Having caught you up on all things foursquare, you’ve now got a pretty good handle on how marketers are handling the rise of this location-based social network. Of course, foursquare’s not the only game in town. While the world figures out what to make of Facebook Places, Gowalla continues to be the best LBS alternative [...]

Back when we introduced the idea of After the App, we suggested that with every brand under the sun jumping on the app bandwagon, smartphone owners were sure to start suffering from app overload. And, when these users eventually started pruning their app menus, only the most useful or most entertaining apps would survive the [...]

In last week’s look at how Consumer Controlled Conversations are impacting the hospitality industry, we mentioned that it’s a great idea to monitor and respond to the social media conversations of current guests. Of course, the only thing better than monitoring and responding is proactively influencing these conversations. To do this, you could follow the [...]

In our 10 Trends for 2010, we cautioned brands to be wary of the rise of Consumer Controlled Conversations. Now that consumers had become comfortable “expressing themselves” online, we felt they would increasingly use their (digital) voices to demand accountability, immediate assistance, flawless customer service, and other perks from brands and retailers. So, it’s not [...]

Hopefully you’ve been enjoying the first stage of the World Cup – we wouldn’t want you to have dropped the ball on that USA-England game. Either way, we figure you must be enjoying the slew of great marketing efforts that have surrounded the games. If you haven’t seen it already, you should definitely spend three [...]

Thanks to those of you who attended yesterday’s Smartshot webinar. A recording will be posted on the blog later today – apologies for the delay! So, apparently there’s some kind of tournament starting up tomorrow? Involving a cup? I thought we just won one of those here in Chicago. We kid, we kid. Of course, [...]

While no one’s taken us up on our suggestion to save Chicago’s 4th of July fireworks just yet, that doesn’t mean we haven’t seen smaller scale examples of Hometown’s Heroism. In fact, for Chicago’s Big Shoulders Realty, this is old news; they’re in the middle of their third year of offering free neighborhood bike tours [...]

In our discussions about inserting gaming into everyday life, we’ve spent a good chunk of time discussing Volkswagen’s “Fun Theory” campaign. That effort included a user-generated component, where folks could suggest tasks that would be improved through gaming mechanisms. The video to the right was the winning submission, and asked: Can we get more people [...]

Whew. We’ve had one heck of a SXSW Dispatch, haven’t we? One last post to tie up some loose ends, and we’ll get back to the non-SXSW world. (It still exists, y’know.) For starters, we told you to be on the lookout for QR news. Then, mid-conference, people started noticing that Facebook had rolled out [...]

According to Jason Finkelstein at Wavemarket, 55% of all text messages are some variation of the question, “Where are you?” That means that in 2009 there were at least 650 BILLION text messages asking for location information, without even counting what was happening on apps, maps, and the mobile web. If you’re still wondering whether [...]