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.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Viralheat

Viralheat seems to be a few months old, judging by the history of their “In the press” section. It is a social measurement software as a service platform that provides social marketers and social networking types with an in-depth way to slice and dice information from Facebook, Twitter, “the realtime web,” and viral video. (And I suspect they’ll be adding more sites in the future.) One can then track, react and optimize social campaigns and audience engagement.

Poking around the site reveals a clean and easy-to-use user interface, as well as offering important geolocation data for global brands and an API to embed key statistical information into applications and internal websites for the movers and shakers at your company.

Notably, Viralheat has been instrumental in the helping to decide the outcome of the geolocation war between the two social-geo giants Foursquare and Gowalla after the recent South by Southwest conference.

For marketers grappling with analyzing the right social data, this primer post about ‘Making Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data‘ by Viralheat CEO and founder Raj Kadam on Mashable offers a great starting point.

Performable

Performable is a new product that’s in a closed beta mode. It offers analytics that help to optimize important online marketing tools such as landing pages, lead acquisition forms, newsletter sign up pages, targeted videos and contact forms.

At this point, the information at Performable.com is rather sparse. However, the potential is huge. I’ve been in countless meetings with UI designers, editorial teams, marketing and sales teams, as well as developers, trying to figure out how best to create a landing page, lead acquisition form or newsletter page. Each stakeholder has a different perspective and level of understanding. I would leave frustrated as these pages were diluted into watery mud puddles that proved to be ineffective in the end.

With Performable, one can: A. Easily create numerous variations based on stakeholder input without having to worry about design and development time and B. Easily gain insight from measurable real-time usage statistics. That’s a double win in my book.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any quick data on results or customer testimonials, but this looks like a good group to keep an eye on.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Until about a month ago, we’ve been relying solely on written copy in our User Guide, community forums and other scattered areas on the website. Typically—and as often predicted by Internet user studies—many visitors would not take the time to read online documentation and would veer towards the forums for one-on-one or one-one-many help requests, and community connection. (The fact that many members would seek advice from other members and directly from moderators rather than reading the manual is also an interesting point to note.)

The videos help to answer some of the most basic and frequently asked questions such as what’s Helium all about, how do I write on Helium, how do I rate on Helium, how do I earn money on Helium and how does the Marketplace program work. We’re still awaiting initial user statistics, but I suspect that each flash video will appeal to members who are inclined towards visual learning tools and quick answers, rather than reading guides or waiting for questions to be answered in our forums.

The videos reside on a few key pages, as well as within advertising blocks that appear throughout the site. This should ensure that they get enough exposure to visitors.

I’m excited because it’s also a first successful step in demonstrating our ability to use alternative multimedia learning tools that we can leverage in places like tutorial pages that are specific to certain types of members, visitors or business partners. For example, let’s say we want to create a page that teaches Helium writers how to optimize their titles and articles for web search while still providing an easy-to-read and professional work of long-lasting knowledge to the community, a video might be a better way to go. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? It could be reasonable to assume that a video would be worth more.

These videos are also a great marketing tool. What better way to educate the time-strapped publisher about what Helium is all about than with a quick video that’s just under two minutes. By showing, rather than explaining, the ease of how Helium can be used as a cost-effective and time-saving publishing resource, I hope that it will bring potential business partners knocking on our door asking for more information.

Here’s a video that briefly provides instruction about how to rate articles on Helium.

Click here to view the embedded video.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

The news is that Matt hired Andy Peatling, “the developer behind BuddyPress, a social network built on top of WordPress. BuddyPress will now become an official WordPress project.”

As many of our readers know, we use WordPress and love its functionality and ease of use. There are a lot of tools, called plugins that can be installed easily into the software and this will take advantage of WordPress’s application program interface (API), an interface for allowing a program to communicate and work with another program. Typically, these exist within online applications.

Despite the conceived glut of social networks and programs already on the ‘Net, Mullenweg said, “The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards.”

I agree. Although a goodly portion of Internet users know and use sites such as MySpace and Facebook, open source and small communities really make the Internet a more interesting space. Using open and common standards, it’s easier for all these smaller communities to connect and communicate. While the larger networks do have their uses and are great financial successes, they do have limitations with flexibility and functionality.

I can’t wait to see what the folks at WordPress come up with.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Here’s a brief synopsis, based on a news report from NPR.org:

1. Steve Fossett goes missing somewhere in Nevada, last week.
2. His friend Richard Branson, also a tycoon adventurer, tells reporters that he’s been talking with Google about using the company’s satellite imagery from products such as Google Earth and Google maps to help locate Fossett.
3. Google contacts GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, the companies that provide those photo images, with urgent requests for satellite images of the section of Nevada that Fossett was presumed to be lost in.
4. Both companies collect photos after Fossett went missing.
5. Google gets those images and passes them to Amazon.com, which puts them in its AmazonMechanicalTurk artificial intelligence tool so that thousands of people can search small sectors of map space. (The tool divided the entire search area of 6,000 square miles into small sectors of 300 square feet.) Each sector was assigned to any person who signed up to help.
6. According to Amazon, tens of thousands of people signed up to participate.
7. If the person sees something interesting, they say yes. If not, no.
8. The international community of Amazon searchers has marked several thousand images as “interesting” and those sector images have been forwarded to search teams.
9. So far, none of the tips have produced any results.

NPR reports that images cost $7 per square kilometer and this section of desert would cost approximately $100,000. But the time saved by having thousands of people online scour small sections of desert is invaluable.

As far as I’m concerned, this scenario merely scratches the surface of the Internet’s capabilities, but it’s a brilliant example of its power.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Well it is according to today’s generation of Internet teens. Young under-twenty entrepreneurs who were interviewed for a recent article on CNET, said email is better suited for business purposes or communicating with older generations.

Small consolation for those of us who use email on a daily basis, and whose gnarled and arthritic hands struggle to text quasi-coherent messages on our tiny cell phones with their wee buttons. And does this mean we’re staring the same fear our parents had about losing touch with their children, in the face? Am I going to lose touch because I can’t condense a sentence into 10 characters? Even worse, am I no longer too cool for school? Gah!

If you’re hip nowadays, it’s all about texting or sending notes through the myriad of social networks. It’s faster and you’re still communicating with the people you want. The best part is that you don’t have to waste time dealing with the scourge of spam each time you check your messages.

And if you don’t like it, too bad. Better limber up those stiff digits of yours. Smart people know that teens are early adopters of technology that often becomes commonplace within a few years.

You also better start joining those social networks—many of them. I mean, come on, not all friends hang out in one place on the ‘Net. So you have to diversify. I’ll break it down so the geezers can understand. Diversify. Like you’d do with your 401k portfolio. At least, until someone creates a social network that could aggregate all your buddy lists and networks in one place, like the ICQ or Trillian instant messaging tools.

But we can only dream. For now. Until then, better work on your thumb and forefinger aim because those phone buttons will only get smaller.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

We’ve been using it about a year now and we’re very pleased with it.

Within the past six months, I’ve also been reading about how it can be easily used as a full content management system for websites. The folks over at WordPress and the development community have added so many features that a person can build in a slew of manageable web pages in addition to using it as just a blogging platform. Many big sites have implemented it quite successfully on small and large scales. Even the Wall Street Journal, a site that is oft reported to give blogging a bad rap, uses it to manage its small, but growing, stable of bloggers.

However, I wanted to point out a hyper-local site, or niche website, that has also successfully harnessed the power of WordPress since February, although on a small scale. The Toy Soldier, a hobby and comic book shop in Amesbury, MA. (I’ve mentioned the shop before in regard to purchasing Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics.) While the shop’s needs are nothing like larger publishers, they’ve taken a simple use case and done it well.

The home page is also the page where the site’s blog resides, so visitor’s are immediately met with the most recent news or thoughts from the store’s owner, Mick. In the left-hand navigation bar, you can click “About Us” to find out more about the store, similar to our “About Paul and Randye” page. There is also a page for directions.

The site also has a user forum powered by Invision Power Services, which was integrated with WordPress. The Toy Soldier intelligently requires registration before it can be viewed or used. The great part about proprietary and opensource forum software packages working with WordPress is that they are an integral way for community members to be able to contact each other and engage, the key to the survival of any group. Forum software suites are very popular and easy to manage, but we may see a decline as more sites figure out how to let communities form sub-groups themselves within their sites. But that’s a topic for another post.

Finally, the site has a link to its online store, which is also a key element for retailers in this day and age.

If you’re a comic book collector, gamer or an online pro interested in seeing how smaller web sites handle their content with WordPress, I suggest taking a look around the Toy Soldier site. It has certainly caused me to think twice about reformatting our entire web presence as well.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

The site contains an archive of fishing articles, a photo gallery, a Reel-Time gear shop, fly-tying advice and articles, an east coast listing of guides and shops and an active forum. There’s also a fish report that tells you where and when the hot spots are during the fishing season.

With all due respect to my mentor, the site’s other founders and its members, I feel that over 10 years later the site is now “old school.” Especially with the recent arrival of Angling Masters International, that, according to a recent post on TechCrunch, is “a social networking site for recreational fisherman that also supports the creation of user generated online fishing tournaments.”

The site’s users can create their own pages and groups, a la MySpace, which they can personalize with photos, links and maintain blogs. The coolest part is that users can generate online fishing tournaments. Duncan Riley from the TechCrunch blog found that users can compete with one another across the North America.

“The vast differences in rivers, lakes and the many fish species inhabiting them is overcome with an interesting twist. Length conversion tables and a series of algorithms allow fish of one species to be compared to fish of another, no matter where they were caught so all participants compete on a level playing field. 12 species of fish are covered and the back end considers how large each species typically grows in each geographic region and scores fish caught accordingly.”

To top it off, cheating can be stopped by requiring the use of witnesses and Angling Masters Measuring Tape for accurate measurements. Online fishing competitions that attempt to stop cheating. How cool is that?

I checked out the site a little more to see how the site could be used on an even larger scale in addition to its singular web 2.0 community features, which is an area of the site called “Cabins.” Users can also create their own communities or an online retail presence in an area of the site called “Marinas.” You can take it a step further by building a “Lodge” that is a community that has stronger ties with the angling community, is also a viable online business, but it looks like terms must be negotiated with the site’s owners for what is probably some sort of profit-sharing relationship.

From an “old school” user perspective, it’s hard to give up the formal editorial articles and guides to this, that or the other on micro-niche websites. But this new model, based entirely on users connecting and sharing their experiences and personal knowledge is at the forefront of today’s web communities. I’m excited to see if Angling Masters International can reel in a permanent place in today’s Web 2.0 culture.

©2010 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.