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Many public relations professionals who investigate Foursquare often struggle to grasp the usefulness of it or geolocation gaming in general. I would argue, however, that for any leisure, tourism or travel sector business, games like Foursquare can form a major part of their public relations campaign.

Geolocation gaming, where users ‘check in’ to locations and are “rewarded” with points and badges, is seen by many as pointless, or even an invasion of privacy. Others find automated Tweets and Facebook updates of check-ins annoying and tedious. Some voices just don’t get why geolocation gaming falls under the remit of public relations at all – isn’t Foursquare a sales promotion or marketing tool?

Of course there are grounds to this criticism, but my response is to remind dissenting voices that perhaps they don’t understand Foursquare because they are not its target demographic. In short, critics don’t get Foursquare because they are just too old to see why it is fun. Without this understanding, how can a public relations professional see why Foursquare is relevant to their profession?

The kids (and some big kids) like to play Foursquare and other geolocation games like Gowalla and Yelp. They want to see which of their friends is the biggest socialite. They find the tips their friends leave at locations useful and it helps them discover new things about towns and cities. They don’t care about privacy (and, yes, they HAVE read Orwell’s 1984). In fact, making public their every move is no big deal.

Geolocation gaming is not to everyone’s taste, but cold hard facts don’t lie. Check out the incredible rise of Foursquare in terms of the sheer volume of unique users: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallofhair/4232092914/ . This is predicted to continue rising exponentially.

So why is this relevant to PR? Well, public relations professionals can use Foursquare in many different ways. Here are three examples.
- Many bars in the US offer free food or drink to the person who has checked in the most to their venue. Incentives can be given to the mayor of any venue. Imagine a fun version of Tesco Club Card and you might be getting close to what Foursquare can offer business
- From a reputational point of view, restaurants, bars, gyms and pretty much any organisation with a physical location needs to keep an eye on Foursquare and find out what others are saying about their company. If tips on the site are negative then this reputational issue needs to be addressed. Likewise the leaving of positive comments can be encouraged, like a virtual guestbook in a hotel or restaurant. Foursquare can provide third party endorsement
- The leisure, travel and tourism industries can use Gowalla in a slightly in a slightly different way. This platform has “trips” which users can take. I could for example, take the London Pub Crawl or the Frank Lloyd Wright Tour. Any organisation in the travel sector can upload a trip, giving them the opportunity to promote their resort.

Further reading
- Foursquare was created by Dennis Crowley. I’ve corresponded with him over email. He’s a nice guy.
- There is some more interesting information on Foursquare in this presentation. Not all the slides are relevant, but have a look if you are interested:

- Foursquare has just signed this interesting deal as detailed in the Daily Telegraph: l
- Facebook is predicted to acquire Foursquare or one of the other geolocation games. Or bring out its own. Geolocation gaming is not going away
- Here are some interesting tips for Foursquare virgins
- This New York Times provides some interesting background on Foursquare:
- Foursquare is going to appeal more and more to young hipsters who enjoy celebrities, music and other frivolity. Just look at this deal with major US entertainment companies:
- This blog adds some more meat to the pro-Foursquare bone
- Programmers have created applications using Foursquare such as this one

Every so often, something occurs which shows why social media has to be integrated with other areas of PR expertise, such as reputation management.

Issues with errant tweeting, as experienced by Vodafone on Friday afternoon, illustrate why so many larger organisations are still as skittish around social media as a Chelsea player taking his wife to a John Terry pool party.

Vodafone typically uses its Twitter account to dispense technical advice and deal with customer service queries so its followers were probably aware that the overly informative Tweet about homosexuals and a desire for ‘large semi-aquatic rodents’ was unlikely to be official corporate policy.

The company responded quickly and admirably, replying to almost every ReTweet of the original message with a personal response explaining: “We weren’t hacked. A severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally. We’re very sorry.”

Simple, honest, apologetic and, most crucially, indicates that Vodafone has a social media policy. It was breached, the same way that email policies can be breached or employees can ignore that rule about not punching colleagues in the face.

The company’s actions simply indicated: ‘No social media crisis here. Move along.’

‘Homeworking’ just hit a bit of a benchmark throughout the region.

Britain doesn’t do extreme weather very well and, unless you really like risk, using a car wasn’t a great choice in the worst snow the North West has seen for decades. First thing this morning, public transport websites were crashing faster than a philandering golfer.

Like many Manchester PR agencies, Citypress employs a number of people who live in the city centre. Without the need to consult confusing fake social media sites for travel information, the biggest barrier to those commuting on foot was trying to avoid dozens of people shuffling through the slippery conditions, looking at their feet while shouting ‘Yeah, it’s really snowing!’ into a ‘phone.

In the suburbs it’s safe to say that the email subject line ‘working from home’ was quite popular. A high percentage of employees in the region put the kettle on and took their technological connectivity for granted, answering emails with one thumb while stirring their tea.

At the beginning of the last decade, not being at your desk meant more disruption. Putting in calls to clients, ‘getting stuff in your book’ and writing press releases – on a PC if you were one of the 30 per cent of households sporting a home computer 10 years ago (compared to almost 80 per cent at the end of the ‘noughties’).*

You would even have been able to email your work to the office via dial-up if you were among the 10 per cent of early adopters who had an internet connection. Even then, sending anything larger than a web document took hours, a stark contrast to this morning when everyone on Twitter had posted a picture of their road/car/balcony/driveway by 8am.

None of these things are a modern concern for the snowed in PR person. ‘Working from home’ is such a seamless transition that we barely think about what impact, if any, it will have on our ability to do our jobs or for clients to contact us. Direct telephone lines re-routed, smartphones in hand, you don’t really even need a desk.

Of course this is all totally relevant if you work for a PR agency in Manchester and absolutely no use at all if you’re a bus driver.

*Office for National Statistics

‘Tis the season to be jolly. Has been for a while if you count how many times you’ve heard Slade since October.

So let’s mock the world of social media similes, but in a festive way.

We can call it ‘Jingle Bell Jargon’.

There’s nothing wrong with a good simile, plenty of people use them very effectively in tweets, blogs, presentations and meetings. It’s just that the world of social media does seem to spawn some hilarious ones. You’ll have seen them promoted by people with 45,000 Twitter followers and user names such as @SocialMediaGuruSEOPRspecialist.

“Social media is like a slot machine” is a new favourite – unearthed when trawling Google recently. But, this isn’t going to be a list of the funniest similes already in existence, that’s way too subjective.

Instead, via the mini-crowdsourcing mechanic of texting a few Manchester PR colleagues, here is the Citypress Top 10 Totally Made Up Christmas Social Media Similes 2010:

1. Social media is like Santa’s sack. You have to be good to get the best presence (see what we did there?)

2. Twitter is like a massive turkey waiting to be carved. If you serve up too much on one plate, no-one will be interested when you offer any more.

3. A Facebook friend is like an eager child, waiting to check the tags on all the presents under its tree of followers.

4. YouTube is like an advent calendar. Every day you open a new moving window of fresh knowledge.

5. Bringing social media knowledge to the meeting table is like being the Wise Man who carried the myrrh. No-one quite knows what it is but it’s the talk of the stable.

6. Managing a good LinkedIn profile is like carol singing. Hit all the right notes and people will open the door to you.

7. Talking about social media is like hanging decorations – you have to get the right balance or your tree will fall over.

8. Twitter is like Quality Street – not everyone likes every tweet in the tin.

9. Google is like Father Christmas. It knows what you want and whether you’ve been bad or good.

10. Getting social media wrong is like smashing a snow globe. All the parts are there but you’ve ruined its charm.

Are you groaning yet? I hope so. The alternative is nodding sagely and cutting and pasting one of those into a presentation or Twitter update.

If you feel the need to add your own please use the hashtag #jinglebelljargon.

Season’s Greetings.

I smell a digital media conspiracy.

And it goes a little something like this.

Buoyed by the web hits created by Sachsgate in 2008, shadowy online content czars representing each of the UK’s main media outlets meet somewhere secret.

On their agenda is just one topic, to discuss how such snowballing scandals can replace the outmoded fallbacks of Princess Diana and Big Brother, which have served their printed front pages so well.

They hatch a plan. It involves a new breed of media consumer they call the Twitterati – crucial for fuelling the scandal – and an idea stolen from America, where partisan commentators such as Glenn Beck have given up on reporting news and decided to become the story, realising that this is quicker than waiting for the next celeb to stumble into their fake outrage trap.

Silently, the Daily Mail’s czar summons Jan Moir.
Despite being a meeting of digital minds there is a low-tech National Lottery draw feel to proceedings and Jan plucks a ball from the modified bingo machine.

It reads ‘Gay Scandal’.

She nods gravely and steps down to make way for The Times’ AA Gill. His face breaks into a grin as he sees ‘Dead Baboon Scandal’ on his.

Next up is The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker. He triumphantly holds up his choice in the light like a Hobbit with a quest. It states ‘Jan Moir Scandal’.

And so it begins.

The digital age of scandal after media scandal.

One columnist implements it, a hashtag is born, another columnist covers it. A bazillion page impressions for everyone later we move on.

To Richard Littlejohn.

Sat in his car outside a pet shop with a lottery ball which simply instructs: ‘Punch a kitten’.

You may be familiar with the concept of the ‘so bad it’s good’ movie.

I don’t want to cast aspersions on what, for many, may be favourite films, but Keanu Reeves and the late Patrick Swayze are two of the genre’s key actors, making Point Break the benchmark film. This is fact.

But I’m not sure it works as a marketing ploy, even when the explosion in sharing digital content allows both good and bad campaigns to make an impact.

Whereas many truly awful campaigns once died on the daytime TV circuit, today’s worst examples are emailed, Tweeted or have Facebook groups dedicated to mocking them.

One recent example is so bad that it’s tempting to dismiss it as a spoof. Unfortunately it’s not. The Windows 7 ‘launch parties’ video on YouTube is over six minutes of marketing so knuckle-bitingly cringeworthy that I challenge you to get to the end.

The official version has had nearly one million views but adding comments has wisely been disabled. Remarks below this unofficial version reveal why.

While Apple continues to redefine cool with its products and marketing, Microsoft has chosen to promote one of its core launches with a cheap looking campaign seemingly devised by a team of Apprentice hopefuls. I can hear Alan Sugar now.

As a contrast, look what this group of French Canadian students produced to promote their university in Montreal. Cheap, effective, over a million views.

It isn’t even an original idea. Just a good one, well executed.

Apps are a hot topic for marketers, fuelled by the growth of the iPhone and Apple’s classically smug – and now banned – app-led advertising campaign.

As a result there is much debate about the worth of apps to brands and whether they should aim to entertain or actually provide some lasting value.

There’s now sufficient marketing budget being directed at apps to fund the emergence of specialist agencies (one US specialist grandly promises to help brands focus “on contextually-relevant targeted media and integrated sponsorship programs that encourage consumer engagement with brands” Mmm!)

However, beneath the hype there’s a genuine opportunity for brands. In a rapidly developing digital culture, apps that offer genuine value (whether that’s a useful tool or a short-lived prank for the office joker) are finding their way into people’s pockets.

With this much-prized goal up for grabs the battle of branded apps is likely to be fiercely contested. All it takes is the right idea.