Tonight we discussed social, mobile and location as it relates to marketing. We first established the fact that with ~16 million users, Foursquare has completed the holy trinity when it comes to social media.
- Facebook  = Who you are
- Twitter – What you’re doing/going to do
- Foursquare – Where you are
(That in no way means that there aren’t more things to focus on as evidenced by Pinterest’s recent explosion.) From there we discussed the technical aspects of location and the curent state of accuracy. Todays focus is on location but tomorrow, the focus will be on the exact location of the product (or service). Back to today; location is not lat and long. It’s the positon of an offering along an X, Y and Z axis. (Dust off the geometry books!) The current issue is that the adoption of technology by businesses isn’t there yet. Products need to have RFID built in and the real time inventory RFID creates, needs to be pushed to the web and searchable. When that happens, retails is going to evolve much faster.
From there we moved to discuss Foursquare, Instagram, Highlight, Untappd and Path. I think it’s interesting to see how Foursquare has changed the message of what they do, going from game (with poor mechanics) to social glue for those that are out and about. Good time to pivot. It also think it’s interesting to see that Instagram is growing faster than Foursquare but not sure it’s the largest mobile social network (as someone claimed recently)Â since Mig33 has over 50 million users.
We finished up reviewing all the places I’ve been on Foursquare in the last 6 months on Weeplaces. geekOUT! Next class, I get to finish up some location specific methods and then talk about mobile commerce!
