Marketing

Foursquare gets down to business

For as far back as we've been discussing social networks, there have been question marks around the best ways to monetize users. To date, advertising has been the primary strategy, with virtual goods starting to pull in some serious revenues.

But the challenge with advertising is that users tend to ignore ads that are not highly targeted. Even precisely targeted ads are largely ignored, which is why you see more and more of them taking up screen real estate. This has also led to more sites adopting a "freemium" content model.

And targeting is even more of a challenge when users are mobile, but mobility also introduces a whole new way to interact with and monetize users.

One of the more interesting companies in the location-based services (LBS) space is Foursquare. Surely, you've seen some message in your Twitter stream telling you that your friend is at some location or is the mayor of whatever, or has unlocked a badge.

And while Foursquare has nowhere near the user base of Facebook or Twitter, the users are very valuable as they promote the places they go and things they do simply by mentioning them in their communication stream.

According to The New York Times, Foursquare plans to distribute a new analytics tool and dashboard in the coming weeks that will give business owners access to a range of information and statistics about visitors to their establishments. This means that businesses can more effectively target users with specific offers and ads.

But what it really provides is a way for Foursquare and other location-aware services to make money.

Going back to 2001, I remember talking about location-based services while working at OmniSky, a way-too-early provider of hardware and software that turned handheld devices like the Palm V into mobile devices. We even acquired an Israeli company called NomadIQ to deliver location-based content.

Ten years later we're just starting to see location-based offers roll out in the U.S.--better late than never?

Many of the early international LBS were very basic social networks (primarily dating) and the demand for such services in the U.S. simply wasn't there, partially because of social mores and also partially because mobile devices have evolved fairly dramatically. … Read more

Has business press lost touch with the tech industry?

A new report by ITDatabase that examines tech coverage over the last six months from eight top business news publications raises some questions, in particular: Does the business press factor companies' revenue and profits into their tech editorial agenda?

The report shows that Apple and Google dominate, while Twitter and Facebook are far more discussed in the business press than Intel, Dell, IBM, or even HP (the largest tech company in the world).

The eight publications surveyed are: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Economist, Financial Times, and USA Today. Over a period of … Read more

Valve games coming soon to a Mac near you

A few months back, I searched high and low for a few decent Mac games in preparation for a series of long flights and found myself looking at titles that were long surpassed by their PC brethren. Titles for the Mac are a dismal representation of what's going on in gaming.

But it looks as if that's about to change.

Doug Lombardi, Valve's VP of developer marketing, confirmed to MacNewsNetwork that the company is planning to port some of its most popular games to the Mac. And while details remain thin, most in the gaming community view … Read more

IBM BigSheets to preserve fleeting Web data

IBM announced Thursday that it is working with the British Library on a project that will preserve and analyze terabytes of information on the Web before it is lost forever.

Recent research estimates the average life expectancy of a Web site is 44 to 75 days. Every six months, for example, roughly 10 percent of Web pages on the U.K. domain are lost.

In most cases of personal sites, this is no big loss. But in the case of organizations attempting to archive and chronicle elections, news, media, and video, this data leakage presents massive challenges. And even if … Read more

HP launches new cloud efforts in Asia

HP on Wednesday announced the opening of a new advanced research facility in Singapore, the latest addition to the company's global collaborative research centers. The opening marks HP's third research facility in the Asia Pacific region and its seventh worldwide

According to the press release, HP Labs Singapore will "serve as a hub for open innovation in the Asia Pacific region and represents another investment the company is making to drive its Everything as a Service vision."

HP's "Everything as a Service" (EaaS) is really just marketing spin on the company's cloud … Read more

Need a job? Learn Drupal

The economy may be getting better, but unemployment is still high. Companies slashed budgets and personnel last year, but as the economy begins to recover, the creation of jobs is not falling in line.

The lack of new jobs continues to be an issue even for San Francisco Bay Area tech companies. So, how are unemployed developers and technologists supposed to find work? One solution: learn new skills.

Drupal is a free software package that makes publishing and managing social content on the Web easy. It's been downloaded more than 2 million times to date. And though Drupal has … Read more

Building social games on Facebook vs. off Facebook

I few months back I wrote about Ohai!, a relatively new social gaming company founded with the goals of making social gaming more fun and accessible.

One of the things that has struck me in the past is whether or not game companies should build directly on Facebook (or other sites) or go stand-alone. Fortunately, Ohai CEO Susan Wu spent a great deal of time thinking about that very topic and posted her thoughts in a recent blog post.

Ohai! is supporting both on-Facebook and off-Facebook experiences for their first MMO, City of Eternals. And as you can see below, they look a bit different.

According to Wu, when people play the game embedded through Facebook, their usage pattern tends to be bite sized: five- to six-minute sessions about eight to 10 times a day. When people play directly at the City of Eternals site, they'll play for 20-plus-minute sessions two to three times a day.

And the experience is a bit different, as gameplay on the direct site is more immersive than in Facebook. The stand-alone site has a theoretically better playing experience, since it's full-screen, which can also lead to different types of behavioral patterns in the game.

Data so far suggests that on-site players may be more likely to partake in longer missions, and more interested in joining groups and performing group activities. Players may also be more likely to participate in exploratory vs. discrete goal-oriented behaviors, such as completing specific missions. … Read more

Study: Amazon.com is most trusted brand in U.S.

New consumer research released today by Millward Brown reveals that Amazon.com is the top performing brand in the U.S. based on "trust" and "recommendation."

Nokia tops the chart in eight other countries with Toyota garnering the top spot in both Canada and Japan (Clearly, this data was compiled before Toyota's recent mishaps.)

According to a summary of the full report, only 1 percent of brands achieve scores of over 120, with 27 percent getting scores of 105 or higher. What's interesting to note is that Amazon only ranks at No. 41 of … Read more

Demographics and social-media marketing

For all of the benefits that social media and marketing can bring to brands, the majority of social sites don't have enough history to accurately reflect their user demographics. This has left marketers at a disadvantage, though there are a number of tools available to track how users engage with brands and social-networking tools to communicate.

The Open Forum, American Express' small business community site, recently published an article that shows the relative relationships between constituencies of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Facebook Users:

116 million unique U.S. visitors in December 2009 (slightly more females) Average user age range 13-34

LinkedIn Users:

24 million unique U.S. visitors in December 2009 (slightly more males) Most have at least a college education, 33% have a graduate degree, as compared to the Internet average of 21%

Twitter Users:

23 million unique U.S. visitors in December 2009 (even male/female ratio) peak at the 18-34 age group Generally less wealthy than those on Facebook and LinkedIn

While none of these results are too shocking, there are some interesting tidbits. Facebook was recently revealed to be the social leader in the link economy, driving 44 percent of the social sharing on the Web. And Facebook clearly dwarfs the other sites in terms of raw visitors with a user base that scales affluence fairly equally. … Read more