4 posts tagged “marketing”

Foursquare is a location-based social game and activities finder that lets users describe and discover activities that are nearby where they hangout.  Played mainly on mobile phones like the iPhone and Android-based phones, Foursquare started by rewarding virtual 'points' and 'badges' for participating in activities.  Frequent visitors to a location could also vie to become the 'Mayor' or 'Deputy Mayor' of some locations and sometimes the venue would reward the Mayor (if the venue was a bar, the mayor might get free drinks).

Foursquare today fomallized thier business program as 'Foursquare For Business' where they actively assist business in setting up loyalty programs based on Foursquare.

Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable wrote an article on it today called "Foursquare Beats Twitter to Local Advertising Goldmine"

Foursquare is something we have been discussing at Tunheim Partners since earlier in the year, and I am certain we will soon start seeing it used as a key tool in local vanue promotion soon.

Facebook is starting beta testing of new search functionality that covers pretty much everything posted by your friends and pages you are a fan of (basically anything that could appear in your feed).

It also covers everything published by anyone who has a public profile or page. This is huge.  This is not only functionality that will be very helpful for the individual casual Facebook user, it will be of immense help to folks who are using Facebook as a research and promotions tool for their cause or business (or meeting their story deadline). They will finally get something more akin to Twitter search but covering the diverse content of FB (Photos, notes, posts, and comments galore!)

Admittedly, search will still be limited by privacy settings, but that is neccasary and does not much dilute this huge step forward.

ONe side effect I can see is pushing folks to establish both a public (marketing) profile and a private (personal) profile so they can have publicly searchable content for the whole community to see.  I'm on the fence about this but leaning against (and which Facebook strongly discourages...mostly by deleting accounts). I'd say, stick with a page for that sort of thing...

(As per usual, they announced it with a random blog post by an engineer at 9:30pm the day before.)

This can't be fully rolled out quickly enough, in my opinion!

I'm hoping they open up public search outside FB (and not just to Microsoft as per one of thier last search partnership deals).  This would make the business and research side of this functionality even more desireable.

(My friend and colleague David Erickson at the e-Strategy blog, has been pining for this for years...so if anyone can get him in the beta...right after they get me in...there will be a bag Twizzelers in it for you...the big bag too...with the ziplock!)

Interesting.  Jennysmith806 (if that's your real name!)  just posted a comment on my post "e-Strategy online marketing site goes live!". 'Her' comment was entirely plagiarized from from an Australian government site called e-strategyguide (a guide to promoting websites).

Jennysmith806 wrote:

Keywords need to relate to your website. Avoid being too general or your listing will get lost in among thousands of other sites. For example, don’t use ‘football’ but rather something like ‘kids football club’; don’t use ‘child care’, use ‘ Richmond childcare’.

It seemed to be clearly a spam comment that got inserted based on the phrase "e-Strategy" in my post.  There is no Jennysmith806 blog on Vox and Jennysmith806 does not show up in a Google search.

Yet there was also no link in the comment and no promotional message.  I have no idea what's going on with this.  It seems to be targeted comment spam with no rational behind it. 'Guess I'm going to have to do some further investigation...

For the past two days ads have been popping up all of the interwebs, on TV and (reportedly) in print for some new series called Scarlet.  Check out the website and trailer. The Web site is very high quality, the ads are on expensive sites (Yahoo, Gizmodo, others), the video is of good production quality and shows up in the usual places, and they list decent actors (Natassia Malthe) and a good director (David Nutter).

Yet the voiceover and actual shots are super cheesey and over the top, it lacks most of the critical details (no network listed), and the trailer scenes seem to make no sense at all (not in a mysterious way - just in a thrown togather randomly way).

It is so obviously a fake or spoof that I have to assume it's a viral ad for something.  What amazes me is that no one has leaked what it's for.  Despite it's cheese factor, I think it;s going to work.  I can't wait to find out who's behind it and whether a (seemingly) large amount of cash and a good lid on leaks can generate guaranteed buzz. I think it can...