If you are a local business that you think Foursquare is your salvation in these challenging economic times, think again.  It may just as easily breed mediocrity your business mindset and create an opportunity for your competition to get a hand up on you.  As a local business you need to treat every one of your customers, every day, like Queens and Kings.  They need to feel special all of the time.  Believing that you can simply concentrate on the few customers who use Foursquare to build your brand, and business, is a mistake.  Yes, it may give you a little bit more visibility, but the question is how effectively this translates to your bottom line?

What is Foursquare

For those who don’t know, Foursquare is a website and application that runs on your location aware smart phone to enable users to “check in” when they visit your establishment.  When a user checks in to an establishment they have chance of collecting “virtual badges” and possibly becoming “the mayor” of your establishment.  They are in competition with other customers to become mayor and collect badges.  This competition for badges and to become mayor is based in gaming theory and used to drive adoption.  Anyone can add your business to Foursquare and once added people can check in and become mayor.  When they check into a location, they can broadcast that fact others in on Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook and other social networks.  It certainly may increase the visibility of your business, but remember your business is local and a person’s social networks are often highly geographically dispersed.  As a business you have the opportunity to sign up with Foursquare and reward your mayors with specials, or whatever you want to offer them.  The gaming aspect has proven to be fairly addictive and fun for certain demographic, namely techies, early adopters, and the younger social crowd.

So what’s wrong with that?

So here’s the rub.  Foursquare is a tactic; a tactic that relies on a few loud customers who are more concerned about collecting virtual badges than they are in evangelizing your business.  They are advocating your business as a secondary effect rather than a primary purpose.  Everyone on Foursquare knows this, they know that people check in because they want to collect badges and become mayor, and many maybe get something free of the.  Yes, of course, they probably like your business or they wouldn’t go there in the first place, but checking in really doesn’t tell anyone that your business is special.

While it is true that Foursquare can connect local businesses to tech oriented and younger customers, it misses the boat with women, most importantly “moms” – the demographic that controls 85% of local purchases.  Women account for a staggering amount of consumer spending,  Sylvia Ann Hewlett, writing for the Harvard Business Review points out that “Globally, women control nearly $12 trillion of the $18 trillion total overall consumer spending”.

Now, I do know moms who use Foursquare, but they are the exception to the rule.  There are two reasons why moms are likely to be very reluctant to adopting Foursquare.

1- Moms are leery broadcasting their location
2- Moms could care less about the gaming aspect

If a location based service wants to attract moms it need to offer real value everyday, and not broadcast their whereabouts to the world.

Dave McClure, a highly visible Silicon Valley VC, believes that $5 is the opening bid.  He talks about it in his article “Check-Ins are Coupons. Game Mechanics are Bullshit. Show Me The MONEY or Go Home”

It makes perfect sense to add Foursquare to your marketing mix if you are targeting the techie and young social adults.  If these demographics make up a decent portion of your customer base, and for a good counter point to this article, take a look at Olivier Blanchard’s article “Do you know who the mayor of your business is”

From what I can tell, Foursquare may be a great way gain visibility and loyalty among a targeted demographic,  but I don’t think it is the next big think everyone is hyping nor do I think it can easily crossover to other demographics.  I have never heard anyone who is not either a techie or scenester rave about it! Have you?

Getting back to basics

If you want to generate positive word of mouth, deepen customer loyalty, and cultivate customer evangelists, you need to be an exceptional business in the hearts and minds of your customers.  Not only do you need to offer great products and services, but you need to consistently provide great experiences.

Make all your customers feel special

Treat every customer like they are special, every day.  Learn their names. Tell them you’re really glad they stopped by any hope to see them again soon.  Give them a reason to come back; tell them “by the way, I know you like brand X, a new shipment is arriving on Tuesday.  I should have it out on the floor by Wednesday”.  Think other creative ways you can make customers feel special that are particular to your business.  If you are a flower store, your customers usually for someone else; give them one for themselves.

Make your employees feel special

Make this part of your company culture by making your employees feel special.  If for some reason you have a hard time doing this, get new employees; find ones that you really feel are special.  Believe me your customers sense when your employees are happy and feel good about working for you.  It makes them feel better about doing business with you and keeps them coming back. Exceptional employees are one of your biggest assets.

Survey your Customers

If possible, survey your customers by asking them at the end of their visit to write down the first three words that come to mind when they think about today’s experience with your business.  This will give you some great insights and, at the same time, tell your customers that you care.  Collect these words, group similar words or feelings together, and keep a tally. This will give you a good idea of your brand, areas in which you excel, and areas that you can improve.

Celebrate your customers

Throw them a customer appreciation party.  Invite them to your employee appreciation party.  It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate.  Even if your customers can’t attend, the fact that they know that you are having a customer appreciation party will affect how they feel about you.

Remember customers are not Mayors, they are Queens and Kings; be grateful to be able to serve them!

Many of you probably don’t know this but I have been a photographer for 30 years and have done occasional professional work.  One thing that has always worried me was how I would showcase and market my images on the Internet and, at the same time, make sure people wouldn’t just take them and use it as they wish.

Well, recently I ran into a company called PicScout and realized that I really don’t need to worry at all.  PicScout offers a service that “fingerprints” my images so they can be identified even if they have been photo-shopped and modified.  Their service also goes out on the Internet and will find my pictures and let me know where they are being used.

This in itself is great but they do much more than this.  People often use Google image search to find pictures to use in their digital marketing and creative work.  Say my pictures are being used all over the web, when someone searches with Google image search they may find my pictures but still it is hard for the searcher to figure out who owns the rights.  The PicScout firefox add-on displays rights information regarding images directly within the Google search results.  This  makes it easy for anyone who sees one of my pictures to license it.  And when it is easy for someone to do this, it is much more likely that they will.  If it would be difficult they would either just take it or find another.

I know this because I am guilty.  My team and I grabbed some images off the web to use as placeholders in a website we were developing and one of those images made the final cut without us realizing that we hadn’t secured rights.  All was fine and dandy for about six months and then we got a letter from Getty Images informing us that we were using one of their images without securing rights to it. Hah, I wonder if they were using PicScout technology. We were slapped with at $2000 fee that we easily could have avoided.

Now I can allow my images to be spread throughout the web, giving my work more exposure and linking them all back to a commerce engine so that they could be easily licensed.

I better get to work and spread my images!

Since we are talking photography, just for fun you might watch what Nigel Barker, professional photographer and judge on America’s Next Top Model, had to say to me from CES

Twitter will introduce advertising

Last week I speculated that the new Twitter’s native Retweet feature was about search, but it looks like maybe I was wrong; it a may be all about advertising, with search playing a supporting role.  Robert Scoble says that at today’s TechCrunch Real Time Crunchup, Dick Costolo – Twitter’s COO, said that Twitter will introduce an advertising model.  Scoble speculates that this will be done through metadata.  He believes the metadata would be revealed when you mouse over a given tweet.  I think that the metadata will be used to instantly generate an advertisement and it will be the ad that is revealed when you mouse over the tweet not the metadata.

The metadata

Your digital camera captures metadata every time you take a picture.  In many picture viewers you can see the metadata when you mouse over a picture or when you look at the properties of the picture.  Similarly, metadata is currently being captured every time you tweet and this could be easily expanded to capture more data about your tweet.

This metadata could include:

• Geolocation
• Time
• Application
• Reach
• Influence of tweeter
• Retweet rank
• etc.

How it works

While Scoble says this could be used to deliver personalized advertising to the originator of the tweet, I say it could be used to deliver targeted advertising to anyone interested in the content of the tweet, and search would help to deliver these tweets to interested parties.

An advertising model could be introduced that instantly generates: “undertweet advertising”

Say I tweet, “I think the Droid will pose significant competition to iPhone [and link]”.

My tweet could be targeted for advertising based on the included metadata and the content of my tweet.  When someone mouses over the tweet they would see a link that says “Use this code for 25% off Droid at Verizon” or even a video about the Droid.

The advertiser could simply set criteria for keywords (used in the tweet), location, sentiment (love, hate, rocks, sucks, etc.), reach (based on the size of the network), users influence, etc. and when the criteria are matched the “undertweet advertisement’ is instantly placed.

So what does this have to do with Retweet?

Twitters native RT feature allows original RT to be passed along with its metadata, and the old system would assign a new set of metadata for each RT and this would ruin the advertising model.  This is why I suspect that while search may be part of the reason, advertising may be the main reason.

Costolo says this is advertising that we will love; I am not so sure.  What do you think about all this? Let me know here or tweet me @andrewmueller.

Sponsored tweets have arrived in earnest and are creating quite a controversy.  People are very passionate about this topic and view it as either a great thing or something that will send Twitter to the grave.  Ultimately the effect will probably not be so extreme but sponsored tweets will likely have repercussions of varied strength across the entire Twitter ecosystem.  Stakeholders include: advertisers, spokespeople, users, and the platform itself – the question is how will this play out and how will these stakeholders be affected.

The latest sponsored tweet program is brought to you by IZEA and has some high profile advocates and spokespeople already signed on.  Basically, the sponsored tweet program works by aligning advertisers with “spokespeople” who would send out “approved” tweets in their behalf.  Anybody can sign up to be a spokesperson, but the compensation for sending this tweet varies by the amount of influence the spokesperson has.  Factors like Twitter Grade, # of followers, follow/follower ratio are considered to arrive at a value for a tweet by a specific spokesperson.  If you would like a more in depth description, Jennifer Van Grove in this article for Mashable did a nice job of explaining the new IZEA program.

I know there are many people in the twitterverse who are excited about the opportunity to earn money by sending sponsored tweets, and these are people whom I greatly respect.  And why shouldn’t they be excited?  They have worked hard to cultivate a following and to provide value to them, and believe they should be able to get paid for their work.  Many say that they would only accept sponsorship opportunities from companies and products that they would evangelize regardless of the pay.  They say that it is important to maintain their integrity and credibility with their followers. This makes me wonder how many products or companies are exist that I feel so strongly about that I would organically evangelize – I can think of 3, 4, possibly a dozen if I really thought about it.  So how likely is it that I would be able to match these natural affinities to a paid sponsorship opportunity? Probably not that frequently.

This type of sponsorship done with integrity is perfectly legitimate and ethical but its ultimate effect is a far cry from unpaid evangelism that charismatic brands organically generate.  The very fact that someone gets paid to take an action, alters the actions that they will take. The very fact that they are earning money by promoting a brand affects their opinion of the brand.  It is how the subconscious mind works and part of human nature (we have good feelings for things that benefit us).  Integrity in respect to sponsored tweets may be more difficult to maintain than many realize.

So how does this affect the advertiser? Transparency is a feature of this new sponsored tweet program; disclosure is mandatory.  How will viewers respond to a sponsored tweet?  Will they value it as much as a non-sponsored tweet that evangelizes that same product, service or company?  Will it inspire the same gut feelings in the mind of the customer, and have the ability to align groups that would naturally evangelize, or will everyone want a part of the pie and those who don’t get a piece because there isn’t enough go around become resentful?  Will sponsored tweets generate backlash and negative sentiment if seen as an attempt to purchase favor?

In order to understand the true value to the advertiser one must consider what a follower really is and how they follow.  Following is really a misnomer.  We don’t follow people on twitter any more than we follow a TV or Radio station.  We tune in from time to time and hear what’s on the air, but for the most of us we miss most of what has been broadcast.  Yes, it is possible to go back and look at recent tweets from any unlocked twitter account but how often do we do this?  TV and Radio advertising work because they have large passive audiences to which the advertisement containing a carefully crafted marketing message is repeated over and over again.  Twitter is an interactive experience the audience is actively scanning for information and all tweets are fighting to be noticed.  There is no benefit of visual or audio technical events to catch the viewer’s attention.  How comfortable would a spokesperson be with posting a sponsored tweet over and over again?

This begs the question of how this affects personal brand.  How will yours be affected if you choose to broadcast sponsored marketing messages to your followers?  There is no one answer for this.  It is unique to the person and the gut feeling that their audience has about them and the method and frequency that that person chooses to broadcast the messages.  For some I suspect it would damage their brand, for others it would have little effect and for a few it may positively affect their image.

Sponsored blogs have been around for some time and after an initial negative reaction have been largely accepted as an honorable way to earn money for ones efforts.  People use this as a justification for the efficacy of sponsored tweets but I feel the analogy fails.  A sponsored blog usually contains a banner and link but rarely does a blogger incorporate a sponsors marketing message into the body of their blog.  Blogs are fundamentally different than tweets – Tweets are broadcast in real time and appear in your stream.  Blogs are visited either at your leisure or through RSS feed that you read at your leisure.

All this leads me to believe that sponsored tweets that include a specific value proposition and call to action (direct marketing) like “25% off for the first 100…” would the most effective, acceptable and offer the greatest value to followers.   Additionally, advertisers love analytics that can quantify the true ROI of the campaign and direct marketing type efforts are easiest to measure.  I guess it would be possible to cultivate sponsored conversations on twitter but this could backfire if the spokesperson is not knowledgeable about the product and aligned with the values of the brand.

I could be completely wrong, and if I am please tell me so, but it seems to me an advertiser’s would benefit much more by focusing their, energy, creativity, and dollars at cultivating organic word of mouth that will yield a long term boost in brand sentiment than the short term effects they could achieve through a paid word of mouth promotion.  It certainly will be interesting to see how this plays out over time.

And finally, the other big question is how all this will affect twitter as a communications platform.  What will users think and how will they react if brand messages coming from their friends start to account for a greater percentage of overall message volume?

I realize that this post raises more questions than it answers and I hope you take the time to comment and discuss these questions and more.  Thanks for reading.