Perhaps it’s not politically correct for the CEO of a digital marketing company to express his disgust with a strong new entry into the social media consciousness, and yet here I go.  I hate Foursquare.  OK, my kids tell me that “hate” is a really strong word, so let me rephrase – I strongly dislike Foursquare. And I don’t care who knows it.

Advocates of Foursquare say it’s the next big social media marketing platform.  They say that businesses small and large should try to attract members of Foursquare because it will help them promote their business online. Even the New York Times has picked up on the hub-bub, so it has officially entered the public lexicon.

Foursquare is basically a social media game, which requires players to “check in” at various locations they visit as they vie to become the Mayor of that location.  A dubious honor, this mayorship can sometimes lead to – are you ready for it? A free cup of coffee!  Coupons for dollars off a sandwich!  Maybe even a crown you can wear around town to let people know of your superior status.

So why do I hate Foursquare? Because its participants — many of whom reside in this very office and are people I trust and respect — continue to feel it necessary to share with me through their Twitter and Facebook streams exactly where they are at all times, and what they are buying/consuming/eating etc. Frankly, I do not care where you are.  I don’t care that you are bra shopping. And I don’t care that you just unlocked the super-sonic, gold-plated badge level like some Worlds of Warcraft fanboy.

And I certainly don’t care that you are the mayor of the Hillcrest Subway. Or the mayor of Bailey Gardiner for that matter.  What makes you think anyone actually does care, except for you and the owner of the business you are promoting by telling me where you are?

There are a lot of great online business models that already offer geolocation services and popularity ratings – and way better in my opinion. User generated content and public rating systems are not new, and there are great platforms like Yelp, Loopt, Chowhound, and even grand-daddies like TripAdvisor, that allow me to check people’s opinions about all sorts of things. But on my own time and according to my own set of search criteria.

Having people barge into my social media stream with updates about their current location is pretty much spam.  It’s uninvited information from people I actually like, making it really hard to just turn off their Facebook updates or unfollow them on Twitter.

So do us all a favor Foursquare junkies – disconnect your relentless updates from your social media streams so we don’t all have to witness your trips to Subway, Starbucks and Target. Then you can become the Mayor Of Wherever The Hell You Want, and I don’t need to know about it.

Because really, no one cares except for the brands you are helping by mentioning them.

The social media world has erupted with buzz (pardon the pun) about Google’s newest launch - Google Buzz. The new social network is integrated directly with Gmail and allows you to take all of your personal web feeds and create a single stream. Buzz also includes a Foursquare – esq function where you can make updates based on your location and receive tips and reviews based from other Google Buzzers. The overall effect is that every photo, blog post, video, status update etc can all be found in one place where other Google users can view it and comment on it.

So is Google Buzz a game changer? Some are saying this could be the next big social network, but I just don’t see it. I went in and played with mine, and I am not convinced as to why I need this when I am already perfectly comfortable using my existing networks. Furthermore, not everyone I want to connect with has Gmail, making it impossible for this to ever become my preferred social network.

However, within 56 hours of their launch, Google Buzz already had more than 9 million posts and comments. Plus, with 38 million Gmail users automatically hooked up, there is a tremendous potential for growth.

The real question is, will Google Buzz last? Google Wave made a huge splash when it came on the scene, but was dismissed as too complex within mere weeks. Mashable recently conducted a poll asking their readers which they preferred: Facebook, Twitter or Google Buzz. With more than 6,500 votes, Facebook was the clear leader, receiving 47 % of the votes. 26% of the votes went to Twitter, and only 18% went to Google Buzz.

So what do you think? Is Google Buzz going to be the next it thing? Are you using Google Buzz? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Dave Taylor, blogger extraordinaire,  came to BG for a visit last month, and I took the opportunity to conduct a short interview with him. In this video he provides background information on his popular tech support blog, askdavetaylor.com and why it continues to attract a growing number of visitors.

Dave’s 2 keys to successful blogging include:

• Help people
• Provide value

He also gave us a few tips on how to monetize a blog using affiliate marketing. These included:

• Crystalize your purpose for blogging (get specific)
• Produce new content frequently to keep people coming back (grow traffic)
• Complete a competitive analysis on bloggers in your space (what works/doesn’t)

Check out the rest of what Dave had to say here:

When ordering pizza with friends a few days ago, I was surprised at the level of interaction Domino’s Pizza offered their customers. Here are five of the ways that Dominoes is giving consumers what they want online:

1. Real time tracking of your order. Minute by minute, your order is tracked from “Order Placed” to “Out for Delivery.” The tracker even shows you who is making your pizza and who will deliver! Social media and online ordering has created a real time consumer.

2. Sharing every moment of your life. No matter how boring. Domino’s made it easy for me to connect to Facebook and share that I am about to have pizza. This message is then displayed on my wall and the news feeds of my friends.

3. Domino’s monitored social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Yelp and listened to their critics. They took all of this feedback and re-created their pizza. Then, they went on the road and found the people that were their “harshest critics.” They called this promotion the “Pizza Turnaround.” They showcase their videos on their YouTube channel and on their own website.

4. Notice in the picture just above that they highlight their Twitter stream about their new pizza. They realized they needed to listen to their customers and make things right.

5. They genuinely want to know how they are doing. They make it easy for you to leave comments and feedback about your pizza and your experience.

6. Last but not least. The email follow-up not only confirms your order and tells you that you can track your order online, it also has a “come back” message:

At BG, we have a team where each member specializes in a specific area of the digital marketing field, including mobile marketing, social media,  SEO, PPC and blogging. This team compiled a list of our predictions for 2010 in the five most popular areas in the advertising and public relations world today.

Social Media 2010 Predictions

1. As social networks mature, the value of using each tool (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) for business will become more defined and specialized. Companies will become increasingly strategic about where their resources go and we may see some pullback on tools that aren’t yielding results, while explorers will start testing less mainstream networks such as digg, del.icio.us and foursquare.

2. Company sites will become increasingly social. Applications like Facebook Connect will allow customer engagement within the site while communities, blogs and targeted pages, eliminate the need to jump onto Twitter, Facebook, etc. in order to engage.

Email Marketing 2010 Predictions

1. We will see a simplification in email creative design, to cater to mobile users, while retaining speed-to-market.

2. Expect to see a lot more calls to engage via social media in marketing email in 2010. Around 60% of marketing emails today have no social media elements in them, which is a huge missed opportunity to gain additional brand touch points with engaged consumers.

PPC 2010 Predictions

1. Rapid responses to market news, and the buying up of relevant keywords early, will give marketers an edge over the competition.

2. As search engines get smarter, many SEO techniques will become less effective, making PPC and blogging must-haves instead of nice-to-haves. Shrewd keyword choices that don’t have a lot of competing bidders, and close watchfulness of keyword performance will be the hallmarks of successful marketers in this arena.

Mobile Marketing 2010 Predictions

1. As apps become more popular, advertising within the apps themselves will dramatically increase, especially with free apps. These will become more frequent and the design element will become more savvy, which in turn, will make skipping/avoiding these mobile banners/messages almost impossible.

2. Messaging that is targeted to someone in a specific location (i.e. in Downtown San Diego) will become the new thing. Strategically placed nodes will pick up Bluetooth signals and serve a person an ad relevant to the exact location they are in. They will be given the option to opt-in or opt-out. These preferences that you select will follow you around like a puppy.

Blogging 2010 Predictions

1. Blogs will look more like news sites and news sites will look more like blogs. As bloggers become more sophisticated, blog designs have more functionality than ever. Many top blogs now resemble news portals with featured content and categorization. Simultaneously, as traditional news sites become more and more social with the integration of Facebook fan boxes and tweetmeme buttons, they are beginning to aesthetically look more like blogs.

2. Development of niche blogs will increase. With the plethora of blogs out there, new blogs will have to be extremely targeted and identify a niche audience. While this limits the potential number of readers, it ensures that the blog’s traffic is relevant. It is also a new blog’s only hope to compete for search traffic.

There you have it. Those are BG’s 2010 marketing predictions on where Social Media, Email, PPC, Mobile Marketing and Blogging are heading in 2010. I will be curious at the end of the year to look back and see how on (or off) we were on our predictions for the year. Do you think we missed any key changes?

I’m hearing a lot of rumbling about Foursqaure being just another social media thing that no one has time for. Everyone wants to know why they should care where people are, or who just became the Mayor of Subway in Hillcrest… Well if you are running a business, or you are in charge of the marketing for a business, it’s my opinion that you should care, and here’s why.

First off, what is Foursquare?

Well, it’s a location-based, social networking game. In the most basic sense, it allows you to use your phone to alert your friends, in real-time, of your exact whereabouts. You can build a friend network on Foursquare and simply elect to alert those people, or you can connect your Foursquare account to your Facebook and Twitter, in order to update your already existing friends of your whereabouts.

When you check-in places you are given the opportunity to leave a little tip about the venue (eg Try the portobello mushroom sandwich, it’s fantastic). Those tips are then shown to anyone when they check-in to a nearby location. If they like your tip, they can then save it as a “to-do” for themselves. Foursquare also lets you tag a location with descriptive words to let other users know what to expect.

As you begin to use Foursquare you can earn yourself badges (remember this is a game) which tell fellow Foursquarers exactly what kind of Foursquare user you are. Then if you go to a venue enough times, you become the Mayor of that venue. This is a very prestigious honor (ok not so much) but it is super fun to say you are the Mayor of places. Just ask Jason, the current Mayor of Bailey Gardiner…

You’ll earn points every time you check-in somewhere, and you get more points for being adventuresome and checking into different parts of the city, or for going more than once place in a night. You also get points when someone else takes one of your tips or when you complete one of your To-Do’s. The best part of the game is that the stats get reset to zero every Sunday, which gives everyone a fair chance at playing the game – no matter how long you’ve been a Foursquare player.

So why should you care about Foursquare?

If you own a business, work at a marketing agency or are a marketing director for a company, there are five main reasons you should care about Foursquare.

1. Monitoring – As more and more people begin using Foursquare, it’s imperative that your business knows what is being said about you on the platform. Between tips and tags, people have a lot of opportunity to talk about you, and like any social media platform, we recommend you are monitoring what they are saying.

2. Rewards programs – Many companies have already started integrating Foursquare into their customer loyalty/rewards programs. Take Tasti D-lite in NY. They’ve created a comprehensive social media rewards program that utilizes Foursqaure (and therefore Facebook and Twitter) to reward their regular customers for their social media involvement. On a smaller scale, some companies simply put a sign out in front of their venue, offering a free drink, sandwich, whatever, to the Mayor of their place. This inspires people to check in regularly to compete for Mayorship, while rewarding the venue’s most loyal patron.

3. Events - Word on the street (and by street I mean Mashable) is that there is possibly an events layer coming soon that will reward Foursqaure users for attending events. As a public relations professional, I can only imagine how helpful this might be when trying to throw a big event for a client, to have yet another way to give people an incentive to attend.

4. This is just the beginning – Foursquare has some smart developers, who are on their A-game, to say the least. They’ve got some big plans and are in no way done creating Foursquare. Think how much Facebook has evolved since it began (anyone out there remember when it was just your profile picture and some information about your interests?) Foursquare is growing fast. Hop on now so you can be along for the ride.

5. And finally, Foursquare is the next big thing – not to sound trite, but this is getting a LOT of buzz from the higher ups in the social media world. These people know a good thing when they see it, and with so many companies already beginning to adopt Foursquare, I think they may be right. These are the same people that were telling you to pay attention to Twitter back in 2007, when most of us were going “Tweet what?” or “That sounds ridiculously lame.”

In addition to getting involved as a business or as a marketing/PR representative, there are some benefits to using Foursquare as a user:

1. Foursquare answers the question, “I’m here, so now what?” – Foursquare can do everything from help you choose what to order, to seeing what other great places are nearby, to learning about drink specials and deals. The developers told Mashable in an interview that they want to be more than any other location based service by focusing on the “So what”.

2. It will help you connect offline - You spend all this time making connections with people on Twitter that you have never met, which, to me, is kind of a bummer. In fact, it was one of the reasons I so enjoyed going to Blog World this year, because it was fascinating to sit next to some of the people I’ve been communicating with for the past two years. Foursquare helps make this process even easier because you are able to see where you Twitter friends are even if you aren’t all at a conference.

3. It’s fun - There’s a reason people like games. Everyone loves a good competition and what’s better than being rewarded for places you are already going and things you are already doing.

So, what do you think? Are you convinced? Want to be my friend on Foursquare?

It’s really the antithesis of SEO because it leads you to believe that we’re just talking about one word around which to base all of your content.  In most cases, you’ll get nowhere with one word, there’s just too much competition. Today we’re throwing the tricks of the SEO trade out of the window and getting back to the basics to remind ourselves that, aside from stellar content, increasing traffic to your blog is all about the niche keyword.

The goal is to find the “word” (more typically a phrase) that is so niche to your site that very few people use it but just enough people search it, bringing them directly to your site.

If your company has a blog, you are in an excellent position to increase traffic to your blog via search because blogs provide a way for you to get to the top of search results for multiple keyword phrases.  Here’s why: Search engines judge each of your blog posts as a new page.  If every one of your pages used the same keyword phrase, you would be continuously competing against yourself and losing your niche.  By choosing a new phrase each time, you have endless opportunities to get to the top of search results for a variety of niche phrases.

For example: Don’t Drink the Koolaid Blog is all about marketing.  Our keyword phrases may include things like: “search engine marketing,” “public relations” and “San Diego advertising.”  But those are so broad they wouldn’t get us very far.  So, rather than focus our efforts on words that would cause us to compete with every marketing site in the world, we write posts about very specific things like eco-friendly marketing tips, how to use Google Analytics and social media for non-profits. After all, those terms like public relations are going to be included naturally, and naturally, Google will count them towards our SEO.

So next time you write a post, think to yourself, what would someone search that would lead to this post specifically?  It may not be what everyone searches, but for those that do search it, they will be your perfect target demographic.  That is the essence of the niche keyword phrase and this is what will increase the traffic to your blog.

Anyone who has logged into Google Analytics knows that it’s a beast. With so much information, how are you supposed to know what’s important? Below are the two things that I like to look at when I am trying to measure the blog’s success and look for things to improve.

The two most important areas to look at in Google Analytics:

1. Traffic sources - This section will tell you how people are coming to your blog, which gives you feedback on how well you are doing promoting your content. You can check what your top traffic sources are (likely your website, Google or Twitter) and the top keywords that people are using to find your blog in search.

• The referring traffic portion of the pie chart will show you all the traffic that comes from other websites (eg. your company’s site, Facebook, Twitter and any of your other social media endeavors). You can see exactly which referring source is driving the most traffic by clicking on “View Report” and then on “Referring Sites.” Spend the majority of your time promoting your blog content on the sites that are working the best already. You may also want to choose one of your social media platforms that is under-performing and work on increasing traffic from that site as well.

• The search traffic portion of the Google Analytics graph refers to all the visitors who found your blog organically on Google, Yahoo or Bing. If your blog is just starting out, it is likely that this will be a very small percentage of your traffic sources. As you implement SEO tactics and establish credibility with the search bots, you’ll watch that percentage grow.

2. Top content – This will tell you what blog posts are getting the most traffic and give you insight into what resonates with your readers. If you click on “Content Overview” you can see the top posts for any given time period. Make sure you set it to the time period that you want to measure. I usually check top content by month as well as for the overall in the history of the blog.

Once you have the list, I’d recommend taking a closer look at the ones that got the most traffic to figure out why. If you click on the title of the post, it will pull a report on just that post. Click on “Content Detail“ and then check “Entrance Sources.” This will tell you where people are coming from to find this particular post. If the number one source is Google you can then see which keywords people are using to find this post by going to “Entrance Keywords.”

You can then capitalize on your top posts by going back in and updating them.  For instance, I wrote a post in August about Facebook contests for companies that continues to get traffic daily. It’s likely that a lot of this traffic is coming from people looking for info about the new regulations to Facebook contests, rather than a case study on how to run a successful contest. So, in order to capitalize on the traffic AND ensure our readers are getting the info they need, Katy wrote a post about the new rules for Facebook contests which I then linked to in an “update” to the original post.

With Google Analytics there are a whole lot of other fun things you can look at, but I have found the above two areas to be the most telling in shaping the way I measure success. How about you? Anything you find more useful to look at?

I see a lot of brands make innocent mistakes in their online marketing efforts. Here are some of the most common mistakes I see and how to solve them.

Mistake: Sending an email to your entire subscriber base.
Solution: At the time a customer opts-in to receive email communications, allow them to select the subject matter that interests them. Only send them emails that fall into those categories.

Mistake: Sending customers to your homepage from a banner ad or email.
Solution: Create a specific landing page that addresses exactly what your customer is expecting to see when they click.

Mistake: Not putting a limit on the number of impressions your banner ads give per customer. I have written about this before and I can’t stress this enough.
Solution: Limit the number of times one person is served the same message to five.

Mistake: Freaking out if you see a dip in any kind of analytic.
Solution: Figure out why. What goes up, must come down. Seasonality. There could be a million reasons.

Mistake: Discontinuing a banner ad because it isn’t performing as you expected.
Solution: You should always be testing several versions of the same banner so that you are constantly refining the perfect message, offer, and creative.

Mistake: Giving people too much credit.
Solution: Make things easy. People are lazy.

Mistake: Setting up a Pay-Per-Click campaign and letting it run its course. Often referred to as “fix it and forget it.”
Solution: Constantly monitor performance, competition for terms, success of ad text and your bids.

Mistake: Your URL reads www.mywebsite.com/xrljdoiuds09eryqi
Solution: Create custom URL’s like www.mywebsite.com/aboutme. This is the first place that search engines look.

Mistake: Your link says “Click Here” or “More Information” or some other generic term.
Solution: Make your link say what it is linking to. For example, if you are linking to more information about sea otters, make the link read “Click here for more information on sea otters.” Linked text is SEO Friendly.

If you happened to log into Facebook last Thursday, January 7, you probably got a gander into all of your female friend’s lingerie drawers (via colorful status updates, we mean).  Women across the country were secretly sharing the day’s bra color as a means to show their support for breast cancer awareness.

Facebook updates tell bra color

The risque updates created a buzz as marketers took notice wondering the source of the campaign.  Perhaps the bigger point isn’t where it began, rather what it resulted in – a “viral” campaign that actually went viral.

Oddly while on the topic of breast-related health and social media campaigns, a PA nonprofit, Feel Your Boobies Foundation was named one of the top 100 charities on Facebook via Chase’s Facebook contest, Community Giving.  They were awarded an initial $25,000 and are waiting to hear if they will be the grand prize recipients of $1 million (to be decided late February).

While both of these viral campaigns show the power of social media to share a message, perhaps we’ve all missed a rather obvious means to raising money for our favorite nonprofits – well, not all of us have missed it, exactly.  San Diego’s Tariq Khamisa Foundation (TKF) is using social media for their recent Viral Donor Drive, and they’ve tapped into C.K. Prahalad’s message: “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.”

Our client, Aladdin Bail Bonds currently supports the local nonprofit, dedicated to breaking the cycle of youth violence by empowering kids.  TKF’s Viral Donor Drive uses their Facebook fan page, Twitter account, email database and a special “Stop Kids from Killing Kids” website to spread the word about the drive, with a goal of reaching $1 million.  The beauty of this campaign is that instead of asking a few significant donors for a large sum, TKF aims to reach their goal by asking for $1 from 1 million people – illustrating the power at the bottom of the pyramid and highlighting how well social media factors in, offering over 350 million eyes worldwide to TKF and other nonprofits.

Supporters of the nonprofit can make a donation or help fundraise by creating their own social networking campaign in which educational materials will be provided.  For more information or to donate, visit their website or Fan Page.