Category Archives: Trends

I pretty much knew that as soon as I wrote my post about Highlight that I’d have to write yet another one about all the other location services taking off this year at the South by Southwest conference. Just a few years ago, the main competitors in this arena were Foursquare and Gowalla. Sure, there were other folks like Brightkite, Whrrl, Loopt, and others, but what everyone was pretty much talking about was Foursquare and Gowalla. And three years later, Foursquare seems to be the only one standing tall–well until this week.

The location-based service space is rapidly heating up with over a dozen new services set to take off and fight for attention at SXSW starting this Friday. If you think that this is almost like a primary battle like in politics, then you’re absolutely right. Services like Glancee, Banjo, Intro, Sonar, EchoEcho, and many others are seeking the spotlight and to unseat the front-runner service that folks like Robert Scoble and TechCrunch are calling the “must have” app at SXSW: Highlight. But if you’re trying to find a good way to figure out which ones are which, then I suggest you take a look at this great analysis done by TechCrunch writer Sarah Perez.

With SXSW, most people are either wondering about which parties they should RSVP for or which sessions they should put into their schedule. However, the recent news of emerging location-based services has added some unneeded stress in their lives. Contrary to the time when Foursquare and Gowalla did battle, the one consistent thing in that scenario was that they had a bit more privacy associated with it–revealing one’s location to the public (and when others were logged in) was opt-in, but now, the services doing battle all will reveal your proximity to others along with other pertinent information like your interests, your photo, and maybe your biography. It will also reveal mutual friends that you have. I think that’s kind of interesting and useful, but there are some scenarios where just giving out that information freely (without some sort of opt-in) would be a bit much.

Interestingly, this battle royal location services brings a new era in location-based services into light. You might say that it’s the marriage of Google’s failed attempt at using and promoting Latitude with Foursquare to create a service that will slowly change the way we find people. But is there a discernible difference between the 12 or so applications that are fighting for your attention? Let’s take a look at some of the details about these applications as reported byTechCrunch:

Highlight:

Highlight has been getting a lot of attention pre-SXSW, especially from members of the tech scene. The app uses your Facebook profile to match you up with nearby friends who share your interests. Highlight has a very cool and simple design, but it also seems to be moving toward becoming a personal, social CRM system that helps you remember people’s names and when you met them, as well as just suggesting nearby people you may like.

Glancee:

Glancee is most like Highlight, in that it also uses your Facebook profile data and interests to help you discover nearby users. But unlike Highlight, it doesn’t display people’s exact location on a map, only giving a general distance (e.g. “5 miles from you”). People are ranked by distance and common interests. On the app’s homescreen, it summarizes how many things you have in common – possible conversation starters, I suppose. You can then reach out to those suggested folks using the app’s built-in chat function.

Banjo:

Banjo has been around for a bit, but a recent update has given the app enough new polish to see it achieve “featured” status in the iTunes App Store. The best part about Banjo is that it doesn’t have a desolate first-launch experience – that is to say, even if none of your friends use the app, Banjo may still prove useful. Instead of only relying on Facebook, Banjo also taps into data from Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and more, and shows you where people are and what they’re saying/doing, based on their check-ins or geotagged tweets. The app also lets you know when your actual friends are nearby, even if they’re not on Banjo.

Intro:

Just launched today, INTRO is meant for business, not social, networking. The app is built on top of LinkedIn, and includes messaging, privacy features and a premium “teleport” option that lets you virtually network with others anywhere in the world. In order not to limit itself only to INTRO users, the app also uses Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare data to display other nearby users.

Sonar:

Sonar, updated just in time for SXSW, has moved away from focusing on people checked into particular venues and now focuses more on finding recommended people nearby. The app separates your nearby friends from a section of nearby “relevant” people, who are ranked based on how many friends you have in common. Like Banjo, the app finds nearby users based on their check-ins in (or geotags) on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, but fills out user profiles with data that also includes LinkedIn info. Also, like most others in the space, Sonar can alert you when friends are nearby.

EchoEcho:

This app will be helpful to those at SXSW who are actually there to attend panels and presentations, not just parties. Why? Because EchoEcho can map your friends indoors, too. The app uses GPS outside then switches to Wi-Fi when you head indoors, using special tech from the startup WifiSlam to map out the interior of the buildings.

Kismet:

Launching just in time for SXSW, Kismet finds nearby people using ambient location data like Highlight and Glancee, but also finds them using active check-in data like Sonar. The app lets you create “pop up events,” too, which can then be discovered by other app users who are nearby (think “happy hour drinks,” “SXSW panel on social apps,” etc.). Nearby people are ranked based on degrees of separation, which extends beyond mutual friends. Kismet is also one of the few that lets you check-in to both Foursquare and Facebook, saving you that extra step.

Glassmap:

Glassmap is more of a “Find My Friends” type of service, except one that works cross-platform (iPhone & Android). Built on top of Facebook, Glassmap finds your Facebook friends who are on Glassmap and plots their location in real-time on the map. You can selectively enable or disable who can see your current location, and the app makes smart use of server technology to preserve battery life.

ntro:

Not to be confused with INTRO, the business-focused app, ntro is for meeting people who share your interests. You can either enter in these interests manually, or have them imported from Facebook. The difference with ntro (which is almost like the social version of INTRO, surprisingly!), is that you can filter through search results by interests and set your own “top” interests very narrowly. (e.g., not just “music” but a name of a band). Ntro also allows you to message users who share interests in common with you.

Mingle:

Mingle is most similar to INTRO, in that its focus is on business networking. You join Mingle using either your LinkedIn account, Facebook account, or you can sign up directly. It will then show you who’s nearby and available for networking using your phone’s GPS. Like INTRO, you can specify your occupation and who you want to meet, but you can also post that “intro” to Facebook, if you choose. The key difference between Mingle and INTRO, however, is that users are ranked by proximity alone on Mingle – there isn’t an indication of the friends or friends of friends you may have in common.

Once you’ve read all of the descriptions, there are two things that kind of become clear…the location-based app industry is slowly moving into creating clones with different niches and those that are the same are becoming very difficult to differentiate themselves from one another. The goal of each of these applications is to help you network and find people, but in an area like SXSW, the one thing that services will want to be absolutely clear about is telling people who are often interested in why they should use your service why they’re different from the others in the marketplace. But as of this point, the best way for people to really figure out what the market leader is going to be is to simply download all the applications to their mobile device. Then, they’ll need to create a screen where all these apps can be easily accessed and then test them out one by one–take them for a test spin, if you will.

Quite frankly, I might just stick with Path or Foursquare and leave it at that this year at SXSW.

Photo Credit: Quandary by Reikhavoc/Flickr

One of the latest trends in online marketing today centers around one of the largest platforms on the Internet: Facebook. Billions of dollars are being spent advertising on Facebook alone with a predicted worldwide revenue exceeding $5 billion in 2012. It might seem like there’s a rosey forecast ahead, but eMarketer is predicting that over the next two years, growth rates will dip significantly, but yet, more money will still be floating into Facebook’s coffers and more than double the 2011 revenues to $8 billion. Just what could this mean for brands and businesses advertising on the social network? Could the increased revenue, but stagnant growth be an indication that businesses are spending more, but aren’t getting enough from their return? This could be a sign that brands could use some help to get more bang for their buck or least get a handle on how to be more effective with their Facebook advertising execution.

GraphScience, a full-service social data and Facebook advertising platform, is just the company that they’re looking for. Launching today, this platform for the top 100 brands and retailers, will enable companies to move beyond engagement and convert them into sales all through Facebook. All of this is done using GraphScience’s SocialEngine platform, which leverages Facebook ads API and will tap into the social graph using its “powerful algorithms” and social data to help brands create highly targeted campaigns for maximum branding and revenue generation. Simply translated: you put your trust into SocialEngine and it will spit out the data you need to make sure that your advertising is effective enough to make everyone happy.

But the problem isn’t necessarily that brands are timid about Facebook advertising or that the strategies are inefficient. No, the problem could potentially reside in the fact that Facebook isn’t keeping up with the demand that brands are asking for. The Examiner reported yesterday that the social network is facing considerable pressure from brands for more advertising on the site. Sure, the site initially sought to do advertising to raise some money while it was still private, but now that it’s going public, brands are demanding that their needs should be taken care of. As the Examiner puts it: As more people continue to surf the Internet from their laptops, desktop computers, tablets and mobile devices such as a smartphone or just a regular cell phone with Internet access, eventually it’s possible for online advertising to surpass television as roughly 425 million Facebook users currently access the site from a smartphone or tablet. So where’s the inventory? Greg Kahn, Executive Vice President and Business Development at Optimedia International, says that there’s no argument that for the past year, Facebook is a place to be (for marketers).

Isn’t it about time that brands who want to get marketing on Facebook had a chance to get more sensible targeting and had the ability to look at more social data to make educated and wise decisions on where they want to spend their money? That’s what GraphScience hopes to achieve using SocialEngine. By analyzing millions of targeting combinations across a wide array of demographics like age, gender, location, interests, and more, brands will be able to identify highly-targeted user segments in real-time and then make optimizations on their bids to increase the return on ad spends. How good is this system? In 2011, GraphScience delivered more than four billion connections to their customers and generated 4-8 times ROI based on click-based conversion for their customers across several industries. Not bad!

The point of using SocialEngine is because it’ll help drive more strategic marketing decisions for the brand’s customers. No more guessing on how your money is going to be spent–find out how exactly and maximize the return. Dave Harber, Senior Director of Marketing and Social Media at Ice (a fashion-focused shopping destination store) reinforces this belief: “GraphScience takes the guess work out of understanding how to find and reach the right consumers on Facebook, and has demonstrated that they not only can help us build a strong fan base on Facebook, but also do it at a cost significantly below industry average.” Isn’t that something that all brands are trying to achieve? Facebook advertising doesn’t have to simply be about placing an ad on the social network and forgetting about it. There’s an art form to getting your ad noticed with both creative and targeting and GraphScience can offer that to brands right now. The company predicts that social media advertising will overtake display and search as the dominant force within the next 3-5 years. If GraphScience can repeat the 4-8 times ROI that they’ve done before, it will be a good sign of things to come. More businesses will finally get to understand Facebook marketing and start to spend more because they’ll be more educated and aware of how to properly execute a strategy.

Raymond Rouf, CEO of GraphScience, told me earlier that their philosophy around customers was centered around what can they do to help a business grow value. They’re the first company to really show that Facebook is a viable marketing tool for businesses and have amassed a great deal of customers, from leading national department stores to home furnishing commerce sites to major high-end fashion brands. All are aimed at trying to get the maximum return on their investment. What they are finding is that paid search is still doing better than Facebook ads. In a USA Today article, Dave Beltramini, director of online strategy for G5, said that “the intent for consumers on Google is about shopping, On Facebook, people are more social, looking at photos of their friends’ kids.” It’s all about different behaviors. In fact, Chris Moore, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, says:

Facebook fares poorly in a key pricing metric used in the industry to measure the value of ad inventory in reaching an audience. Its CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, is 22 cents, less than half the industry average for the Web (50 cents) and minuscule compared with Google’s, which is north of several dollars…

Facebook ads are still the Wild Wild West of online advertising and brands will need a guide to help spend their money wisely without throwing it all away. GraphScience has come along at the right time to help shepherd the businesses away from the recreational advertisers and provide them with the full-detailed data that they need to become serious advertisers on Facebook.

You can check out more information about GraphScience and their capabilities by visiting their website.

Photo Credit: Facebook advertising via Bostinno.com

Now that the Oscars are over it’s time to take a look at something incredible that’s happened over the last ten days. The trailer for low-budget independent comedy, Pulp, has shot to the top of YouTube’s film & animation chart with over 1 million views.

Thanks to the power of viral marketing and the strength of the geek army, the most watched trailer over Oscar weekend was not any of the award contenders, but this tiny British film.

On Saturday, the Pulp trailer was the 2nd most watched and shared video in any category in America. It is currently the number 1 worldwide trailer by a significant margin – the result of a spectacularly successful grass-roots viral marketing campaign.

The filmmakers behind Pulp ascribe the success to the fact that they previewed a scene from the movie at the end of the trailer. The now infamous ‘Star Wars’ scene has got fans and bloggers talking, and it’s authentic tone has struck a chord with geeks all over the world. Pulp is the ultimate underdog story, and it seems that the trailer’s success is mirroring events in the film.

www.pulpthemovie.com
www.facebook.com/pulpthemovie
www.twitter.com/pulpthemovie

There are tons of businesses and brands eager to get a solid foothold in the social media scene. Sure, they’re able to set up Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, blogs, and the like, but how do they really connect with their users. Is there something else besides creating conversation? What if you have a product that you’re trying to sell? Well believe it or not, it’s not that difficult to do. The premise is probably pretty simple: you want to encourage people to buy your product in a secure environment while also finding a way to exploit the sharing aspect of social media. Now how do you execute?

Well for starters, you could probably create some links back to your own store’s e-commerce section where they can buy your product. But then, how would you make it viral? You’d probably have to find some way to incorporate Twitter OAuth or Facebook Connect in order for the customer to share their experience. It would seem so unnatural though and there’s no guarantee that they would do that because it would also seem out of place. So if you can’t bring them to the experience, you might as well bring the experience to them. And one particular service has found a solution to do just that…

ShopIgniter, a provider of social commerce software, today announced its latest product: an enterprise-scale social commerce platform. Basically what this means is that for businesses, this is a new way for them to sell their products right inside the social network. Social commerce is a huge market opportunity for brands–in fact, it’s estimated to be a $30 billion industry globally over the next five years. And a lot of companies are starting to realize this. Many have already set up Facebook pages or Twitter feeds in order to come up with great ways to engage with their customers.

In a recent study by Booz & Co., retail, consumer electronics, and media companies are among the many types of organizations following consumers into social arenas. Even more, Shop.org reports that in 2010, 68% of North American consumer-oriented businesses have acquired at least some customers through Facebook. So the eventual trend here is pretty obvious: in the next phase of social media and buying, communication won’t be the “thing” anymore. Rather, Booz & Co believe that the next phase will be when consumers transact commerce inside social networks–selecting products, adding their selections to shopping carts, and completing purchases through payment with credit cards and points. This will signal the beginning of the social commerce era.

And this is exactly what ShopIgniter looks like it wants to do. They’re offering a complete solution that will give brands the tools that they need in order to create more commerce-centric (not consumer) designed with products and promotions in mind. In addition, this platform is designed to give businesses the ability to easily create, manage, and measure social commerce programs like VIP-only stores, product launches, curated product collections and storefronts. But first, ShopIgniter is going to have to get rid of the myths and fears associated with giving credit card payments over social networks like Facebook. In a Digitas infographic released earlier this month, one of the things brands will need to do is act with certainty to address security concerns. Out of those surveyed, 55% indicated that they were not comfortable with giving credit card information through social media. Most of these were over 54 years old, female, and had a household income of less than $35k. So if people are afraid of giving out their credit card information over social media (but yet still give it to play games like Farmville?), how exactly will brands manage to get things sold? ShopIgniter took a look at this and solved it. Rather, they created peace of mind. In this new platform, ShopIgniter made sure to include a key requirement for merchants who process high volumes of credit card transactions. With PCI (Payment Card Industry) Level 1 certification, ShopIgniter is one of the only social commerce platform providers authorized to meet the security needs of large retailers and brands–meaning, they have your security in mind.

Matt Compton, CEO of ShopIgniter, explains it this way:

Customers expect, and brands demand, the same level of security and confidence when buying through social channels as they do on their eCommerce stores…by adding PCI Level 1 certification to our Social Commerce Platform, we’re proud to offer brands and retailers the most complete social commerce offering on the market, with peace of mind that their transactions and data are completely secure.

So now that we’ve secured peace of mind for merchants and their customers, what else does ShopIgniter’s social commerce platform offer up? Well for one, it takes your e-commerce service and throws it right into the social media mix. Currently available for Facebook, one of the cool features of the service is their Group Gifting program. What this allows is for anyone to create a gift card at any participating retail store. Then, you can invite your friends via Facebook to chip in to add some money to the card–essentially creating a collective gift. Once that’s done, a virtual card will be sent to the recipient and they can use it at any retail store or online. Isn’t that a great gesture? I asked Kevin Tate, CMO of ShopIgniter, about whether this Group Gifting could be done for someone besides an individual? Imagine during Back to School days in late August, a non-profit organization with a Facebook profile sets up a Target gift card (powered by ShopIgniter) in order to see if the community would donate to help kids get school supplies? Wouldn’t that be a great idea on how to use Group Gifting? Mr. Tate told me that it’s a great idea and “certainly the kind of thing that our Group Buying feature can support.” I imagine that this will hold promise to some great charities and those eager to help those less fortunate. Great community work.

As for the rest of ShopIgniter’s offerings, Mr. Tate breaks it down into three top-level components: a social promotions engine that will allow users to create, manage, and measure social commerce experiences both “authentic and engaging”, a social presentation layer giving the ability to publish social commerce to Facebook (including mobile) done through HTML5-compliant themes and shared anywhere on the social web, and a foundation which involves integration with merchant’s existing e-commerce solutions, fulfillment, inventory, etc. But what e-commerce and CRM systems are currently supported? A wide range, apparently–ShopIgniter can handle working with systems like DemandWare, IBM, Oracle, etc., as well as a variety of payment, tax, and fulfillment providers. An API is even available for businesses eager to build their service using ShopIgniter.

Services besides the Group Gifting feature that merchants will get include tools to handle product launches, special offers for their VIPs, flash and private sales, seasonal and holiday collections–build a nice little community within Facebook that gets people to virtually shop, share their purchases, and talk about your great products! ShopIgniter hopes that by giving brands a “repeatable and cost-effective toolkit”, merchants will be able to take their social conversations and e-commerce programs and make them work together to increase revenue and loyalty–a double win!

Currently, there are over 40 leading brands using ShopIgniter for their social commerce experiences, including Target, Levi’s, Nike Golf, Kaenon, Steven Alan, Omaha Steaks, and CafePress.

The world of e-commerce is rapidly changing. People are becoming way more active on social networks than ever before. It will be interesting to see how in the next ten years whether the estimated $30 billion social commerce is expected to bring in skyrockets into an astronomical amount.

Are you going to buy anything online?

Photo Credit: Money by Nick Ares/Flickr

We’ve all seen the posts about QR tags: they’re either dead or they’re of no use to the rest of the world. But there are some in the marketing world who see validity in actually using QR tags. In fact, they’re practically everywhere. Just look at any piece of paper, packaging, or product box and most likely you’ll see one of those strange hieroglyphic symbols. But just because they’re everywhere, is there actual adoption and usage of these things by consumers?

Some actually believe that there is adoption. According to a December 2011 report by comScore, within the United States, 20.1 million mobile phone owners used their device to scan a QR code between August and October 2011. When you break it down further, 59.4% did so from home, 44% did it from a retail store, and 26.6% did it from a grocery store. 21.4% scanned something from their office while 11.2% were outside or on public transit. 10% did it at a restaurant. People are using these things.

On sites like Mashable, there are a plethora of posts where they say that QR codes for marketing (or in general) are dead.  You can come up with creative means to promote your company using QR tags like Intel’s social media strategist Ekaterina Walter says in a January 2012 post on Mashable, or you might wind up proving people right about QR tags with some of the more memorable fails. It’s definitely a polarizing piece of technology and many people probably have erased it from their memory. Or so you’d like to think that…

Today, Scan.me, a producer of one of the more popular QR tag readers with over 10 million downloads, announced two newsworthy items that have far-reaching implications for the QR industry, and maybe its “second wind”. The first piece of news is that they received $1.7 million in seed funding from several top venture capital firms and even some angel investors here in Silicon Valley. Leading the round is Menlo Ventures with contributions by Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, Social+Capital Partnership, Transmedia Capital, and Ludlow Ventures. Angel investors include Ariel Pooler, Naval Ravikant, Jim Pallotta, and Troy Carter. It must be saying something about the QR industry when all of these major investors find something interesting about what Scan.me is doing.

But what is Scan.me doing that is revolutionizing the industry and taking QR tags up a notch? That’s the second part of their announcement. Being unveiled today is the introduction of Scan Pages, which are apparently “user-friendly mobile websites accessible via custom QR code or short URL”. What these pages will do is give businesses and individuals the opportunity to quickly and easily create a mobile site.

Wait, it’s a WYSIWYG for your mobile sites! Of course the downside is that it’s not 100% connected with your brand nor is it directly tied back to your company website, but for simple sites done that allows you way more flexibility than you probably can do with existing resources, Scan Pages are a good resource for any beginner or company eager to want to begin their mobile strategy and are using QR tags. Users have an option to select from one of several types of mobile pages: personal, business, social media, website, and simple text. Each of these types has their own interface and design so make sure you choose carefully. Once you choose, you’ll be able to enter your content and immediately afterwards, be given a customized code to insert anywhere you choose. Users will need to log in to their Scan account in order to use it, but I suspect that by doing so, you’ll be able to have tracking data available to you as well as other useful tools.

Something that most people probably don’t think about when they create a mobile page are tie backs to the company social media channels. With Scan Pages, users can add up to three of their most popular networks, including Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Vimeo, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, AngelList, Github, Tumblr, Foursquare, LinkedIn, YouTube, and many others. The idea is that you create these pages, but it isolates them on this page without any connection to talk back to you–but by adding social media profiles and links, you give additional value and content to the end user and an incentive to build their community.

Garrett Gee, CEO and co-founder of Scan, believes that his company’s innovations will help generate business for others above all other QR technology:

QR codes and other mobile technologies have always had enormous potential, but until now they have been held back by poor experiences and incomplete products…Scan fulfills the promise of these technologies by creating direct connections and valuable information exchange between businesses and consumers.

It definitely looks like it…I personally have created QR campaigns for clients and the things you need to deal with are tracking, custom URLs, and testing to see if the page loads up when scanned by various readers. With Scan Pages, there lies enormous potential for real value and ROI for businesses. And they’re already realizing this opportunity–brands like Barneys New York, Kroeger’s, Lady Gaga, People Water, and others are all participating and using Scan Pages.

To create your own Scan Page, you’ll need to visit their website. But if you want their QR reader for your phone, you can download it from the iPhone or Android marketplace.

Photo Credit: QR tag tattoo by Synergy Interactive