Foursquare fights fake friends
Popular check-in application Foursquare is facing a problem that has long bedeviled social networks — spurious friend requests. And it’s dealing with violators by putting a cap on them. Users now have a limit on the total number of friends they can have as well as the number of friend requests they can send, a change first noticed by AboutFoursquare.com. For the average user, this may not be an issue: Most users don’t want thousands of people knowing where they are at any given time. So the policy is likely targeted at businesses looking to take advantage of creating a profile on Foursquare. Some companies have been randomly sending friend requests to thousands of Foursquare users, like Bastardjeans.com, which currently has 61, 923 friends. Other advantages include being able to know where these users are from their check-ins, as well as being able to send them messages, since many Foursquare users share contact information with friends.
La m?thode infaillible pour r?ussir sur les m?dias sociaux enfin d?voil?e | Courir Longtemps
Si vous avez déjà mené quelques expériences pour votre entreprise sur les médias sociaux, vous avez pu constater que ce n’était pas si simple. Vous n’étiez que 4 à la flashmob que vous avez organisé sur le parking d’Auchan, et dans la foule du samedi matin, personne ne s’est rendu compte qu’il se passait quelque chose. Votre lipdub sur une version remixée de Licence IV , pourtant censé exprimer toute la convivialité de votre marque, n’a fait que 17 vues sur Youtube (Remarquez, il valait mieux…). Et vous regardez, éperdu, les compteurs de vidéo virales qui dépasse les 100.000, les 1.000.000, les 10.000.000 de vues parfois. Et vous aimeriez bien que cela vous arrive à vous aussi. C’est un truc que seul les vrais gourous du web comme moi connaissent, et surtout qu’ils ne s’échangent qu’entre eux. Alors ce soir, je vais te livrer ce secret. La mnémotechnique, ce n’est pas nouveau. Si avec ça ils persistent, on en fait des professionnels, en ajoutant alors de la difficulté avec les .
Indoor LBS: Foursquare
Indoor location was discussed by Foursquare, Micello, aisle411, TCS, Skyhook, Glympse, and others at the GPS Wireless conference in San Francisco. Nokia talked about their precise indoor location technology based on Bluetooth, which IndoorLBS reported on last year (read here.) Nokia is now in trials in stores where Beacons throughout a store that leverage Bluetooth 4 can send signals to mobile devices with Bluetooth 4 and identify a user's location to within 10 centimeters. Devices that have Bluetooth 4 include the iPhone (see here). With that level of precision, a vendor could present the mobile user with a promotion on a specific product when it is right in front of the user, and the offer could be targeted to shoppers based on past purchases or other factors. When the customer reached the checkout stand, the discount could be applied automatically, said Marc Kleinmaier. FourSquare thinks indoor location would benefit its user experience.
Twitter Testing Geo-Targeting Ads | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD
Foursquare Blog
Presenting: 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media
Samir Balwani is an emerging technology strategist at Morpheus Media, a firm specializing in Social Marketing, SEM, and SEO. You can follow him on Twitter @samirbalwani and get his newsletter. As we battle a global recession, corporations are looking for new ways to sell their products and engage their consumers. Many have turned to the Internet, with Social Media in particular, to market their goods. 1. Who doesn't know about the "Will It Blend" series on YouTubeYouTube reviews ? Blendtec leveraged YouTube's subscriber base and tried something fun and original. Lesson: Social media marketing doesn't always need to cost a lot of money. 2. Recently, Burger King has really been pushing the envelope with their marketing. Sadly, the application was shut down as quickly as it started by Facebook, citing privacy concerns. Lesson: Successful and viral campaigns don't just test out social media, they jump in it. 3. Starbucks has also embraced Twitter, you can see their stream at @Starbucks. 4.
Google Latitude Adds Checkins
Google's location-sharing app, Latitude, has just added the ability to check in at a specific business or other location. In the past, users simply pinpointed their location on a map. The difference seems minute, but letting users check in at a "real place" is an important part of Google's overall strategy. As Google Latitude engineer Joe LaPenna blogs, "Until today, sharing my location let friends and family know if I was across the globe or in their neighborhood. And real locations mean real advertising opportunities. Here's the app in action on an Android phone: Latitude is adding a few key components to its checkin offering, too. Here's a demo of how checkins will work: Checkin apps have been of particular interest to Google for some time.
Promoting Products Using Social Media - Advertising
Now, companies increasingly are running online ads that focus less on pitching their products than promoting their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. The ads, which have menu tabs and increasingly resemble mini-Web sites themselves, allow users to click within the ad to see a brand’s Twitter messages or Facebook wall posts in real time, or to watch a brand’s video content from YouTube — all without leaving the Web page where the ad appears. A recent online ad for Mrs. Although Internet users rarely click on an ad to be taken away from a page — only one in a thousand do so, according to Google — they could engage with all those tidbits in the Mrs. And engage they did, according to Flite, the media and technology company that produced the ad. Consumers on average spent 30 seconds interacting with the ad, compared with an average of what, according to Google, is just 11 seconds. On the Kontera network of sites — which include those for the magazines U.S.
