Let’s Discuss Social Media Taboo
Okay, let me get started by saying that I don’t blog a lot about social media anymore because I don’t want to fall into the category of being a self-proclaimed guru, but I do this for a living, and yes I have clients that pay me to do this for them as well, so I feel no shame in admitting that I might know more than a lot of people handing out advice these days because this is my full-time gig. Not bragging, just saying. At Pleth, we have clients reach out to us on an almost daily basis for social media consulting and it’s something that I think we, as an industry, pretty much do right w/ the exception of a few bad apples and of course some companies that try to do it themselves internally.
I am not for sure who all out there is advising their clients to do these two things, and maybe some are just taking this upon themselves, but I know of at least one firm (won’t mention any names, they are out of state anyway) who advised a client to do this and it sent shivers down the base of my spine. I wanted to set the record straight, or at least weigh in on my opinion as to why these things are being handled completely wrong…
Businesses / Organizations Should Not Be Facebook Profiles (They are not Humans!)
Here’s the thing, there are right ways and wrong ways for your business or organization to get involved on Facebook. You even have some options when it comes to pages or groups, depending entirely what your motivation is for getting involved. I hate to see a friend request from a business or an organization. This is not correct.
Surely at some point during the process while this profile was being setup, this had to seem like it wasn’t right. I don’t know, maybe at the point where they asked you your birthday, or your sex, possibly even relationship status. I mean, does your business date? Does your business have a gender? Hopefully not, that would be illegal in most states. Sorry if this sounds like a rant, but this gets under my skin a little bit, especially when I find that a firm has consulted someone to do things this way so that they have some different options that pages or groups presently don’t have. I have to scratch my head and wonder if that is not some sort of malpractice somewhere down the lines. Don’t we, as an industry have a fiduciary obligation to our clients not to steer them wrongly?
Companies / Organizations with Geo-Social Profiles (Where you Goin?)
Why would a company add me as a friend on Foursquare / Gowalla? You got me, I have no idea but I have had 2 do this recently and it made me wonder. I mean I know your company, the request wasn’t out of line, but your company is comprised of hundreds of employees and you have 2 physical locations. How come you want to be friends w/ me? Your company is not representative of one person, where are you going to check in at? Are you physically going to move your entire building to another location and check-in? Of course not. If you are interested in knowing where I am checking in at, you don’t have to be my friend to find out that information.
Now that that part almost sounded like a rant, so let me back up a little bit and commend you on your interest in wanting to be involved with geo-social. You are on the cutting edge my friend, no doubt. But, there are right ways and wrong ways to get involved with trends, and honestly by doing it wrong you can make yourself look worse than had you not even tried at all. (example: me trying to sing karaoke).
If you want to get involved with geo-social as a company or an organization, I would advise contacting these companies (Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, Loopt) and seeing what they recommend, or possibly by going off on your own and offering discounts for mayors / checkins / etc. You might even consider getting a custom stamp for your business on Gowalla, I won’t go into all of the details on this right now, but trust me, these companies are startups so they are eager for your involvement, just call them.
In closing, I am sure I am not the only one that these things bother, please comment your thoughts on this. Also, what are some other things that you see that bother you today w/ corporate / organizational use of social media?? I am personally inviting some heavy hitters and experts that I know to contribute to this discussion. Please feel free to weigh in with any other pet peeves you might have. I would love to turn this discussion into a podcast at some point soon…
Bringing Gowalla to Your Site
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It’s no great secret that I am a Gowalla fanatic. Out of all of the geo-social apps on the market today (Foursquare, Brightkite, and Loopt) I see Gowalla as the premier app. As soon as Gowalla gets it’s Blackberry app going full steam I think we are all going to see it steal a lot of market share from Foursquare. To position yourself to be ready for the great Gowalla explosion you might want to consider leveraging your Gowalla account on your website or blog. Fortunately Gowalla has an API that will allow you to roll your own integration if you are a developer, but if you are not a programmer this might present a challenge.
Fortunately for Wordpress users there are already a few really nice Gowalla plugins starting to show up from various developers in the community. I am going to touch on a few of these and give you some insight as to how I think they can best be used.
- WP-Walla: This is probably my favorite plugin so far for integrating your Gowalla checkins into your blog. I actually have it running on this website in the sidebar. One day when I am able to sit down and do a redesign of this site it’s going to have a much more prominent location. This plugin allows you to present your most recent checkins in a sidebar widget. It’s a really clean plugin that has a lot of flexibility. You can exclude the Gowalla icon if you want, however I think it looks cool to have it there. You can also limit how many checkins you want displayed. Based on your vertical real estate you might want to have 3 or 4 locations stacked in your sidebar. Each checkin is also linked back to Gowalla’s main site. I highly recommend this plugin.
- GoWPWalla: This is another really nice Gowalla plugin that pretty much does the same thing. I think it might have some additional functionality w/ it as well but for me I think the out of the box layout and design of the sidebar widget takes up too much vertical real estate. One thing that this plugin does if you are a location is that it also allows you to display recent check-ins at your location. There are some great screenshots here if you are interested in checking this one out. I haven’t spent a lot of time w/ this plugin so I don’t know a whole lot about it other than to say it’s pretty freaking sweet.
- Gowalla Spotter: This plugin displays activity in a Gowalla Spot in a Wordpress Post or Page. It uses the Gowalla API and requires the unique Spot ID saved in a custom field in Wordpress. While custom fields might not be the easiest thing in the world to explain to clients, it could still be pretty useful if you are a developer and you are deploying pages for them. I really like how this looks on a page.
I am sure that as time goes on there will be plenty of other Gowalla related plugins in the plugin directory but right now these 3 should give us all something we can use to get started sharing our geo-social content with our visitors.
Embedding Tweets w/ Wordpress
![twitter_thumb1[1]](http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog/wp-content/2010/06/twitter_thumb11.jpg "twitter_thumb1[1]")
Last night Keith Crawford brought up something in The Cotton Club Podcast that has been out for a little while now but I just haven’t had a chance to really sit down and play with, and that’s embedding tweets into Wordpress blog posts. If you are an avid Twitter user, you probably already know that w/ really good tweets, the kind that make you think, an entire conversation can be born with a tweet that may exceed 140 characters.
Well, with this in mind, Twitter decided to release embeddable tweets using Blackbird Pie a while back. This is extremely handy for bloggers who want to take a tweet and blog about it instead of posting an “@” response to it’s author. From a blogging perspective I can see a lot of practical applications for this, so I figured I would take a tweet from today and embed it in this post to give you an idea as to how these tweets look once they are embedded, etc. Here goes… (yeah, I know it’s a terrible joke, but you get the picture.)
I heard BP was going to try to stick a giant wedding ring on the blowout preventer to see if it would stop putting out. #rimshot #bpcares
cottonr
Cotton Rohrscheib
Fortunately, for Wordpress users, there’s an easy way to go about doing this instead of having to go to the Blackbird Pie website and generate an embed code. The Twitter Blackbird Pie plugin by Brad Vincent, once installed, allows you to add shortcode for tweets into your post like so:
#ToadsuckTweetup Video
This is a video that was shot during the first Toadsuck Tweetup here in Conway. As you can see from the video, it was an awesome turnout despite the weather that plagued the area the night before…
#ToadSuckDaze Gowalla Stamp!
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Okay, so I reached out to Gowalla to help us promote this weekends Toadsuck Daze Festival in Conway by creating a custom Gowalla Event Stamp and wow did they ever come through for us. I can’t say enough how awesome Sandi and the crew there have been to work with in putting this thing together. They kick butt.
To get this stamp, you will need to be at Toadsuck Daze this weekend and check-in on Gowalla. The event stamp will be available from Friday through Sunday. Here’s a preview of the Gowalla page for the event: http://gowalla.com/spots/1029425. If you haven’t RSVP’d for the event yet, you can do so by visiting: http://toadsucktweetup.com.
Oh, and here’s what the custom event stamp looks like. I think that this is the first ever custom event stamp from Gowalla for anything going on in Arkansas so for all of you Gowalla Groupies, you won’t want to miss your opportunity to add this to your collections!!!
Isn’t this the coolest thing you have ever seen??
Also, for news and information about the #ToadsuckTweetup be sure to follow @toadsucktweetup on Twitter.
RSVP for #ToadsuckTweetup!
You can RSVP online for the Toadsuck Tweetup this Saturday at noon in the square! By doing so it will give us a good idea as to how many people we can expect to attend. Just select YES in the box below to RSVP. Thanks, and stay tuned for more news and information. I am looking forward to meeting everyone, this should be an awesome time.
Toadsuck Tweetup – This Saturday
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We have finally arrived on a date and a time for our first Toadsuck Tweetup. We will have the tweetup on Saturday, May 1st, 2010 at 12 noon at Toadsuck Square. The event is open to any Twitter users / enthusiasts in town for the festival. We will have prizes and giveaways for those who attend, stay tuned to this blog for more information as the date draws near. The Conway Area Chamber of Commerce has jumped on board to help us promote the event so be sure to stay tuned to their website for more information as well.
Just another sidenote for Twitter / Gowalla users, there will be a custom Gowalla Event Stamp for the weekend available for people that check-in during the event. I think that this is the first stamp of it’s type ever available for users here in Arkansas so you don’t want to miss out on that. Again, stay tuned for more information as well as the launch of our website, http://toadsucktweetup.com in the very near future.
Custom Gowalla Event Stamp!
A few days ago I reached out to Gowalla to see if they would be interested in helping us out with our first ever Toadsuck Tweetup by designing us a custom stamp for Toadsuck Daze. I got notification today from Sandi that they were in fact interested and that they were going to design the custom stamp for us. This stamp will be available for people to pick up by checking in on Gowalla during the weekend long event. Now, I haven’t seen the stamp yet, and I can only imagine that it’s going to have a frog on it since that is the direction that I pointed them in, kind of fitting don’t you think?
Why is this a big deal? Well, because aside from large, highly publicized events, there just aren’t that many of these custom stamps out there to pick up for Gowalla collectors and enthusiasts, and I am not for sure but this might be the first one in Central Arkansas for an event. The only way to get this stamp is to check in on Gowalla during the festival weekend, after that it’s gone forever unless of course you picked it up, in which case it’s yours forever! A great time to do this check in would be during the tweetup we have scheduled for 12 noon on Saturday during the festival. Stay tuned for more information on the Tweetup later, I just wanted to shout from the rooftops how cool Gowalla is for helping us out with this.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Toadsuck Daze, which is expected to see 150,000 people this year, here’s a little bit of information from the main website:
Toad Suck Daze is a free festival. A 3-day festival of food, family and fun held on the streets of downtown Conway, Arkansas. This ‘Laid Back Weekend’ occurs annually the first weekend in May and has something for the entire family: arts & crafts, ‘Toadal Kids Zone’, a carnival, local and national entertainment, food, rock wall, petting zoo, ‘Stuck on a Truck’, 5K/10K, golf tournament, a 3 on 3 basketball tournament, magicians, and so much more! Toad Suck Daze is also home to ‘The World Championship Toad Races’. The festival is run almost exclusively by volunteers from Conway and Faulkner County, including the local police and fire departments. It has free admission and proceeds go to support higher education in Faulkner County. Since the start of the festival over $1 million has been given in scholarship and towards scholarship endowments. This money has helped over 200 individuals attend local institutes of higher learning.
If you aren’t familiar with Gowalla, I suggest you check them out immediately if you work in the web industry! You can find their awesome app in the app store as well as linked from their corporate website: http://www.gowalla.com. Stay tuned for more info on this stamp as I get it…
Let’s Discuss Gowalla & Foursquare
Today we had an active discussion on Twitter (for the 10,000th time) regarding the whole Geo-Social showdown between Gowalla and Foursquare. I have summarized some of my thoughts that I took from this conversation below as well as some insight provided by people in my network. I have also posed some questions below that I would love to have your feedback on so please feel free to comment your thoughts…
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Being a die-hard Gowalla fan as well as a loyal user I have a hard time buying into the statement that Foursquare is the best geo-social application to get behind. A common response that I get back from my network of followers is that Foursquare is better for businesses.
Every time I hear this I keep thinking that maybe I am missing something with Foursquare that I should learn more about but the best that I can come up with is the fact that Foursquare has these listed features for businesses that more or less allow business owners to post messages to users who are in the area to entice them to visit an establishment. Foursquare also allows owners the opportunity to offer specials to Mayors and those who have loyalty points (# of check-ins). I guess I can sort of see where everyone is coming from on their position that Foursquare might be better than Gowalla in this one aspect, but overall Gowalla has a much better product and user experience. As a developer and a business owner, I can attest to the fact that user experience and application quality go a long way!!!
I posed the question today on Twitter: What makes Foursquare better for businesses than Gowalla? and I didn’t get any really concrete or specific answers back from very many people. Keith Crawford brought up the fact that Gowalla really needed to address business users, and I agree w/ that point. Natalie Ghidotti mentioned that Foursquare did a better job connecting users to businesses w/ mayorships, etc. and I can sort of see that point of view as well, but doesn’t the idea of picking up items on Gowalla that can be exchanged for tangible items such as appetizers, t-shirts, phone cases, etc., sort of counteract that? Not to mention making it more fun when you win these items? Furthermore, to counteract the loyalty aspect of Foursquare (ie. mayorships, # of checkins, etc.) couldn’t Gowalla’s leaderboard also answer that one?
Not too far into this debate, I posted links to the online location profile for Pleth, LLC in Conway from both locations (Gowalla: Pleth, LLC and Foursquare: Pleth, LLC) to demonstrate that from a desktop browser perspective there really wasn’t much difference between the two. It wasn’t long after this that a representative from Gowalla, @SanLei came into the conversation and had me refresh my browser to see my Pleth location page again. She had added my company information, twitter handle, and stream into my profile page. All day long during this conversation we never heard a word from Foursquare.
Bryan Jones also weighed in saying that he also leans toward Gowalla over Foursquare for similar reasons that I do, Quality over Quantity. Mark Ferguson also weighed in saying that he preferred getting items for prizes than becoming a mayor of a particular establishment, and I think I am inclined to agree w/ his position as well.
- Here’s my thing, isn’t the user experience going to win out every time?
- Does anyone disagree w/ my position that Gowalla has a much better user experience?
- What does Gowalla need to do to address / encourage Business Use?
