This year we decided to apply our Cinco de Mayo excitement to a study that would provide some very interesting insights about the difference in customer engagement on a big restaurant day based on varying levels of promotion.

The Study: We analyzed the increase in customer engagement at the local level via Facebook, foursquare, and Twitter for five Mexican restaurant chains on Saturday, May 5 compared to the engagement levels at the same locations from the previous Saturday, April 28. We also looked at the campaigns or promotions each of the five restaurants were running for Cinco de Mayo to see if the promotional efforts had any impact on engagement. The restaurant chains were Chevy’s, Chipotle, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Rubio’s, and Taco Bueno. Customer engagement tracked included Facebook check-ins, foursquare check-ins, Facebook place page likes, foursquare photos and tips, and tweets tagged to each location.

The Results: Chevy’s had the highest increase in engagement – 240% compared to the previous Saturday. Moe’s Southwest Grill was a close second with a 224% increase. Both ran strong promotions with free gift cards and t-shirts plus food specials as well as hashtag campaigns on Twitter. Interestingly, when we isolated out Facebook place page likes, Moe’s Southwest Grill actually had the highest increase – 223% compared to 103% for Chevy’s. Chipotle and Rubio’s also redeemed themselves to some degree with more likes than Chevy’s – 143% and 147%, respectively.

The Conclusion: Running solid campaigns and promotions around special occasions like Cinco de Mayo increases customer engagement at the point of sale, and campaigns with social media components in particular increase this type of engagement. Chevy’s and Moe’s Southwest Grill are clear examples of that. Additionally, combined engagement data across Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter tends to correlate very closely to actual sales, which suggests that Chevy’s and Moe’s Southwest Grill saw a significant increase in sales as well.

View the cool infographic that summarizes this study here.

Today, we’re excited to announce our integration with Instagram and the release of new publishing tools that lets brands aggregate and curate their best customer-generated content for distribution across corresponding Facebook place pages, providing the first scalable solution for local content publishing available to multi-location brands.

Many brands are realizing exponential fan growth across their Facebook place pages, due in part to recent Facebook algorithm changes that prioritize them over brand pages. This creates a unique opportunity to reach and engage customers at the local level. Research from Mainstay Partners shows that fans of local pages are 40 times more engaged than those of corporate brand pages. However, scaling local page management is a significant challenge.

MomentFeed brings Facebook, foursquare, and Twitter into a unified solution for multi-location brands. MomentFeed’s new curation tools enable brands to publish their best foursquare photos and tips to their corresponding Facebook place pages with a single click, complete with attribution and a “thank you note” sent to the customer via Twitter. The same can now be done with place-tagged photos from Instagram.

“Our customers are creating and sharing authentic content on foursquare, Instagram, and other mobile apps that is unique to each of our restaurants,” said AJ Sacher, Regional Manager at Barney’s Beanery, a chain of gastropubs in California. “We use MomentFeed to curate the best photos and tips and distribute them to our Facebook pages as a way to acknowledge those customers while engaging our fans. As a result, we are seeing a significant increase in engagement across all of our Facebook pages. And it makes sense, because this is content created by fellow customers.”

“Thanks to smartphones and ubiquitous social networks like Facebook, global-local marketing is becoming a scalable reality,” said MomentFeed founder and CEO Rob Reed. “The MomentFeed platform enables marketers to leverage Facebook, foursquare, Twitter, and Instagram in a holistic way to engage a brand’s most valuable customers and drive sales. The tools we’re launching today take this to a new level by maximizing the value of earned and owned media at the local level with stunning efficiency. For a brand with 1,000 locations, it takes all of 10 minutes per day to curate and publish the best foursquare and Instagram content to the corresponding Facebook place pages, and the return is huge. This is a lot like Facebook’s Sponsored Stories, only instead of connecting with a user’s social graph, the connections are made with a brand’s customer graph. This takes place at the local level on a global scale and facilitates a new type of social connection—customer-to-customer—which is uniquely valuable to the brand.”

These new tools are enabled by MomentFeed’s PinSync™ service, which optimizes and synchronizes venues across Facebook, foursquare, Twitter, and Instagram. PinSync provides centralized control and management of brand venues, which can also be decentralized to local representatives.

Being a proud partner of foursquare as well as users of  the platform ourselves, we decided to measure the engagement levels at a sample (86) of the 4sqDay meetup locations using the Momentfeed platform. The primary objective was to monitor the increase in engagements at these locations and track the potential social reach and media value of 4sqDay.

The 4sqDay meetup venues monitored saw a whopping 275% increase in engagements (check-ins, Tips, Photos, Likes, tweets) compared to the previous day.

Besides receiving a huge influx of engagement at the point of sale, an increase in the social reach for these locations was also observed. Tweet Café was the official 4sqDay venue in Milan, Italy and registered a massive increase in the total number of followers for the location from 19 to 62,315. Similarly, The Caulfield in New York saw an increase from a social reach of 618 to 134,211. These locations also saw an increase in their average visitor Klout scores of almost 600% and 65%, respectively, demonstrating that 4sqDay attracts highly influential consumers.

Foursquare campaigns continue to be an invaluable tool to local businesses and multi-location brands. Increased customer engagement at the point of sale equals greater mindshare among customers, resulting in a competitive advantage for the business and ultimately increased sales and customer loyalty and frequency. 4sqDay serves as another reminder of exactly that.

Today, we’re announcing our partnership with Retailigence, a leader in using local store inventory obtained directly from retailers to connect shoppers with products, and provide retail marketers with critical data about mobile shopper activity. The integration provides retailers with a Web-based interface to visualize and analyze data about location-based, product-specific searches (customer leads) via smartphones and how these correspond to their brick-and-mortar locations.

Retailigence connects real-time consumer demand with real-world inventory supply by way of its network of third-party mobile applications. On-the-go consumers can shop for products on their smartphones and discover which stores have them in stock at what prices. Retailigence clients can now visualize this activity through the MomentFeed dashboard, enabling them to better understand which locations and products are generating the most customer leads and how this is trending over time at the local, regional, and global levels.

“Location is one of the most important dimensions for brick and mortar retailers to leverage. By analyzing consumer trends with a local angle, brick and mortar retailers have a unique ability to respond to the local needs and fulfill shoppers’ demands immediately. However, to capture this opportunity, retailers need to collect, analyze, and respond.” said Jeremy Geiger, CEO of Retailigence. “Today, MomentFeed is the most powerful location-based analytics platform for retailers and will help smart retailers capture their full potential.”

“With the integration of Retailigence, we are adding a valuable data source while demonstrating MomentFeed’s capabilities as a universal location-based marketing platform,” said MomentFeed Founder and CEO Rob Reed. “We are truly agnostic when it comes to location-specific inputs and outputs. These can include public sources such as Twitter and Instagram, private sources such as Retailigence, hybrid sources such as Foursquare and Facebook, and proprietary sources such as sales and foot traffic data. We look forward to further integrating with Retailigence in providing retailers with actionable, real-time insight about how customers are engaging with their locations.”

With Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter, MomentFeed tells the story of customer engagement at the point of sale. This includes check-ins, tweets, tips, photos, and offer redemptions. MomentFeed provides a full suite of analytics, campaign, and CRM tools to leverage these engagements. Retailigence tells the customer backstory, providing retailers with actionable, real-time insight about how customers are engaging with their locations.  This includes local product searches and purchase intent, which ultimately lead to specific retail locations and transactions. Positive correlations between these data points will show the full customer lifecycle, all of which can potentially occur via smartphones.

MomentFeed clients will immediately be able to start seeing these insights from Retailigence on their dashboards.

Today, we’re excited to announce the findings from an eight-month study we conducted with Cinnabon, Inc., which saw customer engagement increase by 671 percent across its 400+ U.S. locations by leveraging the MomentFeed platform. The engagement was measured across Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.

Cinnabon’s primary objective was to increase customer engagement at the point of sale. The company worked with MomentFeed to register and optimize its venues on Facebook and Foursquare as well as to measure the impact of its location-based marketing efforts. MomentFeed utilized PinSync, the company’s proprietary venue optimization process, to merge duplicate venues, adjust inaccurate geocodes, correct address information, and update venues with consistent branding. This one-time process synchronized Cinnabon’s location data across Facebook and Foursquare by using MomentFeed as the central hub.

In the month following PinSync, engagement at the point of sale increased by 43 and 86 percent on Foursquare and Facebook respectively. This was followed by a charitable check-in campaign with Operation Gratitude on Foursquare.

“The significant increase in customer engagement from working with MomentFeed exceeded our expectations,” said Rachel Hadley, PR/Corporate Communications Manager for Cinnabon at FOCUS Brands. “By simply optimizing our venues on Facebook and Foursquare and running one campaign, it became clear how many of our customers actually want to engage with our brand. Tapping into that engagement potential clearly represented an opportunity for us – one we are glad we pursued.”

“Cinnabon is a superb example of how brands can measurably increase engagement at the point of sale through a few simple steps,” said MomentFeed VP of Product and Client Relations, Derek Browers. “Through the PinSync process, we removed many of the barriers to engagement and made it easier for customers to both find a local Cinnabon and to check-in when they arrived. On a universal basis, we find that 40 percent of locations have multiple, unauthorized duplicate venues and more than half show inaccurate geocodes. This undermines customer engagement, search, and discovery, which results in lost opportunities to connect with customers and generate sales.”

PinSync was developed by MomentFeed to solve a ubiquitous problem for multi-location brands – ensuring all locations (venues) are accurately and comprehensively registered on Facebook and Foursquare. Before PinSync, there was no seamless solution for optimizing, synchronizing, and centralizing venue information on these platforms. In addition, MomentFeed solves the problem of keeping these platforms up to date when new locations are opening and old ones are closing.

The Cinnabon case study further demonstrated that customer engagement achieves higher plateaus following both PinSync and a well-designed campaign. At limited cost and with minimal effort, multi-location brands in the restaurant, retail, hospitality, and banking categories can increase customer engagement at the point of sale simply by optimizing their venues across Facebook and Foursquare. Well-executed marketing campaigns can further boost engagement.

To download the full Cinnabon case study, visit www.momentfeed.com/case-studies.

Today, we’re announcing that former Facebook sales director Rob Lissner has joined the company as Special Advisor to the CEO. In this role, Lissner will work closely with MomentFeed Founder and CEO Rob Reed on key aspects of the MomentFeed business with a focus on product and sales strategy.

Lissner started with Facebook in 2006 as the company’s first Los Angeles-based salesperson. After many years of success working with top-tier advertisers and leading the Los Angeles sales team, he departed the company in July of 2011 to pursue other opportunities.

“We are extremely fortunate to have Rob join our team in this role,” said MomentFeed Founder and CEO Rob Reed. “Rob brings tremendous experience in selling the value of social to large brands and building a world-class sales team. His decision to join MomentFeed and play a central role in these efforts is a testament to our achievements thus far and the immediate potential of our platform.”

“The biggest growth opportunity for the social space is clearly on mobile,” said Lissner. “By focusing on the mobile experience at or near the point of sale, MomentFeed is positioned to help brands get the most from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and other mobile platforms in the post-PC era. This includes the social elements of checking-in and sharing as well as offers, advertising, and payments. Brands that get on board with MomentFeed early will enjoy a distinct advantage moving forward.”

The MomentFeed platform is designed for multi-location businesses in the restaurant, retail, hospitality, and banking categories. The convergence of social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) at the point of sale enables marketers to connect with customers in the buying moment and to maintain customer relationships on the basis of loyalty, frequency, and overall customer value. This is a new paradigm in social marketing where paid media, earned media, customer data, user-generated content, business intelligence, and ROI are tied to specific locations and sales. MomentFeed offers the only unified approach to this dynamic new marketing channel.

Lissner’s role at MomentFeed includes product development, recruiting and building a world-class sales team, and further integration with the social platforms. He’ll be based in the company’s headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif. Lissner will also serve as a Board advisor.

Prior to Facebook, Lissner worked in sales at Yahoo! from 1998 to 2006. He began his Yahoo! career working with tech companies in the Bay Area. He moved to Los Angeles in 2002 to focus on Yahoo!’s burgeoning entertainment category.

Santa Monica, Calif. – February 13, 2012 - MomentFeed, Inc., the first location-based marketing platform for the enterprise and a leader in the SoLoMo space, announced today it has released version 1.1 following the company’s initial rollout with brands in the restaurant and retail categories. New features further empower large, multi-location brands to maximize consumer engagement at the local level via Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.

With version 1.1, MomentFeed introduces the following capabilities:

• Real-time Twitter feeds from the point of sale: Monitor and respond to customers while they are in-store, in the buying moment
• Sort actual customers by Klout Score to identify, engage, and reward influencers
• Measure the reach potential and media value of tweets, check-ins, and other location-based engagements
• Advanced venue management tools centralize company location data and dynamically synchronize with Foursquare and Facebook
• Comparative analysis between custom location groups to measure regional performance differences and enable sophisticated A/B testing
• Rank Foursquare Tips by the “Done” metric to see which are most popular at the local, regional, and global levels
• Measure customer sentiment at the local, regional, and global levels

“Version 1.1 represents a huge step toward our goal of providing a universal and comprehensive location-based marketing platform,” said MomentFeed Founder and CEO Rob Reed. “These new features add tremendous value for brands at the corporate and local levels. We’re providing the real-time intelligence to respond to customers in the buying moment, while providing the deep insights and analysis that generate dividends over time. For multi-location brands, this is the crème de la crème of social data.”

MomentFeed is adding a unique dimension to Klout as an influence metric. By tracking Klout Scores at the local level, MomentFeed shows brands which locations have the most influential customers and, therefore, which are generating the most value from social sharing at the point of sale. These same metrics can be leveraged through MomentFeed’s competitive intelligence tools to determine influence levels for a competitor’s customers at the local, regional, and global levels.

Brands can now also leverage the MomentFeed platform for important A/B testing of campaigns, multi-channel messaging initiatives, and other efforts to increase engagement at the point of sale through comparative analysis features. By creating custom location groups in the MomentFeed dashboard, brands can, for instance, run Foursquare Specials for a specific group of locations and measure lift in engagement at those locations compared to a similar control group. The sophisticated analysis capabilities help brands to optimize campaigns and more efficiently allocate resources based on location-specific engagement data.

Brands now have the option of leveraging the MomentFeed platform as a managed solution from their agency partner.

Today, we’re announcing a partnership with Location3 Media. As a strategic digital marketing partner, Location3 Media is able to provide a layer of services on top of the MomentFeed platform for their clients.

MomentFeed is available to large, multi-location brands and agencies as a self-serve solution. However, some brands and agencies are not staffed to manage the platform on a day-to-day basis. This is where partners like Location3 Media offer its expert services in the location-based marketing space.

“Data analysis is the backbone of everything we do, and MomentFeed stands out among location-based analytics providers,” says Alex Porter, president of Location3 Media. “That’s the reason we decided to invest in the platform and why we’re thrilled to partner with MomentFeed for continued management and analysis of localized campaigns.”

Channel partners like Location3 Media provide additional value to clients using the MomentFeed platform by performing analyses and providing reports on engagement, running campaigns on Facebook and Foursquare, and managing CRM via Twitter, among other services.

“Location3 Media has been a strategic partner of ours from the very beginning,” said MomentFeed Founder and CEO, Rob Reed. “This next step formalizes the channel partnership, such that brands now have an expert, third-party resource to manage and execute their location-based marketing strategies via MomentFeed.”

Location3 Media also offers a range of complementary services including local map listings, franchise PPC, local store websites and landing pages, customer review management, mobile optimization, franchise social media platform, local call-tracking and analytics platform, on-demand reporting dashboard and more.

Location3 Media will be exhibiting at this year’s International Franchise Association (IFA) convention next week (February 11-14) in Orlando, Florida, and will be promoting the MomentFeed location-based marketing platform in its booth. The IFA convention is the leading annual event for franchise professionals.

Serving a variety of consumer, multi-unit retail, and franchise brands, Location3 Media clients include US Airways, AT&T, FASTSIGNS, Ace Hardware and The Darden Restaurant Group. We’re thrilled to officially welcome our new partner and their clients to the MomentFeed platform.

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.