What Location Based Services Need To Do Next

While location based services like FourSquare and Gowalla have been all the buzz this past year, their continued success is likely going to depend on how easy they make it for consumers to “check in” and interact with their service.

Checking in with your LBS of choice (or, for many, your LBS’s of choice) is currently a somewhat onerous act: you need to pull out your phone, find and open the app, find the check-in tab, wait till the app loads the geolocator, find your location from a list of nearby locations, figure out if your current location is in there or if the geolocator has messed up (again!), select your location, decide whether to write something for twitter and hit enter.

Which is all well and good if you’re alone, but if you’re with people, it’s pretty awkward.

LBS’ are great for conferences and large events like SXSWi, where everyone has a vested interest in finding each other, which is why those events are many people’s first encounter with LBS apps. Upon returning home, however, they quickly discover that it’s both inconvenient and socially awkward to whip out the phone and check in everywhere they go. And features which may seem useful down in Austin don’t really translate to the daily grind back home.

But all is not lost.

As the FourSquares and Gowallas grow, they’ll need to figure out ways to make it easier to check in. That can be anything from auto-check in alerts you set yourself (e.g. “You are at Starbucks again? Do you want to check in?” to sponsored auto-check in alerts (e.g. “You are at Starbucks again. Do you want to check in and save 50 cents?”)

Accuracy is another issue: GPS is still really awful in many parts of the country and it’s not clear how long these services can keep relying on their users to make up for that. (Or not: one of Gowalla’s big downfalls is that unlike the scrappy FourSquare, it relies exclusively on GPS and so winds up stopping people from checking in at home or at work because the GPS insists that they’re at some place a quarter mile away.)

But GPS is only going to improve and in the interim, the services may consider making broader use of maps, the way Minnesota-based upstart Toodalu has done or increasing the radius of the check-in as my friend C.C. Chapman has suggested.

And of course, LBS’s value as a teenager-tracking device for parents have yet to be fully appreciated.

Circling back though, it’s the ease of use thing that the people who make the apps are going to need to figure out. Make it as close to one-touch as possible, and you’ll get all the people outside the tech/media world, people who are more likely to be at the supermarket on a Sunday afternoon than at some trendy restaurant enjoying brunch.

And give them a reason to want to check in that goes beyond "because it shows I'm social media savvy" and/or the whole mayor/gameplaying thing (it's going to be next-to-impossible to steal the mayorship away from early adopters, or collect more Chinese lanterns, given that many of them have a year or two's head start.)

Otherwise, it’ll just be one more toy no one’s really sure what to do with.

UPDATE, AUGUST 2010: Thanks to an app called Future Checkin, FourSquare users will indeed be able to check in automatically. TechCrunch gives the details here.

Sarah Palin Is Your Social Media Role Model: What We Learned

This past Sunday, I co-hosted a panel at SXSW Interactive with Brian Cain of Campfire (and Blair Witch Project fame) on Sarah Palin’s successful use of social media. For whether you agree with her or not, the fact that she can post something on Facebook and get 3,000 comments in 3 hours is pretty remarkable.

We opened it up to the audience as a conversation and let everyone weigh in. We had an incredible range of opinion (and a Texas-sized hat tip to Rory Cooper of the Heritage Foundation for weighing in with the conservative POV.)

What we all managed to agree on (more or less) was that Palin’s social media strength had three components:

A) A Consistent Message:  She does an excellent job of staying on point on not straying from her core message and storyline.

B) A Strong POV: Palin does not try and please everyone. She does not worry about what people outside her core constituency think and has very definite opinions on things that she is not afraid to both express and defend.

C) A Feeling Of Familiarity:  Palin’s supporters often view her as “my friend Sarah, the politician.” You can see this in the very personal tone of many of the Facebook comments, which are written as if the poster was speaking to an old friend. (NB: This is a not uncommon scenario with celebrities of all stripes in social media, where the intimacy of the medium creates a false sense of connection between the celebrity and their audience.)

We then turned the question over to the audience: what would it be like if brands with loyal fan bases took a strong POV on issues, rather than trying to please all constituents. We wondered what the fallout would have been if, say, Southwest Airlines told Kevin Smith that he was welcome to fly Delta from now on, because they had their policies in place for a reason, that it wasn’t fair to the other passengers to have someone that large impinging on their space, and while they were sorry he was embarrassed, he knew their policy going in, thank you and good luck.

It’s an interesting exercise and no one was quite sure what the response would have been. Curious what you think would have happened: can brands take the sort of strong stands politicians do?

Note: I am not suggesting that this is what Southwest should have done or that it would have been a good idea. The exercise is merely to ponder “what if brands took strong stands like some politicians do?” And while you may be thinking “it’s pretty obvious you're not advocating that Alan”... well, you’d be surprised.

SXSW Panel today: Sarah Palin Is Your Media Role Model

If you are in Austin, check it out in room 19B at 3:30 PM Sunday, March 14th.
Here's the link

I'll be doing the panel with Brian Cain from Campfire and will definitely bring up NASCAR Blindness.

RSVP Site for Hive Awards

Just a note for Toad Stool readers, to let you know that if you're planning to be in Austin at SXSW for the Hive Awards for the Unsung Heroes of the Internet, you can sign up at the official RSVP site hosted by KickApps and make sure you're not shut out.

Hope to see many of you there.

Possibly Addictive, But Worth It: If I Can Dream

I'll start this by admitting that I'm good friends with the partners at Poke and that I do a lot of work with them. But I had nothing to do with their latest project, If I Can Dream, and it's well worth checking out, for the breakthrough factor, if nothing else.


If I Can Dream is an online reality TV show that tracks 5 hopefuls: a musician, two actresses, an actor and model -- who live together in a Hollywood Hills mansion and watches as they try to break into show business.

Produced by American Idol creator Simon Fuller, the catch here is that the reality is online at all times: you can see in every room of the house and follow the actors around from room to room 24/7. You can also spin the camera to look at virtual versions of their rooms, where the Pokesters have created digital versions of the actual furniture on the other side of the camera complete with photo albums.

And since it's 2010, you can also connect with the characters on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Fuller and 19 Entertainment have a history of tapping into the popular zeitgeist, and they've put a lot of time and effort into this.

Curious to hear what you all think.

Interaction Burnout

It’s hard to believe it was only around two years ago that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh started following and (more importantly talking to) people who mentioned Zappos on Twitter. This was more or less around the same time that Frank Eliason started tweeting for Comcast, talking up-- and calming down-- people who were having trouble with their service installers.

What followed was a mad rush to social media, where the goal was to obtain the level of seemingly effortless one-on-one interaction, brand love (and glowing press) Hsieh and Eliason were able to create for their respective brands.

And despite the fact that most brands are still in the consideration stage when it comes to social media, the brands that have dipped their toes into the water are already driving us towards something I’ll call “interaction burnout.”

To put that in human terms, imagine needing to have a full on conversation with everyone you met over the course of your day. Not just a “nice morning” or “looks like rain” exchange, but a full-on conversation with the gas station attendant, the dry cleaner, the security guard, the guy in the next cube.

Now imagine that almost every one of these conversations feels forced and stilted.

Because that’s what it feels like with so many brands. They all want to talk to you. Show you some pictures. Get you to play a game with them. And you know, we’re all pretty busy and there are only so many unnatural conversations we can have during the day. And so suddenly we’re wishing they’d just run a banner ad or a TV commercial and be done with it. Anything that we could just read or look at without having to stop to talk to them.

Much of this unnecessary patter is due to the unrealistic expectations brands (and the agencies and consultants that enable them) have for social media. Where, in a misguided quest for easily understood metrics, success has come to mean x number of Twitter followers or y number of Facebook Fan Page updates each month

Period.

Which basically recreates the old push media model, only with different media vehicles and ignores the presence (or lack thereof) of any actual interactions.

But there’s another side to all this I keep thinking about too. Which is that the early social media success stories happened because they were both unexpected and real. I mean most people were pretty shocked that the person tweeting as “Zappos CEO Tony” really was the actual CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh and not some behind-the-scenes PR person. The fact that Hsieh was actually  funny and had real personality only added to the mystique.

And that’s the thing: most companies don’t have a cool, funny CEO. Or one who is as comfortable being out there as Hsieh is. Brands, especially bigger ones, don’t really know how to have actual conversations (or their legal departments won't let them) so they resort to the sort of fake party banter (“Great! See you there!”) or plastic sales pitches (“Check out our new spring line!”) that only serve to make interaction painful.

We also expect them now. We’re not all that shocked when a brand follows us and then tweets offers at us. Or has a fun-filled Facebook page waiting for us to fan it. It’s kind of old hat and much as we like wasting time on Facebook, we don’t have time to interact with every single brand we like, especially if we’re mainly there to interact with our friends.

And, as we all know, Your Brand Is Not My Friend™.

So what to do?

Well, social media, to repeat one of my favorite mantras, is not a series of websites with no discernable revenue streams. It’s a behavior: the ability to interact with a site or application and have that interaction recorded, publicly, online.

And that behavior is not going away.

But rather than force consumers into awkward conversations or pseudo conversations, thus guaranteeing that they’ll do their best to avoid you, maybe the thing to do is just listen. To respond when appropriate and not try and butt into the conversation every four hours because it’s an easy way to justify a community manager’s salary or because you're paying your agency based on the number of tweets they issue.

We also need to realize that the same way most people don’t become the life of the party, not every brand is going to be a wiz at charming customers. And the solution to that isn’t to try and force them to be, but rather to accept that either:

1. You’re going to need to change and that means everyone in the company, not just the intern you hired to run the Twitter feed.
2. You need to find one particular area of social media you feel comfortable with - which might just be a blog or a YouTube channel -- and concentrate on being really, really good at that, especially if it makes sense in terms of who your customers are.
3. You may decide it’s not for you and stick to a 100% traditional paid push media plan. That’s not a great long-term strategy, but it’s a lot better than keeping up a really awkward and uninteresting social media program, thus contributing to interaction burnout.

I’ll leave you with this quote from a smart young guy named Matt Daniels “Marketing has a bell curve–most companies create average marketing and achieve average results.”

Why did we think social media was going to be any different?

What 'Thug Life' Can Teach Us About Twitter (new Ad Age column)

This ought to stir the pot up a little:

This Ignored Demographic Shows What You Can Learn When You Look Beyond Social-Media Elites

While most in the social media bubble would have you believe that Twitter's output consists solely of links to "relevant articles," "breaking news stories," "unique insights" or retweets of all three (along with the occasional "what I'm having for dinner" tweet from the latest Asian-Fusion-locavore bistro) a look at Twitter's Trending Topics reveals otherwise.

While the aforementioned geek patter is certainly in there, it's generally dwarfed on the trending topics list by tweets about Disney Channel stars the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus (put out, one can safely assume, by middle-school-aged females) and tweets from another demographic, twenty-something African-Americans tweeting in what can best be described as ghetto slang. (READ THE REST OVER AT AD AGE)

UPDATE, 2.10.10: The article got picked up by Gawker, where it sits amidst snarky posts on American Idol and Gossip Girl. (All press is good press though, right?)

Super Bowl Ad Viewer

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My friend Ian Schafer turned me on to this Super Bowl ad viewer, courtesy of Forbes magazine. Given how much people like to talk about these commercials, I thought it would be a good idea to add it here.

I'll throw out an initial thought: how many of you, having spent the past year pretty much avoiding commercials of any sort (by using DVR, iTunes, Hulu, etc.) are actually kind of psyched to watch this year's crop since you rarely get to see :30 or :60 TV spots anymore? (And yes, I realize that readers of this blog are way ahead of the curve in terms of media usage.)