Posts Tagged 'facebook'

Foursquare + Caffe Henrietta (Israel)

Had the pleasure of meeting Orli this afternoon at Caffe Henrietta, one of the many coffee houses in Tel Aviv area. Shortly before arriving I saw the picture Orli took (embed below), which I believe is the 1st long-term partnership a local business is doing with Foursquare (correct me if I’m wrong).

Henrietta and Foursquare (credit: Orli Yakuel)

Caffe Henrietta and Foursquare: Join our social club (credit: Orli Yakuel)

The first 5 minutes of the meeting both Orli and I spent facing our iPad/iPhone, respectively, registering for the partnership, at Caffe Henrietta’s website (He). The process is fairly simple, 3-4 steps, to connect you to Caffe Henrietta’s social club (facebook, foursquare, cellphone). Shortly after we received 3 text messages – including a free drink coupon for the current visit!

The text messages I received from Caffe Henrietta

The text messages I received from Caffe Henrietta

I’m happy to see location based services (He) are kicking off in Israel, with various models in place – campaign based, specials, partnerships, exploring what works and what not. Although Caffe Henrietta saw only $5 from the 3 of us (+ tip), the long term exposure and buzz is much bigger, not to mention customer loyalty – next time I’m meeting someone in that area, it will probably be at Henrietta.

5 lessons learned from Club Seat Foursquare campaign

Seat ClubBack in July I wrote here about the 1st foursquare campaign in Israel, Club Seat, a bold activity at the time, and even now. 4 months later, and thanks to Lindsay for reminding me, here is best practices for launching a foursquare campaign post. The post is based on data I collected on facebook and foursquare, along with personal insights, from my experience and my understanding of the digital marketing space in Israel. The charts comparing the ‘official’ venue vs. Club Seat venue are a visual aid, based on actual foursquare data collected October 26th.

1. Confusing rules

I’ll start at the end of the contest, a status update (see screenshot below) from a participant wondering why he hasn’t won 1st prize. Before you say anything (sour looser, etc) – the dude has a valid point: the winner should be the Mayor of the venue (Galina) that received the most check-ins during the contest. The response from Club Seat, although agreeing with the participant, doesn’t help clear the air (4th comment in the screenshot below): “The club that had the most check-ins by August 31st was Gazoz, 2nd was Galina, 3rd was Sublet. OK, say we believe it (stats anyone?). But wait, it gets better: The Mayor at both Gazoz and Galina, as of August 31st was Michal Y., who declined accepting the prize. Hence, the Mayor of the 3rd venue, Sublet, is the winner”. WTF?!?! How did they deduce that?? Who is Michal Y. and why did she decline a flight+vacation to Ibiza? Where are the check-in stats for August 31st to support the decision? But the most awkward thing is the logic they used for picking an alternate winner. Just so we’re clear, Runner-up refers to an actual human. Not venue. Confusing, but even more, something’s fishy. And that’s not a term one wants associated with one’s brand.

Club Seat post-contest discussion

Club Seat post-contest discussion

2. Duplicate venues

Google’s mission is to ‘Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful‘. Foursquare, as any other User-Generated-Content service (youtube, twitter, go-walla, facebook places, etc) are working hard on eliminating duplicate and triple content, in order to minimize storage space – and make it easier for us, consumers, to find what we need. I understand it was important ‘branding’ the club with ‘Club Seat‘, making it unique to the contest – but I think that’s wrong. There are plenty of methods to measure traffic and check-ins to existing venues, no need to create duplicates. Plus, by using the existing venue already on foursquare (Gazoz, Galina and Sublet) you give incentive to the current Mayor to ‘keep his chair’, by increasing his/her visits – basically ‘using’ the Mayor’s own need to remain, well, the Mayor.

Galina - Club Seat foursquare campaign

Foursquare stats: Galina vs. Galina Club Seat

3. Leverage evangelists

As I wrote back in July, this campaign will be interesting to watch, as foursquare is considered early-early stage in Israel, around 1,000 active users (who checked-in in the past 30 days) in my opinion. Any digital marketing campaign must include early adopters of the technology in question and community hubs – people that have 1000+ facebook friends, 2000+ twitter followers, 300+ foursquare friends – that will act as a powerful magnet, bringing more traffic, making some noise. Maybe Grey Interactive had such evangelists, but even if they had, I haven’t heard about it – and I’m pretty out there, socially speaking.

4. People, not venue, oriented

CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CIOs – it’s all about the consumer. When doing a location based contest, people count, because tracking their movement and analyzing the data will bring you added value. Premiere value. To strengthen my first point (confusing rules), when the winner (Mayor) of a venue declines a free vacation to Ibiza, give it to the person Runner-up, not the venue. Now, the charts – although Gazoz and Galina (Club Seat) have more check-ins than the official venue, people-wise – they loose. Twice. Because those 114 and 203 people (respectively) could have joined the contest, boosting all metrics, simply by seeing all those other Seat clubbers checking-in.

Gazoz - Club Seat foursquare

Foursquare stats: Gazoz vs. Gazoz Club Seat

5. Bring the business on-board

In my opinion, the #1 reason this campaign didn’t go as planned – minimal business involvement. There are hundreds of clubs/bars in Tel Aviv, all striving to survive, 60% will close within 24 months (actual stat). If Club Seat would have worked with Galina, Gazoz and Sublet, offering an incentive to those checking-in (free keg to parties of 4+, 1st beer on the house, etc), this contest could have taken another route altogether, increasing awareness, boosting sales and helping both Seat and the clubs win the crowd.

Sublet Club Seat foursquare

Foursquare stats: Sublet vs. Sublet Club Seat

Star Wars – Facebook Edition

Dorkly.com has re-enacted the 1st Star Wars movie as a facebook conversation, comprised of 63 comments. Long, but definitely shorter than watching the entire movie.

Star Wars 1

See the original at Dorkly.com.

And thanks to Erez Ronen over at Holes in the Net for sharing!

PixelPipe – Send & Share to 110 Social Networks

One of the applications that were officially introduced to the Symbian platform during Nokia World 2010 is PixelPipe, a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text, photo, video and audio files once through various ‘Pipes‘, across over 100 social networks, including twitter, facebook, linkedin, youtube, blip.fm, twitpic, yfrog, dropbox, Google Buzz, Google Docs, and many-many more.

PixelPipe logoI first heard of PixelPipe at the #NokiaMeet gathering organized by Micky Fin at 1000Heads HQ in London. The next day, between the keynote lectures, business sessions, round table sessions and interview, I got a chance to chat with PixelPipe stuff at their booth (embedded video – RSS readers click here).

The feature I love about PixelPipe is the facebook Pipe of course – using the E72 I still haven’t found the application that allows me to share pictures to my wall. True, I often use the #fb hashtag in my twitpic uploads, but it shows the link, not the picture itself. So PixelPipe just became one of my favorite apps! You can download it from Ovi Store, free of course.

The Real Life Facebook LIKE Button

The Coca-Cola Village is an Israeli summer tradition.

Every year, in July-August, thousands of kids in their summer break attend ‘The Village’, a 5-day camp, organized by Coca-Cola Israel, with fun activities, pool, social games and Coca Cola drinks of course. This year, e-dologic, the interactive agency working with Coca-Cola Israel, has developed a very cool solution for connecting the offline world with the online – facebook.

The real life life button - coca-cola village

The real life life button - coca-cola village

Each kid upon entering the village received an RFID bracelet, with his/her facebook profile saved, securely, in that chip. In turn, the kid was able to ‘Like’ each activity he/she performed at the village, showing up on their facebook profile as a 15sec video, outlining the activity, which was pre-recorded.

The ‘Real life facebook like button’ was a huge success (Hebrew), with tens of thousands #LIKES, for a total of under 1,000 participants! Facebook sent over Mark Cowan, VP Operationsת Europe, to visit the village and experience ‘The Like Machine‘ first-hand, after Mark Zukerberg heard about it at Cannes Lions by Enon Landenberg, e-dologic CEO.

Update on privacy: in a related post (Hebrew) by Jonathan Klinger, it was suggested that the RFID tag stores the username and password details of each participant, thus making it easy to steal the credentials using a simple RFID reader (or in the event of lost/stolen tag). I double-checked with e-dologic the info I had: The RFID tag only stores a unique id number, worthless on its own. When a participant moves his hand near the RFID reader in the village, the on-site server (protected both physically and virtually) receives the participant location and unique id number, to match against its own DB. Every cycle (Coca-Cola Village has 5-7 cycles, each one 3 days) the DB is formatted, for security reasons. On top of that, participants pay a 15US$ fee to receive the RFID tag, refundable upon return of the tag.

The Real Life LIKE Butoon – Case Study – Coca-Cola Village:

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.