ShuttleBox is pleased to announce the launch of Grand Rapids Coney Tour, a website dedicated to finding the best hot dog in the Grand Rapids area.

The coney (or Long Island Coney) was invented in Jackson, MI, its name paying homage to Long Island, New York, where the hot dog originated. GR Coney Tour aims not just to find the best coney in Grand Rapids, but best all around hot dog or hot dog restaurant. The website is user-driven, relying on user reviews and ratings of the restaurants to rank them.

Visit GR Coney Tour at grconeytour.com.

Find Your Tool – Hosted Web-Application vs. Open Source Self-Hosted Solution

Before you can get started actually blogging, you need to find a way to blog.  There are many different blogging solutions available.  As of this writing, there are some clear leaders in the blogging world.  Sites like Posterous and Tumblr make blogging an absolute breeze and offer tons of customization options.  Blogger has been around for over a decade now.  WordPress offers both a hosted and self-hosted solution and, with hundreds of WordPress plugins and themes available, is the most popular solution for serious bloggers.

The best thing about all these solutions is that they are all free. The hosted solutions come with advertising however, typically for the blogging software, but sometimes for third-parties.  If you are serious about a long-term blog, you should likely commit to setting up WordPress on a web host somewhere.  There are many different hosting options available and there are ways to find a good provider without too much effort.  By hosting your own blog, you get to control the features, more easily control the look and feel, and can customize it with functionality you want or need.  The nice thing about open source solutions is that they can be modified to do anything!

If you anticipate needing heavy modifications to get the job done, you may want to consider implementing a custom solution.  WordPress, as well as other open source solutions Joomla and Drupal, can work as content management systems to run your entire site.  Drupal recently started Drupal Gardens, a hosted version of the Drupal software.

Find Your Home – Get Your Domain On

Regardless of choosing a hosted or self-hosted solution, branding is king.  It is important to make sure that your blog is directly tied to your brand, and not to the brand of the software you are using.  Fortunately, all solutions mentioned above allow you to use custom domains for their services.  Using this feature, you can change the domain from something along the lines of yourbusiness.bloggingsoftware.com to something more pleasing like blog.yourbusiness.com.  This can help build trust with your readers, clients, and potential clients, and can even help with search engine optimization.

If you are using a self-hosted solution, you’ll see even more rewards for using the software as part of your main domain, such as www.yourbusiness.com/blog.  Search engines give authority to sites that have been around for a while, have good content, and are frequently updated.  By hosting your blog on your main domain, you inherit the authority you have built up with your existing site.  Use a new subdomain and you start with no authority causing your content to take longer to make it in to search results and pushing it down lower in the result listing.

While it is fine to link to your personal blog on your business site, it shouldn’t be presented as your business blog.  Keep the personal and the professional separate.  Furthermore, when linking to a personal blog, ensure that you don’t have anything showing shady going on.  One business blog I follow, which happens to be a personal blog being presented as the blog for the business, is written on a hosted blogging platform that links the author of a blog to their profile – and the other blogs they contribute too.  It turns out that the author of the web development blog also has a hacking blog.

Remember that your blog is one of many faces you are presenting to the public.  Make sure it is professional and, well, doesn’t link your business to illegal activities!

Find Your Look

We’re back to branding!  Since your blog represents your business, it is important that it matches the look and feel of your site.  Preferably your blog theme will match your site’s theme.  If it can’t do this or you want to make it look different for some reason, at least keep the style the same.  The continuity should be there, with colors and styles being familiar to folks visiting both your main site and your blog.  Just as you wouldn’t change the colors in your logo across mediums, you shouldn’t have a blog that looks completely different than your site.

If you are not hosting your own blog, consider adding links to your blog that represent the navigation of your main site to keep things consistent.  Some folks who feel they have locked themselves into a hosted blog solution (you can always move, but some folks are fearful to do so), have gone to the extent of having their main site match their blog to achieve this consistency between blog and site.

Hosting your blog on your site, or even even incorporating your site into your blog, allows for the tightest integration and most seamless transitions between blog entries and site pages.

Find Your Topic

Always remember for whom you are writing.  It is not you!  It is your readers!  Write what they want to read, not what you want to read.  I read programming blogs, but I wouldn’t dare write about enumerating resource dictionary keys or the benefits of implementing an abstract class in object oriented PHP.  I can see the eyes glazing over right now, so I’ll stop right there and get back to the topic of blogging.  Why?  Because most of our readers and clients are not programmers and don’t want to know anything about programming.  The majority of our readers are business owners who are interested in incorporating technology into their business to improve work flow and business processes – including communicating with their clients via a blog.  They are concerned with the results of what we do, not how we do it.

Another common mistake made by new bloggers is wandering off topic.  You want your blog to be about something. If your business sells pet food, you probably should keep the blog entries about your favorite movie and how to cook the perfect spaghetti sauce on your personal blog.  Loyal readers will follow your blog because the topic is of interest to them.

Conversely, when picking your topic, however, don’t make your focus too narrow.  Using the same pet food business reference from above, you shouldn’t blog solely on the rare Devon Rex breed of cat.  You will inadvertently limit your readership to those who care about such a specific topic and will quickly run out of things to blog about.

Think about radio stations for a moment.  A station that plays every type of music will have few listener, as will a station that only plays music by one artist.  Find a good niche, not too narrow and not too broad, focus on providing quality content, and you’ll be set!

Find Your Voice

Got your blogging software going? Check.  A good home on the web?  Of course.  A fresh and snappy theme that jives well with your brand and main site?  Heck yeah.  A topic you are in love with?  Yup.  Now write!

As we’ve discussed in other articles, it is important to update your content frequently and to follow through on promises you make to readers about how often you will update.  A site that promises weekly updates and hasn’t been updated in three months is as good as dead.  While most professionals will say a blog should be updated daily, most people cannot afford the time needed to support that frequency.

A good blog, in my opinion, will be updated with new content at least weekly.  I’m sure others may disagree, some arguing the need for more frequent postings, and some saying it is reasonable to let a couple weeks go by between updates.  It really depends on what your business can maintain and what your readers expect.  Keeping existing customers up to speed on business happening may not require as many updates as a blog that is trying to increase readership with potential customers.

A new blog doesn’t come with immediate readers.  It is important to spread the word.  Use social media and traditional marketing to share your new blog and the content within it.  This will help to bring in new readers.  To turn these readers into loyal readers, you should give them the ability to be notified of new content on the blog.  As much as one might hope for it, folks won’t be checking out a web site daily just in case there is a new blog entry.  To allow folks to know when there is new content, offer an RSS feed of your articles.  All of the blogging solutions mentioned above have RSS built in.  If you incorporate a service such as FeedBurner into your site (you just give them the URL to your RSS feed), you can receive statistics about people subscribing to your RSS feed and even offer your readers an e-mail subscription of your updates.

You need to bring people into your blog, capture their interest, keep them reading.  Most successful businesses have a blog in some form or fashion.  The key is to not expect the masses to arrive overnight.  It takes time and commitment; if you lack in either one of those, the reality is it may not be worth your effort.  While a successful blog can bring you great rewards, a dead blog can prove to be a hindrance to your business.  No blog is better than a bad blog that doesn’t pertain to the readers or is only updated once every few months.

Are those t-shirts you bought your employees a good form of advertising?  What about business cards and e-mail signature links?  Is tweeting worth the effort?  Being a relatively new business and having only been blogging for a handful of months, I consider these results to be based on a clean slate, not biased by historical efforts or data.  Let’s take a look!

Alexa.com currently ranks the ShuttleBox site at 1,418,571th in the world and 195,308th in the United States.  Two of our local competitors, around for over a decade now, are sitting at 1,002,426th worldwide but only 548,529th in the United States, and 8,509,521th worldwide and can’t even provide a rank within the United States.  It is important not just to bring in traffic, but to bring in the right traffic, and I think we’ve done an outstanding job of that in the past couple months that we’ve started blogging and taking a serious stab at bringing in targeted traffic.

Wanting to know what we’re doing right and where we need to improve, I’ve categorized our traffic sources into seven segments: Direct, Sharing, Search, Social, RSS, Commenting, and Link.  Below you can see how much each attributed to our total traffic.

From where does our traffic come?

Direct Traffic – 32.5%

The trail of URLs scattered around e-mail signatures, business cards, t-shirts, and possibly even a billboard here or there do bring in a lot of traffic.  Traffic is considered direct when someone visits your site by typing in your site’s address in their browser to get to your site.  I’ve long been a proponent of this type of marketing.  The best traffic you can get is from the folks who are trying to get to your site.  They want to get to your site to find out more information about your products or services, to read your blog, to look up your address or phone number.  They’ve found your URL somewhere and are intentionally seeking you out.

I’ve seen a lot of businesses neglect to put their URL on their stationary, advertising, and company vehicles because they figured it wouldn’t be worth it.  Don’t be one of them.  Apart from on your site, anywhere your name or logo shows up, your URL should be right there with it.  It should be a cohesive part of your branding strategy.

Sharing – 31.6%

Most folks using the Internet to market their business are dedicated to social media as one of their primary methods of marketing.  However, there is an entirely different segment that can bring in, in our case, far more traffic.  I call this segment “sharing.”  While similar to social media, this segment is often, but not always, associated with an industry or limited to professionals who have proven authoritative on a topic.

The idea is that after you write a new blog entry (you do have a blog, right?), you share it with associated sites.  For example, our blog has been accepted into Technorati.  When we write a blog entry, it is automatically included in the list of Technorati’s articles.  If someone stumbles upon it there, they may come to our site to see what else we have to offer.  Other examples of sharing sites may include Digg, Delicious, BlogEngage and NewsVine.

Because sharing your content often takes more effort that just a tweet or status update, many people shy away from this approach.  These are not good places to spam, either.  They expect good content from good people who put in an effort.  If one of your articles becomes popular on one of these sites, expect a lot of traffic to be headed your way.

How can you make sharing your content on these sites easier?  We use ByZe.us to share our articles.  While primarily a URL shortening service, once you’ve created a short URL, it allows you to quickly and easily share the page with dozens of social sharing sites.  Full disclosure: we love and use ByZe.us because we made it.  Originally created for internal use, hence the lack of visual creativity, we figured we had no reason not to open up the doors to everyone else.  Feel free to use it if you like.

Social – 12.3%

Everyone has heard of Twitter and Facebook by now, so I won’t dwell on what social marketing is in this article.  However, I find it interesting that this only constitutes about twelve percent of our traffic.  It is definitely worth the minimal effort needed to partake in social media.  It is free, takes little time (depending on your approach), and does bring in a good chunk of traffic.

There are still doubters of this approach, but I also know 1) who they are, 2) that they read our blog, and 3) that they come here from a social networking site.  Interesting, huh?  If you are a doubter, ask yourself if you are willing to throw away a percentage of visitors and the business they bring? While some doubters wraps up their bankruptcies, sell out, or worse yet close their doors for good, others around them have flourished and actually grown during the recession, some of them by 40% or just under a million dollars.  Many of these businesses are moving into bigger buildings, hiring extra helping hands, and are able to offer more enticing wages and benefits.  Which boat do you want to be in?

Granted, this isn’t entirely hinged on social marketing, by any means, but I feel those that are willing to adopt social marketing best represent the mindset of those who are willing to adapt, grow with the times, and keep an open mind.  Old-school business mindsets simply won’t get you anywhere in today’s world.

Search – 11.1%

Search engine optimization is very important.  Why though?  Because it brings people who are seeking out information on a specific topic right to your doorstep.  Someone landing on your site from a search engine should, if the search engines are doing their part well, be faced with exactly the information they were seeking.  This is targeted marketing at its finest!  Granted, it takes some time to tidy up your site but the rewards are well worth the effort.

Recently I’ve noticed a run on sites using some old Microsoft software, the name of which escapes me at the moment (if anyone knows, please comment), that fails to put in any decent metadata.  No keywords.  No description.  Nothing.  Furthermore the first part of the page, just after the body tag, is clogged with a hidden input field that is over two-thousand-ninety-eight characters long!  Considering search engines read the first couple hundred characters of a page for the context of the site, I consider this an epic fail.

The same people who use this as their solution also claim they will update weekly yet haven’t touched the site in months.  They also happen to be some of the folks who don’t believe in social marketing yet visit our blog via a social network.  Go figure.  To succeed in the search engines, you need to play the games the search engines want you to play and you need regularly updated content.  With these two things in place, you may be surprised at the results.

RSS – 6.6%

Keeping your content regularly updated does more than keep the search engines happy; it keeps the visitors to your site happy too.  By keeping the content flowing, you will develop a following, many of which will eventually subscribe to your RSS feed, either via a feed-reader or e-mail subscriptions.  These folks are believers in your business and want to be actively notified when you update your site.  This number grows slowly at first, as it typically takes people a couple of visits to realize that the content you provide is valuable to them.  I’m excited we’re getting any RSS activity so early in the game and look forward to seeing how this plays into things in the future.  What traffic source’s percentages will fall as this percentage increases?

Miscellaneous – 5.9%

Included in this section are links from our other sites, links from comments we’ve left on blogs, and other random links scattered around the ‘net.  Apart from the links on our other sites, these links are practically accidental.  When someone asks for a URL, give it to them; chances are it will be displayed on your profile or comment and will bring in some “accidental” traffic – traffic not sought but of course one is glad to have.

Summary

These are our numbers and represent the game board we’re playing on.  Because your mileage may very, the important thing to bring with you at the end of this journey is the concept that no one segment should be entirely neglected.  Any traffic is good traffic.  Not all segments should be pushed equally however.  Using Google Analytics you can determine your return on investment, be that investment time or money, and come up with a game plan that can generate some serious traffic to your site.

WooRank provides information to improve the readability of your website to search engine spiders, such as the amount of heading tags used, the number of missing alt tags on images, whether or not the page validates with W3C. It alerts you if your titles are too long or duplicated and whether meta description and keywords are missing or too long.

It also provides information about geotagging your page (which is helpful for the Bing search engine) and using microformats to identify your content. Both of these are relatively new topics, but are becoming more recognized and important on the SEO scene. WooRank will also provide information about social networking services linking to your site.

With all this information, WooRank allows you to enhance your web presence and visibility to help meet your SEO goals.

OpenAvanti is an object oriented PHP5 application framework that allows for expedited development by providing a solid foundation. You can download the new release from the OpenAvanti website.

I made mention of hello kitty a few times in my last blog entry as an example of an e-commerce product, which catapulted us in the search rankings. Accidentally, of course. Maybe if we’re lucky, one of those teenage girls or mothers of teenage girls searching for hello kitty sweat pants might need some web development done as well.

We’re not holding our breaths.

IE 6 was released nearly nine years ago in August of 2001.  With how dramatically things have changed on the web in the past nine years, it is hard to believe there are still folks who do still support it.  How long after a new product is released should an old product be maintained by the creators and supported by third-parties?  An equally important question, in my opinion, is how long should software dependent on old technologies be maintained before getting an overhaul.  Technical debt grows exponentially as the years go on, and it quickly becomes harder and less cost-effective to maintain old software than it would be to start over and do things the right way based on current standards and practices.  Read on to view the e-mail from Google.

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

That’s why we’ve composed a list of six features that we think every e-commerce application should have. These features exist to enhance your sales, market your products, increase customer satisfaction and ease of use of the web site. Some of them are so simple and basic, we’re amazed that some sites don’t have them… but we won’t be naming names.

Categories/Catalogs and Tags/Keywords

It amazes us whenever we come across an e-commerce site that doesn’t have products organized into categories or catalogs, and doesn’t have some kind of tagging (or keyword) system to lump similar products together.

Let’s say you run an apparel site. It may make sense for you to lump all your products into several categories: Shirts, Pants, Shorts, Hats and Accessories. You may even break these categories down into Men’s and Women’s, or Adult’s and Children’s for each of the previously mentioned categories.

Why do this? Simple: it makes it easy for people to find exactly what they are looking for. If I’m looking for a t-shirt for my favorite baseball team, why would I want to wade through pages of pants and hats to find it? Worse yet, if I’m a man looking for a pair of jeans, I wouldn’t want to have to click through dozens of women’s leopard print and Hello Kitty sweat pants.

Using tags, we can provide a greater way to lump similar products together without having to have 273 different categories. Let’s say the aforementioned Hello Kitty sweat pants had a tag of both sweat pants and Hello Kitty. Our excited shopper could click on the Hello Kitty tag and be brought to a listing of all products tagged Hello Kitty, including items from all categories (shirts, pants, hats, etc). Similarly, when clicking on the tag sweat pants would show all sweat pants (most likely all from the Pants category).

These features combined provided fast and easy ways for your customers to narrow down the products that they are looking for, and a great way for them to find and buy related products without much hassle.

Product Options

Some products that are sold quite possibly come in one size, one color, one shape fits all. Other times, there are a slew of options that customers can choose to customize their product, such as size, color, material, etc. Sometimes these options add additional price to each product. For instance, a steel handle on a product might cost more than the wooden handle.

A proper e-commerce system should be able to handle these options and their associated pricing an an easy to manipulate (for the customer) and easy to report (for the seller) manner.

The other way (read: wrong way) to handle this is just to create a new product record for each option, but that can very quickly become a nightmare to maintain and just looks silly. Let’s say you have a shirt that comes in 4 different sizes and 3 different colors. That’s 12 different products you have to create when you really just have one product with 12 different combinations. What happens when you notice a typo in the description or the price changes? You have to update each product individually. Now imagine you have 11 different shirts, each with 12 different options. That’s now 132 products that need to be updated when prices change, instead of 11 in an option based system.

So why do some e-commerce solutions not have this feature?

Quantity-based Pricing

In the real world, the cost of producing something usually decreases per unit as the number of units being produced increases (until it levels off). For instance, it’s far more efficient for me to build 300 pens at once than 3 pens. We waste less man hours setting up and tearing down a machine or process, and our equipment takes time to warm up and get to optimal production speed.

If this is true, why would we sell those 300 pens at the same unit price we’d sell 3 pens? Of course we’d make more money, but we’d make happier customers if we provided them a kickback for purchasing more pens at once. Plus, that’s better for us for them to buy 300 pens from us once every 6 months than by 3 pens from us once a week.

Good e-commerce systems provide the ability to sell stock at quantity based pricing when available. For instance, we charge $0.15 a pen for up to 50 pens, but if you order 50-100, we’ll sell them for $0.12 each. Or buy 100-200 and we’ll sell them for $0.09 each.

This allows us to provide incentive for larger purchases when it matches an increase in our margin.

Related Products

When I add that pair of Hello Kitty sweat pants to my shopping cart, shouldn’t you nicely let me know that I can add a matching Hello Kitty t-shirt or baseball cap? Or pink fluffy Hello Kitty slippers? Why wouldn’t you? For all you know, I might actually add all of those to my shopping cart, and your sale just quadrupled.

If your e-commerce system doesn’t provide this method of up-selling to your customers, you could be losing out big. There is a chance I might have gone and searched for those matching items, but there’s also a bigger chance that I wouldn’t have thought of looking for them. There’s also a chance that you might convince me to spend more than I was intending to by pointing out their existence.

This is one of the most basic and most helpful feature to increasing sales, and is utterly baffling why all e-commerce website don’t have it.

Coupons/Sale Functions

Online coupon codes are all the rage these days. Just checkout sites like retailmenot.com. So why doesn’t your e-commerce system provide you a system for creating coupons to advertise to your customers and incentivize them to shop with you? If it’s so common, shouldn’t you have it?

A good e-commerce system should provide you several ways to generate coupons:

1. One Time Coupons: These coupons can only be used once, and are good for targeting specific individuals. For instance, you can advertise a 10% off coupon on your next purchase, and to prevent users from sharing the coupon, only allow it to work once.
2. Limited Time Coupons: These coupons can be used more than once, but they expire eventually after a set period of time.
3. Free Shipping: These coupons do eliminate shipping charges and, of course, can be One Time or Limited Time Coupons.
4. Percentage Off Coupons: These coupons give a percentage off a purchase or a specific item. They can also be One Time or Limited Time Coupons.
5. $ Off Coupons: These coupons remove a certain dollar amount from the purchase. They, again, can be a One Time or Limited Time Coupon.

Is your e-commerce system giving you all these options? We’ve found quite a few that don’t!

Abandoned Cart Reporting

You notice through Google Analytics that potential customers are flocking to your website. Your traffic is up 400% and you’re ecstatic about all the sales that are soon to come flying through the door. But they don’t come. What happened? Why did only 2% of those 400% of new visitors actually buy something?

It’s possible that those visitors spent a good deal of time on your website and even added some items to their cart. They might have actually started to check out. Abandoned Cart Reporting allows you to track the activity of anyone who adds product to their shopping cart. It allows you to see what they did after adding a product to their cart. Did they add more? Did they start the checkout process? How far did they get into the checkout process?

This reporting can help you identify problem areas in your website that prevent people from completing their purchases. Maybe you have a confusing checkout process. Maybe your site doesn’t work with a specific web browser. Maybe it doesn’t work with JavaScript disabled. Perhaps you don’t have adequate payment options (maybe everyone doesn’t have a PayPal account to checkout with).

Abandoned Cart Reporting allows you to discover what happened to potential sales and where they dropped off at, and can be one of the most instrumental tools to increasing your sales. If your e-commerce system doesn’t have it, you’re likely lacking a great deal of information and losing money.

These features seem pretty basic, but it’s amazing how many e-commerce systems aren’t equipped with them. If your system doesn’t have these features, it’s time to start looking for something new.

There is much value to gain from a frequently updated web presence. It provides the ability to engage your customers and prospects and gives your company a sense of activity and stability. It can also be a valuable marketing and sales tool to keep your website updated with your latest and greatest services and products.

There are a few simple avenues you can take to provide a rich, lively website to excite and educate your customers and prospects.

Blogging with RSS Feeds

A blog (or even a news page) is a great way to give your website a lively and updated feel. This will allow you to keep your customers and prospects apprised of news and events with your company, and can also provide an avenue of marketing and training involving your products and services.

Providing an RSS feed along with this blog could empower some customers to follow you and your updates without needing to visit your website by subscribing to your RSS feed with various desktop and web based readers, and even mobile (cell phone) readers.

Twitter and Facebook

By using social network sites, such as Twitter and Facebook to connect to and interact with your friends, customers and prospects, you have an additional avenue to broadcast information about your organization. Much like a blog, you can use these networks to share company news and events, as well as market products and services and provide training on those products and services.

Those that connect with you would have easy visibility into what’s going on with your organization every time they access their social networking profile and see your updates in their feeds. And all of this happens without them needing to visit your site.

But as we’re talking about keeping your site alive, you can also use these social networking sites as a means to update your site by displaying your most recent updates on your website. Thousands upon thousands of sites (including our own!) display recent Twitter updates. This gives the feel of an updated site without even doing anything to update the actual site.

Events

Announcing events such as sales, contents, trade shows, conventions and community outreach events on your website is a great way to show that you’re engaged with your customers, and a great way to keep your website updated and looking fresh. Not all these events have to be specific to your company. You can sponsor charity events, such as relief funds and blood drives, or if you don’t have the money to sponsor, you can provide free advertising for these events which still shows that you’re involved in your community.

Content Management

By building your site within a content management system, you have the ability to actually update the content of all your pages yourself. Continually enhancing, correcting and updating your content is a great way to keep your customers informed and educated about your organization, your products and your services. It also shows search engines that your site is alive and that it should be visited and checked more often.

A Fresh, New Look

When it comes down to it, though, does your website just look old, regardless of how often you update the content? It might just be time to start over with a fresh, new look coupled with some great interactive features. Maybe your website looks fine, but is too outdated or complex to easily integrate some of these ideas. Every website, maybe with the exception of Google, gets a new look every once and awhile. Is it time for you to get one?

Using some of the ideas we covered, you can give your website a lively feel by enhancing and frequently updating your content.

One application, however, has brought many different aspects of social media together into one new, creative, original, and fun application – one that businesses, I believe, should be quick to embrace: Foursquare.  Foursquare is doing for social media what the Wii did for video games; it is getting people up, moving around, and interacting with the medium in a new and creative way.  If you’ve not heard of Foursquare before, or can’t understand how it can help your business, read on.

Before we continue, yes, I am aware that there are other similar applications.  The reason I’ve singled out Foursquare is due to the fact that it is available for not just the iPhone, but also for Android, BlackBerry, and Palm based phones.  For an application to be widely accepted, regardless of how good it is, it needs to be available to as many people as possible.  Application developers who target just one operating system, in my opinion, are shooting themselves in the foot.

Fun for the User

Foursquare is a location based service, meaning the application is aware of where on Earth you are located and the business around you.  As you poke around town, you are able to “check in” to the places you go.  Check in at the library.  Check in at the supermarket.  Check in at the movie theater.  Everywhere you check in, you get to see who else is around, and if you choose, you can send a shout out to friends.  You can even have Foursquare hooked up to your Twitter and/or Facebook accounts and post status updates to those services as you go about your adventures.

So far, there isn’t anything too exciting, neither for the business nor the application’s user.  But here is where things get interesting and everyone starts to have fun.  Each time you check in, you are awarded little trinkets, be it a couple points towards a bigger goody, or a badge for having been to that location a certain number of times.  If you check in at a location more times anyone else, for example, you become “Mayor” of that place.  While within Foursquare this brings with it little more than a badge and a cool little picture of you with a crown on your head associated with that location, some businesses are turning the benefits of being mayor of their business into very real rewards.  Here in Grand Rapids, several businesses are already jumping on board.  Wealthy Theatre announced they were hip to Foursquare in a recent Facebook note, where they tell folks,  “to redeem your special Wealthy Theatre giveaway, simply check in at Wealthy Theatre and show your phone to whomever is working the concession booth.”  It is up to each venue if and how they choose to participate, but I can assure you that folks are talking.  There is a battle on right now at a local restaurant that is offering whoever is the mayor fifty-percent off their meal as long as they are mayor.  Undoubtedly mayorship will change hands back and forth as people visit more frequently in hopes of grabbing, or holding on to, the title.

This mix of competition, social networking, and geo-location service is the perfect mix.  Folks enjoy sharing their activities, are actively building the database of what’s around town, and can have fun with a little competition.  Another concept of Foursquare are “tips” and “to dos” – Someone added a “to do” for Yesterdog, for example, of “shoot for the tip basket.”  Go to Yesterdog, shoot for the tip basket, and earn points when you check it off the list in Foursquare as something you’ve now done.

“Tips” are where folks get to have a voice, leaving little juicy tidbits of information for future visitors.  One business had a tip of “avoid the waitstaff!  They’re rude!”  while another had “try the tacos… delicious!”  This little added bit of functionality brings Foursquare squarely (sorry) in line to compete with some of the best location-based review sites out there.  While other applications let you simply review local businesses, Foursquare makes it fun.

Beneficial for the Business

Much of what makes Foursquare popular and fun has been driven by the community and businesses making use of the application not originally intended by Foursquare.  Foursquare has been watching and listening though, and has made it beneficial to businesses as well.  Foursquare now lets businesses offer “Foursquare specials” that will be promoted from within the application.  When someone checks in at your location, or a location near your business, special offers will be pushed to the user, further promoting your business.  Businesses are also able to use Foursquare to tell them how many times a customer has been to their venue or the frequency of their visits. Many venues are now using this data to reward their most loyal customers with freebies or discounts.  Beyond the spirit of a fun competition, many customers are given a sense of ownership in the businesses with which they are interacting.

You too can become mayor of the mini-mart!

Tommy Allen recently said in an article about Foursquare for Rapids Growth, “I realized how Foursquare could build a new and spot-on urban map of a city, based on the strength and integrity of many contributors.”

Be you a believer in social media or not, folks are using these applications.  Be them a fad or the future of the Internet, folks are now handing out kudos and complaints – broadcast to to the world instantly – right at your doorstep, before they even get in their cars to go home.  Take part in the shenanigans if you can.  Offering a free drink or a discount on your service every once in a while to folks who are supporting you not just off-line, but on-line as well, may go a long way to keep people coming back time and time again – and ensuring more kudos than complaints.  You may even have fun in the process!

Me?  I’m the mayor of my local mini-mart.  They don’t offer any rewards for that status (yet), but I don’t plan on giving up the title too easily nonetheless.  I figure as long as I keep using them for my daily caffeine fix, I am set to be mayor for quite some time.