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 MoreThe SoLoMo Manifesto, Digital Edition Release
We’re excited to announce the digital release of our new whitepaper.
The SoLoMo Manifesto or Just About Everything Marketers Need to Know about the Convergence of Social, Local, and Mobile is now available for free download. Previously available exclusively in print, the digital edition has been updated to include the latest developments in the SoLoMo marketing space and optimized for digital consumption. We’ve also added Twitter and Facebook buttons throughout the whitepaper to make sharing content simple and easy. The SoLoMo Manifesto can be downloaded for free here.
“This is mandatory reading for marketers, developers, and investors who are interested in the SoLoMo space. I think we’ll look back on The SoLoMo Manifesto as a reference for where social, local, and mobile stood at the start of 2012.”
–Mark Evans, Creator of the Geo-Loco and Social-Loco conferences
We have no doubt that 2012 will be the year of SoLoMo. The platforms and trends outlined in this whitepaper are already reinventing the way brands connect with customers. We hope that you find this content to be helpful and informative as you navigate this exciting and rapidly evolving channel.
Download The SoLoMo Manifesto today.
Read MoreThe MomentFeed Pulse – December 19, 2011
The Week That Was in SoLoMo
by Derek Browers & Eoghan Geoghegan
Welcome to the inaugural edition of The MomentFeed Pulse, our weekly roundup of the week that was in social + local + mobile (SoLoMo) marketing! The SoLoMo space is changing…fast. Today’s hot social app is tomorrow’s forgotten acquisition. ROI is whispered in hushed tones among the social media elite as if they were talking about hunting Yetis in the Himalayas. It can be confusing. It can be mind-numbing. It can also be really, really cool. We’ve found that this leads to two kinds of attitudes toward location-based marketing: A) “The potential here is huge! I’m really excited to give it a try.” and B) “Dear God…it’s something else for me to worry about. I hope this is just a fad that passes before my boss reads about it and sends me an excited email.” To the “A” people, we hope these posts will stoke some new ideas and help you stay on top of your game. To the “B” people, we sympathize. There is a lot going on out there. Hopefully we can help to make the SoLoMo space feel a bit less intimidating and help you realize why this channel is worth a bit of your precious time. The marketing landscape is shifting under all of our feet. You might as well come along for the ride.
Why Geolocation App Users Matter to Marketers (via Adweek)
Reports on geolocation adoption inevitably divide marketers into glass is half-full/glass is half-empty outlooks on the future of location-based services. Ki Mae Heussner of Adweek makes it abundantly clear why the glass is indeed half-full and why social-media savvy marketers need to make LBS engagement a top priority in 2012. Users of geolocation apps like Foursquare tend to be influential, young, early adopters that are twice as likely to share product information as the average U.S. adult online. These users, “are also more likely to share promotional coupons, discount codes, or the result of a game they’ve played.” If this were the audience of a network television program it would be the most coveted ad space in America.
SoLoMo naysayers have predictably pointed to the “only 6% of online adults” statistic (which equates to 12-13 million adults in the U.S.) as justification to ignore LBS marketing opportunities. Unfortunately, this outlook ignores the exponential growth in awareness of these apps and overall smartphone adoption. Marketers who recognize the opportunity to reach these highly-influential customers today will have a key advantage over their competitors tomorrow, as social-local marketing continues to shift toward the local level and everyone else plays catch-up.
PayPal to Offer Location-Based Deals (via Inc.)
PayPal announced that it is jumping into the local daily deals game competing with the likes of Groupon, LivingSocial, and the countless other competitors in the space. PayPal’s corporate parent eBay has been laying the foundation for this move for some time, acquiring Where, Milo, and RedLaser in the process. It will be interesting to see if PayPal can leverage these acquisitions into an offering that is any different from what we’ve seen so far. Clearly their play is going to be providing more relevant deals than the competition, a strong point given consumers’ daily deal fatigue, but will that be enough to set PayPal apart from the crowd?
Climb the Social Business Hierarchy of Needs (via Web Strategy)
A video that went viral around the MomentFeed office last week – Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst at the Altimeter Group, delivers a 20-minute presentation taken from the recent LeWeb 2011 conference in Paris. Owyang discusses the social media hierarchy of needs and the processes brands and organizations should go through to avoid “Social Sanitation.” He thinks SoLoMo is the “fuel” behind the predictive business. Needless to say, we agree.
A must watch for any brand looking to develop a successful social media strategy.
Facebook Plans First Foray Into Mobile Ads (via AdAge)
With over 350 million people accessing Facebook from mobile devices you knew it was only a matter of time before the company threw its hat into the mobile advertising ring. It’s a big move for Facebook that will lead to entirely new ways to target and segment mobile users. The big question of course is going to be how Facebook integrates these ads into the mobile experience. Maybe some of that recently-acquired talent from Gowalla can help. Which leads us to…
Gowalla Went For $3M In Facebook Shares, And Many Investors Were Cool With That (via TechCrunch)
So the terms of the Gowalla acquisition finally leaked out, $3 million in Facebook shares. While $3 million may not sound like a big number for this once high-flying geolocation app, it could end up paying off huge if Facebook’s IPO lives up to the hype. This was a pure talent acquisition for Facebook, which has made mobile a top priority for 2012. Gowalla always had a great UI so it will be fun to see how Facebook’s newest employees are able to shape future mobile offerings. The Gowalla app will be discontinued in January 2012.
What We Can Expect from Chinese Technology (via Forbes)
A very interesting piece + interview with Innovation Works CEO Mr. Kai-Fu-Lee that discusses how China could soon become the world leader in mobile technology. Mr. Lee explains that China, with its 800 million mobile phones and dense population centers is well-positioned to see explosive growth in location-based services. Some food for thought on the future of SoLoMo in the world’s largest emerging market.
That’s all for this week! If you have any questions about any of these stories or would like to learn more about location-based marketing you can drop us an email at derek@momentfeed.com and eoghan@momentfeed.com.
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