New CRM

I have been getting in foursquare in the last week. The whole badge thing has sent me checkin into places and I am sure its only a matter of time before mayorships become an obsession for me.

From a marketing perspective, if you are a brand or a business, a person's competitive spirit is being rewarded before you do a thing. Starbuck barista badge?

That means you can do a couple of things to boost your traffic. Firstly you can offer incentives to get them to checkin with you more often (Domino's is already onto this)and also you can collect data on them to tailor make their experience. For me, Foursquare is all about personalisation and my community of friends and trusted contacts who can give me advice and recommendation

Your mayors can be extremely valuable. People want to be the mayor, so if your business has a mayor, friend them. Give them discounts, free stuff or even the seat next to the window. Finally these days the linkage between the social networks is strong so the mayorships of your business gets posted to twitter and their Facebook wall as well. So effectively you can run a twitter and facebook campaign for your brand or business without paying a penny

Empire state of EcoMind

Is New York fast becoming the world's greenest city?



The Empire State Building, has been donated $20 million from the Clinton Climate Initiative, The makeover will include upgrading the building’s 6,500 windows and adding eco-friendly heating and air conditioning systems, insulation and energy-efficient lighting. The whole project is expected to cost about $100 million and is intended to cut energy consumption in the 102-story skyscraper by 38 percent.

What ever you think about conspicuous consumption by the world's greatest city you have to admire the port authority for setting this standard

Pedal Power

I love my bike. The ride to work scheme is just the best think the government ever introduced in the UK. Ok, i admit I don't actually 'ride' to work, but for early even park visits, and weekend commuting a bike cannot be beat.

This chart from the guys at GOOD just shows us how things are taking off in the US.



Now, on a simple level this shows us the clear correlation behind how much the DOT spends on people commuting and the uptake in it. However, I wonder if this hasn't been a trend that has been picked up on by the government to show a friendlier side?

Either way, cool chart, I think you will agree. If we get more people walking and on bikes, planners might wake up and put cars on the loop....just imagine what our cities really will look like and how much nicer they will be to hang out in?

Glasses change everything

Ready for the weekend? Try on a pair of glasses...I love glasses by the way










These are actually an ad campaign for Oogmerk opticians in Belgium - love the thinking, the concept and the execution

Taking on social analytics

No one will be using email in 3 years - it will all be social...that day will be when Facebook hits its billionth 'friend'....One billion is the tipping point. What happens when the activity on our social channel becomes so ubiquitous it becomes difficult to classify? How do you even start making decisions on the basis of your customers feedback? What needs to happen for brands to really embrace social...actually not embrace social - they will have to, its unavoidable. What needs to happen for brands to make the most of their social presence?

1. Automate the collection of share of conversation and sentiment. It's going to be impossible to hand check the amount of quantitative data coming out of these spaces

2. Right now there are only really two platforms we need to monitor for brand conversation (outside China, but you can bet there is a younger, geekier student than Zuckerberg working in a dorm room to launch an even nicer platform for social exchange. So we can expect even more of them. And we are going to need to get all that data together - maybe they will all talk to each other?

3. I was reading the article in e-marketer telling us that a fan on Facebook is worth $136...its a nice article. Jump to it here:

http://www.emarketer.com/mobile/article_m.aspx?R=1007761

I would say that the value of the fan is inherent in what you do with the fan. We do, however, need consistent frameworks to evaluate these advocates and the conversations they generate around your brand

All of this sounds like 'we need this, we need that' I don't want to come off as negative in any way - when we crack this particular code there are a lot of benefits to be gained, benefits as a brand you can put in the bank