The video above is the latest installment in our Upshot Smartshot webinar series, and complements our recent Potty Posting that introduced the concept of marketers with Twitterphobia. This 15-minute episode goes a step further, assuaging marketers’ three biggest fears about the service:

• What should you say?
• What should you do?
• What should you make?

If you’ve missed any of our previous Smartshots, scoot on over to our YouTube playlist for the whole series. Of course, you wouldn’t have missed those if you’d just follow us on Twitter already, at twitter.com/upshotblog. Since you’ve now vanquished your Twitterphobia, you’ve got no excuse!

But the four-wheeled madness doesn’t stop there. Check out the above race from Hot Wheels, featuring a three-dimensional obstacle course projection-mapped on a building in Sydney. (Thanks to Karlin from MUSE for the tip.)

Speaking of races, check out the above clip from a Cornetto projection in Istanbul. In the midst of a big ol’ street party, the brand projected an interactive casual game where onlookers could compete against each other using their phones. As if an interactive projection didn’t have enough stopping power! It’s great to see that, no matter how many projection examples we share, someone always seems to be raising the bar on what’s possible with this medium.

Twitterphobia affects over 83.72% of marketers* in the US every year.

We’ve seen the devastation it causes. We’ve heard your cries for a cure. And, we’ve found the vaccine in… our latest Potty Posting!

Twitterphobics Anonymous

Click the link above for the PDF version, or continue reading below for the online version. As always, please feel free to share this post with colleagues, clients, or anyone who may be suffering from this absolutely-curable condition.

*No it doesn’t. We made that up. But it definitely exists.

Twitterphobics Anonymous

The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem

We’ve noticed something funny happening in recent meetings. While we’re thumping our chests about Driven by Data Twitter visualizations and using the Twitter API for Life in the OOC applications, we’re often met with nodding approval…along with some shifting eyes and simmering discomfort. We wondered: was there something in our teeth? Did we have bad breath? Probably, and possibly, but neither was the real problem. Eventually, we got people both inside and outside the agency to admit (in shamed whispers) that they’d previously dismissed Twitter as a fad, or thought their consumers weren’t using it, or were (understandably) confused by conflicting reports about Twitter’s dominance / irrelevance / significance / shallowness / growth / stagnation / obsession with why #youdeservetobesingle. Realizing their mistake, they asked us to take it back to step one. Luckily, they’ve found a safe place.

First things first. You’ll never understand the nuances of this service if you don’t set up a Twitter account… like, right now. (Being on the throne is no excuse – Google already told us how often you surf in the bathroom. Eww.) If you’re in marketing and you don’t have a Twitter account, you are #FAILing. We’re not saying you have to tweet. But, we are saying you have to follow a handful of marketers, brands, and industry smarties to see how they’re using the service (a good place to start: Upshot’s own The Awesome Blog.) In fact, having an account would’ve clarified why there’s a pound sign in front of “FAILing” above. On Twitter, any phrase preceded by the pound sign is called a hashtag, and its purpose is to organize disparate tweets into a single conversation stream. (Oh yeah, we’d already put the cart before the horse with a blog post describing how brands can advertise via those hashtags.) For instance, let’s say I wanted to have a wine tasting with some friends who are spread out across the globe. Option one: everyone flies out just to sit in my too-cramped living room and resent having to pick cat hair out of their wine glasses. A better idea: tell anyone who’s interested to grab a bottle of this week’s selection and tweet their comments, including a predetermined hashtag in each tweet. Without that tag, our comments would get lost in the stream of other tweets, but the hashtag allows anyone to track or contribute to this particular conversation, regardless of geographical (or shedding feline) obstacles. We’ll even give you a chance to sample some hashtags yourselves – read or contribute any tweets about this posting using the hashtag #twitterphobia. Unfortunately, #pottytweet was already taken because… well, see that aforementioned Google study.

But, following a couple of Twitter conversations isn’t going to quiet your inner skeptic who continues to question the significance of Twitter. With countless social networks vying for consumers’ attention (and giving old-school ad-types heart palpitations), what makes the tweet so special? How about its ridiculous, lightning-quick, superpower-esque speed? You can argue about the ramifications of Twitter all you want, but there’s no debating that Twitter is the fastest system for information dispersal ever created. With a click of a button, users can re-broadcast another persons’ tweet to their own social network (called re-tweeting), enabling information to jump across social circles in a matter of seconds. Case in point: hours before the official announcement about the demise of one particularly evil Abbottabad resident, many Twitter users had already passed around a tweet from a Washington insider revealing this information. Still, the most widely-shared tweets generally include links to online content outside of Twitter; for instance, when the Bulls’ Taj Gibson dropped bombs on another embodiment of evil, the documenting images, videos, and commentaries were racing across Twitter mere moments after impact. Plus, unlike Facebook, Twitter tends to be radically public, meaning strangers can see (and respond to) tweets on any topic from anyone around the world. In fact, many tweets are written with the expectation that total strangers – including marketers like you! – will read them, share them, and respond to them.

And that’s the whole point here. Don’t get hung up on the insatiable efforts to build up or tear down this service. Instead, take it for what it’s worth – a chance for marketers to step into the conversation. Twitter isn’t just about tweeting on your brand’s behalf (although that’s a whole ‘nother topic – see this site for tons of great thought-starters). And while Twitter’s one of the most powerful PR tools ever created, even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Those who dismiss Twitter as a bunch of self-important narcissists who are just tweeting about their Nikon ads and their new TV shows with one and a half other men… well, okay, that does describe one user pretty well. But dismissing Twitter altogether because of a handful of twits is just undermining your own ability to keep up with what’s captivating the public, why those things are captivating the public, and the shifting ways in which the public digests, shares, evaluates, disbelieves, mocks, and mashes-up information in the modern world. In this case, the medium really is the message.

Still have questions we didn’t answer here? Of course you do. How do you generate followers? How often should you tweet? Did this post convince Dave Nigh to finally open a Twitter account? Tweet any additional questions with the hashtag #twitterphobia and we’ll keep the conversation going. In the meantime, Mashable’s Twitter guide book is a great introduction to the service’s component parts.

P.S. Thanks to historicaltweets.com for the images used in this posting.

the hotspot for haute thought is the pot at upshot

we admit we’re awesomeholics at theawesomeblog.net

Today’s post comes from Paul Marran, Interactive Strategy Director at Upshot.

Talk about your online offline convergence. In a July 20th, 2010 post, Upshot’s very talented Brian Asner wrote about Immersive Sensory Experiences. At the time he had ‘hoped’ they wouldn’t include touch, smell or taste.

Well, it’s almost one year later, an eternity in the online space. Move over Elvis. It appears as though ‘touch’ has entered the interactive building.

Researchers from Kajimoto Laboratory at The University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo recently unveiled a device that let’s you French kiss someone over the Internet. Let me repeat that – a device has been created that let’s you French kiss someone over the Internet. Eww.

Dubbed the Kiss Transmission Device, it’s more of a ‘put a straw in your mouth that’s attached to a box connected to the interwebs. Then, roll that straw around with your tongue and your lucky someone somewhere else on the planet feels that sensation from a straw in their mouth attached to a box connected to the interwebs.’

Turned on yet? No. Me neither.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today’s post comes from Adam Stipanuk, Interactive Strategy Director at Upshot.

The nightly tooth brushing ritual with my two year old daughter goes something like this: we ask our child to say “Arrrr” like a pirate to allow us access to her pearly whites. When it’s all over, she gets to pick out a fun little sticker.  Success!

Mom and dad discovered the power of an incentive to motivate behavior, but the folks over at greengoose.com have one up’d us through technology. GreenGoose’s Points Giving Toothbrush turns a mundane daily activity into a fun and rewarding experience.

Essentially, a wireless sensor is applied to the toothbrush that communicates back to an egg-shaped base station.  The base station relays your lifestyle points data into a website where you can track your progress. You can then trade in points with other applications or partners offering rewards.

Oh, and here’s the best part… Their sensors also work on many other objects. I’m sure by the time my daughter is old enough to help out with household chores (sweeping the floor for example), the chores might no longer be considered work, but play.

The ability to flip the perception of an activity or product that usually elicits feelings of pessimism to optimism is a powerful concept. It will be interesting to see how game-like experience technologies like GreenGoose continue to level up in the next year and if marketers continue to make their brand experiences more fun.

So, if you’re a marketer, ask yourself the question: What current products/services could benefit from gaming mechanisms to nudge your consumers to an optimistic behavior?

Now: Thanks for reading.  Pick a sticker.

More articles about our Game On! Trend.
Last’s years blog where we first introduced GreenGoose: Drive Slow, Win Big

Click the image below for the full-size Cracking the Code infographic!

For starters, both Dennis Crowley (co-founder of foursquare) and Josh Williams (founder of Gowalla) think their core features are… well, kinda boring. In their respective panels, each described “location” and “check-ins” as inherently uninteresting. And they’re right. The fact that you are at a venue is horribly uninteresting without some additional context about what’s happening there, who you’re with, or why you’re really there. Locations become relevant and significant to the consumer only when they’re combined with the emotions, memories, and experiences associated with that place. This sentiment was summed up nicely by Crowley: “It’s good that we have a large places database; it’s better that we have an interesting places database.” But even with that additional context, that single data point still isn’t as interesting as a collection of your check-ins over time. In other words, when the context around your location is aggregated and archived over the long run, your check-ins start to tell a story. And speakers across SXSW agreed that for LBSs to grow beyond the geeks and reach the masses, they must make these stories more compelling. To paraphrase Williams, it’s the challenge of making a check-in at Starbucks as exciting as a check-in at the Golden Gate Bridge. Boy, we’ve got some work to do.

Fortunately, the key players have plenty of ideas about how to make this work. Gowalla seems to be planning a service that will help their users easily compile a virtual scrapbook of their memories after going on vacation. If you check in at your home airport, a different airport, then your home airport again, Gowalla might automatically bundle all of your check-ins, updates, and photos that occurred between your departure and return, providing you with a turnkey way to share these memories on sites like Facebook. (Uh, Disney Vacation Club team? This is where you should be paying attention.) Storytelling is even more important for brands that aren’t logically tied to a place, since the only way these brands can interact in the location space is by being a lens that focuses on what’s relevant to their consumers in physical locations. For instance, Crowley gave a hypothetical example in which Pampers could help new parents find playgrounds and parks in their immediate vicinities.

Aside from the hypotheticals, each day seems to bring a new service that is using location to provide enormous utility for consumers. Cabulous is an app (and mobile website) that provides users with a real-time map of available cabs near their current location. As shown in the image at the top of this post, all they need to do is tap on the cab that’s nearest, and the driver will be hailed and provided with the user’s location. There’s also the “Don’t Eat At” app, which foursquare users can add-on if they want to be immediately notified when they’ve checked-in to a restaurant that’s at risk of being shut down for repeated health violations. The more you know… can be a little gross.

So, the stories are coming along, the utility is there, and the base of users is tiptoeing towards critical mass. LBS growth has nowhere to go but up, as long as there’s not a gigantic elephant in the room that could possibly derail their adoption, right? Oh, wait, we almost forgot: the process of checking-in still kinda sucks. Fortunately, everyone in the LBS space is well aware of the problem. Gowalla’s Williams describes check-ins as a band-aid that’s been necessary to get past initial privacy concerns and to generate enough data the make these services relevant. (With foursquare touting half a billion check-ins in the past year, we’d say that’s working.) But even with check-ins being a pain in the butt, users have been trained to understand that check-ins contribute to something useful in the long run, even if there’s not an immediate reward. And if they haven’t understood that before, they understand it now, thanks to the new foursquare interface that we covered pre-SXSW. In addition to helping you explore new places that coincide with your check-in history, check-ins are now accompanied by information like “you haven’t been here in ten months,” or “you just checked in with Kiki – that’s the first time you saw him since you checked-in together at Dark Lord Day,” and other tidbits of information that help you construct your own stories of exploration.

So, if the check-in is only a temporary solution, what’s next? It’s hard to say, but there are some telling signs. The American Express partnership we discussed pre-SXSW is certainly interesting, as it makes this process completely seamless for both consumers and participating marketers. (By the way, if you missed this morning’s update, we’ve got some interesting new information about that partnership.) It’s also becoming increasingly clear that many phones in the next year or two will include NFC capabilities, which could significantly simplify the check-in process. For instance, if foursquare provided venues with “tap here” stickers that included embedded NFC tags, users could check-in just by tapping their phone against that sticker when entering. And if it gets that much simpler to become part of the story of location, we think this space is bound to get a whole lot more interesting.

Before we headed out to SXSW Interactive, we tipped you off to foursquare’s new partnership with American Express (at the very bottom of that post). However, in all the hubbub surrounding SXSW, it took a while for the details about that partnership to emerge. Now that more information is available, it’s only fair that we tie up those loose ends.

First things first: this is only a test. If this were an actual application, you would have seen a foursquare special that looks like the image above, in which you could add this deal to your (pre-registered) AmEx with the tap of a button. The deal would be done as soon as participants used their card; no need to show the server, no need for the server to enter the discount, and no need for the merchant to figure out how to redeem the offer. Everything happens seamlessly on the back end, with the consumer receiving his or her deal within 3-5 business days. While the test wrapped up at the conclusion of SXSW Interactive, it sure sounds like AmEx is planning on rolling this out on a larger scale in the coming months.

But the most eye-opening piece that emerged about this partnership? It wasn’t built on foursquare’s API [oops - updated in response to Tristan's comment below] There was some playing-nice between foursquare’s API and the API from American Express… wait, American Express has an API? Yes, American Express has an API, meaning that developers can produce all kinds of value-added services that work on the back-end of American Express cards. That’s definitely something worth watching in the near future.

Oh, and don’t worry, the folks at AmEx are no dummies. Their API doesn’t share transaction data, card numbers, or merchant info, which also means that anyone who loses their foursquare-enabled phone is not at risk of exposing their AmEx number. (They are at risk of revealing their top scores in Angry Birds, which may be more traumatic.)

So, yeah, that little coup was bigger than the big names involved. We’ll be keeping a very close eye on this partnership when it eventually rolls out. But, for now, we’ve got much bigger things to talk about regarding the location story…

Nice work, Upshot! (And thanks for giving us something to post while work keeps us from our SXSWrapup. We’ll be back with Part 3 next week. We promise.)

[UPDATE: For more information on the foursquare / American Express partnership mentioned at the bottom of this post, click here.]

SXSW Interactive starts tomorrow, which means the battle for blogosphere buzz will be starting shortly… ah, hell, it’s already been going on for a couple of days.

Category-wise, the big buzz is focused on group texting apps, which are pretty much what they sound like: services that enable users to identify groups of peers (often temporary) with whom they want to swap texts, images, videos, events, real-time locations, and more. With hordes of trend-setters and trend-trackers (us included!) heading down to Austin for a week or two, these services are sure to help coordinate meetups, idea swaps, networking, and more during the time when everyone’s in town. There are some obvious implications here for our travel and B2B clients, as these services could be used to coordinate everything from networking professionals to families vacationing together. We’ll be tracking how these services fare over the course of the conference, how (or whether) they differentiate themselves, and what unexpected implications will emerge. For now, we’ll encourage you to peruse a brief posting on Mashable if you’d like to see where the frenzy stands.

As for specific services, the first one to land a big blow has been… foursquare? Again? Clearly, these guys know how to capture the attention of the tech crowd, and they’ve managed to do so with a lengthy blog post about the release of foursquare 3.0. While they’ve got a lot to say, let’s focus on what’s most relevant to us folks in the marketing world.

We’ll start with the fact that foursquare has grown to 7.5 million users who have checked-in 500 million times over the past year. Man, that’s a whole lot of data. If only someone could apply that information in a relevant way to encourage exploration. That someone turns out to be foursquare themselves, and the biggest piece of their big upgrade is the Explore tab. In addition to their classic approach of highlighting the closest venues to your real-time location, the Explore function enables users to also filter by a variety of more refined factors. This is partially enabled by venue tagging (looking for places with fireplaces? got a thing for wings?), but that’s something that’s basically becoming a cost-of-entry to the location-based services’ space. Now, here’s where those aforementioned 500 million check-ins come into play. If you combine venue tags with the aggregate information about your check-ins (and those of your friends) – such as the types of venues you patronize, how loyal you are to those spots, etc. – you suddenly have the ability to receive some extremely relevant recommendations. As we mentioned in our earlier discussion of foursquare’s Pepsi/Safeway partnership, check-ins are increasingly becoming a valuable proxy for aggregate behavioral data that smart marketers can manipulate to provide extremely relevant offers. For instance, foursquare can identify your “areas of expertise” in this new version; if you attend a lot of burlesque shows, you’re probably an expert on the art of tasteful teasing & tassels. If your friends are considering a dive into that world, isn’t your check-in history a valuable asset? Damn right it is.

The next big change worth noting: foursquare’s bringing the “social” back to location-based social networking. While the battles for venue mayorships have certainly been effective for frequent users, these check-in frenzies tend to exclude the service’s more casual users from reaping the benefits of foursquare specials. That’s about to change with foursquare’s new types of specials (shown in the image at right), including deals that target groups of friends checking-in together, first-time visitors, or swarms (i.e. certain thresholds of users checking-in all at the same time). For brands that are looking for innovative promotional mechanisms, foursquare just armed you with a pretty powerful tool.

Oh, our coverage of the foursquare frenzy wouldn’t be complete without their biggest PR coup: landing a partnership with American Express. The gist of the deal is that users who link their foursquare accounts to their AmEx accounts can get receive exclusive deals just by using their card (starting with a variety of “spend $5, save $5″ deals). Interestingly enough, these deals don’t require a foursquare check-in to be redeemed, nor do the purchases automatically check you into venues. Instead, the deal is being touted for its seamlessness – consumers automatically receive the rewards thanks to foursquare’s work on the backend, while the participating businesses benefit because their salespeople don’t need to handle the redemptions. (Our hunch: foursquare benefits too by growing their user base beyond the 7.5 million mentioned earlier.)

[UPDATE: For more information on the foursquare / American Express partnership, click here.]

We’ll be keeping an eye on these developments, as well as the deluge of information that’s about to spill out of Austin, over the next week right here on The Awesome Blog. Let us make sense of the madness for you – be sure to follow us on Twitter and/or subscribe via email through the link at the top right of this page.