Location based marketing finally popular in Europe

Almost from the start of the very first Location Based Networks in 2008, they stimulated retailers to launch promo's for those customers who "checked in" at their local stores, pubs and restaurants.

During the first year I noticed lots of successful actions and promo's starting up in the USA and UK, some even nationwide (e.g. promo's of Starbucks, Domino's Pizza, ...)

Pioneer Foursquare has a great business page, listing the latest promo actions nearby.

It seems that after the summer of 2010 Belgium and Holland also noticed the positive aspects of these promo's and finally jumped on the wagon. Especially near larger cities, it happens more and more that when you check in somewhere, you'll be attended to "Special Promo" actions nearby.

Only yesterday I was attended to a promo by a local bookstore in Maastricht (NL) where they hand out free bestselling books to customers who have checked in to their store at least 10 times.

If you are active in retail or horeca ... take action now and get more customers.

Location based networks are very clever marketing tools and free to use !!!

Integrate and automate your status updates

Since Social Media is time consuming, we need to search for ways to integrate and automate most of the daily processes we use for communicating with our network.

Recently I was interviewed by a journalist for Bizz Magazine, the leading business magazine in Belgium for startups and small businesses. The result of this interview you can find in this article (in dutch) : http://www.friends-with-benefits.eu/images/press/BIZZ105.pdf

I want to share a few essentials in this blogpost :

For each connection you make between networks, try to use the most simple way to connect. For example, LinkedIn and Twitter have integrated direct routes to each other's networks.
In Twitter you can use the hashtag #in to include a status-update on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn you only have to cross the box next to the blue Twitter 'T' to include a status-update on Twitter.

The most popular broadcast tools for status updates are Ping.fm, TweetDeck and HelloTXT

As a 'heavy' user of Ping.fm I still think the best feature is the ability to update all my networks with a simple email message ... a lot cheaper than updating through a webinterface when I'm abroad !

All three mentioned applications offer more or less the same features, only Tweetdeck delivers an application that can be installed on your pc and also gives you a dashboard view on your most popular networks.

When constructing the routes for your status messages to be send from one network to the next, always watch out not to create loops or multiple posting errors !
Each message should only appear ONCE on each network or otherwise this will annoy your visiters and followers !

Integrating and automating your status messages is also a part of the workshop 'Social Media for Business'.

Foursquare : The next big thing is location !

The newest hype in Social Media world are location-based web-applications such as Foursquare.
Foursquare is a very simple mobile Internet tool to build your network and tell each other WHERE you are. The question is no longer "what are you doing ?", but "Where are you doing it ?"

The big thing in this evolution is of course peer promotion. This new platform has all the keys in hand to become the leading network for marketing and business purposes. Users can add tips to trigger other users to visit locations or businesses.

As my friend Marieke (@hensel) points out : It's just a matter of time before companies will offer free drinks or coupons to people who digitally check-in to their store.

Today Twitter is already recognized as one of the most important business networks. It were the users who invented most of the innovative features and uses of this network. I hope users will also be clever enough to develop the right uses for Foursquare ... there is a lot of potential in this new network ... but it's up to us to unlock it !

Network with your target audience

Networking is not about direct transactions, it's about getting to know people. Nevertheless it might be a good idea to network with people who have access to your target market. This could be the key factor in deciding which platforms to keep on using, after trying out a bunch of them.

On Ecademy you will find lots of small business owners, while Xing seems to have more production companies on board. The corporates are present on LinkedIn while you'll easily find the younger generation on Netlog. On Facebook you'll discover a nice sample of the total community, perfect for launching new products or ideas.

If your professional activities are aimed at a small and very specific piece of the market (e.g. lawyers), you might want to be part of a niche network for that target audience too.

Of course each network also has a strong memberbase from it's own origin. Ecademy was founded in the UK and still has a large percentage of UK members. Xing was launched in Germany and still has a huge amount of German members. This also gives you the opportunity to have a quick and easy access to the market in that country.

Some time ago I was helping one of my contacts to find a high-tech company in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh (Scotland), ready to accept an internship from a highschool in Belgium.

Because I knew Ecademy was probably the network with the strongest UK memberbase, I posted a cry for help on their blog and two days later the problem was solved.

If you want to do international business with a certain country, it's always a good idea to locate the top networkers in that country and meet up with them. They probably have all the contacts you need to get started.

Of course the best way to use online networking is to make the perfect combination of multiple networks, covering all your needs. More about this coming soon !

Has networking changed in the last 4 years ?

This week my new book 'Friends with Benefits' was launched onto the virtual shelves of the Ecademy Press webshop and Amazon.co.uk.

Next month, 21/11/2009, the official Booklaunch-event will take place in my hometown Diest (B).

Because this new book is launched exactly 4 years after my first book, 'A Girlfriend in Every City', it also shows the change (or not ?) that happened in social networking during this period.

This gave me the idea to pour the complete text of both books into Word-clouds, to spot some major differences and similarities.

A Girlfriend in Every City (2005)

Friends with Benefits (2009)

It seems that after 4 years the focus has shifted a little bit from business networking to social networking which got much broader and 'part of the furniture'.

In general not much has changed. Networking still isn't about business, but about people. Networking is still about building a reputation and gaining trust.

Following people on networks like Twitter is still pretty new but became a natural habbit in a very short time.

I'm absolutely shure that if I had written this book 6 months later, one of the buzz-words would have been 'Real-time' because that's the technology all online social media are now implementing.

It's interesting to see that networking actually didn't change that much over the last 4 years, it did however get accepted by a much broader audience. More and more people feel the need to start networking because today's world is demanding it !

The future is niche

Now social networks like Facebook have reached the stage where almost everyone you know is on it, the next big thing will be niche networks. In my opinion this is an emerging trend which will lead to an incredible amount of very successful but smaller networking websites, each of them serving a very specific niche audience. Some of them are already around for some time, but indicators show their time has come to shine.

These “themed” networks will cater the needs of very specific groups of people, based on their job description, professional activities, lifestyle, hobbies or interests. Any common interest will do to bring people together around a specific topic.

These are the kind of niche networks we will probably see the most :

- Based on a professional selection (e.g. a network only for lawyers)

- Based on a hobby or interest (e.g. a network for fans of sailing)

- Based on a business relation (e.g. network for all the clients of Porsche Belgium)

Those who start these niche networks have 3 options :

- They can start a "group" on a larger network. Being part of a larger structure will give them a head start and they still have more or less autonomy to manage the group.

- They can also choose for a whitelabel offer, which is an exact copy of the infrastructure of a known network, which can be altered to their specific needs.

- Once a network reaches a certain number of members they will feel the need to have their own platform. This is the only way to design a completely tailor-made website catering very specific needs.

In the last months I also read a few articles about the mass dropout of early adopters from the larger social networks. The average age of new members seems to be increasing. Most early adopters were in their late teens or early twenties and used to be very active on these websites. Today more and more members aged +30 are joining these platforms, while we see some of those early adopters leaving again and heading toward the niche networks.

More on niche networks in my upcoming book 'Friends with Benefits', to be released Nov. 21.