For now, I am still in the Little Rock airport, where my flight is delayed.  I am hoping to make it to Austin in time to pick up my badge and registration materials tonight, and get a fresh start in the morning.  It will be a busy five days if I am going to try to stick to a semblance of this schedule.

According to the site, Foursquare “is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things.”  Well, that explains it.  To put it more plainly: Foursquare is a social media application that allows for users to share their current location (businesses, restaurants, services) and offer tips about that location for other users.  For each check-in, a user is given points.  If you are the user that checks in the most at a particular location, you are deemed the “mayor” of that location (a title that can be stolen by the next person who checks in more frequently than you).  Some businesses are even giving “mayor discounts.”  Users can also be granted “badges” for doing interesting things at interesting places.  Yes, this is very vague.  I don’t exactly understand the badges yet, but per the Foursquare site:

“Badges are little rewards you earn for doing checking-into interesting places.  For example, staying out late on a school night or frequenting too many karaoke bars.  We’re constantly adding new badges and would love to hear your suggestions.

“A lot of our badges are tied to venue “tags”.  People use tags to describe the places on foursquare (e.g. jukebox, pool table, fireplace, pizza, etc)  Without giving away too much, here’s a few suggested tags you can add to your favorite places to help unlock badges :  airport, college, douchebag, food truck, frat, gallery, gym, karaoke, movie theater, photobooth, pizza, playground, socialite, sorority, tourist, etc.”

The honor of badges has even spawned an offline business called Nerd Merit Badges (brilliant!) that recently received approval from Foursquare to sell these badges for people to wear on their clothes, backpacks, etc. (there is even a velcro sash for attaching badges your laptop).  I am starting to see how this could be fun.  But, I am a bit of a nerd, too.

Admittedly, I haven’t used Foursquare much.  Yet.  I signed up when I first read about it;, but in the beginning, the cities were limited to only larger markets.  And although I could have still used it in Little Rock, it just felt pointless since no one else was really using it around me yet.  Recently, the service opened up to every city and we started to see some Little Rock users popping up.  So I spent some time checking it out.

The more I poked and prodded Foursquare, it first seemed that in order for Foursquare to be relevant, the user must route their updates through their Twitter feeds - a place where everyone is already hanging out.  But then I realized that the benefit of Foursquare over Twitter is that you can do a location search to find information about the place that you are or want to go.  Wait, isn’t that how we use Yelp, too?  Oh, but Yelp doesn’t have that game aspect and the nerdy-cool badges.  Ok.  So, I need Twitter, Foursquare and Yelp?!

Then, on top of it all, thieves are tapping into Foursquare to learn when we are home and when we are not?  Do we really need all of this?

For those of us who like to share our experiences and let others learn from our experiences: yes, we will use each and every one of these services.  For now.  Until the next iteration comes along and ties it all together and adds a new aspect.  We do this because it fun.  Because we like to help others out.  And because we are nerds.  But that is cool, right?

And that is the point of Foursquare: sharing, having fun, and giving the nerds something else to do.

Foursquare, here I come.

“As part of White House’s commitment to make government more accessible, the Economic Report of the President is now available as an eBook for your Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble nook, Sony Reader and a number of other devices. We are always looking for ways to bring people closer to their government through new technology.”

The @whitehouse tweet:

“A first: Curl up by fire w/ the Economic Report of President on Kindle, nook, Sony Reader.”

This White House has done more to engage the public in its processes than any other before it: Twitter, blogging, Facebook, an iPhone app, and now books for ereaders.  They have embraced this era of transparency and opened the doors for everyone to enter.  Regardless of political affiliations or presidential popularity, the effort must be applauded.

Today, when the ratings for the Super Bowl were released we find that with 106 million viewers, it was the most watch telecast EVER.  So, was Pepsi smart to sit this one out?

Watching the Super Bowl has always been a social event: friends gather, eat, drink, boo and cheer. The advent of social media made our parties grow exponentially over the last couple of years as we interacted with those we knew online in addition to those watching the game with us in person. Last year, 12% of Super Bowl viewers were online during the game, according to Mashable. But this year, rather than having to search out the pertinent discussions on Twitter and Facebook separately, communities have developed around areas of interest, be it sports, food or advertising.  Hashtags are now used more consistently, making search for relevant commentary outside those communities easier, too.  With these community hubs and hashtag prevalence, our online interactions have gone from just the people we know (and the people they know) to introductions to people, content and views we might never have stumbled upon before.  And just when we thought we couldn’t be more connected to the world.

I didn’t want the Super Bowl fun to end last night. In years past, I have only watched the Super Bowl for the commercials, and even then become bored by the second half. Last night was different, it was bigger and it felt like my world expanded just a little bit more.  And that is always a good thing for the curious being that is me.

For fun, here is my favorite commercial of the night.  Although, as it turns out, it has been around for a few months, last night was my first viewing.

“The mail-order service, which finishes the testing phase on Monday, allows women to rent dresses from notable fashion designers like Diane Von Furstenberg, Hervé Léger and Proenza Schouler for roughly one-tenth of what they would cost to buy in a retail store.

“The rentals run $50 to $200 for a four-night loan and are shipped directly to the customer’s doorstep. After wearing the dress, she puts it into a prepaid envelope and drops it in the mail. Dry cleaning is included in the price, but damage insurance costs $5, and in the case of outright destruction of the dress, the renter is responsible for the full retail price.”

This is pretty exciting.  Granted, rental of dresses has been available for sometime.  But local rental selections aren’t always the best and there is that whole physical shopping thing to deal with (I am almost exclusively an online shopper).  An online rental that allows for easy returns is definitely a turn on.

The ladies who started this business are smart: they are only allowing for limited “membership” at this point.  When you make something exclusive, not only do even more people want to participate, but it also assures that you can walk into a party and know that not everyone there will have seen and shopped the same dresses you did.  As the business starts to take off and membership grows, I would like to see an ability to “register” your dress for the event to which you are wearing it, effectively blocking anyone else from renting that same style for the same event.  I also hope that they will incorporate customer reviews of the dresses to help those on the fence as to a particular style decide (I love this feature on Zappos.com).

I signed up to be put on the waiting list for membership at Rent the Runway.  Sigh.

“Approximately 25 million Tweets are posted every day; more than 5 billion have been created since Twitter’s launch.

“Facebook users are even more prolific in aggregate: Forty-five million updates are posted there daily. In May, the last date for which we have data, YouTube announced that 20 hours of video is uploaded to its servers every minute. That’s more than three years of content being uploaded to YouTube daily.

“As the barriers to media production fall — cameras in virtually every cell phone, video cameras in iPods, text messaging as a publishing platform — this content tsunami is growing ever taller”

Lists allow for those you trust to create a filter of all this data, by category, for you.

And, for those that follow Twitter through desktop apps like Seesmic and Tweetdeck, they are working to integrate list following into their applications (Seesmic actually already has; Tweetdeck is still working on it).

Check out the Stone Ward Staff Twitter list.

“Each day on the website, Sprinkles announces a secret word, such as ‘ganache,’ or ‘bunny,’ or ‘tropical,’ or ‘love,’ and the first 25 or 50 people to show up at any of its five stores and whisper that word get a free cupcake.

“‘On Facebook, we can ask our customers what’s the next location they want,’ Nelson said. ‘What do they think of our next flavor? It’s an amazing way to communicate with our fans.’”

This is exactly how small businesses (or even businesses in general) should be using the social media channels: (1) not just pushing information out to their fans or followers, but providing them with a benefit for “friending” or following them, (2) engaging them in dialogue and asking for their opinions, and (3) giving them a reason to come back to your page again and again (or keeping them from “hiding” your brand’s updates from their news feeds.

Social media channels allow small businesses, that can’t afford a website or advertising to drive customers to a website, the opportunity to set up their own space in an existing community.  Increasingly, consumers are searching out their favorite brands on Facebook and businesses that are not there are missing the chance to connect with people (and all their friends).

One local small businesses that is using social media well is The House (on Facebook with just over 1300 fans) and @TheHouseBar (on Twitter with 136 followers).  The House uses these channels to update fans/followers on changes to the menu/hours, scheduled events and when they reopened after some remodeling invited just its Facebook fans to check it out the day before the official reopening.  I don’t think that The House even has an official website: on its Facebook page, the Twitter page is listed as its web address and on its Twitter page, the Facebook page is listed as its web address.

I am sure there are several other local small businesses using social media in a smart way; please send me any examples and I will post them.

Thank you, @DanaDB, for the LA Times article link.

In a presentation that we gave on social media last week, someone asked, “what is the biggest mistake companies are making in the space right now?”  Our response: “Not being in it.”  Social media and mobile communications really go hand-in-hand as social media gets more social with constant improvements to mobile devices.  Mobile applications–like those available for the iPhone–are the perfect channel for getting in front of customers.  So many brands are just dipping their toe in social/mobile media, timidly trying it out.  Brands should take a dive in and consider an investment in an iPhone app.  Yes, there are 100,000 apps available in the app store, but many consumer brands aren’t there yet.  Just being there will put you ahead of the competition in this social/mobile space (and don’t forget to put a little promotional support behind it; just putting it there will not guarantee it will be found by your customers).  This is not a complete list, but some things to consider when developing an app for a brand, it should: (1) do something cool that others haven’t done yet (or do it in a different way; improve on what is already out there), (2) provide a clear benefit to the customer, not just benefit the brand (example: Pizza Hut offered 20% off orders placed through iPhone app), (3) be free (example: not like CNN), and (4) give the customer a reason to use the app over and over (hint: constantly update/improve the capabilities).

Check out a demonstration of the Pizza Hut iPhone app here:

What pizza brand doesn’t get it?  Domino’s.  Everyone remembers the embarrassing “food defiling” video post by Domino’s employees.  It took Domino’s several days to respond, they signed up for a Twitter account to deal with the consumer response (note that they didn’t ALREADY have a Twitter account), and produced a stiff teleprompter-read video from their corporate office.  In those same days, Pizza Hut put out an ad for a Twitern.  Pizza Hut definitely gets both the digital and social space.