“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 thanks, he looked at the QR code on the back of my card and said, “This stuff is never going to catch on.”

He was wrong about the QR codes, which are popping up everywhere. I especially liked Calvin Klein’s approach. But, silly as VC’s example might have been, he had a point on the other thing. He was talking, in his own confused way, about the problem of lead acquisition.

The biggest challenge that many physical retailers have when it comes to e-marketing is capturing qualified leads. Not Facebook fans – these are not leads because they are not addressable. When you get down to it, all the social platforms in the world are only as valuable to a retailer for marketing as his ability to use them for reaching out and engaging prospects. Otherwise they’re just more advertising. Spray and pray, someone said.

(You’re lucky if you’re a health club or other membership-based service provider, because you can make lead acquisition part of your member registration. Skip forward to the more fun stuff – running contests and promotions and offering targeted deals, etc.)

So we’ve been focusing on solving this single, fundamental challenge for hospitality: how do you get all those anonymous customers to provide you with contact information before they leave, maybe never to be seen again?

Any high school kid can tell you it’s important to get the girl’s number at the dance. If you wait until the next day it’s probably too late. You might not be able to catch her between classes soon enough, and even if you do chances are the moment is lost – she’s thinking about other things. (High school kids know this, right? I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?)

We kicked off our first full-on lead acquisition campaign with a restaurant down near Wall Street last week. First-time signups get a free drink. People can sign up with either email or mobile (SMS) but they do it on the spot and get their coupon back electronically right then. And we’re seeing killer results:

• better than 25% conversion rate during the first 3 days – which means that for every 100 little cards the wait staff hands out, we get more than 25 immediate signups
• surprisingly large number of SMS signups relative to email: 83%

That last little stat defies the conventional wisdom around here (the U.S.) that people don’t want to give up a mobile number. In fact, we were counseled by many folks far marketing-wiser than ourselves to forget about SMS.

I’ll take up the SMS thread in the next post because it’s really exciting and interesting and this post is already getting too long. But what I think is really cool here is we’re proving to ourselves that opt-in works if done properly. And once they opt-in, we’ve got an opportunity to engage them and give them reasons to become better customers. That is when all the cool and fun social media stuff comes in.

links:

Calvin Klein’s QR billboard
Facebook “Fan Exchange” (?!)

Foursquare’s Big Idea was location sharing: a new kind of social network, really, that’s all about letting people share where they are with their social circles.

Initially Foursquare thought it was a game. But people don’t care about earning badges or being a virtual mayor. Or at least I don’t know anybody who does. As a game it’s not long-term interesting to users.

Foursquare is useful as a way to add location context to updates. By overlaying places on the map it created a way for people to say something meaningful about where they are and what they are doing. Simple, obvious, and powerful.

But what about the places themselves? Is there a retail angle, for instance?

I think the answer is maybe. Not now, because there’s just not enough people using it. CEO Dennis Crowley says that “almost half” of Foursquare users check in “at least once a month.” Being generous, that’s 25,000 users checking in each day across the entire planet.

But back up and look at the forest: there are a dozen “check in apps” out there. Yelp is 15 times bigger than Foursquare. Twitter, which is 100 times bigger, has added support for places. Tweeting from a specific place is no different than checking in.

If I’m a retailer and my customers and prospects are checking in, then that’s certainly interesting. I don’t care about the platform, as long as I can plug in to wherever my customers are.

To my way of thinking, Foursquare is TiVo. Even though the unbelievable hype machine behind Foursquare keeps it in the spotlight and probably has many believing that world domination is imminent, the reality is there are no real competitive barriers and as a result more capable platforms are poised to eat its lunch.

That’s ok though. What Foursquare has done for retailers is opened up a new world of possibilities for connecting with customers locally. After all, it’s about connecting with customers, not connecting with Foursquare.

I’ll keep checking in on Foursquare. Today, with my Twitter account linked, I’ve got a perfect way to combine the Foursquare application interface, which I like, with the Twitter network, which is real.

——
more funding for Foursquare
Starbucks experiments with Foursquare
Carrabba’s does, too
Twitter adds places support
Yelp is not afraid of Foursquare
me on Foursquare
TiVo is still the best DVR

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 $5 CPM rate which I guess is generally accepted. Here’s how they got it.

That’s a pretty solid answer to the question; I just don’t think it’s a particularly good question.

I get that we’ve spent the past several years working towards a tenable valuation model for impressions online so that we could support an advertising economy on the web. And that a Facebook fan or a Twitter follower represents a potential impression. And although a fan is likely to miss your post, so the logic goes, she’s equally as likely to see it and share it. So, network effect.

But wouldn’t it be great if, rather than speculating about impressions and impact, we could make those fans and followers “sticky” so that we could connect with them individually, make them offers, and see if they bit. That would take the guesswork right out of it!

It’s the very same idea Asa Candler had when he created coupons at Coca Cola back in 1887. The coupon, after all, is a super-effective token for tracking a promotion from offer to redemption. It creates a feedback loop and measurability. This is ironic, I think: Coca Cola has 5.4 million fans of its Facebook page. Vitrue recons that page is worth $4.5 million and could be worth $58 million. But Coke can’t reach out and engage any of those fans directly!

Publishing, on a webpage or a Facebook page or a Twitter stream or a billboard, is a one-way channel. Spray and pray, we like to say. Throw it up there and hope people notice. You pay more for a billboard on a busy highway than for one on a lonely country road… but you’re not guaranteed people will remember one more than the other. Not unless there’s some kind of feedback loop.

Coke’s Facebook page is like a billboard on a super-super-busy highway.

Social media creates opportunities to engage with massive communities of folks but you’ve got to ask them for permission. It’s not about presentation, it’s about offering value. The good news: once they’re engaged — once the feedback mechanism is in place — we can stop guessing about how much our marketing is worth. We’ll know for sure.

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 press on this today but BusinessWeek’s writeup shows what I’m talking about if you missed it.

Facebook, too, seems to be gearing up to launch custom QR codes for people. While it’s not clear exactly how they plan for these things to work in the Facebook world, I think it’s a reasonably clever idea to make people scannable too.

Maybe if you wore a tee-shirt with your QR code on it I could zap you with Facebook on my iPhone and we could be friends.

QR codes can embed pretty much any type of information. Commonly things like web addresses and phone numbers and contact info, but also company profile information (Google) and people profile information (Facebook). Interesting applications for couponing certainly (this is what Google is thinking about) and another important piece of the social media–mobile, specifically–marketing puzzle.

A solution for checkin fatigue. Or so it seems to me. I assure you, if you haven’t felt the fatigue yet you would’ve.

Here’s the QR code for this post… in case you want to zap it and come straight back here:

Part of the reason for this, of course, is that marketing budgets haven’t quite got their heads around these new social platforms in terms of where they fit and what they’re worth. But the biggest part of the reason is really two parts: first, email and SMS are ubiquitous while these other, richer platforms are comparatively nascent; second, email and SMS are two-way.

The second is key. Facebook, Twitter, and even the social-mobile apps out today are largely one-way platforms. Push or pull information. The stickiest and most effective marketing is engaged/two-way/conversational/transactional.

We think of the social net in terms of channels. Each of these platforms is a channel and each channel does some things better than others. And yes of course this will change and evolve over time as some of these channels begin (or continue) to overlap. But this is where we’re at right now.

I sat outside Coffee Shop in Union Square for lunch today. Who knew that, besides the two guys I was with? Nobody except maybe the two or three people I’m connected to on Whrrl, and only those because Whrrl is new to me so I’m playing with checkins still. I long ago grew weary of Foursquare and Gowalla, but that’s kind of beside the point: that’s not the right channel for letting people know you’re at Coffee Shop. At present, those apps are for earning badges. (Which is why I’ve grown bored.)

Here’s the thing. If I wanted you to know I was at Coffee Shop, it would almost certainly be the case that I also wanted to know whether you’d come along. So I’d have emailed you before I went and/or SMS’d you from there. So you could let me know. Right?

The real coolness here, I think, is this: if the app catches on – if they roll it out widely (as I mentioned it’s brand new and only working in Targets and a few west coast locations now) – Starbucks will be able to collect a lot of good info on where their customers are going without any cards or paper coupons.

It’s the check-in thing. If I scan a barcode on your iPhone, I know you were in the store. (If you check-in to the store on Foursquare, on the other hand, I can only assume you were probably in the store.) I wonder if they’ll close the loop: advertise deals through mobile social apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, and wire everything together so that when the customer checks out with his iPhone virtual debit card the app(s) can somehow accept that as a check-in. Automagic.

Or what about the other way around: Starbucks could also think about an API so that friends can buy friends a coffee on Facebook, electronically sending some credit to their friend’s iPhone. I’m sure they are already. Electronic coupons… you get the idea.

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