The first is that the week Facebook made this announcement, Foursquare had more sign ups than at any time in their history. You have to wonder at the meaning of this piece of trivia. Either people are already figuring that the Facebook system will not be as good as Foursquare, or Facebook is legitimizing this industry. I have not heard what has happed and location based services firm Gowalla, but I assume they probably did OK last week as well.

The second is the logo that Facebook has chosen mocks Foursquare as it puts a four inside a square at the base of a map tag (see above.) Really??? That is a bit juvenile – even for a young technology company. It seems like they could better spend their creative energy creating a logo that actually looks nice because this one is as pedestrian as they come.

My real concern about this is the possibility that Facebook will be able to add this capability to their base platform and crush Foursquare and Gowalla. I dearly hope that does not happen, but the possibility exists, and if it does come to pass, it is yet another symbol of a disturbing fact about the technology world. Ideas are just about impossible to patent, and large organizations can digest them and crush the originators. We are pretty good at providing patents for specific engineering methods or sophisticated inventions. We even do allow a software patent to stand from time to time. However, there are many ideas that are simply embraced, and extended by the gorillas.

If Facebook is able to release this product and basically steal the ideas from the entrepreneurs that have labored to get them on the market, we will all shake our heads and move on. The sad thing is we will be one step closer to the day when innovation and creativity are simply another piece of inventory for large organizations to mash up into their hegemony. I am not sure allowing people to patent concepts is the answer, but certainly there has to be better solutions that Facebook believing they can crush a Foursquare with their might, and mocking them with their logo at the same time.

Now, to be fair, I do not know what is going on behind the magic curtain, and for all I know, Facebook is still going to acquire one of these firms and make a it a little more legit. Time will tell I suppose…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

If you are not familiar with the new use of the vocabulary “check in” let me give you the fast version. With location based applications like FourSquare you can identify a location (your office or store for example) and then associate a reward for people to check in while they are at this location. You can also provide tips for anyone checking in which really is just a way to provide real time information on any special, discount, or new product you want people to know about. These location-based applications provide some game based benefits on their own like badges, and mayorships for the people that are frequent users. As a side note, I am not even the mayor of my own office because one of our team who makes it into the office everyday checks in like a mad fiend wherever she goes so I never have a chance to take over being the mayor!

Personal issues aside, you hopefully are starting to get the picture that with services like these, retailers have the ability to now use technology to advertise, reward, and attract customers on a free platform that utilizes the Web and mobile devices. Forget little plastic cards I have to carry around to prove I came to your store. Forget expensive advertising tools that cannot be targeted to each location, or that land on millions of people that are not your customers. You now can give incentives for people to make multiple trips to your location, and then ply them with ads on their mobile devices that are unique to that location. Even better, when someone checks into your location, a note is sent out to their friends to tell them where they are at that moment which gives you great eWord of mouth advertising. If your eyes are glazing over at this point because you just don’t get it, then load one of the two I have mentioned and use it for 30 days – then you will get it.

The surprising thing to me is that retailers, franchisees, and service providers are not moving more quickly to experiment with these tools. This is such an obvious extension of what a mobile device with a GPS can do for a user and a marketer that one has to have zero vision to not understand the concept. Now, to be fair, a retailer could challenge the easy ways this kind of marketing system can be gamed. For example, sending your friends to a location with your phone over and over so that you can rack up visitation points, or employees that abuse the system because they are already going to be at the location. I get it. Putting the right algorithms into the check in process can solve all of these abuses, and we will sort this out quickly. Since I love predictions, here are a few I look forward to:

• A check in button on my phone so I don’t even have to open the application to check into a location – just hit the button
• Automatic check in when I walk through the front doors and the wireless network senses I am there
• An automatic loyalty discount that is given based on how many visits I have had to the location
• A list of new products sent to my mobile device that I might be interested in based on past purchases
• An alert if any of my friends are in the same location
• An annual report on how many visits I made to a location and the amount of hours spent there

If you have a company with retail locations, please, please get on this trend quickly. The early implementers have a chance to grab market share, and consumers will love the new capabilities!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Here is my take on what we should all be doing… The umbrella term needs to be Social Technologies. This is a general enough term that it covers the various branches of the discipline. To use the term social networking or social media as the umbrella is a misnomer because these are simply branches that I will discuss in a minute. Since Social Technologies (or technology) is a little long, we could shorten it in most cases to Social Tech. With this as an general term, let’s look at what falls underneath it and why…

Social Networking is clearly the right name for the branch of this field that speaks to any application or platform that is used to connect people through live, or delayed written communication. This includes eCommunities, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc. Any service that seeks to connect people one to one, many to many, or one to many for the purposes of communication or community falls within this branch.

Social Media is the branch that refers to any application or platform that uses a form a media to allow people to share information one to many. Media in this case means video, documents, presentations, or pictures. Or said another way, YouTube, Scribd, SlideShare, and Flickr. The word media is a specific term that refers to a specific method for leveraging social communications or information sharing and the key thought here is that it is done through a media file.

Social Relevancy is the branch that speaks to online reputation, or online credentials. This includes all of the concepts and applications that help build, monitor and measure what your visibility is on the Internet. This includes all of the social networking and social media sites. Whether we are talking about an organization, a person, or a product, all are starting to have online reputations, and a measurable amount of social relevancy.

There is now a fourth branch I will call the catch all branch. This is for any activity that now has the word “social” pasted in front of it to denote the fact the social tools are now being used to improve performance. For example, Social CRM, and Social Recruiting. I suspect we will see many more examples of nomenclature like this over the next five years, then we will drop putting social in front of terms when everything has a social tech element within it.

If people cannot discern the difference between these terms, they will never be able to actually be good at using them. Vocabulary can be powerful in that way. So please help me get the popular press, and the various commenters to start using this paradigm. It makes much more sense to delineate these terms into branches that make sense, and to use an umbrella term that is intuitive. By the way, it starts with you using these terms correctly… My next stop is Webster’s Dictionary. I intend to put the full court press on for them to define things this way!!!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The other change is that I am going to broaden the content range just a little. I have long wanted to add some content on the topic of where leadership and technology crossover. So from now on, I will share some stories and observations about what leadership means in this new technology augmented world. I think this is a topic that is talked about in the halls of organizations, but rarely addressed with leaders themselves. We just seem to assume it is OK for the C-suite to be technology ignorant as long as they have IT people they can outsource their decisions to, and I think this is dead wrong.

As always, I will continue to comment on my thoughts about new announcements, technology trends, and useful processes. There was a lot that happened over the last 45 days that I have been away. A whole months worth if blogs could be written about Apple and AT&T. By the way, if you saw the press conference that Steve Jobs just did, can you figure out why they ran it like a product announcement with marketing slides and the lot? What would have been wrong with a direct press conference instead of the spin show it turned out to be. I love what Jobs has done, and Apple products, but I am getting tired of their style of delivery on such things.

And in case you did not notice, I Foursquared my office today so that I could be mayor of something! I also offered to give away a free book to anyone that checks in five times. Mostly, I just want to be the mayor of my own office. As luck would have it, the people that work with me are here more than I am and will probably beat me to it. My second option is being the mayor of the OKC airport, I figure I have a good shot at that one!

So in the end, this is a warning of sorts… I am back blogging, and bursting with things to say!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com