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If you are brave enough to head out into the craziness that is Black Friday here are some tips for you. This 3 minute video might save you some money (it has me) and you might be able to avoid the chaos.
Black Friday, Foursquare, Toys R Us, facebook places, yelp in Social Media I recently took the family to Disneyland for our annual trip, and I tried out Foursquare while we were there. I have used Foursquare for sometime now and I have moved through all the phases of user experience. I'm largely at the phase of apathy with it, but I wanted to see if Disney was doing anything cool with location. This video is a quick summary of my thoughts and an idea for Disney and Foursquare to work together to create a better user experience for me and my kids.
I reference a few things in the post such as the new Foursquare button for web pages and the new social crowd sourcing project that Disney just launched.
Let me know what your thoughts are. Would you like to have this ability?
Matt Hixson
It looks like Disney was working on something in the location/social space when I wrote this. The announced earlier this week that they are going to work with Gowalla in a big way. This is cool because Gowalla will allow you to get pins, which is a slightly different flavor of a badge. They also allow pictures which is more interactive. The one thing they don't allow which is the main reason I liked Foursquare is the ability to add things to my To Do list which allows me to enhance my experience - not just pick up fun things. Mashable has a great write up of the offering here and you can check out the Gowalla Disney page here.
Foursquare, disney, disneyland, user experience in Social Media This week I have a couple of things.
The big news of the week was that Facebook announced a new feature called Places. This allows you to check in places through Facebook much like Foursquare of Gowalla. The feature that Facebook touts as different is the ability to tag your friends at certain locations. Here is the video that Facebook published explaining the new feature.
They are supposedly partnering with Foursquare and Gowalla but Foursquare has said that they are not sure how they will work with it yet. @Dens - Foursquare CEO - said that they are not that concerned with Places. But then again what else are they going to say. Here is a video from Mashable with the Foursquare VP of Mobile and Partnerships Holger Luedorf.
I am talking about Foursquare instead of Facebook because time will tell what people think of the new feature but location has been one of the hottest spaces in technology and Foursquare has been the golden child of that space. The most interesting thing to me is if this will change the landscape of this space considerably or if they will coexist. One note is that Foursquare had its largest signup day ever after this announcement.
I talked about Rowfeeder two weeks ago. Right after that they released a major new release that really stepped up the sexiness of the product. They now generate 'native Excel files with pre-populated charts, visualizations and pivot tables'. The original beauty of this was that I could get the data in the raw format so that I could create whatever I wanted on top of that. I lived in Excel for 10 years so that is very comfortable for me. Now they just lowered the barrier for use even more by pre-populating some of the first use cases they are hearing. I have talked to these guys a few times and I can tell you they are pushing to continually improve this product and are gaining great traction. Nice work guys.
I will talk about this more as this is my real area of passion but the word influence and influencer is a term that is really getting abused. SO many people are talking about this and they are defining it in whatever way is convenient for their purposes but not necessarily in ways that will provide true value. There are a few companies that are trying to so metrics around influence but they are very 1.0 in their thinking. I have discussed this with a friend of mine about what the true roles in a network are and how you really measure them. There is a better way and over time I will be talking about the more and more here. This is a problem that there is real business value in discussing and solving, and this is an issue that were are working through at my day job currently. As companies start into social media this is a space that they are trying to get their arms around and the misuse of these terms are going to cause confusion and false starts for many companies.
I attended Interop Las Vegas 2010 last week and had some thoughts about casinos and the use of social media - particularly Foursquare. I think there is SUCH an opporutnity to use Foursquare in Vegas. I have been a Foursquare user for some time and have gone through all of the stages of using it. On a daily basis I am kind of tired of it. But when I go to an event it is fun and exciting again. It worked great at SXSW this year because there were special badges that you could earn by being there. There were special to do's for the event that could get you prizes and people were leaving tips all over the place which made exploring Austin all that more fun. You could also see where the action was by what was trending in the area or where all your friend were.
Vegas is an event 24/7. Everyone that goes there is either there for a convention or to have fun. Either way people want to have a good time and explore the city. When I go I want to know about the best places to eat - based on my friends recommendations. I want to see tips or to do's from others. What would be really cool is if the casinos engaged people staying in Vegas. There is such an opportunity here. From creating badges for specific Vegas only things to having tips all over the town to doing something like Bravo is doing.
Here is a video that I shot after getting back from Vegas as a download of my thoughts. I probably would not have thought about this so much if I had not ended up at the Luxor and seen the time share guys trying to give away free nights. I thought it was the Luxor people trying to get people to come back again. Given where I would assume the Luxor is in their life cycle as a property in vegas and the people that come to visit that casino I would think that Foursquare might be a GREAT fit. It would give them something that would differentiate them and make their brand appear innovative. They already have a good presence on Twitter (@LuxorLV) and seem to be engaging people pretty heavily there.
What do you think? Would you play Foursquare in Vegas? Would you want special badges for Vegas? Would you visit a casino just to check in or complete a to do in order to get something in return. I know some of you would because at SXSW we went to places purely to get the rewards of Foursquare and nothing more.
Foursquare, Interop, Las Vegas, Luxor, Twitter in Brand, Events, Social Media 
