Now that we know the basics about location based social networking, the various platforms, and which services are shaping up to be the leaders, (check out last week’s post if you missed it) what can we do with them? Yes of course ‘we’ as the general population can use them to check-in, gain points, read and leave tips, and connect with our friends and community, but how do ‘we’ as marketers utilize this fast growing social trend to connect, engage, and gain consumers? With rewards of course! Lets look at how Foursquare is being used by forward thinking brands who have already jumped on the location bandwagon.

Pennsylvania

According to TalentZoo’s blog Beyond Madison Avenue, the great state of Pennsylvania is partnering with Foursquare to attract vacationers to visit PA this summer. “The Fantastic Roundtrip-a-Matic” campaign is targeting young travelers, and attempting to encourage them to travel. The $1.5 million campaign being promoted through web ads on travel sites provides 20 trip itineraries for visitpa.com. The promotion offers 100 Foursquare tips to attract travelers to various PA hot spots. Virtual badges have also been created that offer rewards and discounts to users depending on the amount of times they visit recommended categories: historical, dinning and shopping. The campaign is also utilizing a Facebook photo contest where the grand prize is a free hotel stay. Another tourism promotion utilizing Foursquare is for the City of Chicago, where users are challenged to recreate the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Winners receive two Southwest Airline tickets, hotel stay, and museum passes.

Mashable

One of our favorite blogs, Mashable, not only writes about Foursquare, but will now be partnering with Foursquare. The “Explore your city with Mashable and Foursquare” campaign will offer insider tips and recommendations when you check-in to various places. Reporters, editors, and employees of Mashable post all tips and recommendations, offering their guide to cities across the country. Perhaps in the future we will see Mashable badges as well.

Starbucks

Starbucks is currently the biggest brand embracing social media, employing Facebook, Twitter, and now Foursquare. Last week at the Mashable Media Summit, Starbucks’ Vice President of Brand, Content and Online Chris Bruzzo said last year’s free pastry day attracted more than one million people to stores. The news spread solely through their social media pages for Facebook and Twitter. Other successful Starbucks social media campaigns include the Tax Day green initiative, which encouraged customers to bring in their own coffee cup in exchange for free coffee. The MyStarbucks Idea campaign was also successful, generating more than 80,000 ideas through Twitter. In fact, Starbucks has so many Twitter followers that it was one of first companies to try out Twitter’s promoted tweets ad platform. Now Foursquare will get its turn on the social media promotion rollercoaster. Starbucks is the first company to offer a nationwide Foursquare deal. Currently on Foursquare, Starbucks rewards frequent customers with Barista Badges. Their new Foursquare deal presents mayors of individual Starbucks shops across the country with the opportunity to unlock the Mayor Offer. The Mayor Offer gives mayors a money-saving perk for their frequent store check-ins. The deal: “As mayor of this store, enjoy $1 off a NEW however-you-want-it Frappuccino blended beverage. Any size, any flavor. Offer valid until 6/28.” Tristan Walker, the head of business development at Foursquare, believes Starbucks is innovative, relating and rewarding loyalty through social media. Many brands can learn from Starbucks, and I’m sure the new nationwide deal will open up possibilities with Foursquare, and encourage other brands to follow.

Bravo & Sephora

NBC-owned Bravo is partnering with Sephora and Foursquare to create a new badge, the Bravo Real Housewives Badge. Users who unlock the badge have the opportunity to receive a $100 gift card to Sephora at select stores in NJ and NY over the next four weeks. The reward works like this: Bravo or Sephora will tweet mentioning to show up at a specific store, and the first badge holder to show the manager their badge wins the gift card. Ellen Stone, Bravo TV’s senior vice president of marketing, says that the badge reward gives participants their own real housewives moment. This integrated approach is engaging and positively reaches their target.

TLC

TLC and Foursquare are partnering up to offer tips and badges for summer fun. Users can earn the TLC Summer Badge by checking into any TLC summer-tagged locations, incorporating zoos, amusement parks, swimming pools, barbeque restaurants, and additional summer fun locations. Other badges include Cupcake Connoisseur and BBQ Pitmaster, which can be earned by checking-in three times at official related locations. TLC is not the first television station to make use of Foursquare. The History Channel revealed a Foursquare campaign a couple of months ago to promote their American history series America, The Story of Us. Users who check-in to various US cities receive historical factoids about their location, and can unlock the limited edition History Channel Badge.

Other brands making the most of Foursquare: Jimmy Choo, Cynthia Rowley, Dominos, Wendys, and CNN & World Cup. Whew, that’s a lot of brands teaming up with Foursquare. You may be wondering, is Foursquare even that popular yet? The answer is yes, and growing at an astonishing rate. Foursquare is gaining around 15,000 users per day. A tweet from Foursquare recently stated that there are more than 10 check-ins per second, which means 36,000 check-ins per hour, and 864,000 per day. Twelve check-ins per second will bring the total to 1 million check-ins per day. Wow, just in January Foursquare was averaging 1 check-in per second, look at the location based social network now.

Although Time thinks Foursquare is one of the worst inventions of all time, I along with many others love it. I’ll admit, at first I thought Foursquare was slightly creepy, allowing my friends to keep tabs on where I was at all times. Many Foursquare-user-wannabees have the same privacy concerns, but there is hope, especially after exploring the privacy-related options. Foursquare gives you the option of publishing your location to Twitter and Facebook, it is not required at all. In addition, you don’t even have to tell your Foursquare friends where you are by un-checking the ‘tell my friends’ option when you check-in. This option allows you to still gain points and badges, but publishes ‘off the grid’ next to where you are, instead of the location name. Earning points, badges, and mayorships encourages users to participate in Foursquare check-ins. I believe this is only the beginning of Foursquare possibilities. With more brands signing on, and badge and mayor rewards increasing, Foursquare is definitely climbing to the top of the location based social networking trend, and perhaps even becoming a key social media platform joining the ranks with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In my opinion, brands need to jump on the Foursquare bandwagon, and use it to engage, listen to, and gain consumers.

What types of rewards would you like to see? What other brands do you think should join Foursquare? What are some other cool Foursquare promotions going on? Let us know in the comment section, we love hearing from our fans! I’m going to go take advantage of my Mayor of Ashworth Creative status and request the rest of the day off; do you think that’s a good reward :) ? If you have a Foursquare and want to check out what Ashworth Creative is up to, friend us! We can always use more friends!

Last week was Mashable Media Summit 2010, an all day event sponsored by Mashable and CNN in honor of Internet Week New York. Here is a recap in case you missed it. One of my favorite interviews was between Mashable’s Editor-in-Chief Adam Ostrow and Foursquare’s Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, thus inspiring my post this week.

Many of you already know about Foursquare, but for those of you who are slightly behind the location based social networking trend, let me fill you in. Location based social networking utilizes mobile GPS technology to encourage interaction between people and local businesses while rewarding users. According to the Foursquare site, it is a “cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. Foursquare aims to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.”

Foursquare is not the only social networking platform of its kind; other popular location based social networks include Gowalla, Yelp, Brightkite, and Loopt. So which one is the best? I came across a few surveys that may be helpful in determining which service offers the best experience. In week 18 of Mashable’s weekly Web Faceoff series, Foursquare was pinned up against Yelp and Gowalla. The results? Foursquare won with 1182 votes, Yelp came in second with 661 votes, Gowalla in third with 509 votes, and 203 votes were tied.

Another study conducted by uTest surveyed respondents about their experiences with Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite. The survey asked respondents to report bugs and answer questions related to six attributes: ease-of-use, location accuracy, opportunity to earn deals, status features, friend connectivity, and social media integration. In terms of bugs, Foursquare had the least with 177 reported, Gowalla in second with 316, and 377 for Brightkite. Respondents stated the top three important attributes of a location based social networking service are easy-of-use, location accuracy, and connectivity with friends. How did the results pan out? Foursquare was in first place for all attributes except location accuracy, where Gowalla won the vote. Gowalla mostly received second place, and Brightkite was the least favorite coming in third four out of six times.

One more interesting study I found covered a location war between Foursquare and Gowalla at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. Attendees of the music festival used these location based social networking platforms to check-in to festival areas, find out where friends were, gain points and special badges, and leave tips. Social analytics platform Viralheat found that Foursquare had the most social mentions and gained the most users over the course of SXSW.

In my exploration of location based social networking it seems users prefer Foursquare. After signing up and testing out Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and Brightkite, my favorite is definitely Foursquare; Gowalla was too intricate, Yelp didn’t give any rewards, and Brightkite was just plain confusing. I now have six mayorships and seven badges on Foursquare, including the Super User Badge! Now I wish I could get more friends to join me (some of them think I’m crazy).

Do you think location based social networking is just a fad? It is useful, fun, weird? What is your favorite platform, Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and why? Let us know in the comment section, we love hearing from everyone! Stay tuned for next week’s blog post; I’ll be exploring how brands are already using Foursquare deals!

As the new intern at Ashworth Creative I have been given the task of handling all things social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and this blog. Part of my daily routine consists of keeping up to date with all of our favorite bloggers. As I was reading through the hundreds of new posts this week, I came across an interesting trend: a battle over the life of social media.

According to the blog Duct Tape Marketing, social media doesn’t matter anymore. The blog is based off the Duct Tape Marketing book by John Jantsch, which claims to give simple, effective and affordable small business marketing tactics. John claims that small businesses are lacking in the adaptation of social media, agencies are over-adapting to social media, and in reality it’s all irrelevant. He goes on to say that the reason why social media doesn’t deserve the hype is because it doesn’t exist beyond a label. Social media was mislabeled, and really it is part of the new way of marketing; listening to and involving consumers. Social media tools, plans, agencies, departments, and experts are drawing focus away from marketing strategies and tactics. Instead of wasting resources on the hyped-up social media trend, marketers should be focusing on engaging prospects, customer experiences, collaboration with communities, and fusion between offline and online activity.

So right about now I feel pretty useless, but as I continue reading through the blogs the life of social media (and my job!) starts looking up.

I came across a post from Brian Solis in honor of National Small Business Week. Brian claims that social media in small business in anything but small. He discusses how social media is helping small, local, and emerging businesses increase visibility and value. People and businesses are connecting, consumers are participating, and customer-bases are unifying all from opportunities created by social media. Results from a study published by the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business and Network Solutions shows interesting statistics about social media adoption among U.S small businesses. According to the study, the rate of small businesses adopting social media has increased from 12% to 24% over the last year. More interesting statistics from the study: 61% of small business owners use social media to identify and attract new customers, 75% of those surveyed have a company page on a social networking site, and 45% expect to see profits from social media integration over the next 12 months.

Now I’m beginning to feel better about my love for social media (and the importance of my job!). I disagree with John; I think social media does still matter, and can be used to reach and start the conversation with your consumers. However, it is important to note that social media alone can’t be your only marketing strategy. Social media can be utilized as a supplement to other strategies such as search engine marketing, optimization, traditional advertising, public relations, and other marketing tactics. Brian found fascinating statistics about the use of social media in small businesses, and made an interesting point: social media help businesses and people connect. If your business doesn’t have an online presence, you might as well not exist. This online presence doesn’t just include social media, but a website, searchability, general contact information, and perhaps even some multimedia. The Internet is the first (and probably only) place consumers go for information.

Even Facebook is becoming a search engine, and not only for people but businesses too. According to Eli Goodman, a blogger for SearchEngineWatch.com, Facebook hosts 600 million U.S. searches per month! Currently the majority of searches on Facebook are for people, but Facebook can further develop their search technology so that when an individual searches “cars,” a list of their friends’ “liked” related pages such as BMW or Toyota appear. This type of social search doesn’t exist yet, but as consumer behavior changes we may see Facebook redefine search and become a key search market player.

All of this social media buzz may seem overwhelming to you, but have no fear Ashworth is here to help! I came across a blog post by Michele Linn from MarketingProfs Daily Fix . She gives some great tips to remember when you consider starting a social marketing plan:

(1) Start small. Don’t jump into every social media vehicle at once, you will be overwhelmed. Try setting small goals: check out other blogs first, try writing possible blog topics, observe how others are using Facebook and Twitter, do some research on your target market to see where they are interacting.

(2) Realize opportunity cost. Starting a social media campaign is time consuming, and sometimes hard work! You will have to spend hours researching, developing, and maintaining your presence.

(3) Get others to help you. Have a group of people at your business help maintain your online identity. Or hire outside marketing agencies (like us!) to design and develop a strategic online marketing plan. Once established, think about hiring someone internally to keep your online presence going and up-to-date.

(4) Commit. Once you have your website, social profiles, and online existence, you must keep it going. Engage and interact with your consumers, keep information current, and grow your customer base.

Want some more tips? I found a post on Mashable.com that describes 6 tips for effective recruiting on social media sites. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook, we are always posting useful and interesting information. What do you think about the importance of social media? Should marketers stop using these vehicles all together? Do you think social media is effective? What do you think could make social media more effective? Any comments, suggestions, questions? Let us know what you think, we love hearing from our fans! Until next time, keep tweeting, liking, and posting, it’s good for you :)