|
|
It’s been exactly 100 days since I’ve blogged as I’ve been tied up with a new marketing role at ReachLocal. After seeing this video I had to share and applaud Publicis E-dologic for a pain-free way to integrate social sharing with Facebook.
Talk about connecting the real world with your social graph. I can see this integrated with events in the future but while Facebook is great for this age group, Twitter would be a better fit for professional events since many folks may not want to litter their Facebook stream with all these posts.
Why This Facebook Integration Rocks
Not only is Coca-Cola playing into the dominance and role Facebook plays in our lives, but they are also providing an incentive to engage with the brand. By enabling an easy way to share where you are and what you are doing with a users social graph Coca-Cola should have seen a tremendous number of impressions. Big question is how much did this cost?
How could it be improved for other events?
- Send a push notification to the user to comment on the “like” or photo that was tagged
- Leverage Facebook Places to check folks in
- Give the user the option to publish to Twitter as well
Original post on Adland.tv
What do you think? Would you leverage something like this at say SXSW if it automatically allowed you to check into Facebook, Foursquare or Gowalla?
 I’ve always been a big fan of supporting local dallas companies, especially when they are a talkable brand. I had the pleasure of meeting Cristiana Ginatta, co-founder of Paciugo Gelato and Caffe, at the Taste of the NFL a few weeks ago. It was there I discovered they were launching four new flavors of gelato in May, including one with bacon. Of course, it’s not every day you meet the co-founder of a successful business with 43 locations. I asked to interview her and learn more about the motivation behind Paciugo and the four new flavors.
Now my wife and kids are also big fans of Paciugo and our first experience was at the location on the corner of Preston and Park in Plano, TX. Not only is the gelato lower in fat than traditional ice cream, but the focus on quality ingredients and freshness has a big impact on flavor and texture.
Recipe for success is based on three principles
Paciugo is pronounced “pah-CHOO-go”. It’s interesting to note how Cristiana came to create Paciugo with her husband Ugo. Cristiana’s grandfather owned a local shop in Italy which featured six homemade flavors of gelato. It was her experience growing up that prompted her to apprentice at a Gelaterie in Italy. She then met Ugo who had always wanted to bring the flavors of Italy to the US. In fact, many of the recipes are fourth generation. What came through in my discussion with Cristiana was not only her passion for excellence but also three underlying principles for making delightful gelato.
- Balance:
There is a heavy focus on balancing ingredients to insure one doesn’t over power the other in a specific recipe. For example, if a flavor has too much sugar, it could leave you feeling thirsty.
- Ingredients:
With several full-time buyers on staff there is an intense process to secure the highest quality ingredients with the most flavor. All of the recipes use real fruit vs. concentrate and she shared the example of leveraging Texas peaches for their unique flavor.
- Preparation:
Since all flavors are prepared each day before guests arrive, the company performs extensive research and testing to ensure a predictable experience in each franchise. One example is the machine used to make the gelato. This machine can freeze and prepare the gelato in 6-7 minutes insuring the ice crystals don’t get too large. The result is a much smoother texture compared to ice cream which can sometimes have a harder texture.
Motivation behind the 3 of the 4 New Flavors 
As I was listening to Cristiana describe the motivation behind the four new flavors, I realized I wouldn’t do them justice so I chose to feature her words below for three of the four flavors. Note, I tasted the Durian flavor and it’s definitely an acquired taste.
It’s also important to note that many of these flavors were the result of collaboration with celebrity chef and host of the hit show Glutten for Punishment, Bob Blumer. The show airs on the Food Network. Their goal was to develop a collection of flavors for the popular 2009 Austin Ice Cream Festival. The successful teamwork inspired Cristiana to roll-out the flavors as gelato in all Paciugo locations.
- Chocolate Chipotle Butter Pecan
“I was going for Texan inspired flavor. Pecans are delicious and Texas is the second US producer (behind Georgia). Tex Mex is also easily associated with Texas and I love chipotle peppers, ripe jalapenos that have been sun-dried and then smoked. The resulting gelato has a smooth texture and intense chocolate flavor from the extra brute cocoa powder we use (with high cocoa butter content, that gives us a great mouth feel). The smoothness of the gelato is counterbalanced by the crunchy toasted, buttered pecans. Then you taste the smokiness and final heath of the chipotle pepper.”
- Roasted Banana Cashew Heath Crunch
“I was going for a twist on a classic ice-cream flavor. Banana and heath bars are very commonly used in ice-cream recipes. Our banana is roasted in the oven with brown sugar, developing a more intense aroma and more complex notes than raw banana. Then toasted and salty cashews are added to the heath crunch for a contrast of buttery mouth feel and saltiness. ”
- Organic Maple Caramelized Bacon
“The judges at the competition came from all sort of back-grounds and culinary preferences. There were children, chefs and restaurateurs, moms and dads, a famous hair-dresser, a teacher and some real estate agents. I was trying to create a recipe that could be popular and evocate good feelings for all these different people and ages. I thought Sunday brunch with the family creates happy and warm feelings for everybody and the image of the last bite of crunchy bacon used to clean up the plate with some maple drizzle came to my mind. The gelato is made with Grade B organic maple syrup and a touch of salt. Salt and sweet, like bacon and maple. I chose Grade B maple because it’s from the sap produced by the plant toward the end of the season, it’s darker and with more intense flavor and I needed the intensity to “stand up” when blended with milk. The bacon is first cooked until crisp and crunchy and then caramelized with the same maple and some sugar. By cooking the bacon until crisp, we keep the pleasant, smoky notes of the bacon, and loose the “porkyness” and less desirable taste of cold, greasy bacon. By caramelizing the crisp bacon, we maintain the crunchiness of each bite, even once it’s mixed with the gelato”
As I stated, there is now way I could have captured her words as elegantly as she did above. I had the fortune of tasting all four of the new flavors and I have to say the Banana and Bacon inspired flavors were two of my favorites.
Reputation Before Profit
The Paciugo motto is “Ante Lucrum Nomen” which stands for Reputation Before Profit. After touring the facility and hearing the commitment to quality and flavor, I’m confident their reputation will only help them continue to grow. It’s also the unwavering passion that will carry them through any challenges.
I am excited that Paciugo will also cater our May 20th, 2010 Social Media Club of Dallas event. This will ensure many more folks will have the opportunity to taste these new flavors.
As I was going through business cards Sunday inviting people to connect, I noticed LinkedIn had recently added a new feature. The “Follow company” capability allows you to follow all of the updates to a company profile. Since I have a Business account, I’m not sure whether this is a free feature or not. However, I do have to hand it to LinkedIn for continuing to stay relevant by adding new useful features.
LinkedIn Follow Company Feature
LinkedIn provides extensive intelligence about a company and this one just made it easy to automate searches and updates. For example, if I was trying to find who was hired as the new Head of Marketing for a company, this feature would automatically update me once that employee updated their LinkedIn profile. Of course, this assumes the data is accurate and folks maintain their profiles. As many of us know, many folks don’t change their profiles until they have landed a new job. In this economy, someone may keep their old title for months or even over a year. Either way, I can see how this can be extremely helpful in a sales, competitive intelligence and job search initiative.
LinkedIn Follow Company Notification Settings
Once you choose to follow a company you have the option to choose your notification settings. Not only can I choose what I want to be notified about but I can also choose the medium. I wonder if you get an additional email for each company or if there is a weekly email that combines all of these? I see great use cases for sales, competitive research and a job search.
It’s also nice to see how this content shows up on my home page if I choose “Network Updates” as seen in the image above. Under the top navigation on LinkedIn, I can also look at all the companies I’m following for a snapshot of changes by date of update. It would be nice to limit the notifications from a specific city. In many cases, I’m only interested in updates from the local office or headquarters and not the regional sales offices.
New Suggested Feature for LinkedIn.
Now that LinkedIn gives me the ability to follow a company, why won’t it take advantage of grouping all the Twitter users for a given company profile. For example, if I wanted to review all the Twitter stream for those who have so configured it in LinkedIn at that company, it would be ideal to click that from within the company profile somewhere. Talk about providing tremendous value. Right now, I have to either create those Twitter groups myself or find someone else who has and follow it via twitter.com or some other Twitter client.
What do you think of the new “Follow company” feature? How about my new suggested feature? Let me know your thoughts and potential use cases in the comments below.
It was February 9th, 2009. I arrived to work early that Monday morning to plan my week and get a jump on what was already a challenging sales quarter. Then around 8:15am an email came across my inbox from the CEO announcing an 8% layoff. Surely, the folks who were going to be let go were told on Friday or something, or so I thought to myself.
Then my manager walked up to my cube at 8:30. I could tell by the look in his eyes, he wasn’t stopping by to say good morning. I had just left Dell in August 2008 to join NetApp as a new Account Executive to build out their west Texas commercial business. I was the newest member to the team and reveled at the potential opportunity to make more money than I ever have. This job would have put me in the big leagues in terms of C level sales and income. The product was compelling and I could see how I could differentiate in a competitive data storage market. Especially, once I was able to get in front of a customer, our story and demo was spot on. So much so that EMC purchased them last year as they continued to take market share and develop their channel.
While I originally was looking for a job with more money (MBA Loans to pay), I was also looking to get off the road. This job also offered an opportunity to further develop my cold-calling and prospecting skills. I had been traveling full-time with Dell for over two years and it was wearing on me and my family. Furthermore, since I had moved to Dallas from Austin to take the job, I hadn’t developed any relationships in my community and really had no network beyond the few SMEI meetings I had attended and my local church. The NetApp Dallas based role offered the chance to eat dinner at home more often, see my kids activities and start to network socially and professionally.
Money Wasn’t The Answer
What I realized right away is that I just wasn’t motivated to sell data storage. Now I’m not saying I was the best sales person on the planet, but the lack of passion about the product affected my commitment to the job. Oddly enough, at new hire orientation, I still drove my team to win the best team presentation on the product. However, I’ve always been extremely ambitious and told myself I would do anything to succeed. But I was lost professionally, spiritually, and physically. I had no connection to the company and while I really enjoyed the team I worked with, we were sales guys and were really focused on our own territories. Sales is the ultimate meritocracy and that’s what I have always loved about it.
Fortunately, I had a decent severance package even for having been there 6 months. I recognized right away that I wanted to return to marketing with a strong customer interaction and business development focus. I had been actively engaged on LinkedIn and connecting to folks, but I realized for what I wanted to do, most of my existing network in Dallas was too far removed. At that point, I didn’t realize how tough the job market actually was. However, I realized how powerful social media was in achieving my goals, but had no idea what an impact it would have on my life.
Social Media Helped Me Find My Passion and Get Me Closer to my Dream
I saw the potential of social media early on and had been a power user of LinkedIn since it first launched. A few days after I was laid off, I posted this to my LinkedIn status update: “I’m a free agent, who wants me”. Honestly, I didn’t anticipate any response. I wanted to test how many folks really monitored these updates and possibly test my social capital as well. At this point I had well over 1,000 connections on Linkedin. Surprisingly, I not only received numerous offers to help me out, but more importantly, an email from a former customer that put my consulting business in action. At this point, I wasn’t even considering consulting. It was a large 4YR university that I had previously sold to who also knew me as a marketer at Dell. It was this first four month consulting engagement that made me realize the potential of social media. This project doubled their web traffic and tripled their revenue.
This last year has provided incredible opportunities and challenges. Obviously, financially it’s been difficult as I started the consulting business and I’ve had to make some very tough choices to do something I’m passionate about. That being said, I’ve had some opportunities to affect change that I never knew possible. I realized it was time to find a career I could really get motivated about. Then, my first opportunity to speak about social media came as I started a career support group at my church. My first presentation was on the power of social media and Linkedin in to develop ones personal brand and to network. It received rave reviews and I coached numerous folks not only on the philosophy but the tools as well. More importantly, I gave access to my network and taught others how to find contacts. As a sales rep, I could find anyone. I then spoke at the DFW Social Media Marketing Meetup in March 2009 to a full room. Little did I know, that topic would become one of my signature speeches.
Ever since I read “The Pursuit of Wow” by Tom Peters, I knew I wanted to be an author and professional speaker. I was too busy doing my current job at Dell to develop speaking opportunities outside my own company and industry. This is the problem with most people, they never take the time to sit down and really think about what they want to do. Furthermore, they don’t take action. They just make incremental job changes. To increase my knowledge of social media, I started reading blogs and books voraciously. I already had a background in direct marketing at Dell and several startups, but if I was going to talk about marketing in the context of social media I also had to practice it. The consulting not only offered that tactical testing ground but also helped me understand other strategies I saw in practice.
Out of passion and necessity come Creative Destruction. This passion and need to succeed and survive are fostering new ideas, new collaboration, and a whole new set of friends and connections that I would have never imagined. I’m having discussions with all sizes of companies and agencies about outstanding opportunities. As I was working on my taxes this past weekend, I was amazed at how much I money I actually earned. Albeit, not what I made before. Means its time to work harder, smarter and to partner more.
One of the big successes of last year was around the social media workshops I executed in New Mexico. I had a network there and a place to stay since my mother and mother-in-law live there. My largest event was in Las Cruces, NM where I filled a room with 50 people, predominantly in real estate, at $99 a piece for a social media workshop. That turned into several consulting opportunities as well. The fact I spent zero on advertising to generate that kind of return is amazing.
I am seeing more and more opportunities to continue to consult and partner with friends and business associates such as Cameron Gawley, Eddy Badrina and Chris Walters. The idea of a virtual company that comes together for various projects then disbands has been discussed regularly with Chris Walters and I. I’ve always been a firm believer that social media has provided an opportunity for me to network online to eventually meet folks offline. That’s where the real work gets done.
20 Wonderful Ways Social Media has Changed my Life
- Executed numerous speaking gigs and jump started my paid speaking career
- Empowered me to relaunch the Social Media Club of Dallas and connect me to the team that’s helping lead
- Allowed me to increase my network 5-10X
- Introduced me to more authors than I ever imagined such as Chris Brogan, Tim Sanders and former client Michelle Prince
- Led me to help organize and speak at Ignite Dallas through someone I met on twitter
- Featured in the Dallas Morning News Business section January 30, 2010 and March 2, 2010
- Interviewed on CNN Radio about Ignite Dallas
- Interviewed on BlogTalk Radio multiple times about social media and personal branding
- Completed my first Triathlon and chronicled it on my first blogs – cathartic process. Motivation came from a long lost friend I connected to on Facebook.
- Strengthened my religion.
- Empowered me to start a career support group at my church and teach personal branding and the modern job search via LinkedIn, etc.
- Realized that Bacon is freaking cool, tastes good, and is good for SEO and personal branding
- Delivered several paid workshops and marketed solely over social media
- Developed some amazing friendships and new business partners
- Helped me find my passion for community building
- Helped me find my passion for teaching
- Allowed me to spend more time and home with my wife and two wonderful daughters
- My wife went back to work – Yes it changed my life too, not just financially
 . She’s happier
- Featured in Wiley book Twitter Marketing an Hour a Day by Hollis Thomases who found me on Twitter
- … and many more to come
This post is also the premise behind a book topic that would obviously be an autobiography. If you haven’t seen Lemonade the Movie, this post is also motivated around that theme. “It’s not a Pink Slip, It’s a blank Page”
Let me know your thoughts and comments. I’m obviously opening the kimono a bit here and hope there are others like me who have had similar experiences and wonderful things happen as a result. I know God has a plan for me.
Ok I need to get back to work. Off to meet someone for lunch.
 I have had my own domain name of http://www.mikemerrill.com for over 10 years now. I initially secured it as a place to host my resume and as a unique way to differentiate myself when applying to business schools. Moreover, it provided the opportunity to brand my name with every email I sent. Oftentimes people would ask why?
I knew back then with the growth of the Dot Com era that everyone would start to use the web to not only market their businesses but also to market themselves. For graphic designers, photographers, and developers this was an ideal way to showcase your capabilities. Speed ahead 10 years and everywhere you turn folks have their own domains as a hub for all of their online activity. For those of us who are knowledge workers, it’s an ideal place to feature our expertise and opinions on a given topic with a blog.
Using Third Party Email Domains is a Missed Branding Opportunity
This past weekend I had the fortunate opportunity to speak about personal branding at the Kellogg Northwestern Career Symposium hosted by SMU here in Dallas. As I was perusing the list of attendees and their email addresses I noticed that only 3 of the over 128 on the list had secured and used their own personal domain. While there were plenty of people who branded their employers by using their corporate email addresses, I was saddened by the sheer number of folks who used Hotmail, AOL, MSN, GMAIL or some other third party email provider. What a missed opportunity to brand yourself.
You need to own yourname.com or a website that aligns with your name in some fashion.
- Dan Schwabel
Many folks will respond to me with the age old “I’ve had that email address for 20 years. Why would I change it?”. First, if you have AOL or MSN you are basically telling the world you are over 50. Why give anyone a reason to age discriminate. Don’t take that the wrong way, but folks we have moved on. Why not have an email address you can have forever regardless if you change your hosting company, ISP or country for that matter? Yes, you are reading my mood correctly. I feel very, very strongly that everyone should have their own domain. For the cost of 2 Starbucks lattes and a muffin you can host www.yourname.com annually. Call GoDaddy.com today.
10 Reasons Why Having a Personal Domain Name is Essential
- Search Engine Rankings
With the world of the web run by Google, Yahoo and Bing, having your own domain automatically places you higher in search engines for your name and in many cases on the first page. Assuming you can secure yourname.com. If you can’t secure a .com, than try .me, .tv, or .info. If you have a common name, then get a name that references your profession like www.merrillmarketer.com or www.digitalmerrill.com. One more reason to secure it now before someone else does.
- Professionalism
Having your own domain name and email address provides a higher level of professionalism and trust. If you have your own domain name vs. some long hotmail.com address it instills a higher level of integrity. If you are in marketing or tech it also shows you understand branding and technology and the value of SEO.
- Brand Recognition and Recall
How much easier is it to remember yourname@yourname.com than Joe356TX@aol.com. More importantly, every email you send is your name. If folks can recall your name when they think of a need they have, you are more likely to get a referral or a sale.
- Same Email Address Forever
This one is a no brainer. As I mentioned above, you can now keep your email forever even if you change your ISP or hosting provider. Your domain stays with you as long as you pay the hosting fee every year. The other added benefit is that jobs may come and go, but your personal email address will always be the same.
- Security
Even if you don’t plan to do anything with the domain other than redirect it to your LinkedIn profile, secure it so no one else can. Especially if that person could be some worthless celebrity, convict or questionable politician. Remember, very few folks look past page one on Google.
- Advertisement Free Emails
The best thing about having your own domain and email address is you don’t spam your friends with ads with every email you send
- Your Homebase on the Internet
If you ever decide to start you own blog or consulting business, you will have a URL you can immediately point your blog to and start promoting. Your blog becomes the hub of all of your social sites and drives everyone back to content you own forever. Don’t forget to of course back it up.
- Just Google Me – Similar to number one, wouldn’t you love to tell folks to “Just Google Me”. Crowdsourced from @LevelTen_Colin
- See Below
- See Below
Don’t take my word for it, let my friends on Twitter tell you why:
What say you on this matter? Unless you are a child molester and don’t want to be found, why wouldn’t anyone want their own domain?
By the way, I actually have the iPhone app that tells me there is a sex offender one street over. Kind of scary.
 As someone who started the new year with the goal to lose weight, I’m always looking for new ways to lower my calorie intake. That’s why I was excited when Greenz asked me to sample their new Wellness Program they launched this year. I realized back in 2003 when I ran my first marathon that managing your diet was the most important aspect to losing weight. In fact, I was running 20 miles a week at one point, but my less than stellar food choices had prevented me from losing even more weight than I did.
New Wellness Menu Guides
In addition to 400 calorie meal options, Greenz also created three Menu Guides to meet a variety of diet needs. These include a Gluten-Free, Point-Based, and Heart Healthy guide with a wide variety of choices to aid the customer. If only every restaurant made it dead simple to meet our weight loss goals and diet restrictions.
I personally opted for the 400 calorie Seafood option with Salmon. Dictating the portion size and calorie count is an easy way to ensure you don’t overeat. At the last minute, I added bacon to the salad as I figured that would help with flavor. However, I was surprised at how flavorful the salad actually was. I didn’t need the extra calories of the bacon at all. The mediterranean salad closely resembled a Greek salad in flavor and still featured olives and feta cheese.
The soup was a light broth with good flavor and I was surprised at how fresh the fruit cup was with grapes, strawberries and cantaloupe. My daughter even liked the soup which was a win. Overall it was a good choice. Of course with my sheer lack of control, I also finished the remainder of my daughter’s turkey club sandwich ruining the prospect of sticking to my target calorie count for the day.
Greenz an Early Adopter of Foursquare
  
Greenz has become an early adopter of Foursquare to promote special offers for their current mayors. Their current special is a great deal too. Current mayors receive 50% of their entire ticket every time they visit. This is a great viral campaign for several reasons. First, Joe Flowers, the current mayor has a built-in incentive to return to this location. Second, anytime someone checks in on Foursquare their social networks are pinged. All their followers on Twitter and Facebook see this update, if so configured. Lastly, as an early adopter, they get to test out what works and what doesn’t in terms of driving consumer behavior. With the new Bravo announcement, Foursquare just became mainstream.
Conclusion
I applaud Greenz for introducing healthy meals and aiding the customer in making smart food choices. Additionally, they feature a build your own salad menu for ordering online that shows you the nutritional information in real time as you add or subtract items. Be careful as it’s pretty easy to go over your target calorie count. With free Wi-Fi this is also an ideal place for a working lunch as well. My only suggestion would be to print the access code on the receipt so customers don’t have to ask for it.
To see more pictures of the Greenz Addison location and my meal see my Flickr here.
Hello, my name is Mike Merrill and I’m addicted to location-based apps. The first step is to admit you have a problem. While the gaming aspect can be appealing, what’s keeping me up at night are the innovative ways companies will be able to take advantage of Foursquare and Gowalla to reward influencers and loyal fans. After all, most social media updates are about where your at and what your doing.
I’ll admit I was a bit late to the party here. At first I thought the whole gaming aspect was a bit sophomoric for a guy like me. Then I started using the applications and started to see the potential. It’s not about the game at all; although I will admit I do like becoming mayor of a place. As I have mentioned before here, one of the easy ways to get your customers to talk about your brand is to make it easy for them to share an experience with others. Design your applications and create content that makes it easy for your biggest fans to talk about you.
There were three stories in the last week that kept me up the last few days. So like all bloggers, I’m putting pen to paper..or fingers to keyboard I mean.
- Tasti-D Loyalty Program
- Harvard Teams up With Foursquare
- Go out with Gowalla and Incase
13 Innovative Ways to Leverage Foursquare and Gowalla
- Starbucks: As a company with loyal fans and stores everywhere on the planet, we have all seen how profitable their rewards card have been. In fact, they continue to come up with more incentives to get us to use them. Just recently they announced free wireless if you maintain a balance on your rewards card. Why not update their location and status as the reward care is swiped?
- Gym: It’s no mystery that everyone wants to be the mayor of the gym they frequent. This is often the most coveted mayorship on foursquare in gyms across the country. As customer’s swipe their gym card check them in. With Gowalla, create special stamps for number of check-ins at a gym with unique names such as Gym Rat, etc.
- Movie Theatres: How many folks actually ever purchase and use movie rewards cards? What if, like the Tasti-D example, you get double reward points when you tie to your Facebook and Twitter?
- Airlines: Reward miles to folks who use their Advantage card or Advantage Credit Card and tie to their social stream. For example, if a customer gets upgraded to first class, update their lifestream and location. Why not hit their stream when they get upgraded to Executive Platinum or Platinum as well?
- Hertz: When you upgrade them to a nicer car or higher status, let them update their social stream.
- Nike + iTunes: Now I know there is a way now that you can tweet about your run once you sync to iTunes, but what about while you are actually running. It sure would be neat if you could optionally, tweet your location and distance while on the run. Something like ”Mike is on mile 2 at Russell Creek Park”. Then your spouse would know when to expect you.
- Marathons, Triathlons, and Bike Races: What if using GPS and markers at each mile or significant mile marker you could automatically update athletes location on the route to their social stream. Then folks could follow real-time from home.
- Hotels: Update their status when they check in with their Hilton Honors or Marriott Rewards card for example.
- Music Purchase: Why not give folks the option to check in and update their applications when they download a song via iTunes. Now personally, I don’t want to see every purchase, but I know I use Shazam to share what I’m listening too while driving.
- iPhone App Installation: Similar to above, why not give me the ability to update that I downloaded and installed an app, my location and share with my stream.
- College tours: Every campus should use these for touring campus as well as for existing students similar to what Harvard provided. Let folks connect and get to know each other. More importantly, think of the great hidden tips about historical buildings you could provide. Gowalla already has the concept of trips built-in.
- City Tours: Take this to the next level and use for athletic city scavenger hunts. Provide tips and tricks to find the next place to check in and use for competitive races or for just folks to go on walking tours. What if you teamed with Gowalla to provide special stamps along the way as well.
- Giveaways. Foursquare offers this today for businesses. Reward the new mayor with 50% off their bill. What a great incentive for folks to visit and to check in where they are. Who knows, maybe more folks will visit your establishment if they keep seeing that folks are eating there. Per the story above, Gowalla also featured the promotion with Incase where if you check in at an Apple store you could win Incase giveaways.
Make the Check-ins Optional
Regardless of which way you choose to take advantage of the hyper growth of location-based applications, give the user the choice whether their status is automatically updated or not. You never know when that person may not want to share that specific information.
What say you? What ideas have you thought of? Please comment below.
 photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg
 As I was driving into work today I heard a story on NPR (KERA) about how Farmers Branch, TX is promoting their Buy the Branch program to help keep taxes low. One of the gentleman they interviewed talked about how they are developing a retail database of all the Farmer’s Branch retail services available. First, I was surprised that this database didn’t already exist. Wouldn’t the Chamber of Commerce have a pretty comprehensive list already? Second, I wanted to let them know there are many online and mobile applications that already provide this type of information.
It’s no shocker that city governments across the US are facing a shortfall in taxes due to the economy and other demographic changes. All of this had me thinking about the power of mobile location-based applications for this type of initiative.
There are numerous location-based applications such as Gowalla, Foursquare, AroundMe, Yelp, etc., that offer the ability to find nearby restaurants, retail and services. However, what if there was an iPhone or Blackberry application for your city. As a resident of Plano, I would definitely want to ensure my taxes do not go up and would be willing to leverage an application that only showed Plano retailers, restaurants and services. What if the application also featured information about city services as well.
If I was an enterprising web or PR agency, I would partner with the City and Chamber of Commerce to build such an application for free as long as I could put my name on it and showcase my services. Of course, the city would be made responsible to maintain the database. Or what if I was a local Plano publication such as Plano Profile or the Dallas Morning News local version NeighborsGo who funded this based on the ability to feature advertisements. Talk about advertising at point of conversion! The City of Plano is losing revenue to new developments in Allen, Frisco and McKinney. Make it easy for residents to keep their dollars local.
There are tons of ideas around this concept. What are your thoughts on this?
|
|
Popular Posts