September 2, 2011

Why Hootsuite is so Good for Tradeshows and Events

Okay, this is gonna sound like an ad for Hootsuite. But it’s not. Well, it’s not intended that way!

But the more I play around with Hootsuite, the more I find it’s a terrific tool for managing your social media efforts at tradeshows and events.

First, everything is in one place. And I mean everything! You can load up several accounts from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Ping.fm and others. You’re able to set up several members of your team with access to the dashboard, making it easy for them to schedule tweets or posts ahead of time. This is a great tool when you consider the chaos of the tradeshow floor, and you know that you’ll want to be able to take care of people in the booth as well as mix in the occasional live tweet or Facebook posting with your scheduled tweets or posts.

Let’s say you’re planning a tradeshow appearance. You can schedule various activities in your booth, such as guest appearances, product promos, demonstrations, etc., and set up tweets and posts ahead of time. It takes some time to put it all into place, but once you’re at the show, you can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that all of those tweets and Facebook postings are going to show up at their scheduled time. And if something changes in mid-stream, such as guest getting caught in traffic and having to delay his appearance, it’s easy to log on to Hootsuite and make the changes in the scheduled posts.

When Hootsuite first came out, I grabbed a free account, and bounced back and forth between that and Tweetdeck (I wouldn’t count Tweetdeck out yet – I hear Twitter purchased the software and is working to add more capabilities to it). Then I drifted away. But now I’m back, and as I mentioned, the more I use it the better it gets. The coders behind Hootsuite keep adding more bells and whistles, making it more useful all the time. In fact, there’s so much there that I probably won’t ever use all of its capabilities.

As an event manager, your biggest social media advantage is the ability to get ahead of the curve on being able to set up pre-scheduled tweets and posts. This software is the best at doing that, and it’s web-based so you don’t have to download and install anything.

And don’t forget the mobile platform. There’s a Hootsuite app (which I rarely use because I prefer the web approach) that is also available if you prefer to do it from your smartphone.

Have I said enough? I could go on, but you might think I’m trying to suck up to the dudes at Hootsuite. Naah, it’s just a cool tool.

Hootsuite is available in both a free and premium version. The premium version, for just a few bucks a month, offers ore detailed analytics and deeper tools – well worth the modest monthly cost.

March 10, 2011

What’s the Use of Foursquare?

Last summer just a few weeks after I got iPhone I was on a road trip with a buddy. Every time we ate at a restaurant or teed up a golf ball at a golf club I’d whip out the iPhone and check in via Foursquare.

“What are you doing that?” he’d ask. And of course I’d show him the app, explain how it works, how I could become the mayor, etc.

“Yeah, but why? What’s the point?”

Uh..it’s fun! Right?

It’s something a lot of people struggle with. Foursquare, to their credit, is trying to find ways to make it more of an engaging platform than just a ‘check-in’ tool that leaves you asking questions about what to do next.

One complaint I’ve seen is that when you check in with Foursquare and have that information posted to your Facebook and Twitter feeds, all you’re really doing is cluttering the stream. And people don’t want to see the clutter.

Well, if you look at it that way, virtually ALL posts are clutter to one degree or another. I tend to check in, have the info post, and then watch the reaction – and I often get it. And isn’t reaction the whole point of sharing via social media?

If you search online it’s easy to find hundreds of blog posts that are foretelling the end of Foursquare because they can’t figure out what the hell they’re doing.

But you can also find a lot of great ways to use Foursquare (as well as some nice tips on how NOT to use the app). Check out this post from Lifehacker. One very useful idea is to create a separate account for checking into any location where you spend money and use Foursquare to track expenses.

Here’s another post from Geeksugar.com which shows you a handful of ways to use Foursquare.

They also have a fun slideshow on where NOT so check-in.

While Foursquare is not perfect – here’s Peter Shankman’s blog post on his trouble with Foursquare overseas – it still has a lot of interesting uses. Maybe not as much of a game as SVCNGR, but as LBS (location based services) go, it’s still the leader. And I expect it to remain the leader for the foreseeable future. Which in social media years, could be as long as six months or more!

September 15, 2010

Is Foursquare the Next Killer App for Tradeshow Marketing?

The year: 2016

The scene: a busy tradeshow floor in Chicago

The situation: almost half of the exhibitors at the show are welcoming visitors to the show, who are ‘checking in’ via Foursquare (or some similar app – who’s to know what will survive that long). After then check in at the booth, they’re rewarded with a couple of spiffs. Maybe a free download just for show visitors, a store discount, or a chance to win something cool. Maybe they get a free one-on-one with the CEO. Doesn’t matter, could be anything of value. By checking in, they also automatically are asked if they want to opt-in to receiving special offers via text message or old-fashioned e-mail.

When visitors check the stats in Foursquare they see that hundreds of visitors have also checked in at the booth, as well as many others. There’s a thriving online community of people who are also connecting face-to-face thanks to location-based-marketing apps. It could be Facebook, could be Foursquare or any other of the LBS (location based services) apps that are thriving in the new, increasingly connected world. With the deep personal profiling that has grown in the past few years, it’s easy to connect with people who are interested in the same things, or have certain characteristics in common, such as location, similar job titles, or even off-job interests like golf or skiing. Meetings are arranged either by users or companies who have an interest in bringing these small groups together. Kind of like a Tweetup on steroids.

The scene is not that far from reality. Location based marketing is exploding. Mobile marketing is right behind. Some people are already starting to use the mobile and GPS tools to great effect. Sarah Perez writes on Read Write Web that the key to success for your location-base app is to find a way to reward people for their activities. So what’s your reward?

Indeed. Give something of value to a group of people that are hungry for that item and you’ve started opening the door to a new client-customer relationship.

While Lopez refers to a recent study by Forrester Research that shows ‘only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based apps such as these, and only 1% out of those that use them do so more than once per week’ – just think back to the middle part of the last decade where people were just getting excited about podcasting and blogging, both of which are now well established. Web 2.0 was the new buzz. Since 2005, the incredible growth of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has been the focus of countless media spotlights.

The world is going mobile, and GPS-related services and location-based marketing is poised to take off big time. There’s huge potential there for the masses. And even now, as the Forrester research points out, the current small group of users of Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, MyTown, Brightkite are all very influential. People look to them for opinions and leadership. Friend ask what they’re up to and who’d they buy from.

It may not be the time to jump into location-based marketing quite yet for a tradeshow, but if you did you would not be too far ahead of anyone.

photo credit: abulhussain