Foursquare and "checking in"

With this blog I've reviewed a number of different social media tools. This week I'd like to introduce Foursquare, the best location-app I've seen catch on in a major way. Foursquare is an online directory that detects businesses, restaurants and retail locations nearby wherever you are. The app detects your location and allows you to "check in" to a nearby location. 

After over a year of consistent Foursquare use, I've put together a list of tips for potential new users:

1. Scrutinize who to accept as a Foursquare Friend- Foursquare users must "friend" you to be able to view your Foursquare posts. It is easy to fall victim to strangers reaching out through Internet cover-ups. Be careful who you accept as a Foursquare connection.

2. Use Foursquare as your go-to restaurant review- the "tips" section of a restaurant's Foursquare profile are reviews left by people who have visited that location. I've often used these tips to get the low-down on different menu options. 

3. Careful where you post! Foursquare is integrated with a ton of Social Media tools- Facebook and Twitter most notably- so be careful of where and when you post. Do you want just your Foursquare contacts to be aware of your whereabouts, or your entire Facebook following? Figure out where to limit yourself to secure your desired level of privacy on the Internet.

Facebook Integration
You might have been using Foursquare on Facebook without even knowing it! When you select the "Place" icon  when making a status update, you're using the Foursquare technology. Similarly, Foursquare was able to use Facebook as a major platform to generate new users. The Foursquare/Facebook integration allows for easy access between platforms- if you're on the Foursquare application you can post things directly to Facebook (with a one-click acceptance). Click here to read more about the Facebook and Foursquare integration.

Twitter Integration
Want to automatically update Twitter every time you check in on Foursquare? Foursquare has created the ability to show all check-ins on social media sites like Facebook (mentioned above) as well as Twitter. Read more on how you can connect your Foursquare account to these social media sites here. 

The Social and Mobile Conversations

There are a number of growing trends on the Internet that involve both social media and mobile applications. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest all have massive audiences spending a considerable amount of time on their website and mobile sites. With this blog post I chose to review the overall mobile and social trends through a few interesting articles I've found on the topics.

Mobile:

Mobile usage is skyrocketing. Don't believe me? Check out some of the trending topics relating to mobile on CNN. The use of Smart Phones in particular has allowed people all over the world to access the Internet without requiring a computer. It is now commonplace to see young children walking around with Smart Phones, or babies being entertained by an ipad or iphone. 

One thing I find ever more interesting is the growing number of mobile Internet users in comparison to computer Internet users. According to a study previewed below, Internet usage through mobile devices surpassed computers in India in 2012. 

Read more on this study at http://www.insidemobileapps.com. 

Social:
The Conversation Prism is a visual representation of the growing number of social media applications out there today. Like mentioned above, the most prominent social media applications are sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, but the number these sites grows every day! The Conversation Prism does a good job of visualizing the complexity of social applications. One ways that it does is is through categorizing different social media platforms by topic.The Social Conversation Prism outlines a complex industry landscape in a way that is still easy to comprehend. Check it out below or visit https://conversationprism.com. 

The IAB

As someone who works in the Advertising industry, I often get asked to validate my profession. Becoming a Lawyer, Doctor or Accountant all require certification exams that validate an individual's knowledge on the topic and gives them the honor of calling themselves a professional in their industry. So how does Advertising govern and set ethical practices and expectations? The answer is through the Internet Advertising Bureau, otherwise as the IAB.

To quote the IAB's website, "the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising" (http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab).

The IAB is an active part of my career. My current company is actively involved in IAB initiatives and support all policies led by the IAB. Our ad units follow the same guidelines as IAB units and runs a number of its Rising Star units. We also actively participate in their certification exams. This past year, all Sales representatives needed to pass the IAB Sales Certification in order to attend our annual sales conferences. 

The IAB is a great way to learn about new trends in the marketplace. After 3.5 years in Ad Operations, I moved into Sales and Account Management for my company's DSP (Demand Side Platform) or what some might refer to as Programmatic Advertising. Programmatic Advertising is new to market and can be described by phrases like RTB (real time bidding) or Non-Reserve. The IAB published white papers on Programmatic Advertising to help educate marketers on the subject. One article included the graph below to help visualize how Programmatic inventory exists within the media world today. 

Programmatic (+ Reserve) Inventory Sources:

This past January I also took the IAB Digital Ad Operations Certification exam. A new exam for the IAB, a number of my Operations Directors took part in helping write the exam, along with many other industry partners and competitors (participating vendors listed at the bottom of the page here). The 3 hour computerized multiple-choice exam was proctored in a Pearson Testing Center, the same testing organization used to monitor exams like the GRE and the GMAT. With over 100+ questions, I completed the exam in an hour and a half and PASSED!!

I have the certificate hanging in my cube at work. It helps remind me to be confident in my digital knowledge and makes me proud to be part of this industry! 

Have you heard of GoPicnic?

I first learned about GoPicnic when a close friend started working there as the Brand Communications Director. Known to some as the "healthy lunchable" GoPicnic prepares ready to eat meals that are predominantly vegan-friendly. The Brand Communications Director, Jamie Siegel, was hired to grow GoPicnic's digital and offline brand presence and often relies on social media to keep costs down and reach a wide target audience. More and more organizations are realizing the benefits of social media and the power of the Internet for both brand awareness and sales. Finding the right platforms and sending the right message has to be 100% customized to the company, so here's how Jamie utilizes social media for GoPicnic!

I sat down with Jamie and interviewed her about GoPicnic. She explained,

"I was brought into GoPicnic to build our social media presence online. In my year and a half at the company, I've build social engagement that rivals national brand competitiors. Facebook has been a very powerful tool for us recently. In just one year, I've utilized social media at GoPicnic to organically fans from 5,000 Facebook fans to over 21,000."

To give you additional background on how GoPicnic uses social media, here are the things Jamie thinks are the primary benefits to using Facebook and other social media platforms.

Building Brand Awareness
GoPicnic began as a start-up selling packaged meals to airlines. The company has expanded its products and relies heavily on social media to reach its nationally scaled audience. Facebook and Amazon are 2 platforms GoPicnic uses frequently.

Driving traffic to the website to boost online sales
GoPicnic uses social media to educate consumers on sales and promotions. They then use this data on consumers to help guide purchasing decisions by making suggestions of additional products based on past purchases and browsing habits. All links tied to social media are trackable, which helps GoPicnic learn more about which social media sites are working well and which aren't. 

Educating Consumers
GoPicnic sells products both online and through partner distribution channels, but finding where to buy isn't always easy! GoPicnic can be found at local Target, your local 7-11 and a variety of other convenience store locations, so social media helps communicate where consumers can buy regardless of online or offline.

Check out GoPicnic's Facebook page: 

 

Check out GoPicnic's Amazon page:

Gravity and Content Personalization

Have you ever been to a website and see advertisements that have nothing to do with your personal interests? Let's pretend you're a woman between the ages of 18-32 on a gossip website when you suddenly see an ad for Viagra. The likelihood that 1. you will take action and click on the ad or 2. have any interest or connection to Viagra is incredibly slim. 

How does advertising combat this? By dropping a cookie on your IP address when you scroll around the web, advertising organizations are able to categorize users and retarget them with ads that are relevant and timely. 

Aol is taking website personalization to the next level with the recent acquisition of Gravity. Gravity is a content personalization engine that will provide site viewers with articles that are calculated to be more interesting to the user. Gravity, bundled with the 2010 acquisition of The Huffington Post, will allow Aol to provide a customized Internet browsing experience that focuses on customized content as well as advertisements.

How does it work?
Gravity has created a patented technology that calculates the type of information that might be of interest to a specific user. Gravity crawls, indexes and analyzes each web page, tweet, status update or post to surface the most relevant content for the user.

Why is it unique?
Gravity has created The Interest Graph, which gathers data on a user's web browsing history to aid in categorizing the type of content that user prefers. Most organizations have broad targeting capabilities that bundle users based on internet habits, but the partnership between Aol and Gravity will index content by type of interest at scale.

The Interest Graph:
Check out the live interest graph here!

Team Snapshot and Upstage Resume

Have you ever walked into an interview with a boring resume? Are you looking for a way to stand out from the competition when applying for a new job? Upstage Resume is here to help! With a variety of customized templates, Upstage Resume will help transform your resume from bland to beautiful.


As part of the Google Online Marketing Challenge, Team Snapshot will be promoting Upstage Resume through an online paid search campaign. Below Team Snapshot provides background on the organization, its mission and products, a competitive analysis and a technical analysis. This information will be used to allow Team Snapshot to help grow Upstage Resume's business.

Background

Alysha Watson was updating her resume three months ago when she became inspired to show off both personality and creativity through the design of her resume.  She realized that her document hadn't changed much in the last 5 years besides minor formatting changes. Lauren, who eventually became Alysha’s business partner, was a graphic designer that Alysha collaborated with to create her updated resume. The design was created to catch the eye of a potential employer, with a finished product that included a headshot and graph used to display Alysha’s skills in a visual way instaed of basic bullet points.  Alysha received nothing but positive feedback on her new resume and found that a lot of her peers and friends were interested in having her help redesign their resumes. Alysha and Lauren began working on a website that would allow consumers to send in a basic Word document resume and select a template from over 20 designs for their new resume. The site launched on April 1, 2014 and because Alysha and Lauren both have full time jobs, they are fulfilling orders as they come in during their spare time.  

To quote Alysha on her new company: “Upstage Resume's vision is to enhance the traditional resume with color, creativity and design. We want to help the every-day person "outshine the competition" with a resume that is unique and one of a kind.”

We (the members of Team Snapshot) chose Upstage Resume for the Google Online Marketing Challenge because they are a brand new company that has great potential for success. Because of their easy-to-use website and creative resume designs available, Upstage Resume taps into a currently un-pursued niche market. Upstage Resume is currently using basic marketing tools , which leaves a lot of ways Team Snapshot can help grow the business (they use Shopify to track click through rates and page views but have not pursued any further advertisements besides their pages on social media profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter).  

Mission & Products: What the company seeks to do and how it does this through its product offerings.

Upstage Resume’s mission is to provide a product that will help their customers, primarily job seekers, stand out from their competition by providing customized resumes and cover letters that look and read very differently than typical boilerplate resumes.   By enhancing their customer’s current resume through creativity and design, Upstage Resume delivers a product that is a more distinctive and eye-catching deviation from the normal tool of job seekers alike.

Upstage offers 15 different resume templates as well as custom resume and cover letter design.  They also offer upgrades and revisions should your resume change or require editing.  Upstage Resume commits to a 72 hour turnaround on resume deliveries, but offers expedited service for a premium.   Upstage does not edit the content of their customer’s resumes, choosing to focus their business on design. 

Competitive Analysis: What other companies out there could be substitutes, or offer similar services?

There are a lot of options out there as far as receiving some sort of assistance with writing your resume or creating a resume that is aesthetically pleasing.  Upstage has determined that their two biggest competitors are Loft Resumes and Resume Launch. 

Loft Resumes is very similar in that they take a basic structured word processing document and translate it into something that matches form with function.  With that being said, Upstage’s costs are far lower and their designs are uniquely designed.  Loft has a lot of options to choose from, but the costs average $99, which is considerably higher than the $35 charged by Upstage.  Their website is also very similar looking to Upstage’s, but a person looking for a job might not always be able to rationalize the cost.

Resume Launch serves a different client base than Upstage Resume.  Again, they offer unique resume product designs that translate boring structure into beautiful resumes but their designs are less interesting than those offered by Upstage. We suspect that a lot of their revenue is driven by their resume assistance offering, which is manned by one person (implying that turn around on purchases is either slow or not top of the line).  Based on reading their twitter account, they are constantly looking to broaden their resume template offerings, advertising new templates on almost a weekly basis.  This will make them more competitive going forward and might force Upstage, new to the market, to consider ways to differentiate themselves.  Their costs are also lower for templates at $25.  

Technical Abilities: how is Upstage Resume utilizing technology?

Upstage Resume is an entirely web-based service organization. Because its products are purchased, paid for and distributed via the website, Internet technology is a core functionality requirement. If the organization forgets to pay its web hosting fees, the website would go dark and there would be limited opportunity for the business.

Upstage Resume relies completely on social media and word of mouth to spread awareness. They are currently utilizing a website, blog, Facebook page, Twitter page, Google+ account and LinkedIn profile. Due to their recent launch, they do not have a large following yet on any of these sites. Their Facebook account has the largest audience, which consists of 305 “likes” for their page. One of their current strategies is too communicate flash sales and special offers via their social media sites. Because of the importance of an online audience going to these sites, one of Team Snapshot’s goals will be to increase social media site traffic.

There are a number of suggestions Team Snapshot has put together regarding Upstage Resume’s social media sites. First, because sales and special offers are only listed on sites like Facebook and Twitter, including direct links to these pages should be obvious on the company’s landing page. A site user currently has to scroll down below the fold to find links to these pages, and there is no call to action or benefits callout on why a user would want to follow Upstage Resume on social media. Second, it makes sense to have an Internet presence on multiple social media sites; however, defining what each will be used for is important.  A critical aspect of social media for businesses is defining the purpose of that social media account. Should all social media sites be used to communicate special offers, or just a few? What type of audience is each social media site trying to attract and what does that actual audience look like? How can we incorporate analytical sites like Google Analytics or other platforms to gain insight into who is actually going to these sites?

All of these points will be addressed in how Team Snapshot helps Upstage Resume grow its business in the Google Online Marketing Challenge.

The Future of Video

Taking a step back from Chicago-based technologies, this week's blog post is about the future of the relationship between TV and the Internet. Hollywood has made great strides in improving film quality over the years, but what does the future of TV/film look like? Companies like Google, Yahoo and Aol are claiming that TV's future is in the digital/online space.

How many TV shows do you watch a week? Do you watch any of them online? Sites like Hulu and Netflix introduced the ability to watch TV shows online. Now, larger media companies are jumping on board and bringing the TV world to consumers via the Internet. 

Don't believe me? Here are a few articles that back up my position.

Netflix, Hulu and ... Yahoo? Why Marissa Mayer Wants Original TV Programming
Check out this article by Mashable that explains why Yahoo is looking to purchase TV programming, which it can then broadcast digitally and sell advertising against. The article highlights the big players in the video media space, copied below for your viewing pleasure.

The 8 Digital Trends That Will Change The Future Of Advertising
Business Insider is a great resource for professional business-related news. The following article discusses major changes and trends that will impact the advertising industry, one of which calls out digital video. Spend on digital video advertising is projected to increase from $4.18 billion in 2013 to $12.27 billion in 2014- that's a 3x increase in only a year!

Three Biggest Video Trends Of 2014
Forbes magazine projected what the 3 largest trends will be for video in 2014. One of these trends includes updating the technology that allows TV/film to be viewed online. With an increasing population looking for TV online, making sure the technology works is an important priority. Check out the other projections Forbes is making by clicking on the title above!

10 Social Video Predictions For 2014
Unruly provides the following article that poses a few social-related video predictions for 2014. When dealing with video in particular, Unruly describes the actions Twitter is taking to make video an active ingredient to its product mix. This article also brings up the blurred line between TV online vs. not, and how companies will use what they're doing on social media to highlight what they're doing in the TV/video space.

Seven social video predictions for 2014
The Economic Times discusses the popularity of music videos in the online space. The article argues that due to the increase in advertisements filmed like a music video is increasing the digital demand for online video. The article also calls out Twitter's video focus and the importance of social media getting involved in the video space. Check out how these predictions compare and contrast to the articles above!