Would a handful of location-based music videos do the trick? Of course they would.

Since television’s so-called “music” channels stopped broadcasting anything remotely musical many years ago, the music video has largely been relegated to the web. This ended up being a blessing in disguise for a number of reasons, including the ability to make music videos far more interactive (as we’ve demonstrated on multiple occasions) than traditional offerings. Now, with location data becoming integrated into web and mobile experiences, clever artists are using this information to personalize their music videos based on a viewer’s location. This added context creates a unique, and more deeply relevant, experience for the fan than a televised video could ever provide.

For starters, let’s take a look at the singer-songwriter Lissie’s new music video that responds to the current weather conditions in your location. (As you can imagine, the above image of the band donning sunglasses and summer dresses is based on Texas, not Chicago.) The various versions of the video do a great job of encouraging both viewer engagement and rewatchability, as visitors are likely to be curious about the band’s responses to the different weather conditions.

While Lissie’s video uses weather to provide context to her video, an interactive set of videos from the band Editors uses the city of London as the context for an entire album. Based on a clever mash-up of Google Maps, visitors are encouraged to virtually wander in and around London using Google’s Street View, with certain locations triggering specific songs from the In This Light and On This Evening album. (The band is even caught hanging out at one particular location.)

The virtual tour of London certainly adds an additional dimension to the music video experience, but the Arcade Fire takes it one step further with a heavy helping of personalized nostalgia. Their interactive video for The Wilderness Downtown asks for the address of your childhood home, and then integrates the Street View of that location into their video. (Warning, the video has a LOT going on, so it’s recommended that you close your other browser windows before watching).

Sure, the integration of location-based data in these videos benefits from a bit of novelty, but none of them are content with being a mere shiny object. In each case, the location information is used to make these videos more relevant, personalized, and emotionally-resonant for the viewer. And, frankly, these are the reasons why location matters. Whether your brand is trying to connect to a location-based service, or considering a mobile tour, or simply trying to create a more engaging web experience, these music videos demonstrate the way location-based data can create a more immersive experience for the consumer. And, that’s why we have high hopes for the Year of Location.

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 to foursquare. While both services have much in common, one dramatic difference is Gowalla’s disinterest in rewarding users for checking-in repeatedly at a single venue (i.e. foursquare’s “mayors”). Instead, Gowalla tends to reward users for checking-in at a variety of venues. In some cases, these are part of coordinated “trips” that are produced by Gowalla users and brand partners. (National Geographic‘s robust collection of trips is a particularly good example of brand-building via LBS.) For any brand looking to connect on a regional level, this Gowalla feature allows you to creating a walking tour of, say, bars in a given city with Negra Modelo on tap.

A new addition called Highlights promises to add another layer of personalization to this content, with users being able to label spots as the best nighttime views, best guilty pleasure, or best kept secret (I think I’ve found a flaw in that last one). Assuming that Gowalla has plans to integrate marketers into these Highlights, there’s plenty of room for partnerships – I’m sure a number of bridal products would love to get a piece of the “Hitched” highlights.

But, Gowalla perks work at individual locations as well. Gowalla users often receive virtual items for checking-in at certain locations (which can subsequently be dropped or swapped at other locations). For instance, you might receive a metal robot when you check-in at a toy store, or you might receive free tickets to an NBA game by checking-in to sportsbars and basketball courts. Huh, wha? Yes, the New Jersey Nets hid 250 pairs of virtual (but redeemable) tickets at various Gowalla locations in the area for their last game of the season! Our “athletically challenged” colleagues here at Upshot might be more interested in a similar giveaway from Adobe, in which virtual items redeemable for a dozen free copies of Creative Suite 5 were distributed across various Gowalla spots nationwide. (A summertime campaign from Eye-Fi spruced up this model by including a random sweepstakes for anyone checking-in at Apple Stores.)

The aforementioned Nets promotion brought up a particularly compelling way for brands to deal with unused inventory (a problem that the Nets had ample opportunities to consider – heyyo!). The same article that described the Nets campaign suggested that hotels could offer unsold rooms in a similar fashion, in the hopes that the winners would make additional purchases via room service or on-site bars and restaurants. (The same mentality could be applied to movie theaters and amusement parks.) Of course, the other benefit is that a LBS-user is almost certainly going to be an active participant in social media, so they are more likely to start conversations about your brand than a traditional contest winner. Why not focus your rewards on someone who’s likely to be a vocal brand advocate?

Before moving on to the next topic, we should add that, um, we’re still not done here. In fact, our coverage of marketers on foursquare and Gowalla is still overlooking brands who are doing great work on other LBSs. Before you get completely exasperated, yes, the slew of services is a problem, and yes, we’ll be addressing this at a later time. But no, this won’t undermine the impending “Year of Location” – in fact, it should help. That’s a whole ‘nother post, though. In the meantime, we’d like to call your attention to Red Bull’s work with Whrrl, simply because it’s a stellar example of a Niche Network in action. When people join the Red Bull Society on Whrrl, they’re privy to exclusive deals (including drink discounts at select bars and clubs) and access to Red Bull events (such as tickets to the Red Bull Air Race in NYC). When our previous post asked “what’s the point of checking-in?” this is about as good an answer as you can give: being part of an exclusive community with tangible benefits, organized around a set of common [and local] interests. We hope other brands continue to do the same. But if they don’t, you can always garner attention with wacky offers like free Virgin America airline tickets for checking-in to taco trucks on Loopt. Wait, wha?

Y’know, the one we called out back in March. But no worries, we’re glad you’re all coming around. In fact, we’re going to spend the next couple of posts sorting out the marketing implications these recent announcements, because we’re just that nice.

The reigning mayor of the location-based space continues to be foursquare, which recently hit its 3 millionth user. foursquare has maintained their lead over other location-based players largely because of their willingness to partner with broad range of marketers, who often end up promoting the service in their own ad campaigns (such as VH1′s foursquare commercial). To get us in the mood for tackling this location-mania, left break down a few foursquare marketing applications from the past few months.

Skeptics of location-based services always start with the same question: what’s the point of checking-in? Of course, the answer depends on a number of things, including whether the venue is offering a particularly compelling incentive. For retailers, rewarding check-ins and mayorships are clearly the low hanging fruit for LBS involvement. Radio Shack started providing 10% off of purchases for anyone who checks-in, and 20% off for each store’s mayor. In return, the chain essentially gets free advertising in the form of a peer recommendation. Likewise, Chili’s restaurants figured out that free chips & salsa are a small price to pay for getting their guests to broadcast each visit to their social networks. But, Kona Grill took this one step further with their Swarm Parties, playing off the badge that foursquare users earn when they check-in to events with 50 or more attendees. Kona encouraged these swarms to hit their restaurants by offering special items during the gatherings, and of course, provided them free of charge for the current foursquare mayor. Again, the free advertising angle is a pretty sweet deal for the restaurant: if they get 50+ diners broadcasting their attendance to their social networks at the same time, the potential reach is certainly worth the price of giving away a few meals (not to mention getting 50+ customers in the door!).

The Six Flags theme parks are also pretty darn good at getting people to check-in, thanks to a wide variety of promotions and incentives. For instance, whoever is still holding the mayorship of each park on September 7th will win a season pass (looks like you’d better take work off for the next week!), while anyone who checks in 10+ times will get a virtual badge and an entry in a sweepstakes for a 2011 front-of-each-line pass. We like the fact that Six Flags has staggered these promotions to appeal to different levels of foursquare users. After all, only one person gets to be the mayor, but anyone with a season pass has a shot at 10 check-ins. Six Flags also uses the often-ignored “tips” section for each park to communicate additional deals (e.g. bring a Coke can for 2-for-1 weekday admission) and tips to improve the visitor’s experience (e.g. where to find bathrooms with short lines).

Speaking of fun stuff on foursquare, we’re a bit perplexed why more brands haven’t used foursquare to provide a digital twist on the ol’ scavenger hunt. One of the few examples we’ve seen was Jimmy Choo using the service to give away shoes as part of an entertaining treasure hunt. Jimmy Choo shoes would “check in” at various foursquare locations, and anyone following the brand could hustle down to the spot to try to locate the pair first. Finders, keepers!

Checking-in at live events is nothing new – or at least, it isn’t new for readers ’round here. Heck, if you can get a variety of badges for checking-in at the Today show’s live concerts, shouldn’t every event offer this simple form of recognition? Why yes, yes they should. But, we like the fact that the Today show is introducing the concept of location-based check-ins to a different demographic than, say, the folks attending the Banksy movie. For these services to continue to grow, an introduction via trusted names like Today will make the transition much smoother for new users.

Phew. Consider yourself checked-in to foursquare. Of course, we’ve overlooked plenty of examples, too. If you’ve seen some fancy foursquare integrations that aren’t listed here, please share them in the comments below!

As part of Pacifico’s sponsorship of the US Open of Surfing, we rolled out a program via QR code for the event’s attendees. Better yet, we made sure we were delivering compelling content according to the recommendations from our QR code Smartshot webinar, in which we advised that QR codes should deliver convenience, entertainment, or exclusivity.

Fortunately, the Pacifico code nails all three at once.

On the convenience side, the code offers a Pacifico tap finder for USOS attendees, enabling them to map out their route to the nearest bars (which, presumably, will also quickly lead to entertainment). Speaking of entertainment, the mobile site also offers a calendar of events surrounding the USOS (viewable to the right), so that attendees can catch concerts and parties after the day’s work is done (and, yes, this doubles as convenience as well). Finally, the mobile site offers exclusivity by also directing users to Pacifico events during the USOS, providing access and benefits that are unavailable to people who haven’t scanned the codes.

This campaign shows that checking off the boxes for convenient, entertaining, and exclusive content doesn’t have to be so complicated. In fact, it brings to life our mantra here at Upshot: simple ideas, brilliantly activated. Good marketing is just that easy.

If you haven’t already, please don’t forget to vote for our SXSW 2011 panel, accessible here. You’ll need to create an account to vote, but we promise that it takes less than a minute. Voting closes Friday, August 27th, and we appreciate every bit of help we can get!

Part of this success was attributable to steadily-improving content, but we also called attention to the rise of live streaming video sites, especially ustream.tv. Ustream not only offers an enormous range of videos streaming from sports and music events, but the site also surrounds these videos with a “social stream” chat box that ties these conversations to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. So, if Ustream can get a big star – like, say, NBA all-star Dwight Howard – to do a live streaming video, not only can viewers chat with Howard in real-time, but all of these conversations are pushed out to social networks, generating an explosion of word-of-mouth activity.

Of course, the Howard example was no accident. Gatorade has obviously recognized the power of live streaming video, and now offers all sorts of live content via their Ustream channel. As covered in a recent Forbes report, Gatorade used their athletic connections to offer truly compelling, exclusive content, such as live videos of athletes training in the Gatorade Performance Lab. Sure, there’s plenty of focus on how the product enhances the workout, but the fact that fans can have an honest interaction with the athletes makes the entire experience feel less like an ad and more like a peek behind the curtain.

Interestingly, though, the Forbes article finds that the big stars aren’t necessarily what’s bringing Gatorade the big ratings. In fact, Gatorade often gets higher traffic for nutrition and fitness Q&As with scientists from their Gatorade Sports Science Institute, as well as the brand’s annual awards lunch for high school athletes. These surprising results are probably the product of a few things done right. In the former case, providing truly useful, tailored, expert information offers consumers relevant information that might otherwise be difficult to find in the clutter of the web. On the other hand, the high school athletes luncheon touches on a few points at once: supporting youth sports, connecting with local communities (a.k.a. being a Hometown’s Hero), and allowing geographically-disparate viewers to experience an event as a group.

It’s this latter point which makes sites like Ustream so compelling for sports and music events, and is also the reason we shouldn’t stop at these two categories. For any event marketing execution, why wouldn’t you arm your brand ambassadors with a couple of video cameras and allow folks from all over to feel a connection to your event? Doing so provides you with all the benefits of targeted regional marketing and amplifies your campaign to your fans across the globe. Sure seems like a no-brainer to us.

Well, almost on cue, Pepsi took a giant step towards redemption. Under the umbrella of their Refresh project, Pepsi earmarked $1.3 million to specifically address the Gulf recovery project, and are currently considering over 250 ideas. This approach is pitch perfect, with the smart folks at PSFK summing it up best:

“Pepsi’s approach feels honest and sincere – it doesn’t try to hype Pepsi’s role in the cleanup, but rather empowers consumers to play that role – the brand simply pledges financial backing to execute the best ideas. Additionally, it’s not overly sentimental (no images of dead birds, or burning turtles) – just an actionable, empowered attitude to help fix a problem.”

That’s exactly right, and brands looking to score an authentic CSR victory should take note. But, in the context of our earlier discussion about the Reputation Economy, there’s another lesson worth noting. We mentioned that reputation is now a long-term process that requires continuous attention, and if done properly, will resonate with consumers on a deep emotional level (even in spite of an occasional misstep). Sure, the Pepsi nutritional blog was a dumb move, but rather than fighting the blog’s critics, Pepsi acknowledged their mistake, took down the ill-advised project, and doubled-down on a cause program that will make a legitimate, impactful difference in the lives of an entire region’s population. Put another way, the way they undid their bad was to do even more good. And that, folks, is why it’s called the Reputation Economy. Your brand is the sum of a mental calculation, a tradeoff between the trust you’ve inspired in your consumers (both directly and indirectly) and the impacts you’re making on the world. Authentic, effective good deeds will go a long way towards tipping the scales in your favor.

The easiest way to understand Promoted Tweets is to think of them in terms of search engine marketing (such as Google’s AdWords). At the core of both systems is the idea that an advertiser purchases keywords that users are likely to search for. When a user searches Google for that keyword, Google delivers a sponsored link on their results page. Now, when a user searches Twitter for tweets that include the keyword, the user’s top search result will be a promoted tweet. In the example pictured above (or click here for the larger image), a user searching for tweets about coffee will see the Starbucks tweet at the top (with a yellow box to clarify that the tweet is promoted). If people interact with the promoted tweet (by clicking on the link, or retweeting it), the promoted tweet will continue to stay at the top of these results, just like Google’s Adwords considers how many times users have clicked on an ad. (For more details, see this nice overview from TechCrunch.)

Notice that the promoted tweet is not an ad – it is a real tweet from Starbucks’ Twitter account. This is the major distinction between promoted tweets and search engine marketing; the tweet is content on its own, but then promoted to a broader audience through the advertising system. Brands that have used promoted tweets seem to be happy with the results so far. The most touted example comes from Virgin America, who used promoted tweets as the sole medium to announce half-off flights from California to Toronto, a deal that sold out in a matter of hours. While it certainly couldn’t hurt to further promote this deal to non-followers, my hunch is that great content has more to do with the success of this campaign. After all, the brand already had over 64,000 Twitter followers when they made this announcement, and it’s a half-off flight! Who isn’t going to talk about that? Until we see evidence to the contrary, let’s assume that promoted tweets are a good way to support great Twitter content, as opposed to a medium that can stand on its own.

So, how does all this differ from a Promoted Trend? For users who go to Twitter.com to interact with the service (and many users do NOT access the service this way), they will see the top 10 topics that are being discussed on Twitter (often some combination of Justin Bieber and the World Cup). Users can narrow this list to the top 10 trends in their country, and, in some cases, to their city, which will come in useful in a moment. Since this list is viewed by many, many users, becoming a  trending topic usually serves as a tipping point for becoming a sustained conversation. For example, when Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano threw yet another dugout temper tantrum this week, he became a local trending topic in Chicago. Chicago Twitter users saw this in their top 10 list, and anyone who didn’t already know about the incident could start discussing it with their own tweets, pushing Zambrano’s trending topic further up the list.

So, any brand that wants to drive Twitter conversations would love to make it into that trending topic list. Now, they have the option of paying their way in with Promoted Trends. The image to the right (bigger version here) shows how Toy Story 3 bought its way into the #10 spot (demarcated with a yellow “promoted” tag). As with the promotedToy Story 3 conversations, that will remain on the trending list (or, ideally, move up the list). If not, it will fall off. tweets, if users engage in

There’s some potential here, especially because of the aforementioned ability to filter by region. Presumably, Twitter will soon allow marketers to target specific geographies with these promoted tweets. And, as before, one marketer is claiming a success story. In an interesting move, Coke chose not to promote themselves as a trend, but promoted a specific hashtag for the World Cup. When users clicked the #WC2010 promoted trend, their top result was not a FIFA announcement, but rather a tweet from Coke congratulating the US and England on their wins (obviously, this story occurred before this week). For more, here’s Mashable’s take on the campaign. As before, it’s hard to tell if this succeeded because of the promoted tweet, or because Coke’s got over 38,000 followers. My hunch is that it’s a lot of the latter, but the promotion helped drive some additional traffic from curious Twitter users. On the other hand, I personally haven’t seen the Toy Story trend climb above the #10 spot, and it appears to have fallen off the site by now.

If anyone has seen a promoted trend or tweet that seems to be working wonders, please submit them in the comment section below!

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 minutes watching Nike’s “Write the Future” ad, which shows the different paths the players’ lives will take depending on their successes and failures. Of course, we already called your attention to Marca’s killer calendar, which provides an enormously helpful service to fans who want to watch the games.

In fact, the only thing missing from Marca’s service is showing users where they can watch their favorite team. Fortunately, Bing is filling in the gap. Their Home Turf Finder is an excellent example of their positioning as a “decision engine,” in which they enable informed decisions rather than providing users with massive amounts of unfiltered data. In this case, Bing maps are overlaid with information about which bars (in select cities) are showing the World Cup games. Better yet, the bars are filtered by their national allegiances, so that fans of a particular country can watch with their peers instead of their mortal enemies (that’s right, we know all about your longstanding feud with Honduras).

While this is an excellent application of Concierge Culture, it’s an even smarter example of how our Hometown’s Hero trend enables brands to make deep, meaningful connections with consumers on a local level. For anyone living in these cities, Bing is providing extremely valuable recommendations by collecting specific local knowledge and filtering it in a useful manner. It’s the kind of targeted content that encourages discovery, as consumers may not even realize that bars in their vicinity have a particular affiliation for certain teams. In the long run, Bing is changing consumer expectations of a particular industry (in this case, search) by providing a more personalized, relevant solution for the consumers. Google shouldn’t be the only one taking note.

But if this is so simple, why aren’t any of the bigger brands jumping on this opportunity? Is it because you don’t want to pound the pavement (or in this case, the pedals) yourselves? No problem, man. We live in virtual times! Come up with a neighborhood tour by foot, bike, or car and import it into Google City Tours to share. These maps go beyond mere directions, letting you build actual itineraries (including the amount of time spent at each location) and storing points-of-interests so folks can check them out in the future. But if that’s still too much work, just partner with one of the many, many organizations that already provide walking tours (just Google “neighborhood walking tours” for a long list). Heck, even Jane Jacobs is getting in on the act, and she passed away four years ago!

For the hotel and travel industries, these concierge opportunities are obvious. But, as we’ve repeatedly emphasized under the Hometown’s Hero trend, any brand looking to make a local impact via regional marketing can get in on this.

Generally speaking, these announcements supported a point we made during our coverage of SXSW Interactive; services like Twitter want marketers to come up with innovative ways to apply their “firehose” of data. This was implicit in founder Evan Williams’ presentation, when he noted that Twitter represents different things to different people, and that finding new applications is the key to introducing new users to the site. Twitter can already be used for keeping up with friends, or tracking breaking news, or getting the scoop on deals and discounts, or being the first to know about new products, or… well, there are probably a number of other uses we haven’t quite uncovered yet. According to Williams, this is the challenge to developers (and by extension, to brands who work with them): create experiences that make Twitter relevant to new consumer groups. Twitter’s success is largely a product of the applications that outside developers have brought to the service, solving problems for users that the “official” Twitter team hadn’t even considered. And who is most qualified to identify problems that consumers want to have solved? Uh, we are. That’s why we have a planning department! It’s up to us to identify issues that a service like Twitter can address; believe me, they’ll be more than happy to figure out the “how.”

Of course, that’s the big picture. In the short run, there are simpler opportunities for marketers. When brands tweet information out to their followers, this information tends to “fall off the screen” fairly quickly, as it gets pushed off by more recent tweets. While this is an obvious problem for marketers, it’s also shortchanging the user. If I am following brand X, I obviously want to know about the information they’re sharing, and having it pushed off the screen is preventing me from accessing relevant information. Enter, promoted tweets. Brands can now pay to promote their tweets and keep them on-screen, so users will continue to see the tweets even as newer information comes up. (Brands can only promote their own tweets; they can’t pay for their competitors’ tweets or other people’s tweets about the brand).

While this system slightly resembles Google’s AdWords, the important distinction with promoted tweets is that these are not ads in the strict sense. The content is still a tweet. Let’s take the hypothetical example from Evan Williams’ presentation. Let’s say the iPad comes out and there are a number of tweets about people having problems charging the battery. If you’re a company that sells a product that addresses this problem, your tweets will be very relevant to users searching for this information. Of course, your tweets will also be lost in a deluge of unrelated tweets about the iPad, since it’s all anyone can talk about at the moment. A promoted tweet will help ensure that your message doesn’t fall off the screen, and provide more relevant data for consumers. And, considering that their are 600 MILLION searches run on Twitter every day, delivering more relevant answers will be extremely important in the coming months. So, everybody wins! (For more information on how promoted tweets work, how they’re paid, and more, check out TechCrunch’s coverage here.)

For brands, this brings up some important points to consider when coming up with a Twitter strategy. For now, the key to promoted tweets is timeliness. Are there days when your brand’s message is more resonant? (Think about how many brands used Tax Day to get a message out.) Are there times during the day when your message especially connects with consumers? If so, it’s worth chatting with us and seeing whether Promoted Tweets are the right solution for that problem.

But, timeliness isn’t the only factor that makes tweets relevant. Highlighting popular tweets (i.e. updates that are frequently retweeted) is the quick fix for now, since these tweets are obviously deemed important by the Twitter community. But, as Twitter continues to aggregate location data, this info will certainly become a big piece of the relevance equation. Since Twitter’s core user accesses the site through a mobile platform, most of those searches are probably seeking some kind of locally relevant information. Someone who’s looking for “best pizza” in New York wants something different than someone in Chicago. But, on a more granular level, it’s important to know if someone who tweeted “This is the best pizza!” was at Giordanos or Lou Malnatis when they said it. It’s this kind of place data that Twitter is currently curating, matching latitudinal/longitudinal data to real places like restaurants, bars, venues, parks, and more. When you consider the aforementioned Promoted Tweets, you can start to see where Twitter’s heading: paying for a promoted tweet at a specific time, for a specific place, will really deliver relevant content to users. Do stay tuned, won’t you?

Finally, let’s round things out with a few stats that will help you get a grasp of the size of the Twitter ecosystem. It’s healthy, to say the least.

* Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users.

* Twitter gets 300,000 new users a day.

* Twitter receives 180 Million Unique visitors a month.

* 75% of the service’s traffic comes from outside of Twitter.com

* There are 600 million search queries a day within the Twitter universe