THE DREAM IN ACTION

Flowtown is a new service that will let you submit the email address of any person and be presented with a list of all the social networks that individual is a part of. It is just as they put it on the site: it will let you “turn an email address into a social profile”.

That sounds familiar doesn’t it. It’s because Google just launched a service called Buzz that tries to do the same thing, turn an email social network into a twitter-friendfeed-flickr-facebook-ish type of social network. They’re going to need to do some serious pruning in order to get that product fun and usable. But in the mean time, there’s Flowtown’s social emails for social marketing. And these guys mean business.

Do know the amount of money that businesses pay for an individuals occupation, location, or even just name and age? A lot. Flowtown can get that information with a click of a button, and the collection process is only the start for them. The analytics that can be executed on the data that Flowtown will collect are really interesting. For example, this screen shot shows my most influential friends on Twitter:

Another thing I like about Flowtown is that they charge real money for the service, many web businesses don’t, and they’re able to do that because they provide real value. Dan Martell & Ethan Block are solid entrepreneurs that know what the hell they’re doing. I spoke with Ethan on ActionTalk way back and his passion is obvious & very contagious.

You can test it out and upload a few hundred contacts but in order get the masses you have to pay-to-play. As it should be. This may not be for Joe Twitter User but for anyone in the marketing space this tool will become a must have.

Lastly, if you haven’t read there blog, there are some hilarious social media and blogging comparisons; you’re missing some good stuff…

How to Blog like Rambo!

11 Things Tyra Banks can teach us about video blogging

The number of brands that are jumping on the Foursquare train is awesome. We’ve been talking about the no-brainer that is engaging with your customers and it’s very satisfying to see it happen with such strong companies and brands.

Zagat

Mashable reports:

Zagat is calling the partnership “Foodie Love,” and there’s even a new accompanying foodie badge. Zagat.com is extending the partnership beyond Foursquare and starting a “Meet the Mayor” online interview series that will feature discussions with prominent Foursquare mayors.

Foursquare’s relationship with Zagat is clearly an answer to Yelp’s introduction of check-ins, especially given the trusted and prestigious nature of Zagat content.

Warner Bros.

You’ve all had a blast playing foursquare, and now the entertainment continues. Chris Dixon said that the next big thing would look like a toy, and take my advice here, Dixon knows what he’s talking about. No a game is becoming a way for movies and tv programs to bring the story off the screen and directly into the lives of viewers.

Through the promo’s & tips that these brands are offering, users/viewers can live vicariously through the characters. I’m so pumped on this. Of course, it wouldn’t be Foursquare without a badge to go with the campaign.

“Visit and check-in on Foursquare at any of the locations on our Valentine’s Day inspired list of the most romantic places in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston to get a Valentine’s Day badge! Then go see the movie, in theaters on February 12!”

HBO

Now HBO’s new show “How to Make it in America” that has been compared to a New York based entourage, will also run promo’s through Foursquare. With 4SQ’s huge NYC presence I guarantee this blows the show up! What if the Jersey Shore guys gave tips? I guess nobody wants to live vicariously through them…

Foursquare’s first direct relationship of note was with the Brooklyn Museum. The museum saw the obvious value of visibility into who checked-in and decided to embrace the opportunity to directly provide it’s visitors with tips and tricks around the museum. The created an interactive experience and essentially a personally guided tour! Awesome. Other institutions saw the obvious value in this type of partnership and wanted in, as I said before, the people who get in early will benefit the most. Tristan is killing it in driving these partnerships and infusing compelling reasons for users to checkin and amplifying the value of the checkin.

Our next announcement was that Harvard University got on board by populating over 30 tips for both students and visitors all around campus. The cheeky headlines read, “Foursquare goes to school” and they were right. With Harvard U. on board Foursquare was learning that the potential for these partnerships were reDONKulous. Harvard used the Foursquare platform to populate a virtual tour guide with tips like…

@ Harvard Hall: In 1764, Harvard Hall burned down in a nor’easter, taking with it almost the entire College library & John Harvard’s book collection. (December 9, 2009)

@ Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage: An American landmark since 1960 & voted best burgers in America! Try “The American Idol” burger w/ bacon, cheese, mushrooms and onions. (December 8, 2009) [Link]

Can you imagine the potential of the worlds best location based social network and the worlds best restaurant guide teaming up? Exclusive tips from Zagat about the highest rated restaurants in major cities like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco becomes very interesting for the foodies out there. Did someone say Foursquare Foodie badge? I think so!

Oh snap, with a Foursquare/Bravo partnership 4SQ enters 90 million American living rooms and hits mainstream big timeness. BravoTV’s experts and celebs give tips about the venues they love so that when you check in, you’ll see their exclusive tips integrating your checkins with that of the BravoTV shows. Everything from Michael Cohen of Miami Social, to Patti Stranger from Millionaire Matchmaker…know you’ll be in the know like never before, and you can live vicariously through the shows and their stars.

@ Joe Allen: This is where the understated in-crowd always dines. You actually need reservations because the food and This is where the understated in-crowd always dines. The menu changes often but for lunch, the La Scala salad is so good!  Their fish selections are also notable. -Michael Cohen, Miami Social (1 day ago)

@ Dave and Buster’s – Hollywood: Sports bars attract hotties. That’s why I love the wings at Dave & Busters. -Patti Stanger, Millionaire Matchmaker (1 day ago)

The institutional partnerships are taking things to a whole new level. Foursquare was always praised for being a game that provided real world, offline value, but with these partnerships that value was just amplified.

Last week Mashable ran a poll to find out which location based service YOU like the most (I say YOU because I’ve learned that the folks that read this blog are likely the type to also peruse Mashable on a regular basis). I was very please to see the result here, obviously, and I’ve been giving the battle for best location service a lot of thought. What does each service have, not have, and have the potential for?

I decided to use something that is very easy to analyze, a car, to explain what I think each service offers…or doesn’t. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Gowalla is too gamie. The feedback I’ve gotten from all of my friends who use Gowalla is that it’s so tough to figure out. There might be free iphones and tshirts hidden around town but those gimmicks fade quickly. Because of it’s overly gimmicky nature, like the PT Cruiser, I think it’s shelf life is very short. Where other services will beat Gowalla, and likely already have, is that they’re useful, they’re a service and people only play games for so long. There’s got to be user utility otherwise I’m out.

Yelps recent entrance to the location services game is on the surface appealing. They do have a lot of venues to work with but it’s clunky, not social, and ultimately not fun. Although mini vans are super effective cars, they fit kids, surf boards, Christmas trees and almost anything else, but they’re not fun to drive at all. Trust me I drove one all through high school, and although I was awesome (or so I thought), my ride was not. :) Yelp is too much on the service side, the game mechanics that other services bring to the table will win out in the end. Phin Barnes of FRC recently wrote about how gaming mechanics will be critical to all social applications in the future and this is where yelp fails, no community.

Ultimately Foursquare has the best combination of social and utility. It may not be the smoothest ride (yet), but it gets the job done better than anyone else and it’s fun, a powerful combo. The foursquare app can fit your friends and your fun into one ride. Like an SUV foursquare is enjoyable, you can be proud of what you’re driving because the community is a strong one, and your friends will think your cool :)

Although I’ve used all three of these applications, foursquare still blows the others out of the water. Yes, I’m biased (disclosure, I’m working w/ foursquare) but, I don’t see how the others are going to cross the chasm into true social utility. Because foursquare was built for that purpose from the ground up it will win.

The New York Times announced that they plan to start charging for the online content. This has been a VERY scary thing for the industry and a topic of much debate. As Fred Wilson said back in July, “the newspaper industry is doing a lot of soul searching for the right revenue model”.

So why hasn’t monetizing new content worked well to date? Why hasn’t the ‘freemium’ model worked well for the news industry like it has for so many other industries? In short the answer is, they’ve gone about it in the wrong way, and luckily it seems that NYT is learning from others mistakes. As newspaper readership migrates from print to web they’ve got to be able to monetize the move and it seems the solely advertising model has proven to be an insufficient way to monetize that content.

If a newspaper was to charge you based on how much you consume (per-article) that would be like slapping your most valued customers in the face everyday. So, they had to come up with a model that works in the opposite way… Reward the best customers, retain the exposure to search (Google juice, Bing, Tweets), and use curiosity to drive sales. I think they’ve found a way to do this through their improved ‘freemium’ model (that Financial Times, FT.com, already uses btw). It sounds like, starting in 2011, they will allow a certain amount of “free reads” per month, then after X amount of articles read (likely 10) you’ll get a pop-up asking you to pay a one time fee for unlimited reading for the rest of the month. This allows the casual reader to get their fix and it rewards the valued customers (Super User) to pay a nominal one time fee and have the ability to read like mad.

The term super user derives from computer operating systems and is used to refer to a system administrator account. This means that they have all the access rights possible or needed. This model targets and rewards they’re best customers or super users by keeping prices low relative to the amount of content consumed. Fred Wilson intuitively called this, monetizing the audience, not the content. Newspapers have got to charge something to stay alive, but they are rewarding their super users by keeping the fee minimal and one time.

I personally hope this works well because my forward thinking self :) realizes that without a model that proves profitable, the quality of the news we receive will begin its inevitable decline. I like having quality journalism on a daily basis and would pay my nominal fee for it.

###

In a semi unrelated note, I heard that Amazon can charge Kindle users a dollar to subscribe to my blogs RSS feed. They’ve monetize my FREE content. Is anyone paying for this blog (or any other) via Kindle? How do you feel about doing that? Love to hear your thoughts.

image via flickr

Most people know that Google’s precious search algorithm is a secret, sacred, thing that they’ve worked very hard to protect. In fact their behavior around that algorithm has been similar to Golum’s behavior towards his “precious” ring. You know, the one that will ‘rule them all’. This algorithm and others allow Google to provide very focused advertising based on your search terms.

In computing, an algorithm is an effective method for solving a problem using a finite sequence of instructions.

However, the way I see it, their dominance in providing web advertising using the “precious”, all machine, set of instruction won’t last forever. There are human powered systems that can adjust quickly for variables, change over time, and become increasingly “sharp” as they learn. Simply, they can learn better than just a computer. A great example of this type of human powered system is a NYC based startup Hunch. Effectively, they’ve created a system where they can collect an infinite number of decision trees, all generated by humans, and then predict future decisions based on passed decision sequences.

So, what am I getting at? Well, as you know I’ve been working closely in the local advertising space through my work with Foursquare and I can’t stop thinking about how large of an opportunity this is. If a bar or restaurant can advertise directly to the folks driving by as they’re deciding where to eat, that’s better than any billboard, radio spot, newspaper clip, full page magazine add, event sponsorship, Adsense ad in my Gmail or Google search, and I could go on… It’s simply the best possible advert you could get, as an advertiser or a consumer, unless I’m missing something. Here’s an example, when companies spend money on other ‘focused’ internet advertising they pay for say 100 impressions. This means that 100 people saw that ad, and the common click-through rate is about 1/100, even on the ‘focused’ ads. Now, what if you were able to directly reach potential customers who frequent your ‘type’ of establishment, fall within a very specific demographic, and only if they’re walking distance from your location!!! Right now you’re saying, “WTF are you serious…”, and I am.

With the blowing up of location based services like Foursquare, Loopt, Brightkite and a few others, this sort of data is readily available. People are using these services to share their location, their purchase preferences, their unfiltered thoughts about almost everything they do and businesses can learn A LOT from that. Now you see why all these nerds (me) get excited about data; because you can change the world with it. With this data you can turn industries upside down, and the ability to reach consumers in this intimate way is one of those opportunities.

It’s all a matter of who can reach the masses, who can create a product intuitive enough for “Joe the Plumber” to use. Google’s Adsense technology is fairly simple, but still local businesses don’t use it. The potential for human powered mobile, local, advertising is in the words of Austin Powers, “dead sexy”. My mouth is literally watering. I can’t wait to be a part of this movement.

Update: This post is going to be syndicated, and I made some additions/updates for that reason. 1/5/10

Here in Chicago we’ve been building a really solid group of users who are excited enough about Foursquare to tell their friends and the venues that they frequent. Last night we all met up at Lincoln Station in Lincoln Park and chatted about our experiences sharing foursquare and some of the challenges we’ve faced in spreading the word. If you’re interested in joining us next time or talking more about 4SQ, shoot me an email ryan@thedreaminaction.com

More Cupcakes was kind enough to sponsor the event and made some Foursquare branded cupcakes with a Mayor badge. Check out those crowns!

Thursday night I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Adler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, the New York based group funding platform. Kickstarter serves as a way for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, and explorers (as they say on the site) to make their dreams come true, post a project, and collect the necessary funding for it. Similar to others like it, projects much reach their goal in order for any of the funding to be collected upon.

Kickstarter has taken off because of the quality of projects they host and the high success rate for projects that do collect on funding. They’ve also given the power to the people, fundraising on a grand scale is no longer for big non-prof corps. The Kickstarter interface is clean and simple, the concept is one that people understand, and there’s almost always a project that you can identify with and support.

Recently, I contributed to a project call the beta cup project. Check it out and think about contributing…

About this project

We want to find solutions to the enormous problem of disposable coffee cups. The hard part it making something that is still convenient, while ending the waste.

We believe there are lots of people with good ideas – you might have a few yourself. After all, so many of us drink coffee every day, some of us must have thought about this, right?

We’ll ask people to rate and review the ideas and invite the best to create prototypes. We’ll reward the best, with prizes. The prize will help the winners begin the process of getting their ideas to market.

All money raised here on Kickstarter will be used for prize money only (Who will check? We hope you will).

Why is this important? In North America we consume 58 billion paper cups every year, which represents 60% of the worlds total cup wastage.

These cups are not being recycled and most end up in landfill. With less than 2% of us using reusable mugs, we have a serious problem on our hands.

For more information please see http://thebetacup.com or contact me, Toby Daniels, directly.

P.S. Maybe helping fund the prize is not your thing. Don’t worry, there will be lots of ways to help out. Please let your friends and family know about betacup – more than 65% of us are coffee drinkers, so there is bound to be some interest. Who knows, maybe they have already dreamed up the winning idea.

Dear Associate,

Today we are excited to announce the launch of a new feature called Share on Twitter. You can access Share on Twitter from the Site Stripe and post to your Twitter account from Amazon detail pages in just two clicks.

The Share on Twitter feature is easy to use. Simply log in to your Amazon Associates account and then visit any detail page on Amazon.com. By clicking on the Share on Twitter button in the Site Stripe, a new window will open and an Amazon-generated message is pre populated in the ‘What are you doing?’ text area of your Twitter account (you may be asked to log in to your Twitter account). That message will include a shortened URL that already includes your Associates ID. You’ll have the option to edit this message or simply hit the ‘Update’ button to post to your Twitter account. When Twitter users click on the link in your post and make a qualifying sale, you’ll earn referral fees. That’s it.

Also, did you know that you can stay connected with Amazon Associates by following us on Twitter, becoming a fan on Facebook and joining our group on Linkedin?

Please tell us what you think of our new Share on Twitter feature using hashtag ‘#AMZNSOT’ on Twitter or contact us via the contact form. We want to hear from you!

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Program

Side note: In my opinion Amazon is a perfect acquirer for AdaptiveBlue who makes the in browser social tool GetGlue.com. It’s a perfect opportunity to immediately bring their customers all together and have probably the largest social network on the web. Yes, with the Glue technology implemented  correctly they could surpass FB and the social graph would all center around REAL PRODUCTS. The potential is ridiculous…this topic will get it’s own post in the future.

This weekend @Mollstar and I had a long (relative to the amount of time I can usually get her to talk about the web) conversation about how we don’t really understand who plays all these Facebook games. Other than Poker from Zynga, which I play a decent amount of, I don’t understand who grows virtual farms, zaps their friends with black magic, and others. Then, on Halloween, Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch posted a follow up post to his question to Anu Shirkla of OfferPal at the Virtual Good Summit about the ethics of many adverting trends within the virtual currency markets. His post covered examples of these ad schemes and a very entertaining video of classic Arrington antics at the event. You may like him or hate him but you can’t deny he’s kind of a bad ass.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

Then the next day on Nov 1, Tech Crunch followed up with quotes from two respected entrepreneurs who admittedly said they’d executed these types of ad strategies in the past and weren’t proud of it. One even said, “I’m surprised it took this many years to be reported by the “media”. These kind of scams have been going on for years…”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/scamville-hotornot-plentyoffish-facebook-myspace/

Then Dennis Yu the CEO of BlitzLocal wrote a very honest post about scamming Facebook and the 3 most common ways to do it: 1) Downloading a spyware tool bar, 2) Tricking users to give up their email using ‘you’ve won a “free” camera, just tell us you email address’, or 3) Getting a users phone number by using ‘thanks for taking that IQ test, give us your phone number so we know where to send it’, which charges a user $20/month.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/

The next follow up was from Zynga’s VP of Biz Dev Andrew Trader who stated that about 1/3 of Zynga’s revenue comes from advertising. This is the same advertising that Arrington calls ’scammy’.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/scamville-zynga-says-13-of-revenue-comes-from-lead-gen-and-other-offers/

Next Mark Pincus, who I wrote about last week, responded to Arrington’s claims with a very thoughtful post about the industry and openly admitting that yes, some players on these social media platforms are ‘scammy’ advertisers and they’re creating bad user experiences. He also raised a point I hadn’t thought of; there are many users who don’t have access to online payment methods (broke kids) who are still interested in making in game purchases. So they’re able to take survey’s and perform tasks to earn in-game-currency. Pincus says this about the worst offender:

In fact, the worst offender, tatto media, referenced in the techcrunch article, had already been taken down and permanently banned prior to the post.

There is no doubt that social gaming is entering the mainstream culture and there is a business to be created around fun….

As we evolve to a world where people connections are the basis for the largest consumer services, we will face more challenges. I’m confident that with so many smart people (and critics) we will overcome these.

http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2009/11/my-take-on-zynga-and-cpa-offers.html

Then yesterday Arrington respectfully responded to the Pincus post:

Hats off to Zynga. Flat out admitting that the problem exists and taking early steps to fix it is just something you don’t see from most companies.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/zynga-takes-steps-to-remove-scams-from-games/

I hope that I could catch you up to what’s going on here and make it easier for you to follow than reading every post (although you can of course). As I stated last week in my application economy post I really think that Pincus is a sharp entrepreneur. He understand that you can’t just F’ the user and still build a great business so I’m excited to see how he responds to this in the longer term. I wouldn’t doubt it at all if Pincus were to push Facebook to adopt the standards that Arrington et al. are calling for.

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For anyone who studies customer development you know that feedback is at the forefront of any successful product. In order to build a product or service that customers will actually want and hopefully pay for. If you’re not asking for customers to pay, you likely want their time and attention. I see this blog as a product and a service, you consume, and hopefully you learn, at least that’s my hope :) I work hard to write interesting stuff so that you’ll learn something from and give me your attention for a few minutes a day. I’ve decided to practice what I preach and ask ya’ll for feedback.

I’ve done surveys in the past but I was always able to provide categories that I wanted feedback and on, now I’d like to ask for your feedback in a more open form. My friends (and I really consider them friends) at Rypple have released an embeddable widget so that you can ask for feedback directly on your blog/website. The widget above, which will also stay in the blog sidebar (down and right), will hopefully collect your ideas and feedback on what you like and topics you want to hear about most from me! If this is your first time on the blog or if you’re a regular reader I’d love for you to drop in a quick idea (almost as short as a tweet) about what you enjoy reading most, or things I can work on! It’s anonymous and quick, and I’d really appreciate the help.

Thanks guys, and great job Rypple!

Someone who I don’t talk about often on this blog but that I do have a lot of respect for is Mark Pincus. Mark is the CEO of the company that makes virtually games, specifically Farmville…yea you’ve probably played it. The game has 20 million active users as of last week. Mark is one of the most forward thinkers when it comes to the web and where it’s going. He also has some very strong beliefs that there are particular ways to monetize things on the web and his track record and performance proves that he knows what he’s talking about. His company, Zynga has 50 million active users and is currently contemplating going public. Wouldn’t it be wild if a Facebook app company went public before Facebook did?

There’s been a lot of talk recently on TechCrunch and others about Web 3.0 and what the next era of startups, specifically web startups will look like. Mark said this about monetizing in Web 3.0:

We have entered the third business plan of the web….

Web 3.0 is about monetizing this massive web audience through users paying for mostly digital goods and services. The product will be a service or at least ongoing relationship. Distribution could be through Apps or even daily emails. The currency will be DAUs (daily active users). This will be higher margin and fuel an exponentially greater number of companies.

Web 3.0 businesses will be measured in $$/pixel/minute. This is a throw back to hsn and qvc. These home shopping services proliferated because they could better monetize local cable screen time which couldn’t be sold as it wasn’t measurable.

After reading Mark’s bio and reading more about what Zynga has been able to do, he’s become of of those guys that I won’t miss a word of what he says. I’d be foolish not to pay attention to people who are not only forward thinkers but are at the forefront of building the future. Mark was the founder of Tribe.net, one of the first social networks back in 2003, well before Facebook or even Friendster.

I encourage you to follow Mark.

http://twitter.com/markpinc

http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/

As described in their new release, “GetGlue.com is a social recommendation network for interests like books, music, and movies. GetGlue.com offers a stream of suggestions based on user interests, friends activity and things that are popular with everyone. Users can also add GetGlue to their browser to more quickly build their taste profile and get suggestions in context, on hundreds of popular sites like Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix, Wine.com and Citysearch.”

Today, they’ve announced a bunch of new features to their FireFox plug-in Glue, which I use on a daily basis. The changes are very interesting and I can already see how they’re going to make my browsing more fun. First I’ll tell you some of the new features, then I’ll tell you why I love the direction that the AdaptiveBlue team is going…

1. Suggestions Stream: A continuous stream of suggestions is generated for the users based on what they liked, friend’s favorites and everyone’s popular.

2. GetGlue Profiles: New profiles make it easy for users to save and share their favorite books, music and movies.

3. Stickers and Guru: Users can earn stickers for participating and get recognized as a Guru for things they actively comment on.

4. Browser Addon: Glue appears around the web providing in context suggestions, friend reviews, clips, and a way to quickly build a taste profile.

Now, the fun part, here’s why I think this is so cool. If you ever read this blog you probably know that I’ve a big fan of Foursquare, the bar/restaurant check-in game that connects the offline world and your friends via and online tool, so very well. Now GetGlue is doing that for online destinations (topics), and you don’t even have to check in. When I visit ‘Surfing’ for example on Wikipedia, GetGlue knows that I’m viewing it, then when I ‘like’ the topic on Glue it collects more information about my relation ship with surfing. Similarly, when I got to my local pub, I check in and Foursquare learns about my relationship with that pub. Now, I can become the Guru of a topic on the web. I just so happen to be the Guru of surfing :)

Because of AdaptiveBlue’s semantic web technology they are able to collect information (that I allow them to collect) and create an online profile that is likely more powerful than anything I could create on my own. They use the content that I browse on the web to build a profile for me. They sometimes are able to tell me things about myself that I didn’t even know. For example, why am I the guru of Brett Favre and not Philip Rivers (my home-town-team’s QB)? Am I a  traitor? NO!!!

If you’re not on FireFox you need to be, and the first plug-in you need to download is GetGlue, it will change the way your surf the web. It will allow you find more relevant stuff based on what your friends and looking at and it will make you more aware of what’s important to you. The technology has always been  amazing and now the usability and usefulness of the site will blow you away too.

In a recent project, I’ve been trying to sign-up venues here in Chicago to be on Foursquare. It’s been a fun experiment in sales and a wake up call to the difficulties of door to door sales pitches. Below I’d like to share some of the findings of the experiment and some of the suggestions that I would make to the Foursquare founders (in the next post) all based on venue feedback. These changes may make those local business partnerships a bit easier and more valuable. Also, note that I am not really a Foursquare sales rep, they are a 3 person startup and they don’t have sales reps, but if they did, here’s what that person would learn from bars & restaurants…

Realizations

1) It’s tough to get in front of the person that makes the decisions – Over and over I would get deferred to a manager that wasn’t able to make a decision on any kind of promotion. I quickly learned that I need to get the right person before I give my schpeel otherwise the time was usually a bust. However, sometimes I found it really fun to just explain the idea of Foursquare to normal employees. In one situation I found that sharing the idea with an employee lead to a glowing review of the product to the manager, which eventually really helped in that important conversion conversation.

2) Brick and mortar is still confused about how the web will help them – With the blowing up of Twitter and Facebook, the offline crowd is becoming more open to the idea that a web based solution could help them. However, it’s still very new. Even though you and I are “savvy” it doesn’t mean that the value of the internet is understood by all. This will definitely take some hand holding. In order to reach the local business masses there would need to be a ridiculously large sales force, which is why most businesses won’t be able to make the economics work. There has to be a better way to reach these businesses than the tradition cold call method. (proposed solution in the next post)

3) You’ve got to relate the future with the past – These business owners don’t want to try the new things. That’s why they started restaurant/bar businesses and not web businesses, but that doesn’t stop their entrepreneurialism from thriving, they are looking for ways to beat the competition! If you are going to make a case to them, you’ve got to relate what your trying to do with something they already see the value in. Maybe for a restaurant it’s Yelp, or maybe for a bar it’s the economics of a Monday night drink special. Either way, connecting with something they already understand and buy into is mission critical.

During my experience in the shoes of a Foursquare sales rep there were many lessons learned, these are some of the main ones. I’ve really enjoyed this project for a few reasons. I believe in the product. I don’t understand how somebody could take a sales job when they don’t truly buy into the product, it would be a lie the entire time, nightmare. Also, I love convincing people of the webs value. I do think that so many people have not yet taking full advantage of the web and I will always promote it’s use where possible. Yes I’m a nerd. Lastly, I love talking to bar/restaurant people. Their businesses are very basic and they aim to serve. Similar to the game Foursquare, bars aim to help people have a good time, and I’m into that.