My Media Exposure Continues: Interviewed about Foursquare Launch in Raleigh
Yesterday I was contacted by Tyler Dukes from News 14 Carolina, our local cable news channel, requesting an interview about the launch a Foursquare, a location-based social network. The program has rolled out in a number of larger cities, and just added Raleigh to its roster of nearly 40 cities. Here’s the text of the complete article below, and here’s the link to read it in context. And, yes, they did call me Jeffrey, but I told them to, and that’s a different story.
RALEIGH – Jeffrey Cohen was surprised to learn that the social media application Foursquare was launching in the Raleigh-Durham area Thursday.
Just two days earlier, Cohen had been selected as one of five beta testers for the application, which combines elements of social networking and friendly competition to help users explore their cities.
After downloading Foursquare on their smartphones, users can search for anything from restaurants to entertainment venues, then “check-in” when they visit using their built-in GPS. That information is passed along to the user’s friends, along with any reviews or recommendations they might have.
“It is essentially a location-based social network,” Cohen, a marketing and social media strategist based in Durham, said.
But in a phone interview Thursday, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley said the lead time for the beta testers shouldn’t have been too shocking, given the size of his team.
“It’s four guys sitting around a table,” Crowley said with a laugh. “It’s less formal than you’d think.”
After starting with an initial list of places, Foursquare depends on users like Cohen to add to its local directory, essentially creating a crowdsourced database of — ideally — every business in the area.
“Once we have enough content, the users fill in the blanks,” Crowley said.
Users have already begun this process in 23 cities around the world, from Atlanta to Amsterdam. But Thursday, the start-up firm announced it was expanding the service to 15 additional places, with Raleigh-Durham among them. The service adds cities based on user feedback on its Web site.
Location-based social networks aren’t necessarily anything new. Services like BrightKite and Loopt allow users to share things like photos or places they’ve visited. The microblogging service Twitter recently announced it would add location services as well.
But for Cohen, the defining feature of Foursquare is the competitive element. Every time users check in with the service, whether at a bar or a city park, they receive points. Those points are compared to other users who visit the same place, creating a virtual hierarchy.
“It actually has a leaderboard,” Cohen said. “The more times you check in, the more time it accumulates.”
The user with the most points — or “mayor” in Foursquare parlance — is selected for each location every week. Users can even cash in their titles at participating businesses for freebies or discounts.
“Today I became mayor of Open-Eye Cafe of Carrboro,” Cohen said. “The leaderboard is one of the key things. It adds a competitive element to it.”
Crowley said points can also earn users specialized badges created by Foursquare programmers and often recommended by users.
For example, he said, “if you’ve been to too many karaoke bars, you get the Don’t Stop Believin’ badge.”
The element of competition and the chance for reward has so far kept users coming back.
“It’s really sticky,” Crowley said. “Once you start using it, you get addicted to it.”
And Cohen can attest to that.
“I feel like I need to drive around and go to places to check in to be on the leaderboard,” he said.
But Cohen points out that the service is mostly limited to smartphone users. Although users can access Foursquare on the Web, it has limited functionality compared to the mobile version. Crowley said that’s intentional.
“What we do is build things for phones to make cities easier to use,” Crowley said.
As with all location-aware programs, Cohen said a lot of people are hesitant to broadcast their whereabouts to a large audience. Often, he said, some of the same concerns come up.
“Do you really want people to know where you are every minute?” Cohen said. “If you check in at a coffee shop, people will know you’re not home.”
But he points out that users control what information they put out and who will see it.
Crowley said that control is important to users, and his small team has focused on this element since they first began Foursquare in 12 cities back in March.
“You don’t want everyone to know where you are all the time. You want some of your friends to know where you are some of the time,” Crowley said. “That’s what we’re trying to help you do.”
Pizza Tracker
This past weekend the kids and I ordered pizza for dinner. I wanted Papa John’s, but the kids insisted on Domino’s because of their thin crust. This was the first time I had ordered pizza since I moved to my new house, so other than my general preference for PJ, it really didn’t matter to me. I didn’t know where either store was located, but I figured I would order online and it didn’t really matter.
I have never ordered Domino’s online so it was my first experience with the above pictured pizza tracker. As soon as I placed my order, the pizza tracker told me my pizza was being prepped. Two minutes later, it was in the oven. I was so intrigued by this system, I began tweeting about it. It happened to be a pizza-eating kind of night and lots of people were tweeting about pizza.
Others began to respond to my pizza-tweets (pweetzas?) asking about the social networking component. Since my tracker was not sharable, or social, I posted a link to a flickr photo. This was the only way I could share the progress of my pie. It made me think that Domino’s could create a social network around pizza where you could not only talk about your favorite toppings, but it would have a feed of your orders and real-time tracking. Might work better as a Facebook app where you could share the same data within Facebook. There are a few apps already, but they only address virtual pizza, not real pizza.
After about 7 minutes, my pizza was out of the oven, boxed and out the door by my delivery expert, Bryan. The term delivery expert got a chuckle from some twitter followers. The best response to me was from @fmedlin: just got a tweet from domino’s that @dgtlpapercuts had a third slice.
The breakdown of the pizza tracker happens once the order leaves the store. The driver does not have GPS in his car, which as a former delivery expert, I can understand. The last section of the tracker just shows me that my pizza is on the way. There is no way to update anything beyond that it left the store and it’s on the way.
There is a real missed opportunity for customer feedback. Since they know I ordered this pizza online, and I am probably watching the tracker, why don’t they provide me incentive to update the tracker once the pizza arrives. The driver, er, delivery expert can say something like, “It would be a big help to us if you can mark the pizza delivered on our website. You will get a coupon to use on a future order.” This can add a missing piece of data to the delivery metrics, and can better track the delivery experts.
So, in the end, the pizza tracker is cool for the customer, is not social or sharable, and does not capture a critical piece of data for Domino’s.
And, just in case you were wondering, we ordered a medium with black olives and bacon for my kids and a medium sausage and mushroom for me.
10 Commandments of Facebook
Earlier this week, Cracked.com published a list of the 10 Commandments of Facebook. They followed the common practice of putting out a numbered list, which is something that is a known strategy to getting dugg and driving traffic. While the point of the article is to make snarky comments about people’s Facebook use and some of the ridiculous things that show up on the site, these 10 Commandments really are a list of best practices on Facebook. While not being holier than thou, this is primarily how I function in Facebook.
If you want to read their humorous, and not entirely appropriate for children, descriptions of the most egregious abuses of each of these commandments, here’s a link to the article. And in the interest of full disclosure, I read Cracked magazine as a kid, and I can’t believe it is still around.
1. Thou Shalt Not List Every Movie, TV Show, Band and Book You Have Ever Heard Of In Your Profile
2. Thou Shalt Not “Poke” Indiscriminately
3. Thou Shalt Not “Friend” People You Don’t Actually Know
4. Thou Shalt Not Use A Wall As A Private Messaging Function
5. Thou Shalt Not Join A Billion Groups
6. Thou Shalt Not Use Stupid Apps
7. Thou Shalt Not Give “Gifts”
8. Thou Shalt Not Contact People From Your Distant Past While Intoxicated
9. Thou Shalt Not Update Thy Status Message If Thine Status Hath Not Changed (Or If You Have Nothing Clever To Say)
10. Thou Shalt Not Act Like You’re On MySpace
White People Like Facebook
from the site Stuff White People Like:
Social Networking sites have been embraced by white people since their inception. Because these sites use profile pages, white people can more efficiently judge friends and future friends on their taste in film, books, music, and inspirational quotes. Advanced level white people, fearful of being judged on their tastes from last week, will often only list one or two ironic things as their favorites. For example under music they would simply list “P.M. Dawn” or under films they would choose only Armageddon. In both cases these ironic answers serve as protective shields from the harsh gaze of other white people.
Triangle Tweetup 4.0
Yesterday evening I went to the latest Triangle Tweetup in Durham. This event of local people connected through Twitter was held at iContact. It was nice that the event on this side of the Triangle. It was smaller group than last time, but it was still nice to see friends from my social media circle. The interesting part of the event was that we were connected via a video stream to an Atlanta Entrepreneurs Group and Robert Scoble. He is one of the Twitter celebrities. He is following over 21,000 people and often answers the question, how do you follow so many. He scans tweets quickly and determines that most are not useful to him. He views Twitter as a big social experiment and he just follows along.
The Atlanta folks were all too new to Twitter to even have any questions, so the event was a bit light on interactivity. After we turned off the stream, we talked about other micro-blogging platforms. While people appreciate the open source model of identi.ca, because of the community on Twitter, no on has really latched on to other services. It will be interesting in the future to see what causes the mass of early adopters to move and follow their communities off Twitter. I was chastised a bit for using ping.fm to broadcast my updates to multiple platforms, and did not follow up by participating in their communities. I check Twitter frequently, and don’t check the others enough to warrant posting there. I guess I need to find a new way to update my status on Facebook.
The rest of my photos are here on Flickr.
What I Am Doing This Weekend
Normally on Monday morning, people chat about their weekends. This time of year, people might go to the beach, or cut the grass, or even just chill with friends and have a cold one. Well, my Monday morning chatter will be about starting a new company. From scratch. Over the weekend.
I am participating in Start-Up Weekend in Raleigh, at the Edge Office. Local techies, entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs (a word I thought I made up until I found it on Valleywag) are gathering for the weekend to create a company, or companies, depending on how many good ideas are presented.
If you’ve never wanted to start your own company, or you’ve never passionately pursued your own ideas, or you’ve never thought it would be fun to hang out with like minded-people for two and half days straight, well, it’s hard to explain the allure. I think it sounds like a lot of fun. And I’ll get a t-shirt.
Here’s a local story about it, and CNBC is expected to be in the house providing coverage. I’ve been on cable tv before, but as a pitchman, not a news maker.
As you can imagine, from such a connected crowd, there will be lots of twittering, plurking, identica-ing, brightkiting, flickring, blogging, facebooking and friendfeeding. See you on the internetz. Maybe we’ll come up with the next big thing.
Triangle Tweetup
Last night I went to a Social Media event, called the Triangle Tweetup. It was a gathering of like-minded people interested in Social Media, but self-selected by being on Twitter. It was good conversation, both in presentation mode and in mingle mode. I saw some old friends (in internet time that may mean someone I met 2 weeks ago) and made some new friends (people I have been following on Twitter, but never met in person). There is a growing Social Media community in the Triangle, and it is exciting to be at the beginning of this local movement.
Here is a link to Flickr photos tagged for this event.
Thanks to Wayne Sutton for organizing and to Jeff Tippett and Lisa Creech Bledsoe from Calvert Holdings for hosting. And finally, congratulations to Abbyladybug for tweeting more than me (and everyone else in the room) with the #Triangletweetup reference to hashtags and winning an ipod.
Raleigh Tweetup
This morning I went to a local Social Media group that has formed around twitter and SocialCarolina.org. Wayne, Francis, Ryan and Ginny were there, and I am now following all of them on Twitter and they are following me. It was definitely a new media event, as everyone had laptops, Wayne twittered the topics of conversations, plus we had a video camera running and tapped into ustream. This allowed other local folks (over 20 of them) to watch and listen to the conversation and join in via twitter.
It is always interesting to be the marketing guy in a group of techies. It allows me to bring a different perspective to the conversation.
Twitter in the NY Times
from the NY Times:
ON Aug. 1, Nick Starr, a 27-year-old computer consultant from Tampa, Fla., was tapping text messages into his cellphone, telling hundreds of his virtual friends about his day.
Mr. Starr was using Twitter, a relatively new program that allows its mostly young members to post “miniblogs” — running diaries about the mundane details of their lives, in entries of barely two sentences.
Social Networking Likely to Grow in Businesses
While social networking sites may primarily be the domain of students and recreational use, enterprises can be expected to climb aboard as well, dignitaries said at the Nokia Mobile Mashup 2007 event in Palo Alto, Calif.Mobile Mash-Up emphasized mobile computing, social networking, and extending social networks to mobile devices. Although many of the estimated 200 persons in attendance acknowledged participating in the LinkedIn business networking site, only a small handful used the more recreationally oriented MySpace site. But as the “millennial generation” leaves school and enters the workforce, businesses will have to accommodate them by deploying the social networking capabilities they are used to, analyst Ben Bajarin, of Creative Strategies, said in an interview.