Announcing Our Partnership with Foursquare
Collaborating to Streamline Venue Claiming and Optimization
Today, we’re announcing a partnership with foursquare to claim venues on behalf of our clients.
Claiming venues on foursquare is a process whereby brands take ownership of their respective venues, which correspond to each of their real-world locations, in order to leverage the foursquare Merchant Platform. This enables brands to do the following: update venue details, including the address, geocode, and branding; access venue analytics including customer demographics and loyalty; and manage foursquare Special campaigns for customers who check-in. For brands with a large number of locations, this can be challenging. This is one of the fundamental issues MomentFeed addresses.
“Our goal is to make it that much easier for brands to market through foursquare,” said MomentFeed CEO and Founder, Rob Reed. “The MomentFeed platform offers the added benefit of Venue Optimization™, which increases the likelihood of discovery and customer engagement at the point of sale.”
“We’re psyched to see the tools MomentFeed is building on top of our Merchant Platform,” said foursquare Director of Business Development, Jake Furst. “Optimizing the venue management process from claiming venues to managing foursquare campaigns will allow brands to increase both sales and engagement metrics through the MomentFeed dashboard.”
For current MomentFeed clients, this means taking control of newly opened venues on foursquare is as simple as entering a street address or uploading a CSV file to their MomentFeed account. In the restaurant, retail, hospitality, and banking industries, this can amount to hundreds of new locations every quarter. These new features significantly streamline the process for brands and foursquare alike.
For companies that are new to foursquare, MomentFeed’s Venue Optimization™ process simplifies the initial setup. This includes identifying and merging duplicate venues and updating all claimed venues with accurate details and branding. This is like SEO for a brand’s locations. Given that foursquare is facilitating real-world search, discovery, and social engagement, it’s imperative that venue information is as accurate and comprehensive as possible. foursquare venues are becoming key consumer touch points. They are truly brand assets and ought to be managed accordingly.
As we previously posted about, the search and discovery facilitated by foursquare Explore makes Venue Optimization™ that much more valuable and essential for large brands that want to market through the foursquare platform. Consumers are relying on the accuracy and consistency of venue data to locate and engage with brands in the real world. At MomentFeed, we’re committed to facilitating and maximizing these engagements at the point of sale.
Marketers for multi-location brands are realizing that the point of sale is the signal that truly matters in social. Global brands with 100 or 30,000 locations are not global brands. They are 100 or 30,000 local brands. As such, managing social at the global level perpetuates the waste and inefficiency of broadcast media. A Twitter follower or Facebook fan that can’t buy one’s products is largely irrelevant. With the rise of large-scale social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and foursquare, marketers can target their efforts where it matters…at the local level with a clear path to the point of sale. And they can manage this all through the MomentFeed location-based marketing platform.
Read MoreFoursquare Explore: Search, Social, and the Real World
Foursquare Explore is a social search engine for the real world. With MomentFeed, you can optimize for it.
Foursquare has made its previously mobile-only Explore recommendation engine available for the web. The feature provides personalized recommendations based on a user’s check-in history, the histories of their friends, their current location, and other preferences. Not only does the Explore feature considerably increase Foursquare’s value proposition for users by facilitating the discovery of new places, it significantly changes the value equation for brands as well.
We wrote about this potential in November of 2010 in a post entitled “Why the Hell Would I Do That? Four Reasons to Check-in.”
“The promise of intelligent recommendations is the feature that gets me most excited. Based on the data I volunteer through checking-in everywhere I go, whether it’s a public or private check-in, location-based services can use their aggregate data to accurately recommend other places I’ll like.”
Foursquare Explore is powered by algorithms that intelligently recommend places to consumers based on a broad range of criteria. These recommendations ultimately drive foot traffic (and sales) just as Google Search drives web traffic. As such, brands need to optimize their locations for search, discovery, and engagement in this new medium. How does one do that? By using MomentFeed, of course.
Read MoreConnecting with the Next Generation of Consumers
Research shows that SoLoMo (social + local + mobile) is the key to connecting with Generation Y
The Next Web published a broad aggregation of research-based stats for Generation Y marketers. Following are the most relevant highlights for multi-location brands seeking to connect with Generation Y (ages 13 – 24) and establish brand affinity and loyalty with the most powerful generation of consumers the country has every known.
- 66% would look up a store after learning their friend had checked in
- 71% report having liked a brand on Facebook just to receive an offer
- 91% make their Facebook Places and Foursquare check-ins public.
- 52% have over 300 friends on Facebook. Top 10%, over 1,000.
- 58% use Twitter “all the time”
- 62.7% of US undergraduates surveyed had an internet-capable handheld device.
- 67% access Facebook from their smart phone
- 75% upload photos via mobile
- 12% use foursquare
- 38% of students surveyed said they could not go more than 10 minutes without checking their digital device—about the time it takes to walk to class.
- 62% of youth brand and technology decisions are influenced by friends and family
- 23% access social network sites on their phones
- 11% purchase things via their phones
If you’re a major retail, restaurant, hospitality, or banking brand, the best way to connect with this generation is on mobile in a social context while they are in one of your actual locations…which to say, when they are present and engaged at the point of sale.
For more information, download The SoLoMo Manifesto.
Photo Credit: Mobile Youth
Read MoreThe Location-Based Engagement Stack
And how MomentFeed brings together the SoLoMo ecosystem as an integrated solution for multi-location brands
The central premise of The SoLoMo Manifesto is what we term the Location-Based Engagement (LBE) Stack. This is a cutaway view of the SoLoMo ecosystem. The layers are as follows:
1. Location Data-as-a-Service (L-Daas) Platforms
2. Location-Based Engagement Platforms
3. Location-Based Engagement Applications
4. Distribution & Awareness
5. Point of Sale (POS) Data
In the following, I’d like to expand on how the LBE Stack functions holistically. To be clear, the goal of this is the very top of the pyramid: driving sales, revenue, and profits. This is the ultimate measure of success. With that in mind, we can work our way through the stack in an effort to ring that register and realize value.
Read MoreRockfish Interactive Invests in MomentFeed
We’re excited to welcome Rockfish Interactive as a Strategic Partner and Investor
Rockfish Brand Ventures, the venture capital arm of Rockfish, announced today it has invested in MomentFeed, a platform that centralizes access to analytics and campaign management tools for Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla. The service is especially effective for brick-and-mortar retailers with more than 20 locations, as it tracks each store’s location-based engagements – check-ins, likes, tips, tweets, pictures, and more – individually, together with insights about a brand’s most valuable customers at the local level. The investment signifies a strategic partnership, as Rockfish will work with MomentFeed to help brands translate location-based engagement data into useful marketing insights.
“Our investment in MomentFeed is what Rockfish Brand Ventures is all about.” Said Kenny Tomlin, CEO of Rockfish. “One of our core strengths is using digital to transform the retail experience, so finding a startup that fits in that niche is a perfect match. We’ve seen the emergence of location-based services and recognize the need for a platform that can help brands navigate all the new data that’s now available. We believe that MomentFeed brings a smart solution to this unique problem, so investing in them made sense for both our business and our clients”.
“A strategic partnership with Rockfish Interactive means we can tap the knowledge and resources of one of the leading digital agencies in the world”, says Rob Reed, CEO and Founder of MomentFeed. “With MomentFeed, we want to evolve location-based marketing from its nascent stage, where we are today, to full maturity by combining the best practices of retail, restaurant, and shopper marketing with the technologies of social media, location, and mobile. These are areas where Rockfish has demonstrated leadership and innovation, specifically with Fortune 500 brands.”
MomentFeed is the second investment this year for Brand Ventures. It joins Tap.Me, a Chicago-based mobile advertising platform that allows game developers to directly connect gameplay with branded rewards and achievements from any advertiser. Rockfish joins previous investors in MomentFeed, including distinguished venture capital firms DFJ JAIC and DFJ Frontier.
About Rockfish
Rockfish is a Digital Innovation Partner for brands such as Walmart, Sam’s Club, Cisco, and Tyson Foods. Through a company purpose of “building a better world through the power of digital innovation,” Rockfish helps clients find solutions that are meaningful to their customers and measurable to their business. Rockfish has been recognized as the OMMA 2010 Agency of the Year for Web Design & Development, ranked third on the 2009 Ad Age Agency A-List that recognizes the ten best agencies in the world, and has earned a place on the Inc. 500/5000 Fastest Growing Companies the past two years. Rockfish is headquartered in Rogers, AR, with offices in Dallas, TX, Cincinnati, OH and Little Rock, AR. Rockfish Brand Ventures is the venture capital arm of Rockfish.
