Yearly Archives: 2011

On the blog this week, Mike B. covered the big news about Foursquare’s new app and introduced us to Lolay. Jed shared some thoughts about the deal between Bing and The Dealmap to aggregate deals while AT&T announced its own group buying platform as did The NY Times. Jed also answered some questions about social media data from last week’s webinar and I previewed DemandForce’s new Facebook product.

And we shouldn’t pass up pointing to Charles’ post on the survey from Suffolk University that suggests the most overlooked element of small-business marketing is the uniform. The survey found 80% of general building contractors believe their uniform was more effective than Internet advertising. Really, no fooling.

Here’s what we uncovered this week out there in the socialsphere:

What the $%@! Did Your Agency Just Tweet?

Chrysler had to fire its social media agency for tweeting smack about Detroit. No bail out for that tweeter.

Citibank Goes Long on Social
Citibank’s CEO spent a fair amount of his company’s annual report talking about how it needs to embrace social media (and make money), not necessarily in that order of course.

SCVNGR Combines Groupon and Foursquare
LevelUp, a new service from SCVNGR, teaches marketers how to combine game dynamics, social media and location-based services to turn customers into regulars, according to Erica Naone. SCVNGR, financed in part by Google Ventures, makes location-based services a game.

I first came across DemandForce because it was popping up in Google Maps a couple of years ago. DemandForce was started in 2003 by Rick Berry and Sam Osman to help dentists and auto shops market themselves online. Today, with more than 7,000 clients across a variety of local service verticals, it is a fast-growing local SMB software service company located in the Bay Area. I caught up with Bonnie Wang, DF’s manager of professional services, at SMX West today to get an idea of DemandForce Connect For Facebook, its recently launched social media service.

DF has three apps that help customers generate more demand from Facebook. People can request an appointment via the SMB’s Facebook page with DF’s Easy Scheduler app. Once a customer makes an appointment, it shows up in the SMB’s DemandForce dashboard and will show the source of the lead. Currently more than 1,000 DF clients are using this app. According to Wang, those businesses that are active on Facebook are seeing the greatest use of the app by customers.

Speaking at the Credit Suisse Global Media & Communications Convergence Conference held in Miami, Florida, this week, Ted Cohen (Tag Strategic), Harry DeMott (Raptor Capital Management) and Eyal Goldwerger (TargetSpot) all agreed with Cohen's assertion that localization, personalization and recommendation…

Social media? Overrated. Search marketing? Yesterday's news. Yellow Pages? Seriously? The real small-business marketing silver bullet is, apparently, the uniform. Yes, we're talking blue-work-shirt-with-a- logo-and-a-name tag uniform. According to a recent survey, conducted at Suffolk University's Sawyer Business School, the…

On the blog this week, Mike B. noted that Google Hotpot had added new social features to Google Maps for Android, other platform to follow. Hotpot users can now tweet their GOOG Places ratings and reviews on Twitter, or ping…