Blog de Puree

I came across a Mashable.com article for journalists last week that I thought would be valuable for online marketing and community professionals as well. 7 Ways Journalists Can Use Foursquare pointed out some key elements that news writers can engage their audience and source valuable information. And those use-cases can also be extremely valuable for digital marketing teams.

For those not familiar with Foursquare, it’s a geo-tagging application for online and mobile users that tells your friends know where you are and vice versa. It also provides you with online schwag such as points, badges and even coupons for use at local businesses. It’s also not the only geo-tagging game in town and anyone interested should check out Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, Where and Hot Potato.

Like journalists, marketing professionals often need to target communities and get valuable information. In today’s social environment, where interacting with one’s audience is a key element, these geo-tagging apps have the potential for greatness. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the valuable ways to use them:

1. Find targeted contacts. With geo-tagging applications, you can attach real people to actual places. Find people who frequent certain types of establishments. Reach out and chat. Find out what type of people are going where. There’s valuable information here.
2. Get tips on local business, customers and competitors. Users leave lots of tips regarding local businesses and venues which provide insight that a professional analyst may not be privy to. Knowing how people view a restaurant chain or coffee shop can be gold for marketing teams.
3. Learn about people you’re profiling. You can learn a lot about people based on where they go and things they say. Make more friends on apps such as Foursquare and you can follow their activity, as well as begin to understand their habits. Find out where folks are going and you can “accidentally” show up to observe activity. Yeh, it’s essentially like cyber-stalking, but if you have a relationship with them, it’s not too creepy.
4. Discover and monitor trends. This is easy with Foursquare and other apps. Find out where people are suddenly going and why. Find out if a local joint that sells competing products is becoming popular and why. More gold here.
5. Publish and distribute content. As a member of a community, there has to be some give with the take—one of the golden rules of digital marketing—and it pays to link to places you go, as well as share your tips. An online marketer would be wise to share tips and information about places you like, in addition to just peddling your product or service.
6. Crowdsource real-time information and reward readers with badges, etc. People just love online schwag and badges. It’s like Internet coolness merit badges. You need to find out what people think about your client’s juice stores or a local event? Create a badge, ask folks to check out and offer them incentives with badges and coupons. Forget surveys, this is uber-valuable marketing information. You can also offer different badges and incentives for different levels of participation.

Geo-tagging applications now provide digital marketers a fast, effective way to gather market information about clients, businesses, services and the people who rely on them. Tools such as this could be a massive game-changer for marketing budgets and gathering valuable metrics. I believe that any marketing team or service with their salt should be looking into using one of these tools.

And be sure to read this hard-hitting article about social networking tools and how we cover them.

Tags: crowdsourcing, foursquare, geotagging, gowalla, marketing, Online marketing