In the most recent episode of The New Mediology podcast, Nathan, Alison, Ray, and I discussed, among other things, the rise of a mobile phone-based location aware game called Foursquare. Alison does a good job explaining it (jump to the 14:15 mark of the podcast on the New Mediology page to listen to the Foursquare discussion) but the idea behind Foursquare is this: businesses sign deals with Foursquare and the people within a city who visit the business “check-in” with their mobile phones whenever they visit. By checking in, the person is broadcasting to his or her friends their connection to that particular business, resulting in marketing exposure for the business. The person checking in may get special offers from that business for checking in, visit frequency, or becoming the “mayor” of the business (person who’s been there the most). At that point it’s up to the business to decide how to reward people.

So what’s this mean for you? It depends. Maybe nothing much. Maybe a lot.

Three Options For Foursquare And Your Business
If your company doesn’t have any physical location in which business with customers is conducted, this may not mean much for your business. I may be missing something here (and if I am someone please show me what I’m not seeing) but locations are key to Foursquare, and therefore the absence of a location makes Foursquare less applicable.

If your business has a physical location of any kind you will want to know, at the very least, if anyone has claimed mayorship of your location. It would be interesting to find out if you have a mayor you never knew about. If you find out you do, you’ve got some connecting to do pronto!

If your business is anything retail oriented, you are really going to want to keep your eye on Foursquare. It appears to be rolling out its services slowly across the country, so depending upon where you live, you may or may not be able to sign your business up with Foursquare yet. Here in Nashville, for instance, it’s relatively new. Frozen yogurt retailer, Tasti D-Lite, is using it locally along with several other bars and restaurants. You can see a full list of the businesses who have signed on with Foursquare on their businesses page.

In the end, the future success of Foursquare will depend upon getting enough people to participate. Whether players push retailers to jump in or retailers offer such good benefits to Foursquare players that it compels people to sign up, remains to be seen. At the very least it’s time to pay attention to Foursquare and determine for yourself whether it’s time to get in the game or not.

PS: As always, you can subscribe to the New Mediology podcast on iTunes.

In the recent episode of The New Mediology, Nathan, Alison, Ray, and I discussed a story about a marketing firm that sued a former client for what the ex-client said about the firm on Facebook and Twitter. The former client criticized the company so the company sued him. The big takeaways from the discussion are:

1. You avoid legal trouble when you make a statement of fact. Once you go outside that, you open yourself up for litigation.
2. There are legal issues and public relations issues. In business, you need to recognize that just because you have legal justification, you might lose more by pursuing it when ultimately you have a PR problem that is resolved a different way entirely.
3. It’s important to understand social media so you respond appropriately to criticism that may come from social media.
4. Social media tools give you the means of responding quickly. If you aren’t using a blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. you’re missing some platforms to deal with criticism and respond to customer service issues.
5. When you respond to anything, you bring balance to the discussion. Don’t be afraid to respond, but again, understand the right ways to respond and the culture within which you will be responding.

You can hear the entire discussion from The New Mediology podcast in iTunes or you can listen online.

The the latest episode of The New Mediology, Nathan and I discussed a PR blunder that relates to bloggers, marketing people, PR pros, and anyone interested in social media marketing in general. You can listen to the podcast (online or via iTunes) to get the full story.

The quick version is that several weeks ago the firm Brody PR pitched a large list of bloggers, podcasters, and social media/technology media outlets. The pitch itself was bad and missed the mark, but the way it was done and with a technical issue that went along with it, the whole situation made Brody PR a case study traditional PR people doing a poor job of understanding how to pitch in social media. The whole situation provided an opportunity for numerous bloggers to comment on the situation.

The bottom line is that anyone trying to reach out to people for business purposes using social media MUST understand what they’re doing or it has a high probability of blowing up in their face. Just ask Brody PR. A mere Google search of “Brody PR” brings up numerous negative posts about this situation. That’s hardly good for business but it’s the reality of business today. In the words of my childhood heroes G.I. Joe: “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.”

A few weeks ago I went to social media purgatory when my blog was flagged as an attack site by Google. The problem, we finally learned, was a bad Wordpress plugin for embedding YouTube videos. What I didn’t know was that Twitter takes it’s cues from Google about which sites are legit (or not legit as the case may be.)

The link to my blog is the one I use in my Twitter profile. Since my blog was flagged by Google, Twitter suspended my account. Who knew? Google can shut down your Twitter account…or maybe it’s more correct to say that Twitter will permit Google to tell them whether your account should be suspended.

I talked about the entire episode on a recent episode of The New Mediology and a bit in a short post after the blog got back online.

The bottom line is this: Google has more power than you think. Don’t make them mad.

In the latest episode of The New Mediology, Nathan and I had the chance to interview Tom Cheredar. Tom’s a freelance journalist here in Nashville who also has a great understanding of the social news world. In the podcast he explains that social news is very different from traditional news and that marketers or PR pros (or anyone else for that matter) must understand them well before they hope to benefit from them.

You can listen to the full interview online or download it in iTunes.

In the latest episode of The New Mediology, Nathan and I discussed the need to understand transparency in social media. Two weeks ago I talked about the right mindset needed to use social media well. Though I didn’t focus on transparency in that post, it is also very important to social media success and one that can be easily overlooked.

The fact of the matter is that people’s expectations have changed. They welcome candid communication now more than ever and social media tools are proving to be the best platform available for this.

You can listen to the podcast online (in just under 20 minutes) or download it in iTunes.

In the most recent episode of The New Mediology, Nathan and I discussed RSS. RSS isn’t the sexiest thing to talk about in social media, but it’s really important to know why (and how) RSS changes everything for content creators. Think about it like this: it used to be important for people to come to your website to see what you had to say. You tracked page views and unique visits because that was your gauge for success. Now, with RSS you can allow people to stay current with you content but they never need to visit your blog or website again. They can aggregate your content with all the other content they’re interested in.

For some content creators, RSS is a welcome technology because it increases the number of people who can be exposed to your content and decide for themselves that it’s worth their time again. For others, RSS seems like trouble because it threatens all of the control that once existed over the distribution of content. In this episode, we covered what RSS is and why it’s really important to understand and fully utilize for anyone who creates content.

In the latest episode of The New Mediology, my podcast with Nathan Moore, (available in iTunes or on the podcast page for listening online) was a discussion on what it means to be thinking about online marketing in an increasingly mobile environment. The iPhone changed the rules for the Internet in mobile devices. Now Google is about to jump into the game and Blackberry isn’t planning to be left out either. These devices are changing the way people use the Internet and therefore will change the ways marketers will use the Internet to reach people. I don’t want to be too much of an alarmist here but this really seems to be something to put on your radar screen now if it’s not already. The good news is that if you’re paying attention to this now you’re much less likely to be left behind.

The latest episode of The New Mediology is now available. Nathan and I talked about how to be a great blogger. You can listen to it online or via iTunes. Here’s a synopsis of what we talked about on the show:

How To Be A Great Blogger

First, think less about how to do blogging and more about what it takes to actually be a blogger. To get started you want to get some key terms right. These terms include:

• Blog: A single web presence that includes multiple posts. Don’t say you “just posted a blog.” You just wrote a blog post but didn’t “post a blog.”
• Post: Individual entries on a blog.
• Hyperlink: Words or phrases linked to other sites, blogs, etc.
• Blogroll: List of blogs typically found on either the left or right-hand side of a blog. Only link to blogs. Don’t link to non-blog websites on your blogroll.
• Embed: Code found typically for audio or video files that is added to your blog so people can watch and/or listen on your blog without going to the audio or video site to engage the media. Basically, if you’ve ever watched a YouTube video on a site or blog other than YouTube, you just saw the embed stuff at work.

The number one thing to remember for being a great blogger is that great bloggers create great content. Fair bloggers create fair content and bad bloggers create bad content. To start creating great content (content that has value to the people reading your blog) start with the Old McDonald method of creating good content:

• E- Entertain
• I - Inspire
• E - Educate
• I - Inform
• O - Outrage

You also need to determine your weekly post frequency. How many times a week can you consistently create good content? Every blogger needs to determine how many posts they can create each week and keep the blog up at that pace. Bloggers should also consider what their meal to snack ratio is in their weekly blog posts.

A few other things to think about:

• Default to shorter posts…something in 400 words or less.
• Create multiple points of entry. Create subheads, bullet points, numbered lists, etc. that can hook a person scanning the post to begin reading your post.
• Put more emphasis on the post titles. The best titles succinctly summarize your entire post.
• Respond to comments on your blog to show that you’re engaged in the conversation.
• Start commenting on other people’s blogs, particularly if you find someone talking about you, your organization, or something that directly ties back to your particular blog comment.

The bottom line: Focus on creating really, really, really good content.

A few weeks ago I had heated debate friendly discussion with Nathan about whether Twitter is a social network or a social media platform. You can hear the discussion here. He said it’s a social network. I said it’s social media. As I have thought more about it since then I think we were both wrong. Twitter is both.

It would be limiting to Twitter to say it is JUST one or the other because it has so many aspects that are distinct to social media and social networking alike. For instance, social media is about user generated content, conversation, and sharing information. Twitter does that. Social networking, however is about connecting people together through shared interests, interacting, and facilitating relationships. Twitter does that too. What I have realized is that Twitter as a tool/platform is distinct in that it covers both the social media and social networking.

I think Nathan and I were debating the wrong question. The better question is this: Do you use Twitter as just a social network or social media or do you use (and utilize) it as both simultaneously? The basis for my original perspective of Twitter as a social medium was because I only used it as a social medium. I hadn’t really been looking at it for social networking opportunities. Likewise, I suspect Nathan was using Twitter more from a social networking side and not as much for the social media opportunities.

So now the challenge is this: if we find ourselves on one side or the other, how do we incorporate the other side into our Twitter use? For me, I know I can use it better to interact with people who I don’t know (or don’t know well.) That’s not something I’ve done much, but I think I’m going to start…after all, that’s part of the social network aspect of Twitter that I’ve been missing out on.

Bonus Twitter related info: USA Today wrote an article about Twitter. Plan on some extra downtime over the next few days as more people (who hadn’t heard of Twitter until now) join and give it a shot.