How Businesses Are Using Foursquare To Promote Themselves

Foursquare is more than just a simple check in service, it can be leveraged by businesses to promote their brand and connect with consumers.

Foursquare Marketing Campaigns

Don’t knock Foursquare as just your regular check in service, businesses are already using it to promote themselves; by having users check in to them.

Starbucks, one of the biggest Foursquare promoters created a special campaign just for its loyal customers. The coffee chain instituted a special that gave users who checked in to five different Starbucks a Barista badge. The badge gave Foursquare users access to promotions other customers couldn’t take advantage but the offers varied between locations.

However, the campaign fell flat on its face. While the coffee titan created the campaign on a company wide basis, not many outlets were informed of the offer or even what the Barista badge meant on Foursquare. This left Foursquare users looking at a dumb founded manager when they requested an offer that could only be unlocked by the badge. This shows poor management on Starbucks’ part on what could have been a great social media opportunity.

Foursquare Promotions & Deals

But there have been brands that have successfully used Foursquare to create some awesome marketing campaigns such as lifestyle brand Diesel. The company launched one of the most elaborate social media marketing campaigns the fashion industry has seen; “Be Stupid.” The Ad was combined with a special one day event at Diesel’s flagship New York store as part of the company’s experimental organic social media campaign. During the one day event, users who checked in to Foursquare within a three-city block radius were alerted a promotion available directly from the store. When those users checked in to the store, they were treated to special printed tees; a great marketing tool for Diesel considering four people within the first hour of the campaign took advantage of the Foursquare offer and dozens more walked in.

Foursquare Business Tools

If your business is interested in using Foursquare to generate buzz without generating a marketing plan from an ad agency, the company has tools you can leverage. Their services for business allow them to create specials for Mayors (those who check in the most to a venue in the past two months), multiple checkin specials (which Starbucks implemented, albeit on an unsuccessful scale), frequency based specials and wildcard specials which require staff to see you’ve met certain conditions to receive an offer i.e. “show us your swarm badge and you’ll get a discount on this product.”

If you do implement Foursquare specials for your businesses, remember some basic etiquette. If you add tips to your venue, avoid making them sound spammy. The purpose of tips for a venue is to turn on new users to what’s hot or any deals. Even more important is alerting your staff to Foursquare specials. If Starbucks has taught us anything, you can’t rely on word of mouth for your employees to automatically know about the latest and greatest in social media offers. Make a graphic to detail what each badge means and what special is associated with it. Chances are a lot of your customers will show you their badges on Foursquare’s mobile App or website automatically matching up a badge with its corresponding offer is critical to good customer service.

Are you already using Foursquare to promote your brand or business? Let me know what tips or practices you’d recommend.

Contrary To Popular Belief, The Web Is Not Dead

Chris Anderson of Wired made the audacious claim that the web is dead. While such a bold claim can’t go unchecked, Anderson’s proposal of the Web’s death is an interesting write up to how we should view the Internet and to an extension, the web.

Anderson makes his point through rethinking how the web is viewed. Typically, we’d like to think of the web as the Internet, content delivered to us, the design aspects of a website, graphic design etc. Anderson says the web, sites you visit, the actual HTML content that helps power the Internet will die as developers move towards closed platforms and use the Internet to deliver data to smartphone based apps. While it may seem like an Escher-esque concept, Anderson makes an interesting point, but he is right about the move to a closed model of content delivery:

“It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.”

From Anderson’s perspective, the Web will soon be a shell of its former self, an engine to toss bits back and forth, bits that have no real meaning or represent anything worth consuming. The evidence to support Chris’ claims? A chart of data consumption estimates from Cisco showing HTML traffic on a sharp decline contrasted by a rise in video traffic. However, traffic delivered from sites such as YouTube (which are very much apart of the HTML category) are lumped in with the broader category of video traffic which encompasses Skype video calls and Netflix streaming content (which aren’t apart of the HTML category. This error causes excess growth and excess decline to be factored in to Wired’s graph which power their bold claim of the web’s death.

The shift Anderson is seeing comes from developers wanting more options. The web, and to an extent the browser promised a future of web Apps that would eventually replace desktop Apps. Both platforms failed to promise the options mobile Applications would give developers (location awareness, augmented reality) but those features are already making their way back from mobile devices to the browser. These environments are in a constant tug of war for developers but in no ways an indicator on the web’s death.

While content delivery is moving towards easier to use mobile applications and closed systems, I don’t believe Wired’s claims of the web’s death are viable. Not when it’s been backed by a Orwellian like future for the web being reduced to a dumb pipe that tosses useless bits around.

VIa: Gawker

Precious, The Bike That Tweets For Charity

Utilizing the Internet for charity is nothing new, but they’re evolving. The latest involves a Tweeting bike and an ambitious trek across the US.

Precious, The Bike

Precious, marketed as a bike with brains is part of a journey that not only raises money for Livestrong and Team Fatty but combines Social Media and wit to engage followers that rivals anything an ad agency can do. The bike, outfitted with an onboard computer, does more than send out simple status updates littered with spec data. Instead, Precious has a mind of its own. The bike analyzes its surrounding conditions, sends the data to its website which includes very detailed information on the status of the bike and its rider, Janeen McCrae. Precious has enough sensors to determine its location, direction, outer temperature, humidity, speed, pedal rotation and how steep it has to climb. All of this is controlled by a custom built device from the teams at Breakfast. The data is sent to Twitter and is then parsed to show a more graphical incorporated into the website design for Precious’ site. A representation of the bike is displayed via an elaborate Flash design.

How Precious Works

While the Bike has a personality of its own, a lot of it comes from its rider. According to Breakfasts’ account director and partner, Michael Lipton:

“Most of the tweets are coming from the ‘brain’ that we built — that is, the rider has written a couple of hundred tweets that we’ve stored, each tweet has its own specific set of parameters that must be met. For example, if she’s going down hill for 30 minutes straight in 90 degree heat, she may have set a tweet that says something like ‘coasting is easy but somehow I’m still sweaty.’ Once that tweet is used, it is removed from the pool and can’t be reused, so if she hits that same criteria again a different message would be sent.”

Precious is one of the smartest bikes out there and is shaping up to be a great campaign for Livestrong/Team Fatty. Precious’ rider, Jenny, maintains her own Blog about the cross country trip. You can donate for the cause at Team Fatty’s website.

Via: Mashable

10-Point Checklist For High Visibility in Google

Google is the pre-eminent search engine (SE) with no close competitor. Given that inclusion is free, your Web pages must be in it. We’ll show you how to top the Google SERPs, that is, be found at the top of the search engine results pages. These techniques are known as search engine optimization (SEO) and require a small investment of your time.

I took two of my sites to the top of the SERPs in three months, so it can be done. My pages have few competitors: my challenge was mainly to get past false positives such as resumes, job vacancies, articles, and so on. If you are competing with “real” sites that are selling competitive products such as the ones you read about in your spam e-mails, you can get there within a year with some persistence.

Goal

Google SERP

You must understand that SERP positioning is dynamic – what you see depends on no single factor. It depends on the viewer’s location, the type of search used (basic, advanced, regional, filtered, and so on), the content of the page, their keyword density, the page rank (PR), the search term (words or phrase), and so on. Therefore, you need to plan your site carefully.

Ten-Point Checklist

1. Domain Name and Server

Get a.ca domain if your audience is likely to look for Canadian sites. Use a global, top-level domain (gTLD) such as.com if your business is not local. A unique, topical name such as “dentist-atlanta.com” should rank higher in the SERPs than “dentist.com” or “smithclinic.com” (if the search term is likely to be “dentist in atlanta” or similar).

It is nice but not essential if the web host gives your site a unique IP address, but it is highly advisable to host your site on your own dedicated server. Shared web hosting means that a server could host thousands of web sites, and Google’s spiders would be slowed down.

If you already have a Web site, you can find out its IP address using cmd.exe or an MS-DOS prompt, e.g. “ping cnn.com” and call up the displayed IP address in the browser. If you don’t see the expected web page, it has a shared IP address.

2. Page Title

An ill-planned page title is the Achilles Heel of a Web page. This is the text that appears at the very top of the browser window.

The Title tag text should be brief and readable, avoiding superfluous words and punctuation marks. Begin with the most valuable keywords, e.g. “Root canal specialist dentist clinic, Mayfair, London”, not something like “***** Fred Smith, BDS – 5 Stars Dental Clinic *****”, or worse, “Welcome to my home page”, or “Untitled”.

3. Style Sheet

Placing style definitions in a.css (Cascading Style Sheet) file moves the body text close to the top of the document and shrinks the page size. Many Javascript effects can be replaced by CSS. Fast-loading pages are good for both humans and search engine crawlers.

4. Meta Tags

Google ignores the Keywords meta tag for ranking but other SEs use it. An extract from the Description meta tag sometimes appears in the SERP; sometimes you see a snippet from the body text. Moderation and relevance should be your benchmark for placing keywords in these tags.

5. Content

• Quality content is rewarded by top placement in the search results. For example, if you sell new cars, used cars, and car service, you would have three branches, each containing pages relevant to that theme.
• Links to popular causes, memorial ribbons, HTML validation, page counters, etc. could distract visitors to other sites.
• Optimise images and keep the page size low.
• Place key phrases towards the top of pages and in heading tags such as H1. Don’t get hung up on a single keyword for the whole site. Pick different ones for different pages so that you have more ways to be found. Optimise for the search terms used by your paying customers, if you can identify them, not casual visitors.

• Consider (this depends on the size and nature of your business) placing noncommercial pages such as staff pages, personal hobbies, genealogy and so on at a secondary level but not linked from the entry page. Some of my ranking success comes from hosting my hobby pages below my commercial site, because I cannot justify buying a domain for each of my interests. I legitimately link them to my resume, which has a link to my business site. This enables free placement of the secondary pages in otherwise for-fee directories.6. Links and Folders
• Link a site map from the home page so that crawlers can find the rest of your pages.
• Link each page to the home page and to others in its logical group (but not to every other page in the site). The anchor text should use key phrases and words.
• Use keywords for folders, image names and Alt text but don’t overdo it. e.g. /hamilton/lawyer/divorce.htm, alt=”Perth plumber” The deeper your directory structure, the less likely it will be spidered regularly.7. Neighbourhood WatchGet quality incoming links from sites that share your theme. Without referrals, it’s near impossible to be visited by Googlebot. Try to get such links from sites with PR3 (Page Rank – see below) or better, not from link farms that are clearly built to boost PR. Make it easy for other sites to use keyword-loaded phrases in their links, say, by offering a cut-and-paste slice of HTML anchor code. Here is an example you can use to link to this page:Links from lower-ranking peers will not penalise you; they simply won’t appear in Google’s list of backward links to your page. You cannot control who links to you, but you have control over who you link to.Add a judicious number of outbound links to topical peers of the same or better calibre. Google likes links to authoritative sites, but don’t overdo the external links. Although such sites might not overtly link to your site, their site statistics file might get crawled and constitute a link back to you.8. CloakingCloaking hides content from humans and SEs, which is generally a bad practice. Good reasons to cloak include hiding parts of your optimised pages from amateur competitors or to show different pages to different visitors based on their browsers.Subscriber-only sites also manage to get into SEs. They use a cloaking practice known as “agent name delivery”, which is a slab of code that checks whether the visitor is a crawler or a human. Crawlers get to see the whole site, but others are directed to a sign-up form.9. Avoidable PracticesThe following practices could get your site banned from Google at worst or lower its ranking at best:
• Gimmicks. Pointless Javascript effects such as cursor trails and transitions do nothing for your viewers but place a lot of code above your body text. You want your content close to the top of the page.
• Bad HTML code. Novice hand-coders might copy some HTML tags without understanding their meaning. One webmaster used the robot directive
• Multiple sites with duplicated content, e.g. http://www.example.net and http://www.example.com hosted on the same server or different ones, as this is considered spamming. Use a permanent redirect on all secondary sites to point to the main domain.
• Multiple copies of the same page. This is typically an entry or “doorway” page optmised for different keywords to lure different people, e.g. crackz.htm, serials.htm, passwords.htm, and so on.
• Hidden content. This can be repetitive text on the same colour background or a layer with coordinates that are off the visible page. It begs the question why the author does not put this effort into creating visible text.
• Flash-Only pages. A solution is a user agent entry check that displays Flash to enabled browsers, but plain HTML to crawlers and other human visitors.
• Frames. Googlebot will crawl links in the Noframes text, but not ones in the framed pages. Other SEs might not crawl frames, so it is better to use tables and more so to use CSS. If you must use frames, ensure that you use the correct Doctype declaration for frames. I have noticed that Googlebot can now crawl links in frames but sometimes it cannot.
• Submission software or service. They could submit your site to thousands of unknown SEs. You will get a lot of spam, abuse, and possible inclusion in link farms that will ruin your reputation in Google’s eyes. After all, can you name more than five major SEs?
• Session IDs. Sites that require session IDs from crawlers will get poor visibility because the previous session will have expired by the time Googlebot returns.
• Over-optimisation. [Update 11/2003] Many sites that followed a strict “SEO formula” found that they could not be found at the top of the SERPs, or in the index at all. There is speculation that such tactics cause the sites to be filtered out of the search results.10. PatienceHaving optimized and submitted your pages to Google, get on with growing your business, because Google takes time to rank you. Work on getting quality, inbound links from high-ranking sites that feature the same subject matter. Increase your content and keep it fresh. Get free or paid listings in Google AdWords, Overture, Yahoo, Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), and reputable engines such as MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves.