Business

I was reading Sebastien Provencher’s guest post this morning on the LeWeb’s blog about foursquare and comparing it to Twitter.  I agree with Seb that fourSquare is not the next Twitter but I do think its a bit of a game changer in what its doing with in Social Mobile space.

foursquare gives users incentives to ‘check-in’ to different locations on their mobile phone.  It uses the phone’s GPS location to provide a list of local and popular locations for the user to check-in or the user can quickly create a new location profile.   The user can earn badges for each location they visit and it becomes a bit of a game to earn new badges and compare you points with your friends.  The user who visits an individual location the most earns a ‘mayor’ badge for that location.

I think the game changing aspect of foursquare is what its changing for user behaviour.   As users check into new locations they can instantly see other popular locations that are near them.    Right now that list is free from advertising and just based on the location and popularity of the locations.  Kinda like search engines were in 2000, where there race was on finding content and less on advertising/monetizing like search engines today.  Right now the user group engaged in foursquare is still quite small but its growing and ff this user behaviour continues it should develop into an excellent user intercept opportunity.

Advertisers could target users in their proximity with real-time offers.    This is already happening on the Twitter today and its only going to get more powerful with the social mobile connection.  Populating and controlling the list of ‘check-in’ locations will be increasingly important and profitable.  As will advertising that can connect with this location information in a meaningful form.

It will be interesting to see if foursquare can maintain a unique position here or if the other social networks will just duplicate its functionality and bring it internally.  Right now if feels like foursquare is more like an app on Facebook or Twitter than a social network on its own.  I would expect that Facebook and Twitter will continue to provide the identity data for the social mobile experience but the player with the local advertising is still an unknown.

For most marketing search engine marketing is a common marketing technique and entire business united have been established to focus on search.   The most popular tool being Google and in a distant second the Microsoft Bing/live tools.   Facebook search on the other hand is a much different beast and much more difficult to market against.   In order to optimize we need to understand the Facebook Search function.

The key component to understand with Facebook search is the interaction relationship.  This means that content that the user has interacted with in the past will appear first and may appear in the auto-complete if they have Fan, Joined or Bookmarked the content.

Facebook search then will  display search results based on your friends involvement with content.  This means that individuals, groups, pages, or applications which your friends have interacted with appear at the top.  The next considertation is your network(s) and content types with more people from your network will be assigned priority.  Facebook has indicated they will removing networks but this logic is likely to be replace with geographic filters.

The next concept to understand is that Facebook assigns a priorty to different content types, assuming you have equal friend interactions or no friend interactions.  The priority is generally:

1. Individual user profiles
2. Facebook Pages
3. Facebook Groups
4. Facebook Applications
5. Facebook Events
6. Friend Facebook Posts
7. Everyone’s Facebook Posts

After these internal Facebook content types Web Search results will be presented from the Microsoft Bing search results.

The other major different between Facebook and other search tools is the keyword matching.  The matching seems to be much more strict that other tools and partial keyword matching is very poor.

Across all content types the depth of search seems to limited to the content title.    This is probably the most important tool for Facebook search marketing.  Creating an effective title can increase your placement in search.  Without partial keyword matching a long title will be difficult to match with user keyword and keyword stuff has limited impact because the title on most content sources is limited.

The other important consideration, especially when combined with paid advertising is to get maximum coverage across networks ( geographic, schools and employers ) and across as many friend clusters as possible.   Facebook allows for a number of geographic targeting options and good distribution here can help with Facebook search results.

Ebay has released a very cool map/video of Black Friday transactions on their website, you can see it here:

http://www.ebayholiday.com/black-friday

If your not familar with Black Friday, its a mainly US phenomia where retailers enter into the “Black” for the year with the beginning of the Christmas holiday shopping. Most retailers offer significant discounts to get people shopping, and it seems that this trend matchs well with Ebay Transactions online.

Of particular interest is the number of Transactions that appear on the East Coast. Ebay original started as on the West Coast but it would appear to be much more widely penetrated across the East Coast of the US or prehaps East Coast retailers are more aggressive with their Black Friday sales/discounts…

Note: This post can also be found on refreshclassifieds.com

The agenda for Facebook Garage Montreal has been posted and I’ve been accepted present on ‘Public Involve with Social Media’.  I will be great to talk about my work with Ascentum over the last few months.  The preliminary agenda is:

• 5pm to 6:30pm: buffet, socializing
• 6:30pm to 6:45pm: opening remarks – Louise Clements, Head of Sales, Facebook Canada
• 6:45pm to 7:15pm: first keynote – Hell’s Kitchen: Facebook comme plateforme de jeux vidéos, Emmanuel Delmoly, co-founder Social2U
• 7:15pm to 7:45pm: Facebook Advertising 101 – speaker to be confirmed
• 7:45pm to 8:15pm: break
• 8:15pm to 9:15pm Social Marketing / Facebook Connect
  • Speaker: Marc Snyder – Facebook et politique municipale
  • Speaker: Colin Smilie – Public involvement with Facebook
  • Speaker: Virginia Magaletta – FB Connect Marketing Case Studies
• 9:15pm to 10:00pm: second keynote – Matt Wyndowe, Facebook (Palo Alto, CA) – Topic to be confirmed

Should be an exciting evening. The event is free and you can register here.

CanadianTire.ca has decided to stop all online sales as of Jan 29, 2009.  Very little information about why the decision to end online sales has been disclosed.  CanadianTire.ca includes the following reasons for the change:

A few weeks ago I wrote about my frustrations with the CIBC visa opt-out upgrade program.  Since then CIBC and I have parted ways, my Aeroplan Visa card was the last CIBC service I retained from them since openning a bank account with them as a child.   A few years ago I switched to Royal Bank after CIBC was unable re-issue me a bank card without me returning to Hamilton Ontario.  I am now free of all CIBC services…

Being with Royal Bank I thought it would be easiest if I just chose their Avion Infinite Visa.  It seemed similar enough to my CIBC card until it arrived in the mail a few weeks ago.  Royal Bank has decided to be the first bank to take ‘advantage’ of the new Visa chip and PIN option.  This is a system Visa has been using in Europe for years and it hads a PIN to Visa transactions similar to Interact payments in Canada.  Unfortunately it seems that while Royal Bank is ready, and maybe Visa is ready, vendors are not.    I was unable to order a Pizza, make purchases at BestBuy or even use it at the driver through.  With the exception of BestBuy ( where it took 20 mins for staff to figure out how to process a payment with a chip and PIN ) it seems that most vendors don’t support the new system.  In additional Royal Bank doesn’t actually send me a PIN.  Instead the card is essentially useless ( unless you want to talk to a RBC operator about every transaction ) until you visit an RBC branch and create your own PIN.  In anycase the Royal Bank Avion Infinite Visa with new Chip and PIN technology and I are no longer seeing each other.  Its been cut into little pieces as per instructions…

I’m now waiting for a TD Visa, which I’m assured is Visa Chip and PIN technology free, at least until 2011 when its mandatory and hopefully vendors will know how to handle them.  One unfortunate surprise around the TD Visa was the TD won’t actually send the card to my house.  Instead I have to pick it up at a branch.  I suspect this is so they can check my ID and TD bank seems to have really good branch hours with most branches open 8am to 8pm.  I’m hoping their Visa will be the winner…

CBC, or Canadian Broasting Corp, has just made what I think can only be called the worst branding mistake ever with regards to the Hockey Song.  For 40 years the CBC hockey broadcasts have used the Hockey Song and this week they let it slip away to their competition.  I can’t think of a bigger branding mistake… Ever!

I can’t think of another TV broadcast, or show that has ever let its theme song slide to the competition.  Worst yet, the song has been in use all year up until 2 weeks ago with the end of the Stanley Cup playoffs.  If the CBC wasn’t intending to renew the license they should have stopped using it awhile ago and worked on a replacement plan.  Instead they just now launched a contest to find a replacement with a $100,000 prize, in the same week that CTV announced they’ve listened the Hockey Song.

I don’t know much about the management of the CBC, or their sports budgets or the deal that proposed for the rights to the song.  Everyone I’ve met from the CBC has been intelligent and with good intentions but I don’t understand how they let this happen.   Its  hard to believe that they can sign Don Cherry to a multi-year deal but let their theme song  go without renewal.  What a disaster…

Sebastian, over at Praized, has a great post about the “New Inflation “ report by CIBC world markets.  If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you check it out.  I’ll wait… ( besure to check out the “Will Soaring Transport Costs Reverse Globalization?” section )

Over the last few years there’s been alot of discussions about globalization and the Walmart effect on business.  There hasn’t been alot of consideration around the sustainablility of the model.  The simple situation is that we’re running out of fossil fuels and the cost is going nowhere but up…

I think this is going to have a big impact on the business world over the next 10-20 years as  have to deal with the fact that distance is going to cost us money.    The change and the cost increases probably won’t be linear, the tar sands projects in Alberta are showing that.  As the cost of oil increases, less opertune oil deposits are reconsidered.  Alternative energey sources will also become viable but most still depend on a finite supply source.   This is probably good news environmentally too, as the costs of the shipping increase its going to force businesses to consider local options.  Overall a great article and a whole new angle to consider with regards to internation competition.

Joey deVilla has a great post about his experience trying to get a recommendation for a moving company. It sounds simple enough, ask you’re blog readers to respond with recommendations for local services. In reality its hard to get reliable information, in Joey’s case the recommendations were tainted by an apparent fake recommendation and legal/intimidation against apparently true recommendation. Not a great representation for user generated recommendations…

We looked at this when I was with Trader Media, and again with Refresh on Freshrevie.ws. The hard part with user generated recommendation is to evaluate the quality of the recommendation. Its a similar situation with Ebay, and their approach is a user rating system based on past transactions.  Its hard to do a rating a recommendation engine since the past reviews have less baring and there is no money being exchanged to qualify the review.

I think the solution is to have some sort of context around the person writing the review. Facebook is a great environment for this, since you generally know your friends and your friend network helps define and validate you. Gigpark is doing a great job of getting user generated recommendations, by focusing on the user relationship first. They’ve done a good job of connecting users in Facebook and on their own website. The challenge they might face is that people have a limited friend network and they don’t have a complete businesses listings.

The big business directories, like Yellow Pages have very complete listings but haven’t been willing to expose their advertisers to user generated recommendations. Yellow Pages has just recently launched user reviews inside the Yellow Pages Facebook application. This should reduce their exposure to fake reviews since Facebook spends alot of time tracking down and deleting fake accounts.

I attended Rick Segal’s VC round table last week, which was also attended by Susan Dingwall Williams and Scott Pelton.   It was a good forum to discuss the VC community and the funding process for startups.   One area I was surprised with was the agreement from both Rick and Scott that they wanted to involved early in the funding process.  Generally the area where Angels would have traditionally been involved.

Then over the weekend I read about Xnobi being approached by Microsoft, from TechCrunch.  Xnobi makes a social networking for Outlook and it would make sense that Microsoft would want to purchase them.  Xnobi has just recently, probably has no revenue and very little business model.

Is this the state of startups today?  With early funding and early exists?  This would certainly explain the decline in VC funding, with smaller startups and earlier exists, there is less need for huge capital investments.  VC’s will need to be nimble about how and when they invest, and startups will also need to be equally as quick about how they invest.