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COO, Interesante.com. Silicon Valley Entrepreneur


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Geolocation is here to stay. It has been adopted by the major players in the industry and is carving an independent position in the social media market. With products such as foursquare, mytown and gowalla leading the race, we’re sure to see a lot more competition in the space. So far facebook is the only one of the big social networks that is taking geolocation seriously by launching places, a service within facebook that allows people to check in to physical locations and to browse who’s around.  This is just the beginning of the geo-location fight that is sure to heat up in the upcoming months.

In the meantime, here are seven reasons why geolocation is here to stay.
  1. Geolocation has become a fashion and cultural trend beyond early adopters.
  2. Companies have the opportunity to advertise their products and services directly and selectively.
  3. Social networks are rushing to adapt its functionality to also provide geolocation services, though some half-heartedly
  4. More and more people have GPS-enabled devices.
  5. The smartphone market is only getting bigger around the world.
  6. People’s social circle  is becoming wider and larger.
  7. Social networks are increasingly oriented towards mobile devices.

Let’s start by defining geo-location. Geo-location is the practice of associating a digital resource with a physical location. Digital resources can be photos, videos, texts. Location information is calculated according to latitude and longitude coordinates to mark a specific location anywhere in the world. Geo-location networks and services are fast becoming a necessary tool for all smartphone users, who can not only find the location of a friend, but also physical locations such as pharmacies in their neighbourhood, parks, libraries.

So many services to choose from. Here’s a comparison of the most popular geolocation enabled services:

A comparison of geolocation applications and their features:

Geo-Location Feature Comparison

Geo-Location Feature Comparison

Why does geolocation work?

Let’s take foursquare. Foursquare is one of the most popular geo-location service so far. Its secret is to combine social networking with geo-location and a competitive game with a good way to advertise effectively. Foursquare’s key to success is that it converts users’ activities in a game. Every time that someone visits a store they get closer to becoming the mayor of that location which in turn can bring them preferential treatment at the location.

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How are the top brands performing on Twitter and Facebook? What are their follower numbers? Are any of them doing it wrong? Read on for in depth answers.

The Top 15 Brands as classified by Interbrands have been analyzed to find out their level of presence and success in two of the main social media channels: Twitter and Facebook. Google, the dear of the internet shows a strong lead vs. any other brand in one channel but a rather weak following in the other. IBM and BMW although strong are not taking full advantage of their brand power. Here are some of the key findings of this initial study.

Study Top 15 Brands Social Presence Comparison

  • GE passes with flying colors as it was easy to find just by searching http://facebook.com/GE. Plus they have a microsite dedicated to this effort
  • IBM’s efforts with other accounts like http://twitter.com/ibmdesign and http://twitter.com/ibmevents is commendable but they really need to get the @IBM account on twitter. On Facebook there is a strong employee presence but no clear corporate sponsorship of the group or a facebook page devoted to the brand
  • There is a huge difference in the number of fans that a page that is obviously supported by the company on Facebook and a page that does not look like is 100% legit. Take McDonalds with over 1 Million fans vs. Toyota’s page which look amateurish in comparison and has only gathered a little over 50K fans
  • Google is the all time winner on Twitter where the it seems to indicate that the heavy users of the internet reside. Over 1.6 million followers on Twitter vs. just over 350K on Facebook.
  • BMW has a strong fan base but its presence on these channels is minute compared to other top brands that are taking full advantage of the medium.

The B2B landscape has changed considerably. A couple of years ago it was the norm for lower level employees to distill the information that was passed on to senior and C-suite executives.

Social Media (even more than search) has helped bring the information directly to the decision makers which is your target market. This graph below might help understand the demographics of Facebook better  and thanks to @scottmonty for his insightful post on Facebook demographics we can understand it better.

Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

There are a few things you should look at before plunging into social media, but the bottom line is that if your brand is already well respected and folks are aware of the value, then social media will help you harness that power and use it to support sales.

  1. Do you have a leader that understands the social media field? (Not a heavy user necessarily but a strategist that combines social, technology and leadership skills that are needed to thrive.
  2. Does your leadership (senior management and/or C-Suite) understand the value of social media for your organization?
  3. Do you produce fresh and relevant content that can keep your interaction lively?
  4. Is your company or brand a market influence? If so, then social media is a channel to cement the role of thought leader that you’ve already earned.

Furthermore, social media will help you establish the personal brand of the company’s employees as experts in their field and thought leaders in a way that no other media can do. While “old media” gives you one channel and one voice, social media turns all your employees into brand advocates, change agents and thought leaders carrying the company’s brand name with them.

DISCLAIMER: The app was developed in one weekend @weekendapps. All the participants agreed that the exercise was worth the time but due to previous commitments the application was not further developed. We ended in fourth place out of 11 applications. We were behind an app that had been in development for about 12 months (Piki Pages) and another one that needed a few touches not full development (Spring Break). The true winner was Matchtastic. It was developed over the weekend and launched that weekend.

This is s summary of what we want to see for our Hitchhiker Facebook app.

1. Growth and engagement.

These are lofty goals that need to be measured once the application actually launches. Growth, measured in terms of adoption. If the app flops in term of adoption then there is no other metric to be measured.

2. Bottom line.

We all need to monetize to some level to make the exercise viable. The monetization strategy lies in the socialization of this tool and its continuous use. The app will be able to be monetized only if the engagement factor works out. The target client will be a successful online travel service that seeks exposure to a niche audience (25+ individuals with disposable income to spend in discretional travel activities) in the social media market. i.e. Expedia, Kayak, Orbitz, GordonsGuide.

3. Purpose of the app.

We want you to complete a journey to a destination anywhere in the world. A journey that will take you to new places with the help of your friends. You will hitch a ride with friends and friends of friends that are willing and able to introduce you to folks that are in your travel path and that are able to help you reach your destination.

4. Why in the world would I install your app to my facebook profile?

Simple. The more people you give a ride to or recruit for your trip, the more points you will earn towards winning a real life adventure trip. If you are a traveler, you will collect points for every friend you recruit in your journey. Those points count towards getting a real life adventure.

5. What are the adventures you can win?

+ Third prize: Adventure trip to the Amazon Jungle in style.

+ Second place: Luxurious multi-sport adventure throughout South America visiting the highest active volcano in the world, the equator and Macchu Picchu.

+ First place: Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru adventure trip.High end adventure spas and a super cool and knowledgeable guide that will lead you through an adventure of a lifetime. Truly.

All inclusive adventure with a dash of pampering luxury.

Trying to make sense of the amount of data that comes in every week is a monumental task. It bends your thoughts in a different way. There is a difference though in analyzing data base on experience and analyzing data based upon asking the questions the data set might help us answer.

The type of analysis that is based on experience only is the easy one. You put your time (for a few years or months, depending on the industry) and then you are entitle by seniority sake to opine about all the work that is being done by your team, because you’ve done it before.

The thing is, for internet marketing, that does not work well. If you have done it before, over 4 months ago, the odds are that the tactic or strategy you used in the past has evolved and changed. That goes for the actual channel as well. For the sake of full disclosure and openness, my last conclusion is based on experience.

How to Succeed in this ever changing environment?

Learn. Evolve and ask questions that have not been asked before. You will probably find yourself struggling at the beginning but the journey to a new discovery always pays off.

Look at the data and use your experience to ask the right questions, not to suggest answers that might be biased.

Are you a senior manager?

Use your experience to guide you in the search for answers but give your staff the space to be creative and test, always test. Sometimes experience based on traditional marketing can skew the questions and assumptions in the wrong direction.

Take a fresh look at the business objectives and ask how can my new channels can provide support to those objectives and use the historical data to setup more successful test environments. Marketing campaigns online are all about testing – they are not traditional marketing. They are not supposed to be thrown out in market to see what happens.

Traditional vs. New Marketing

Turns out you are a brand as well. Not only the [insert yours here]‘s (corporation, agency, startup) brand that you work for is important. You need to take care of your brand name. That will help you perform better in a corporation, agency, start up or even your own business. Much like Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah took control of his personal brand through his involvement in social media to raise his profile to the level where job offers from corporations came to him rather than looking for them.

This means, at a very high level, that if someone types in your name into Google you should probably own between 40 to 60% of the page. I am not suggesting you go for “reputation management” services such as naymz.com or others. These services you pay for and don’t allow you a lot of flexibility.

I am suggesting the following:

  • Take control of your personal brand online and use it to help your day job
  • Get out there and get a domain that relates to your last name. Install a blog such as wordpress or typepad. Both are open source now. If a domain is not available get a subdomain at wordpress.com
  • Get linked in at linkedin.com