Foursquare… Friend or Foe?

By Dana Randall

While my blog posts are often written from the “expert” point of view, I have been doing research on the Foursquare and now Facebook Places phenomenon and wanted to share the questions I have been asking myself for a change. I’m hoping to open up a dialogue between technology gurus, brands and consumers to gather anecdotal feedback to help bring some clarity and gather insight to the topic.

With that said, this particular post will also be filled with opinions as well as facts. I usually avoid sharing opinions in this format, but for this topic I feel strongly that the topic or Foursquare and Facebook Places is really driven by opinions.

My research on this topic increased recently for two reasons, my interest is presenting the most strategic marketing plans for clients & my interest in ways to promote our agency Built by the Factory. I am going to start with the later area of interest, because I feel it is the one with more room for interpretation.

Do you use applications like Foursquare for service businesses that are not brand & product driven?

Well the question alone brings up another immediate question. Isn’t my company a brand? Yes, of course. But not in the traditional sense of CPG or Franchises. And then the next question. Isn’t interactive & digital development such as website design and building a product? Perhaps, but while a website does result in an end product, it really is more of a service. So it is clear that using something like Foursquare would not be with the intention of directly driving sales or offering discount coupons. Does it have any proven effectiveness for increasing a companies overall visibility?

The next issue on table is really a matter of personal opinion & preference. When I approached Jeremy Davis (Partner/ Creative Director of Built by the Factory) and asked him to take a more active role in contributing to Foursquare, he had a very clear response. “I do not care to broadcast to the world, where I am and what I’m doing”. A very valid concern for maintaining a level of personal privacy. But his comment was followed by “But, if you feel strongly that it will be good for business, I will do whatever I need to.” Sorry Jeremy I didn’t mean to broadcast our “private” conversation to the entire “interwebs”, but I really felt it brought up a valid question. And I can’t begin to tell you how many times clients & other business owners have approached me with the same question. So my research for both public opinion and indisputable data continues. What service business has effectively benefited from an active presence on Foursquare & what strategies were implemented to achieve this success? Until I can clearly answer this question and support my request with facts, Jeremy is off the hook from having to “check-in”. I However will continue to over share my whereabouts to the world, in an effort to gain first hand experience to support any research I find.

Dana has just checked in at “her living room couch” while authoring a blog on the topic.

What brands have launched Foursquare campaigns with measurable success? And what is considered to be a measure of success for Geolocation-based social network campaigns?

I came across an article from May of 2010 which mentioned some campaigns that were being run at the time on Foursquare:

Bravo: Cable television network Bravo turned to Foursquare to help drive its viewers to more than 500 locations associated with the network’s shows. The incentive: badges right now; sweepstakes and awards in the future.

The Wall Street Journal: New York is competitor turf for the Wall Street Journal. So when the Journal launched a new metro section for New York, it decided that Foursquare was a good way to promote it. In addition to offering Journal-created badges for checking in to certain locations in the Big Apple, the Journal is using Foursquare to distribute some of its NYC-related content.

Zagat: Before you ‘check in‘ to a restaurant, restaurant guide publisher Zagat wants Foursquare users to be able to access its reviews, and provide their own suggestions to Foursquare followers as well. Of course, there’s also an obligatory ‘Foodie‘ badge involved that is earned when a Foursquare user checks into Zagat-rated restaurants.

MTV: MTV wants MTV and VH1 viewers to be able to track the moves of their favorite reality TV stars. Through MTV’s relationship with Foursquare, personalities from shows such as Jersey Shore, The Hills, The City and Real World: New Orleans will receive ‘celebrity mode‘ Foursquare accounts that are publicly accessible to fans.

Starbucks: Starbucks is one big brand that has embraced social media and so it’s no surprise that it brewed up a presence on Foursquare. Caffeine addicts can become Foursquare ‘Baristas‘ by checking in at five different Starbucks locations. Starbucks is also considering ways to reward customers who check-in.

Tasti D-Lite: One company that is already rewarding customers for checking in on Foursquare is yogurt chain Tasti D-Lite. It allows members of its TreatCards loyalty card program to earn extra points by connecting their TreatCards to their Foursquare accounts and letting the world know when they make a purchase.

Pepsi: Late last year, beverage giant Pepsi sponsored Foursquare’s New York City leaderboard. For one week, Pepsi donated $0.04 to CampInteractive, a non-profit organization that helps inner-city youth build technology skills.

Planet Hollywood: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, except when it’s memorialized for all eternity by Foursquare. By checking in at the Miracle Mile Shops at the Planet Hollywood hotel, Foursquare users might not only get a Vegas-style reward, they might also find their name in lights, literally.

Lucky Magazine: In an effort to get lucky during Fashion Week in New York this year, Conde Nast’s Lucky Magazine teamed up with Foursquare to engage event-goers with information on the best local places for certain activities. The relationship is expected to expand past Fashion Week, with Foursquare being able to earn access to exclusive Lucky content related to fashion vendors in its ‘Shopping Directory‘.

Financial Times: In an effort to reach tomorrow’s titans of industry and captains of finance, the Financial Times is giving Foursquare users who check in at targeted locations the ability to temporarily bypass FT.com’s pay wall.

Consider this as Part 1 to an ongoing discussion topic. I invite you to share your experience with Geolocation-based social network campaigns.

Oh yes and feel free to follow/friend me on Foursquare

ReBlog: Zinio’s iPad Magazines Suggest Disappointing Future

View the original blog here

By Olly Farshi

Zinio is a magazine store and reader for the iPad. In fact, for now, it’s the magazine store for the iPad, stocking all the biggest titles of which you can purchase one-off issues or even 12 month subscriptions.
Just like Apple with its iBookstore, Zinio has established relationships with an impressive array of publications. As such, you can expect to find enhanced editions of magazines Cosmopolitan, T3, Rolling Stone and Hello among many others. However, unlike Apple’s iBookstore or iBooks app, Zinio certainly doesn’t live up to the hype.

For starters, each page takes around a second to load. Take a moment and imagine that…imagine reading a magazine and waiting an entire second every time you decide to turn a page. Need to quickly flick back and take a glance at that article from a few pages ago? Prepare to wait.

Plus, there’s no in-app purchasing, meaning that you have to leave the app, load Safari, sign in to Zinio’s website and then make a purchase using your credit card. You can’t even use PayPal. In fact, because Zinio’s iPad site login wasn’t working for me, I ended up opening my MacBook Pro and handling the entire purchase on there.

There’s no option, that I could find, for deleting a magazine. I checked the app, the Settings app and even my account settings on Zinio’s site. This means I’m stuck with a couple of freebies: Car & Driver and a rapidly aging edition of Macworld magazine. (There’s also a free copy of National Geographic but I don’t mind keeping that as it fools me into thinking I’m cultured.)

The magazines themselves are just that, magazines. This isn’t Captain Picard’s enhanced edition of Cosmopolitan, just a run of the mill scanned magazine. And while pinch-to-zoom works, zooming in close reveals the low quality of these fuzzy digital magazines.

Any websites that are mentioned will typically have an ugly blue outline to indicate that you can open the site by tapping the text. Aside from that, you’ll be lucky to find the occasional clunky video embedded in an otherwise static page. Welcome to the future, those are your ‘enhancements’.

What worries me here is that Zinio has all the big names wrapped up, as such it might take a while for things to change. In the meantime, I feel embarrassed to use Zinio’s app, to think that this is the future of magazines on my $499 iPad — shoddy ‘enhanced’ PDFs.

Ipad & Tablet Digital Magazine Advertising: How to ensure your creative investment is scalable

We have taken our experiences from developing online campaigns, microsite, widgets & apps and the lessons learned by working in those spaces to identify the potential challenges with this new category of advertising.

Scalability & Cost Effective Production:
The most important issue is scalability & cost. We have seen websites that have developed custom ad units that give advertisers a more integrated & flexible way to advertise. The key issue with that model is that there is a very limited use of that custom content anywhere outside that particular site. Additionally the cost of development for these custom units can be high. Add to that the fact that any advertising campaign has a limited shelf life, the end result being this type of advertising creative may not being a cost effective for a brand.

Our approach in developing these in magazine integrated campaigns is always keeping in mind the ability to repurpose or segment elements of each campaign into stand alone units that might exist a microsite for the web, an iphone game, a widget etc.

It is also important that the publishers streamline their ad standards to some degree, so that interactive print ads can be used across multiple publications. The same way print ads are placed for a fashion brand in a number of the women’s fashion magazines across various publishers. We are aware that this is already being addressed by the publishers and companies like Next Issue Media and isn’t a huge concern for us.

The last way we have addressed the production cost issues is by the business structure of our agency. This was a key factor when we formed Built by the Factory. At the end of the day, we are still a boutique digital agency and that becomes a benefit to brands looking to test out this new advertising medium. We have a very lean & mean business with endless resources on an “as needed” bases. We keep our overhead extremely low in order to apply the maximum amount of a clients creative and production budget into the actual work being done for their campaigns. And not to support our infrastructure. By doing this we are able to be very competitive with pricing.

The story behind why we started working on this is very straight forward. We have been working on elements of this independently in our day to day business. This includes designing and building micro-sites, websites, banner ads, iphone apps, social media campaigns and so on. We have already been faced with the limitations of compatibly with the flash micro-sites we have built when it comes to iphones. That will now extend into the iPad market, and has been a topic that has had no lack of attention from the industry. With CS5, HTML5 and Air just to name a few, there is now a slight decrease in the impact of this if approached properly. This will remain true as long as it is kept on the radar as new campaigns are being developed. It was one of those moments of clarity when our designers, programmers collaborated and realized that the ideal space for these integrated ads will be these digital magazines.

The delivery method of these magazines created an opportunity not an obstacle.

Will interactive ads on digital magazines result in higher ROI?

WILL TABLET INTERACTIVE PRINT ADS RESULT IN HIGHER ROI THEN MY STATIC AD?

When entering into a new category there is often a sense of hesitation or doubt. Brands will question if these next generation of Interactive Print ads make sense to invest in. Will they be more effective? Are they even necessary? Will my campaigns convert to higher purchaser intent or brand awareness by making a more interactive dynamic ad?

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED FROM ADVERTISING ONLINE:

We have been paying close attention to the research that has been gathered on campaigns online. Since this is essentially the most relevant data for us to look at in order to validate that investing in this type of ad campaign will have positive effect on an advertisers ROI. We are looking at the 5 key brand metrics to measure the effectiveness of the top performing ad formats.

What we have learned:

• Rich Media Positively Impacts all Brand Metrics
• Aided brand awareness
• Online ad awareness
• Message association
• Brand favorability
• Purchase Intent

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED FROM DIGITAL PUBLISHING AS IT EXISTS TODAY:

• 26% of readers said that they are more likely to play with an advertisement with these digital extras to see if they “may become interested in an ad.”
• 32% of readers will skip an interactive magazine story that they are not interested in.
• 34% will read a bit of the article and play the ad’s extras
• 21.8% will play only the digital extras.

In terms of user engagement, interactive edition ads topped the charts at 66% as the most helpful or interesting form of electronic advertising, beating out TV ads at 57%

The future of magazines: How the iPad, eReaders & Tablets are effecting the future in advertising

A NEW ADVERTISING CATEGORY FOR PUBLISHERS & BRANDS

We have kept somewhat quiet about our work in the emerging space of media tablets & digital magazines, until now. As the first numbers come in & the pre-orders of the iPad hit approximately 90,000 in it’s first day, we feel confident that our work in this new category which started months ago has been a worthwhile investment.

There has been a bit of speculation on the launch of this new device from Apple, as there often is on anything “new”. Is it all hype? Will the consumer market adopt this new gadget? Is it a gadget or will it change the digital space and future of publishing? All valid questions and things we asked ourselves before diving into the world of digital publishing. We also want to make it clear that our research and development in this space is NOT dedicated to the iPad, and rather all media tablets that will be coming to market in the near future.

So rather than let our “emotions” and “opinions” get the best of us, we turned to the hard facts. And while much of this is information you have seen before, we want to share the research we conducted before investing our time and resources into the development of this new category.

The tablet environment & digital magazines are a completely new category in the digital space. While standard static ads can be an area of ad sales, we are already working with brands who have expressed interest in developing campaigns in this new and more innovative digital space. Advertisers are excited about being about to interact with their audience on a completely new level. The publishers are working to make these opportunities available to them by developing these interactive magazines, we are focusing on the development of the ads that will essentially be a core revenue stream for them.

Brands are looking for the next innovative and interactive way to communicate with their target audience. The technology available in these tablet sized touch screen, multi-touch, accelerometer driven devices completely expands the interactive potential of the digital campaigns we will start seeing in mid to late 2010.

This is no longer a glimpse into the future of digital media. This is the space we are currently developing in. We are designing with a new set of considerations. We are strategizing on campaigns with and entirely new layer of interactive potential.

This new category is essentially exactly that… “NEW” it is not a replacement for the online digital campaigns. Therefore the design considerations & capabilities are new. This category will combine things we have not been able to effectively combine in the online space. It will also be expected to offer those already existing integrations the users have now made the online/digital space a part of their everyday lives. The advertising in this category simple can’t fall short of the existing expectations.

While we have a tremendous amount of research and data to share, here is just one piece of information that we think you might find interesting.

Studies have been done with readers of digital editions of magazines in an attempt to attain some of the first measurements of readers and the new genre of interactive magazine ads. The survey compared how readers responded to ads within digital editions as compared to other forms of media. Though the full results haven’t been released yet, they have found some preliminary results from the first half of the 5,000 readers who participated. Here are just a few findings.

The available enhancements to advertisements within digital editions; like video, audio, slideshows and animation are shown to have a positive impact on the reader’s overall experience.

• 26% of readers said that they are more likely to play with an advertisement with these digital extras to see if they “may become interested in an ad.”
• 32% of readers will skip an interactive magazine story that they are not interested in.
• 34% will read a bit of the article and play the ad’s extras
• 21.8% will play only the digital extras.

In terms of user engagement, interactive edition ads topped the charts at 66% as the most helpful or interesting form of electronic advertising, beating out TV ads at 57%