-more-new-devices direction.

My clustermates are obsessed with foursquare.com. From what I understand, it allows you to live the SimCity reality by letting you figure out where your friends are and use your social habits for the imaginary benefit of earning rank and points for the territories you cover.

We had a guest speaker for marketing who is developing www.webook.com, specifically, a program called Page to Fame. his idea is that publishing needs to evolve in the direction of being allow consumers to purchase editorial in bite size chunks, like a poem, an essay, etc., instead of a 300 page situation. As part of that logic, he's started a site where authors pay to have the first page of their literature read by the people who obsessively peruse blogs, editorials, and the like, for the opportunity to advance in a competition where agents will end up reviewing a few chapters and ultimately offer a book deal.

I think the idea is cool, though I have my questions. But it inspires my interest in expand on-demand programming. I think that there is a lot of money to be made on a lot more movies by bundling and distributing quality arranged video content. (See the recent piece on willingness to buy: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1964604,00.html) And a lot of his ideas on viewer participation means that more people would want to pay for self designed catalogs of digital video content.

And related to last week's class. If Buzz signals what it looks like for Google to become Facebook, I wonder what the internet would look like if Facebook were to become Google. Perhaps content will be organized by most poked.

Foursquare and Twitter Team Up to Rob You

If you never thought that the level of information that is available about you on the internet was dangerous, just have a look at PleaseRobMe.com where Foursquare global positioning updates combine with Twitter updates to produce some very useful knowledge for the unscrupulous among us.

The creators of the site are clearly not trying to provide information for would-be criminals, but are simply making a point. And a shocking one at that. As we become more connected with the internet and information is out there for anyone to use, who will protect us from those who would use the information we provide to swindle or harm us online and in the physical world? How will we, as a society, weigh the benefits provided to us through the internet's vast array of functionality with the potential cost of having the information we input to gain these benefits used against us?

Similarly, if we do not address these issues soon, we risk the involvement of government on the internet which has heretofore been unregulated. In what ways can the internet community police itself so that we don't end up trading our "freedom to" do as we please on the internet (which allows for such immense creativity and growth) for a "freedom from" being victimized?