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.

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.

With the introduction of Foursquare Explore as well as Facebook Recommendations for Place Pages, it’s crucial that brands optimize their locations on these platforms. This goes well beyond simply claiming or registering them.

Optimizing a brand’s locations is an ongoing process, much like that of search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, there are many parallels. Following are the three primary areas of optimization:

1. Venue Registration & Optimization: This is a multi-step process, whereby a brand’s locations (venues) are claimed and registered on Facebook and Foursquare. By taking ownership of these venues, the brand unlocks valuable data about its customers and how they’re engaging. The first objective, however, is to optimize the venues for search and discovery. Much of this has to do with accurate venue metadata such as the geocodes (lat/long), street addresses, and descriptions. In SEO terms, these are akin to having proper tagging structure and keywords. It is relatively straightforward, but with hundreds or thousands of locations, it’s easier said than done. As we’ve found, proper venue registration and optimization alone can increase location-based engagement (LBE) by 100%.

2. Engagement Campaigns: LBE has tremendous value. Each engagement represents a customer sharing their brand experience from a smartphone at the point of sale. Each is distributed through one or more social feeds, and each provides insightful data about that customer. With the introduction of Foursquare Explore and Facebook Recommendations, these engagements serve yet another objective: increasing the likelihood of a referral or recommendation. In SEO terms, LBE is like fresh, original content and inbound links from highly ranked sites. It is the currency of the SoLoMo economy. The more engagement a brand earns, the higher it will rank and the more incremental foot traffic it will drive.

3. Competitive Intelligence: MomentFeed enables competitive benchmarking at the local level on a one-to-one basis. We track and measure individual competitor locations relative to client locations. In turn, these data can be analyzed at the regional and global levels. This provides valuable insight about how competitors are performing within the LBE platforms, from which other metrics such as sales and foot traffic can be inferred. With the introduction of Foursquare Explore and Facebook Recommendations, these data also signal the likelihood of one location being recommended over another. The reality is that multi-location brands don’t compete at the national level. They compete at the local level and should be measured and optimized accordingly.

If you’d like to optimize your locations for social search, discovery, and engagement, get in touch for a MomentFeed Demo.

This originally appeared on the iMedia Connection Blog. 

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

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.

We devote the largest portion of the stack to the LBE Platforms: Facebook, Foursquare, Google, and Twitter. Why? Quite simply, it’s because they have global scale and dominate consumer attention on mobile. In addition to email and SMS, these four players account for the vast majority of our collective smartphone obsession. If you want to connect with consumers on mobile, you start here. Brands should also approach them as a whole because consumers are engaging across each of them with minimal overlap.

It also happens that each of the LBE Platforms is social, which means that consumer engagements are shared with friends and followers. Every time an engagement is sent to Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and/or Google, it generates the most valuable form of advertising: word of mouth. This is essentially earned media. Until recently, however, this wasn’t measurable or quantifiable. Thanks to advancements in the platforms (and MomentFeed), it is now. But this is only where the value begins.

When a consumer engages via these platforms, they naturally (and willfully) share data about themselves. The specifics vary from platform to platform, but the result is that a brand can learn more about its customers at the local, regional, and global level than was ever possible before. And if I might pose a rhetorical question, how much do brands want to know about their customers?

In the LBE Application layer, we find a broad range of apps that facilitate consumer engagement at the point of sale. Many of these are niche applications for restaurants or retail. Others are specific to media types like photos and videos. And then you have the branded applications. Any comprehensive location-based marketing strategy will include several of these apps, but only after the brand has embraced the platforms.

The Distribution & Awareness layer includes mobile ad networks, coupon/deal aggregators, and Facebook itself. This layer is designed to answer the following questions: 1. How do I get loyal customers to engage? 2. How do I get new customers to engage? If you’re running a Foursquare Special or Facebook Check-in Deal, how do you get the word out? Because if you’re going to offer some type of coupon or deal, you (a) want to reach the most people and (b) want to get the most in return. Part of getting the most in return is the ability to measure it.

When a customer redeems a Foursquare Special, for example, you know what they bought and how much they spent. It’s also possible to know if this is a new or returning customer. If you’ve bought media to promote the Special, you can measure its effectiveness in terms of earned media, customer insight, and sales that were generated. This is ROI in the truest sense of the term.

Lastly, the data provided by the L-Daas Platforms offer numerous ways to optimize efforts up and down the stack by understanding the local context for each individual location as well as the context in which consumers are engaging.

As you might conclude from the graphic, the MomentFeed platform is designed to enable brands to leverage this entire stack of technologies, including POS systems and proprietary data, as an integrated marketing solution with analytics, campaign management, CRM, venue management, and competitive intelligence. For more details, request a demo.

This post originally appeared on Street Fight Mag

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.

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)

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.

MomentFeed is a VC-backed startup based in Santa Monica. We are seeking a thoughtful and creative Front End/User Interface Developer to join our engineering team.

MomentFeed provides a first-of-its-kind, location-based analytics and campaign management platform for global brands and enterprise marketers. Our team is passionate about marketing, location-based services (LBS), and above all our product. This is a great opportunity to showcase your work and influence the development of an early-stage tech company.

Our Front-End/UI Developer will be an integral part of the team that is building the MomentFeed application suite. Our ideal candidate has a genius-like understanding of modern, web-based UI development and experience using Ruby on Rails. You are passionate about intuitive design and understand how technology is utilized by our end users (bonus points for any marketing/advertising platform or analytics design experience). We are a tight unit so you must be comfortable working across teams with product and business team members.

This position is based in our office in Santa Monica, right on the Promenade. It’s a fantastic work environment. Compensation includes equity and benefits.

Desired Skills & Experience

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and implement the UI using Ruby on Rails
• Implement the front-end using modern HTML and Javascript
• Analyze the user experience and continually look for ways to improve it
• Analyze user feedback and deliver functionality that will meet their needs

Required Skills and Experience:

• 3+ years of UI development experience
• 1+ years of Ruby on Rails experience
• Good sense of web design and the ability to implement those designs
• Strong understanding of HTML and CSS
• Experience using modern Javascript libraries and AJAX
• Experience designing SQL data schemas and writing advanced queries

It’s exciting to announce that MomentFeed is officially a VC-backed startup. TechCrunch broke the story on Monday, and the press release was issued yesterday. This first round is lead by DFJ Frontier (Los Angeles) and DFJ-JAIC (Menlo Park/Tokyo), both of which are DFJ Network Funds. Gold Hill Capital (San Jose, CA) also participated. It’s an incredible feeling to have this level of support and to join these esteemed portfolios.

We are also fortunate to have a superb network of angel investors and advisors that brings added value to the business in the form of domain expertise, relationships, and the ability to make things happen. Each was named in the press release, and I’d like to take this opportunity to expand on their backgrounds in no particular order.

Gil Elbaz is Founder and CEO of Factual, a big-data company based in LA. Gil was also Co-Founder of Applied Semantics aka AdSense, which sold to Google in 2003. Factual provided all of the international POI (point-of-interest) data for Facebook Places, and the company recently partnered with SimpleGeo to unify their respective data. We’ve had a partnership in place for several months and look forward to working with the Factual team to solve a number of big problems in LBS.

Auren Hoffman is Founder and CEO of Rapleaf, a big-data company based in San Francisco. It’s quite likely that Rapleaf’s data will have an application in MomentFeed, a we seek to provide hyper-relevant consumer experiences at the hyper-local level…in hyper-real time, of course.

Location3 Media is a Denver-based marketing agency that specializes in local search optimization. The firm works with many national brands in the restaurant and retail categories to maximize search performance at the local level. In addition to an investment, Location3 and MomentFeed will have an exclusive agreement to cross-market our services.

Clark Landry is Founder and Executive Chairman of GraphEffect, a Los Angeles-based online advertising platform built on the Facebook Ads API. Clark was a founding investor in Adconian, the largest privately-held advertising network (by reach), and Traffic Marketplace, a leading advertising network with was acquired by Vivendi. GraphEffect is doing for Facebook advertising what MomentFeed is doing for Facebook Places, Foursquare, and Twitter: providing a more robust set of tools for large agencies and enterprise marketers that maximizes performance and ROI.

Jennifer Lum is Co-Founder of Apricot Capital (Boston & Toronto). Jennifer was previously VP, Advertising Operations for Quattro Wireless, which sold to Apple. She then worked on the iAd platform. Jennifer invests with her partner, Peter Wernau, who was previously Vice President at Hill Holliday.

Walter Kortschak is a Senior Advisor and former Managing Partner of Summit Partners (Silicon Valley).

Aamer Abdullah is a Principle at MI Ventures in New York City.

Ty Danco is an angel investor and ex-Olympic luger based in Burlington, VT.

Alex Kazerani is Founder and CEO of EdgeCast Networks, a leading content delivery network based in Los Angeles.

Ken Bane is an angel investor based in Orange County, CA.

Sanford Ewing is Founder of Peninsula Investors based in Darien, CT.

Mark Mullen serves on the MomentFeed Board of Directors. Most recently, he was COO, Office of Economic & Business Policy for the City of Los Angeles and a Senior Advisor to Mayor Villaraigosa. Previously, Mark was Managing Director of Investment Banking for RBC in Los Angeles, CA.

SANTA MONICA, Calif., July 12, 2011 – MomentFeed, Inc., a location-based marketing software and services provider, today announced that it has secured $1.2 million in Series AA financing. The round was led by DFJ Frontier of Los Angeles, Calif. and DFJ JAIC of Menlo Park, Calif. and Tokyo. Both firms are part of the DFJ Network. Also participating in the round were Gold Hill Capital of San Jose, Calif. and angel investors Gil Elbaz (Founder/CEO, Factual), Auren Hoffman (Founder/CEO, Rapleaf), and Walter Kortschak (Former Managing Partner, Summit Partners).

MomentFeed offers a first-of-its-kind location-based marketing platform that includes both analytics and campaign management. The solution is designed for enterprise marketers that manage tens, hundreds, or thousands of locations across the U.S. or around the world. The MomentFeed beta, which launched earlier this year, integrates Gowalla, Facebook Places, Foursquare, and Twitter as a unified dashboard.

“We’re excited and humbled by the caliber of investors the company was able to attract,” said Rob Reed, founder and chief executive officer, MomentFeed. “We are represented in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York City, Boston, Denver, Toronto, and Tokyo. It’s a fantastic group that contributes value to all aspects of the business.”

Additional investors include Ken Bane, Ty Danco, Peter Delgrosso, Sanford Ewing (Peninsula Investors), Alex Kazerani, Clark Landry, Jennifer Lefcourt, Location3 Media, Jennifer Lum (Apricot Capital), MI Ventures, and Mark Mullen (Mull Capital). The company secured a large part of its round, directly or indirectly, through the AngelList service.

“We’re proud to back Rob in this exciting venture,” said Salil Pradhan, venture partner, DFJ JAIC. “His vision for how the location-based marketing space will evolve and the platform he’s developing in response to that is quite compelling. Rob has assembled a superb team and a phenomenal group of strategic partners, advisors, and investors to help fulfill that vision.”

Mr. Pradhan joins Messrs. Mullen and Reed on the company’s board of directors. Mark Mullen was previously Managing Director of Investment Banking for RBC Daniels in Los Angeles. Most recently, he served as Senior Advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and COO for the city’s Office of Economic and Business Policy. Mark is currently Managing Partner of Mull Capital.

The MomentFeed team consists of an experienced group of marketing and technology executives who believe the nexus of social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) amounts to the Holy Grail of marketing.

About MomentFeed
MomentFeed is a location-based analytics and campaign management service (SaaS) for companies with 20+ locations to manage. The MomentFeed platform enables companies to monitor consumer engagement activity; launch, measure, and optimize campaigns; and maintain customer relationships via Foursquare, Facebook Places, Gowalla, and Twitter Places across hundreds or thousands of locations through an integrated, Web-based solution. MomentFeed is available globally. The company is based in Santa Monica, Calif.

About DFJ Frontier
Headquartered in Los Angeles, DFJ Frontier is a venture capital firm that invests in seed and early stage companies on the west coast. DFJ Frontier backs passionate entrepreneurs in a broad array of industries, including information technology, media, life sciences, clean technology, and other emerging businesses. The firm typically leads the first round of investment, taking an active role to help entrepreneurs build extraordinary businesses. DFJ Frontier is a Partner Fund of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and has offices in Los Angeles, Portland, Sacramento and Santa Barbara. For more information, please visit: www.dfjfrontier.com.

About DFJ JAIC
DFJ JAIC, a part of the DFJ Network, is a US-Japan cross border venture capital firm with presence in both Tokyo and Silicon Valley, primarily investing in seed and early stage consumer and enterprise Internet services and in Cleantech-Advanced Materials. Through its prior funds, the DFJ JAIC GP team has invested in more than 100 companies over the last decade, resulting in 20 IPOs and 10 M&A exits in Japan and US. To learn more, visit www.dfjjaic.com