360DigitalInfluence

On November 23, 1787 James Madison wrote:
“A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.”

When he wrote those words, social media was nowhere on the horizon, nor was the telephone. At that time, getting messages out in a timely manner was much more challenging than it is today… significantly more challenging. The smaller the society, the easier it was to make sure everyone was informed. Today’s technologies make reaching thousands of people in real time no challenge at all.

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Definition: Badge fatigue – noun. c. May 2010

• a reduction in the effectiveness of mobile loyalty programs that use status or icons as incentives
• being so over the idea that you’ll be rewarded with some intangible thingy for identifying yourself as a fan

About a year ago, the discussion around “badge fatigue” began. Fans and followers were starting have trouble seeing through the clutter of countless gaming programs that offered incentives. So, plans were hatched to reinvigorate the model before it became another fad.

In the initial format, a user was given the incentive to go to an establishment because he or she would be rewarded with an intangible prize: a title (e.g. “mayor” Foursquare or royalty titles on Yelp!) or an icon (e.g. “badges” on Foursquare or “pins” on Gowalla). Users competed with their friends and unknown competitors to get the best status and personal gratification. As users achieved higher status and left check-in competitors in the dust, they got an even greater incentive: a discount or something for free.  This discount wasn’t targeted to the individual’s tastes specifically, but more so, whoever got the reward first.

The model grew and companies began to experiment; people gained VIP access to parties (Internet Week 2010) and points for existing rewards programs (Top Guest). And this is where we stand today – with a lot of great experiments, but also a lot of clutter.

So, what will happen next?

There seem to be three (somewhat nebulous) schools of thought:

1. We continue along the same lines with this gamification model that has a broad reach, because, in all honesty, it has worked. These indicators of status in the “game” continue to get people in to the cash register even without targeted (and often intangible) incentive. (Note: Some are questioning the impact on business)
2. We move on. Since the market is becoming saturated with these types of programs, it is worth the effort to focus efforts elsewhere.  “Call me crazy, but I say that Foursquare badges go the way of POGS, Tamagotchis, and Farmville – interesting ideas that captivated our attention for a time, but ultimately lost out,” hypothesizes Colin Slasheimer.
3. We repurpose and rebuild these programs a highly relevant, laser-focused marketing tool. Two examples of how this can happen include finding a way to hyper-locate down to the layout of a store or revaluating how the data is used (see pilot launched by Foursquare).

I fall in the third group. I want to be found where I already need to go and told about specifically what I want with hyper-relevant offers. I want to check into the toothpaste aisle of the drug store, and be told what toothpaste brand sale right now.  (Ok, I know this probably isn’t possible right now, but could be pretty cool.)  If I go to the hairdressers, I want to come across an incentive in 3 months when I need my next haircut, instead of right when I check-in.

So, what do you think?  Have we jumped the shark?

Ten years ago, sharing photographs and videos meant snail-mailing content to family and friends. Now, sharing photographs and videos are a digital activity, with online sharing sites and smart phones applications like Instagram, Path, and PicPlz being quickly integrated into daily social media regimens.

Enter Color: the latest mobile photo application drawing mixed reviews about the application. Prior to Color’s launch, Sequoia Capital, considered “one of the highest caliber venture firms” by Wall Street Journal, invested $25 million,  Bain Capital invested $9 million, and Silicon Valley Bank provided $7 million in venture debt, presenting Color with an accumulative $41 million in funding.  Since its launch, the application has received 2/5 stars based on over 600 reviews on the iTunes App Store. Commentary has noted the application’s function as a stalking mechanism, others have expressed that the user interface is not very intuitive, and the most reoccurring question I’ve encountered is, “is Color worth $41 million?”

Despite this feedback, Color attracted adoption and positive reactions from technology elites, including Tristan Walker of FourSquare, Joshua Williams of Gowalla, and David Heinemeier Hansson of Ruby on Rails. Within a week of its public debut, Color is ranked second in number of downloads for social network applications, just behind Facebook. After having the opportunity to use this application over the past few days, I have come to two conclusions: 1.) I am shamelessly addicted and 2.) It is indeed an important product that has high business potential.

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Mashups are nothing new.  In fact on this very blog we recently provided some historical perspective related specifically to music.  OK, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way …

In the last few days I’ve come across three really rad examples of people/organizations continuing to embrace the mashup movement.

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A Content Management System (CMS) is one portal to post and edit content, monitor and respond to comments, and create interactive applications across multiple Facebook Pages, Twitter handles, or other communities. There are lots of options out there (e.g. Context Optional, Involver, Vitrue, Buddy Media, LiveWorld, Spriklr, Spreadfast, Media Funnel to name a few) and all of them service Facebook. If you’ve used Hootsuite or CoTweet imagine that but on steroids and just maybe worth paying for.

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We are very excited to announce that we are a proud sponsor and participant of an upcoming virtual conference brought to you by our friends at PRWeek next week. With new applications and social media tools emerging every day, staying up to date on the latest trends in social media innovation is critical to our business as PR professionals.

The PRWeek Lab will take place Wednesday, June 2 and Thursday, June 3, 2010 and will provide an online resource for PR professionals on the most recent social media trends, tools, and strategies, thought leadership, and case studies- all without leaving one’s office. The online platform includes live webcast sessions, keynote speakers (such as Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak and Ben Edwards, VP of Digital Strategy and Development, IBM), as well as exhibitor booth environments for follow-up questions, live chats, and material downloads. PRWeek Lab will be a fully interactive experience, with Q&A throughout, as well as polling of all participants on the quality of the content and the future of social media. No other PR event will bring you closer to the action that is driving today’s social media innovation.  Please visit here for additional details.

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Now that 70 percent of Facebook are non-US and the network serves 70 different languages, multinational brands are asking for more geo-targeting capabilities and dealing with questions about how to manage a multinational fan base. I’m confident that Facebook will be have expanding options over the next six months but until then here are several tips and tools for running a multinational Facebook presence.

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Last week, we launched a custom RSS dashboard in partnership with Netvibes. It’s a simple idea really - take the flexible, widget-based structure of the worlds greatest RSS start page, Netvibes, and tune it up with all the right feeds and widgets to make it useful for most marketers and communications specialists.

You can grab it here at TheDailyInfluence.com.

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As a marketer used to trying out and using social media tools, I test a lot of sites. To be perfectly honest, not all of them are ready for “prime time” use or are tools that every client should be using. It is interesting, however, to try and group unrelated sites together by function and sometimes it leads to a (hopefully) useful recap list like this one on how some of these newer tools might be useful when it comes to traditional PR activities. By now, most PR pros know about blog monitoring tools and search engines and likely use them to understand some conversations in social media. There are a host of other ways besides a general blog search, however, to turn up some interesting data points and information about brand reputation, who is talking about your brand and what they are saying. Here are just a few tools worth a look.

1. Summize - Rapidly growing in popularity, the easiest way to describe Summize is as a search engine for Twitter. The simple fact of Twitter is that there are millions of conversations taking place every day and many involve mentions of brands. For a real time snapshot of brand discussions from individuals on social media, Twitter is the place to be and Summize has the best interface to help you track it.
2. AllTop - If you haven’t been watching the rapid growth of Alltop, you need to start. It is essentially an aggregation of blogs by various categories, but there are a few things that set Alltop apart. The first is that the simple interface means you can really skim headlines for many blogs in a particular category quite easily. The second is that you no longer have to rely on relatively useless Technorati Authority figures to find top tier blogs. Alltop doesn’t have all the answers, but to see a quick view of what top bloggers are talking about in a particular category, it’s a great place to start.
3. TinEye - Though still in beta mode, this site is getting lots of attention because of the pioneering way that they are focusing on the next evolution of image search. Put frankly, image search is notoriously bad because it seldom reads an actual image and only reads elements like the file title and description around the image. TinEye works when you give it a URL location of an image, or upload an image of our own (like your brand logo, for example). Then the site goes to work, finding all instances of use for that particular image, giving you a great snapshot of how your brand is being remade and used across the web.
4. BrandTags - A brilliantly simple site from Noah Brier, this is a game-like site that asks visitors to share the first word that comes into their minds when faced with a brand logo. The resulting words are then shown in a tag cloud format with the most common words appearing largest. It offers an interesting visual snapshot of what people think about your brand, though it is still somewhat limited to only larger brands. If your brand logo is not in there, you can always submit a note to Noah to ask to be included.
5. YackTrack - One of the big problems with keeping up with Social Media is that people can comment on content that you upload in so many different ways on so many different sites that it becomes nearly impossible to track and respond to all of it. YackTrack offers a useful tool where you can enter a URL and see a list of comments made on various sites about it (including the closed wall of Facebook). It’s a great way to track comments on a particular piece of content across multiple channels.
6. TimeTube - This mashup site offers a way of plotting all YouTube videos that match a particular keyword against a timeline to see when they occurred. If your brand inspires a lot of videos discussing it, this tool will give you a great overview of when these videos are typically posted and offers an engaging way to bring them together in a chronological format that few others can offer.