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 was pondering a reply to some post and thought it would be better to place it here. As it seems that there is more and more talk about what makes social media really social, I wanted to tell you something about some considerations on calling something ‘social media’. As a Sociologist I never really get why people define things as non-social of social in the context of a society or a community. Societies and communities are social constructs, such is commerce. Yes, the rules in the field differ, to refer to Bourdieu somewhat, and yes it’s the problem that ‘old’ commerce often does not get how to act online, but these are all social construct in a social environment.

The biggest mistake about ‘social media’ is to assume there is such a thing as non-social media. One way or the other it’s quite often ‘all or nothing’ for online marketeers: I was discussing this very thing quite recently actually. Either it’s all “let’s crowdsource your SEO via web 2.0″ or “haha, internet that’s all the same, nothing new, new media is a hype”. Both are short term philosophies.

The question “what makes something social” is a valid question, but I feel it is a mistake to define some types of media as “non social” at least for any kind of media that I can think of right now.

Shame on me for coming up with a word-cloud when everyone else has been bugging you with word-clouds for the past year or so. But still it’s quite interesting to see what I’ve been writing about up ’till now. That sharing is a big thing may come as no surprise, although I wasn’t really aware that I’ve been using that word that often. If you want to know what is going to be really hot this year, then it seems like I predict that ‘Location Based’ and Games are the big thing. At least that is true if you assume that I write about things that are still upcoming.

(click to embiggen)

With the new year just started, we can see that many predictions involve location based services, again. After my last post about visualizations I got some mails and other messages, asking what location based services could mean for the future. Most questions referred to which services were actually out there, so to start for 2011 let´s have a quick look at the playing field as it is today. Here is a quick description of the most important services in the, ever changing, field today.

Google Latitude

Google’s service has been around for quite some time already, basically a web application that lets you share your current location with friends. Google quickly introduced a badge to make your location visible to others beyond your usual friends as well, for example by putting it on your blog. While the service works great, I’ve never been really enthusiastic about it, because somehow it feels too unintuitive in its use. Sharing your location is done somewhat on in the background of your current activities, which does make sense in theory but makes you feel disconnected from the service in practice. With the recent introduction of dedicated mobile application Google could get it right this time, if they’re using their muscle to introduce new and better deals than their competitors.

Yelp

Yelp is originally a review service, that added location based features later on to provide extra credibility to reviews people would put up. As such is it perhaps a location based mashup avant la lettre, even though the process with them was the other way around. While others are just coming up with extra services besides just providing location information just now, or are relying more on third parties, Yelp even offered Augmented Reality features quite early on. A weak spot for Yelp could be that they’re not that well known outside the Unites States. Their site is still quite US focused and the service is only fully available in just a few other countries anyway. On the other hand, their hardly seems to be any competition anyway for review-integrated location services, so you might say the rest of the world is still within close reach for Yelp

Facebook Places

Being originally very US focused it is of no surprise that Facebook has started its Places service in just a limited part of our globe. Along with Google Latitude, Places seems to bet on integration with it’s host service, in this case Facebook, though they do offer a separate (iPhone) app and a dedicated Places page that makes it more intuitive to use. With Facebook’s influence spreading more and more, one can only assume that Places will have a bright future. It being part of the larges social network will give Places an advantage in offering deals, both in the partners involved as well as in offering potential rewards to be used within Facebook itself.

Foursquare

Foursquare are they guys to beat in the game, while not having as many users as either Google of Facebook as a whole, they are the leading company in the location based game. Although they offer the possibility to shops and companies to offer their customers deals when checking in to a location, my personal feeling is that this won’t be enough. Foursquare and it’s competitors will have to more actively pursue deals or other services that they can offer their users. And unlike Google or Facebook, Foursquare is a separate service which would need to add extra use for sharing your location besides earning badges if they want to go really mainstream.

Gowalla

Gowalla is the runner up, or are they..? While having less users than Foursquare, Gowalla users are said to be more involved and as for a setup of the service they offer a more solid looking interface. They recently struck a deal with Disney showing that they’re willing to actively pursue new offers for their users. Just like Facebook and Foursquare (’4SQ’) they’re still quite US focused, despite offering their basic service, like 4SQ, basically just everywhere.

SCVNGR

SCVNGR might not be that well known, not even in their ‘homeland’ the US. They do have quite a lot of support from a variety of different organizations, making this a very interesting service to watch in the future indeed.  Slowly but surely expanding their userbase abroad, SCVNGR is especially interesting because they are interesting for they other side of location based services: the venues.

Besides aiming for basic customer loyalty they offer business owners the opportunity to set up challenges for their visitors. Interesting is the additional fact that they offer anyone the opportunity to set up tracks, where you can earn points by following clues and directions from location to location, possibly accompanied by separate challenges.

Out of the game: Brightkite

Brightkite was in on the game quite early on and now they’re out of it again just at what seems to be the real start for location based services. Instead Brightkite is now aiming for grouptext functionalities as their core business. In an interesting move, the founders of the service that might have started it all are now pursueing a new location based offer, Forkly, offering location services around restaurants etcetera.

On Research-Live Annelies Verhaeghe of InSites Consulting is explaining some of the difficulties that come with doing ‘social media research’. First and foremost notion is that when you’re entering such a new territory is to ask yourself certain questions, the first one being ‘what is really new about this?’. It is important to note that there are actually a lot of similarities to traditional research in this case.

As Verhaeghe points out, one of the key differences is the new unit of analysis. When you’re doing this type of research, I’ve often pointed to the idea that similarities with qualitative research will turn up in what is traditionally seen as a quantitative type of research. When doing social media research, ‘netnography’, will change the units of your analysis to conversations. This exactly the point I’ve made before: doing research on the web will focus on the conversations that people have. You can have a quick look about what I’ve said by having a glance at the slideshow here.

Another important notion is that one of the things that will remain the same is the fact that you have to make decisions about which units you’re analyzing. In everyday research we could call this sampling, and in social media research we can see the same need for sampling. Working at a sampling company I’ve stressed this point before; the fact that the population is online now doesn’t change the need to get a decent sample. Yes, one can just grab from the population in order to illustrate other research and enrich it with examples, but real research will require some sort of sampling just the same.

I would like to add another point to all this, which I’ve already mention in the post I linked here previously:

We have to set up Research and show it is not only possible, but that it works. Do not wait for demand, be the unique company that can supply this extra knowledge.

I truly believe this is necessary; otherwise you could end up with a decent idea that just doesn’t get used. As commenter Michael points out here, with already tight budgets, even a forward thinking manager would want to know what he’s going to spend his budget on.

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.

Plain and simple:

#1:  It’s something online

#2: It’s new

I tweeted these two often seen misconceptions about social media and Dave Witmond replied: ‘3d largest misconception about social media: it’s social‘ . Even though I think this is a misconception indeed, I think it’s included in my two earlier statements. Stating this is pointing to the fact that people seem to believe that this new way is something that indeed new, while it isn’t. Media has always been social! As Dave responds, it’s not the ‘social’ part that’s new: it’s the way of presenting it, the interface if you like.

If you’d like to point to the fact that what people seem to call social media is much faster, more interactive than everything before, you may have a point.  New technology allows for much faster, almost instant feedback, sharing and interaction, but it is not something new! The scope and the way we do it, that is what is new!

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.