Inside a venue

To promote the launch of IE9 at SXSW, design company Vectorform has built a neat way to visualize Foursquare checkins. In their ‘world’ called Foursquare Playground, you find yourself surrounded by the nearest venues, which enables to to get an overview of what happens around you. With different animations for each type of venue, this should give you an idea of the type of neighbourhood you’re looking at as well as the level of activity in that particular area.

In a very game like layout you can spot new venues around you, each depicted by a building type that would suite the type of location as defined within Foursquare. (Work, home, park, etc.) This whole thing is supposed to be a showoff of the HTML 5 capabilities in IE9 and if you’re not working with this browser Chrome and Safari will do as well. (More support coming up…)

Matrixlike visualization

User information

I would say the downside of this visualisation is twofold: it’s a pure grid-like visualization, while your neighbourhood is probably shaped in a more natural form.

Combine this with the fact that not all blocks in your real life neighbourhood are venues, or that a lot of venues appear twice (or are in the same building) and this makes for a map that doesn’t really represent the place you’re looking at. That aside: it does look really nice and the whole thing might remind you of the Sim City games. Check out the video at the bottom of this article to see the introduction to Foursquare playgrounds by Dominic Espinosa from Vectorform.

# of people present

Aggregated Data

Even though it has it’s shortcomings this is in my opinion a good example of what you can do with aggregated data and yet another sign that data-visualization has a bright future. Hovering over the venues, which vary in size depending on how many checkins it had, will present you with a brief description of the place.

Venues that currently have people checked in will display a number, so you can immediately see where other Foursquare users are around you. Clicking on a building will then display more information, such as an animation of the people that are there. A chest and a painting on the wall are available to see the tips and current mayor of a place, with people that are checked in walking around the place.

Venue information

Bing

Foursquare Playground has, of course, integration with Microsoft’s Bing and could benefit from the rise of Foursquare users and perhaps a way of mapping the rather abstract layout onto Bing maps. This way it could be a friendly and appealing way to view the hotspots around you, although I wonder what the developers are expecting from smartphone users, which seems like the logical platform to do anything location-based.

If this is to be more than an IE9 showcase, there would need to be ‘an app for this’. On Android please, thank you.

I’ve been discussing the possibilities for location based surveys already. As especially reviews are tied to a certain place it’s only natural to at least offer surveys with a location component. The new company Qriously is now offering such a thing: short location based surveys. With this offer they hope to set up a new mobile revenue model and ride the ‘quick insights’ hype on mobile devices.

The question to why people would even go to take a survey is solved by them in to ways. First and foremost they offer their questions as inapp advertisements on mobile devices.

Funding

The location based public opinion tool has recently raised 1.6 million US dollars in a funding round and the seem keen on offering app developers a new way to make money on free mobile apps. As the questions will be displayed as in-app advertisements, much like is already custom on for example Android or Apple’s iOS, they’ve got the question how potential respondents would even get to the survey covered. The actual ‘survey’ consists of a question that can be answered on a slider scale. When answering, they naturally don’t have the leave the application, so this shouldn’t be too much of an extra step in answering questions. As an extra incentive to answer a question Qriously also offers an insight in how others have answered compared to yourself.

the Qriously in-app content

If the questions that people get to answer will remain fairly location based this would give answering some extra relevance to the respondent. We could say that this is the second solution Qriously has found to the engagement problem. Offering relevant surveys to people does good things for the response rate and if they manage to keep questions not only location-dependent but also really relevant to that location this could seriously help completion rates and deliver quick insights. Perhaps the only remaining question is how many people will really want to answer a question while they are in the midst of playing a game or checking their email. The short, easy, format of the questions could be the right way to go at this problem, though especially if they would integrate ways of interacting with the actual game or other type of application, for example in the form of credits. This is both to the benefit of the respondent, who gains an extra reward as well as to the developer who makes his revenue model more usable. Of course Qriously would gain from more integration as well, as completion rates could rise, they would have to weigh this against downside: the extra efforts such an extended app would take.

(image taken from the Qriously website)

Now that ‘location based’ is becoming more and more of a big thing, the question what we can actually do with it still remains. Just ‘checking in’ to certain places is not much of a business model, as TechCrunch pointed out a while ago. There may just not be enough to it to keep it entertaining enough even though since then offers that go with a check in have increased, also outside the United States. An answer may lie in offering additional services that seem to come to mind naturally when thinking of topics that are relevant to know when at a certain location, such as reviews.

Content is still king in the sense that tying data to certain place (and time) would require the content you’re actually offering to be relevant to that place. Being a mayor in Foursquare is another thing, but there could be much more, that could be way more interesting. Yelp is one of those services that combines reviews with locational data, not a very strange move, since they actually started out as a review service instead of the other way around.

Gaming and promotions

When discussing new possibilities for location based services with some friends we came across the option to do promotions tied to a certain spot. These are of course already available in simple forms, getting a discount for checking in to a location is on of the most ‘pure’ forms of this idea. Going beyond this there is the notion that, coming back to reviews, location based data would be ideal to offer location based surveys or polls to people. This would be an intuitive way to ask for customer experience, to see how and when the atmosphere around a landmark changes to the crowd, and things like that.

As a way to reward people for certain actions, such as taking such a survey a thing that comes to mind is a gaming element tied to points. Whether or not this should be tied to a real life currency is not all that important for the description of this idea. Because I went on to think that maybe a neat crossover of Foursquare or another service like it with Layar would be really cool. Layar offers an extra dimension to reality, where people can load certain ‘layars’ over the camera view on their mobile phone.This way they get an augmented reality to view where the nearest landmarks, possible dates or Twitter users are, for example.

Wouldn’t it be something to tie this in to our idea of location based reviews here? Implementing a layar of our own for this purpose, so people can spot the places where they can do a review survey. A virtual layer over the real world so you can spot your (survey)opportunities through Layars augmented Reality… Of course this this is just a very rough idea, and probably it would be better if this game would offer different opportunities to move up in the game than just posting reviews at locations, but it does give a good view of the amount of possibilities all these new ‘social’ tools give us.

As you might know I have a column in the Dutch radio program “Echte Jannen”. With the start of a new year, I had to do some trend-watching of course, especially after covering the topics of last week in the New Year special (Dutch) the previous day. So here are a couple of things that I think will be important for the coming year, in the Dutch speaking part of the internet and beyond.

1 More apps, less browser

Of course a development like this is relative to other things, we won’t see less browser based content in absolute figures, but the relative number of apps and their influence will grow. Due to the rise of mobile the rise of apps will go on in the next year, not even counting games and the quite recent growth of the number of newspaper applications. Apps are an ideal way to be able to charge for content as well as to avoid browser compatibility issues.

2 Professionalization of advertising

Especially Android users will be familiar with advertisements for mobile, but developments will go further than that. Due to professionalization social media will become a normal part of the marketing mix, you can expect a big rise in new marketeers, who we will suddenly call ‘online marketeers’ as well. That’s not a bad thing per se, as long as you keep risks like too narrow a focus on specific online knowledge in mind.

Besides this, the professionalization will have an impact in the opposite direction for bigger companies. These will put even more budget aside for more daring online marketing actions. Guerilla or viral is not dead for online niches, but it’s the big multinationals that will fuel a continued growth here. This means there are chances for larger new media advertisement companies if you aim at small and medium businesses or, if you want to aim at the multinationals, for niche, daring, advertisement agencies.

3 Twittercode

Your complaints may not be any different from those you express at the water-cooler, we will see more Twittercodes at companies. A Twittercode in this sense is a social media code of conduct for employees, to restrict them in what they can say about, for example, their employer online. In the US we can see that restrictive codes are put to the test, and we might see companies abandoning (some) for common sense. In the Netherlands though, or Europe as a whole, we will see the first examples of Twittercodes for employees soon enough.

4 Data visualization

The data that is available online continues to grow, that’s no secret. Data will be more complex as well, especially if the linking of data becomes the semantic web. this could mean a golden age for journalists, visual artists or any other job position you can come up with in this area: if you know how it ‘works’ online, there are huge opportunities. We need people that can process the huge complex amount of data for us. Newspapers are struggling to keep their subscriptions up, but they might be fighting the wrong game if what they want to do is interpret information.

5 Social Games

There will be real social mobile gaming, think World of Warcraft meets Farmville, on your mobile. The only remaining challenge is making this in usable concept, and we will soon see solutions that try to solve this question.

6 Prosecution of a blogger

See also ‘Twittercode’ above. This might not be a real trend, but we will see the prosecution of yet another blogger, commenter or tweep due to something he or she has said online.

I had this excellent post by Tim Phillips on Research-Live bookmarked for quite some time, and actually there is not too much that I can add to it. His notion that ‘game changing’ has been rapidly on the rise was something that I noticed as well. I hope he doesn’t want to slap me for the title I’m using for this article (must be really good SEO for me) but I was reminded about his article when I was using Google trends to review some hype words.

It’s actually quite hard to do that because most word combinations like ‘pro active’ have been in use for quite some time, sometimes in a different context as well. A methodology like scrum, on the other hand, is mostly used in rugby to describe something different and doesn’t show up on the radar as clear as ‘game changer’. As Tim showed is has been rapidly on the rise, thus raising the question if there is really anything game changing or if it’s maybe just good old marketing.

Using ‘game changing’ in your bingo game at works seems to have been pretty pointless before 2005, and game changers themselves only appeared in 2007. What is interesting is the ‘game changing’ rapid way these words seemed to have spread.

Images are screenshots taken from Google Trends

If you wondered about promoted tweets and how well they fare: they’re super effective. Or so says online brokerage firm Zecco. In comparison with tweets posted on their normal account they’re seeing an increase in engagement of 50%. some specific tweets even saw a much larger increase in engagement, up to 300% more.

Obviously this raises the question what the original level of engagement was, and what level of engagement can be expected of tweets ‘just’ posted on a normal twitter account of a firm. On the other hand, it’s a good sign for ‘promoted tweets’ as a services that Zecco views it as an important increase, so Twitter is on to an important new asset here, despite critiques on the new promotional scheme.

Coming back to the specific services Zecco offers, it says it plans to use the Promoted Tweets platform (more) to share investment-focused resources. They also want to send out alerts such as ‘most traded’  to provide real-time intelligence from the Zecco community. More about the success of promoted tweets on Techcrunch here.

And if you want to read more on the what, how and why of promoted tweets you can read the guest article by Silvia Todorova on my own blog. You can find her article ‘Does advertising on social networks have to be at the cost of user experience?’ here.

Market research bureau Multiscope will end Visiscan, its service that measures the reach of Dutch websites. Visiscan has been running for ten years and offered Multiscope’s clients a benchmark in reach, branding and evaluation of the top 1000 websites in the Netherlands. The service was most well known for it’s yearly ranking of the top sites.

The ranking has been under attack of various Dutch marketers in the past (website in Dutch) and indeed it seems that making a ranking that everyone agrees upon is near to impossible. Even with explanations from the side of Multiscope there remained questions about certain sites being perceived as ranking either way too high or too low (in Dutch), which disappeared from those spots later on. In any case the list was much valued and debated every year, but increasingly seen as superfluous, ranking just an increasingly steady top list every year on the one hand while not listing small sites by definition, which could mean the neglect of interesting niches.

In a press release Multiscope indicates (Dutch) that the market for web-reach research has stabilised while they, have seen other activities grow. Aiming for growth, they mean to focus more on their panel and software activities and new international opportunities. Services for existing Visiscan clients will continue up to the end of this year and 2010 will also see the last of the now traditional ranking list.

At school you learned to write of course just making words but, at least here in Holland, also how to write neatly. Just writing sentences in the neatest, most beautiful way you could in a notebook. If you would do that really well, the teacher would give you a colourful sticker in your notebook to award your good work. The real fanatics would of course want a sticker like that every time! A nice way to make learning something, writing in this case, something fun. You can find similar gaming element online, which combines the urge to save things and the urge to compete into one serive: Foursquare! Visiting your favourite bar is nice, but if you are a really frequent visitor you would of course like to hold on to that ‘mayor’ status.

Since I wrote the initial version of this article, things have already started changing more in the general direction I’m describing here. But maybe that’s all the more reason to put it here as well. One of the nicest aspects of Foursquare is of course connecting with friends and seeing what they’re up to, but the one thing that makes it so attractive is the badges system and the fact that you can become mayor of a place. Last year, Coen Jacobs made more or less the same observation when he was putting up Brightkite against Foursquare and Gowalla. (in Dutch) This element of play makes a service like Foursquare or Gowalla something people want to keep on using: it adds a playful element of competition and it looks good as well.

Of course this is not a new idea in the world of marketing: having the consumer play, having people earn points and thus creating loyalty has been existent in different forms for a long time already. The nice thing for us here, however, is that this is an online service that is used (moslty) on mobile devices. It is perhaps one of the first really successful location based applications, although you might wonder what exactly is the goal of all this: does it have any use at all? A business model to this service may not appear to be all that clear, but this doesn’t stop the service from growing rapidly, making the first commercial initiatives to be based on this platform approach rapidly as well, and actually we’re seeing that happening right now.

Opportunities.

The fact that the play element is well used to keep people engaged and even to attract new users is of course really great, but what can Foursquare do with all these users?

The answer to this question is twofold. First there is that element of play itself: collecting badges is an incentive and it can thus be used to guide visitors to certain places. From the start Foursquare noticed this opportunity and actually used it at it’s introduction at SWXW by handing out special badges when ‘checking in’ to certain spots, venues, at this event. Imagine how cities can use this to guide tourists to certain spots, perhaps sending them to new interesting places instead of the usual hot spots! This way, cities, festivals or brands can make a Foursquare into something that actually guides the movement of people. (Of course Fsq. would earn money in this case by allowing special, custom, badges for certain places.)

Secondly there is another, maybe even simpler way of cashing in on the number of users by thinking about the venues themselves. Because if you are a frequent visitor of some place, why wouldn’t you be thinking about getting a discount, for example? With this idea in mind Starbucks is handing out custom badges as a start, but says it wants to think about using Foursquare to test ‘alternative reward strategies’.  This is indeed not all too far away from collection points or coupons somewhere or perhaps even more like collecting that sticker in your notebook!

When we realize that the internet is still changing every day and that the mobile web is really in it’s infancy then we can expect to see more and more of these new initiatives arise very quickly from now on. Location based is no longer just a nice thought, it’s really something that can be used and can be useful!

And don’t forget: don’t cheat with your checkins!

This article is loosely based on an earlier article (in Dutch) that I’ve written for marketing blog Bijgepijkerd.