The Blog

A VC just 2 months ago sat through my pitch, glazed over, and told me that the real problem somebody should solve when it comes to connecting retailers and online communities is giving retailers a better way to collect customer email addresses:
“Hang an iPad on the wall in the fish guy’s booth at the farmers’ market, so people can type in their emails, maybe. Something like that.”
He really said that. Then, as we were shaking hands and saying bye and…

First off, I’m a fan of Foursquare. I like the idea, and I like the app when it works. I’ve checked in at 42 different venues in a dozen cities… most recently about 20 minutes ago. So this isn’t about critiquing Foursquare, it’s about considering what Foursquare really is, why it’s getting hyped so much, and what if any opportunities it creates for retailers.
Foursquare’s Big Idea was location sharing: a new kind of social network, really, that’s all about letting…

I simply can’t leave this one alone: so elusive, the value of a Facebook fan! Or is it maybe not so elusive? Could it really be as simple as $3.60?
Are we even asking the right question?
The company that came up with the $3.60 number, Vitrue, is the first to point out that a number like this helps brands “justify the spend they’re making, especially in acquiring a fan base.” There are no shenanigans with the math, it’s based on a…

QR codes are little square versions of a barcode that can be recognized by pretty much any device with a camera nowadays and can embed lots of useful info. QR for Quick Response. These things are going to be popping up everywhere.
Apparently they’re already very big in Japan.
Put your business on Google’s map of the world with the newly-announced Google Places, and a cool thing you get is a custom-generated QR code for your company. There was a lot of…

Facebook and Twitter we think of when we say social media, and mobile apps we like to play with and talk about because they’re, well, fun (albeit – at the moment – in kind of a fleeting way). But from an electronic/online marketing perspective, it’s email that’s going to see a cool $1.1 billion invested in 2010 and it’s SMS that dominates mobile “social” communication with 250,000,000+ users in the U.S. alone. (Yikes! Is that really right?)
Part of the reason for this, of…

Mobile Marketing Watch reported a couple days ago that Starbucks is rolling out an iPhone app that basically virtualizes your Starbucks debit card (for those of you who have both Starbucks debit cards and iPhones and – at the moment at least – shop for your Starbucks coffee at Target). So you don’t have to carry a card around in your wallet, it just lives in your phone. Top it up over the air, and spend your credit by letting the…

Things are moving pretty quick around here. Since our business is all about connecting consumers to brands over social and mobile media, a big part of our job is to stay on top of what’s shaking in the social media and mobile space. It’s a super-active space where there’s a lot of really interesting companies and ideas. This blog is a place where we’ll publish our observations and thoughts as new things happen.
Check in every once in a while, or…