Twitter Matters: A Conversation about Foursquare

Below is a real life example of how a company can actively participate and manage conversations about its brands via Twitter. Learn more about and follow gnagesh, Goodakm, and Foursquare on Twitter.

gnagesh @foursquare The "Go here, do this" format makes it seem more like it's aimed at tourists. Cities have more than 12 things to do for locals.

Goodakm @gnagesh (mayor of Atlantic Media Co.) I think the #foursquare "badges" feature is antithetical to the effervescent tourist

gnagesh @Goodakm I suppose the badges would help. But not every store/restaurant/location can be boiled down to one tip & some of the tips are wack

Foursquare @gnagesh We're actually building for locals over tourists. Our thinking: Top 12 = encourages curated lists rather than meaningless reviews.

Goodakm @gnagesh that's why there should be a way to see a "top 10" list of things to do at a venue based on pop opinion of #foursquare community

gnagesh @Goodakm I like that, but it depends on @foursquare reaching critical mass first. I'd rather be free to leave a note or pic at a location

gnagesh @Foursquare That supposes people are constantly ranking locations with respect to others. I just want to comment on where I'm at right now.

Goodakm @foursquare have you thought about a #foursquare zeitgeist based "top 10" things to do at a venue?

Foursquare @Goodakm We'd love to do the "zeitgeist for to-dos" thing. Requires a lot of user participation, but that's the direction we're headed.

The above conversation happened within the span on an hour and helps outline the new face of marketing.

First, marketing is real time. Think less, point-of-sale marketing and more point-of-thought marketing. The Foursquare team reached out to customers in a moment when they knew those customers were thinking and talking about their product.

Second, introducing nano-marketing. The web has made it possible for companies to reach out to customers when they are searching for their products, but Twitter allows for another layer of granularity by signaling when a specific person is thinking about a product. This produces a reverse telemarketing experience for customers where at the moment when they are thinking about a product a representative from the company contacts them.

Finally, your best marketing team members don't work for you. In the above example, two customers had a conversation about a product and that conversation was overheard by everyone who's following them on Twitter. Foursquare chimed into this conversation which basically anointed the tweeting customers as valid spokespersons for their product.

Smart companies will use Twitter and other social media platforms to leverage the natural viral messaging conduits they create to empower existing evangelist, create new evangelist and spread the good news about their products themselves. And not just to the masses, but to the people who already want to be converted.

TV Matters: Shep Smith - "Glenn Beck?"

Shep Smith gives Glenn Beck the credit he's due.

Movie Matters: The Watchman

I wasn't planning on doing a post on The Watchman but then Brian Garback sent me this in an email:

re: watchmen: it took a couple hours to develop all the dark and monstrous characters and in the end i found it hard to empathize with them. unlike batman and harvey dent, the few human emotions they showed were cheapened by their willingness to disregard one other and the rest of humanity, apathetically sleeping around and causing immense collateral damage with little selfless remorse.

Here is my response.

I think the film was first about the dehumanization that accompanies fighting evil. To truly root out evil one has to become the thing that he or she destroys. The film goes one step further to suggest that the only way to really conquer evil is to destroy mankind because mankind is fundamentally evil. This, then, begs the question, why would we want to root out evil if it is in fact essential, or at least part and parcel, to the human condition? Therefore, superheroes, or even average heroes, equipped with powers or the capacity for stepping outside of the human condition and live unaffected by evil are antithetical to human survival.

So what this story finally deals with, and this, I think, makes the graphic novel so important, is why do we need stories about superheroes? I think the answers lies somewhere in our collective idea that if only we could be faster, smarter, stronger, or all powerful we could make all of our problems go away, but when these theories are tested in our imagination, on the pages of comic books, or on the big screen, we are faced with the reality that the solutions to our problems, if there are any, must be found within ourselves.