Vancouver Internet Marketing Social Media Marketing Consultant Canada

Geomium offers four main sections and information can be viewed on a map or as a feed: People (all friends near your current location), Places (all the nearby bars and restaurants), Events (all nearby plays, festivals, concerts and parties, which can be filtered by type and date) and Deals (all the local deal, discounts and offers from nearby bars and restaurants).

So, for example, you might spot that their is an event in your locality that your friends are already at or attending. Afterward you want to find somewhere to eat/drink and see that there is a special offer at one particular establishment. That’s the idea anyway.

Geomium is a new location based social network application launching in UK now, then Europe, then USA later. Canada? Maybe to follow.

Does it feel too late to be coming on the scene with another "check in" application? Almost. Pretty hard to follow Facebook Places given their huge userbase. The unique Yelp, Qype, Eventful dataset and the People, Events and Deals integration features of Geomium had better be amazing and extremely easy to use if it's to expect to carve out any market share before its competitors such as Facebook Places, Foursquare and Gowalla copy geomium's unique features. It's a (decreasingly) big world, so maybe there's a little piece of the pie left to grab in Europe? More competition is a good thing.

How can anyone commit to one location-based platform during these wild-west days of social network geolocation shootouts on main street. There goes a tumblr tumbleweed going rolling by. Is your iPhone/Android smartphone's main screen filled at least getting full of all of the different location-based apps like mine? Just wait til your boss gets a whitelabel location based app for your company (E.G DoubleDutch), and then the local grocery store gets one, then the local mall. Soon with location-based apps auto-sensing where you're at (if you let them) there won't be a place too small or too remote that you can't check in to.

Location-based services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, are proving quite popular with consumers open to sharing their locations with the world. They’re also built to be inherently business-friendly, as most allow retailers to incentivize checkins and social sharing behaviors in the hopes of attracting swarms of patrons to their businesses.

As the space continues to evolve, new platforms, technologies and services are emerging with the specific intention of helping small businesses reward their loyal patrons with deals for their in-store behaviors.

Summary of location-based social media marketing services available for businesses looking to take advantage of mobile location-based marketing, checkins, barcode scanning & group buying:

1. Verified Checkin Rewards - SCVNGR 

2. Social Barcodes - Bakodo.com iPhone app can scan most barcodes. Stickybits.com and Shopkick.com integrate social experience w/ barcode scanning

3. Group Deals - Groupon.com LivingSocial.com , OpenTable, Yelp.com , Zagat.com all offer group deal services to businesses. GroupTabs.com
combines group buying with checkins.

4. Challenge-Based Rewards - SCVNGR, Foursquare, Gowalla offer challenge based rewards allowing businesses to decide what rewards to offer and reward criteria.

5. OPt-in Deals - Bizzy.com is a go-between for businesses and local consumers -- it allows businesses to upload deals and consumers to create a list of businesses they want to hear from.

Most of the attention paid to Facebook Places, the new location feature that the social network launched on Thursday, has focused either on the privacy implications of the service or on the impact it could have on location-based startups such as Foursquare (which some have said they expect to be "crushed" by the new feature). Facebook's real focus with this launch, however, isn't individual users or even Foursquare: Instead, it sees Places as a way into the local business and local advertising markets, and the company with the target painted on its back is Yelp.

Google Places, Facebook Places, Foursquare Location Layers & Mayors. Having trouble keeping up? Will Yelp have to partner with Gowalla or another smaller check-in startup to stay ahead of the million-business-pages-strong Facebook checkin tsunami? What is your business doing to get listed in all of the social network places? Why should you even consider spending your valuable time or marketing dollars on something like this Facebook Places or Yelp or Foursquare advertising or promotion? Drop me a note at brent[at]stirgroup.com and I'd be happy to answer your questions or setp a time for a free phone consultation to discuss your business and whether getting on the Facebook / Yelp / Foursquare / Gowalla check-in marketing train is right for your business, products or services.

I wonder if the next generation of fridges will have a touch screen on the outside of the door that allow you to "Like" (a la Facebook) products presently existing in your kitchen (aided by rfid in each product package). Perhaps I could quickly rate or review any product as well either via webcam in the screen, just audio, or by typing a quick message on the touchscreen - and perhaps I'd be motivated to provide feedback by the companies that make the products by earning points for each review which can be redeemed for other products. Actually, there'll probabaly be an iPhone app that comes out sometime soon that, using a new rfid reader, would allow you to rate any product in your entire home -- perhaps Yelp will strive to carve out more market share and leave the Foursquare-Gowalla-Facebook-Twitter crowd in the dust by integrating this kind of product "check in / review" feature. Where does stickybits fit into all of this? Maybe that concept will simply be replaced by my iphone's camera being able to take a picture of any product and then recognize it (as we are already seeing happen with book covers, CD covers etc. Why not recognize every human as well and check in to them and rate them? Maybe being Mayor or Duke of a location (or person? new meaning to "I own you") won't be as easy as checking in every time you walk or drive by your favorite coffee shop. Perhaps it will (or should) also be be based on one's social score. You gotta be liked by others who have also checked into a location in order to rank high in that place. SERPS are for websites that rank high. What would my
my human media HRP or HERP SRP or SHERP (Human Ranking Position or Human Engine Ranking Position or Social Ranking Position or Social Human Ranking Position) be Starbucks in this scenario? Give me a dollar off my Frappucino, baristaman, everyone here likes them and me and thinks I deserve one.

A few weeks ago, we announced some pretty jaw-dropping numbers:

- Just over 1 in 4 searches on Yelp are performed from our popular iPhone application.

- Even more thrilling: every five seconds someone uses the Yelp app to call a local business.

And that's just from our iPhone application!

Yelp for small business. Check it out. If your business isn't listed in Yelp it's time to sign up for a business listing. Need help? Drop me a note at brent[at]stirgroup.com

Starting tonight, local businesses that have created free accounts and claimed their listings on Yelp will receive additional analytics specific to mobile user traffic: the number of times they've shown up in mobile search, the number of times mobile users have clicked to call them by telephone and the number of times users have clicked for directions to their business.

Yelp says that 2 million unique users searched on a mobile Yelp app last month, performing 27% of the total searches the company saw. The entire Foursquare network claims 1.8 million users. Yelp said this Spring that it sees 31 million unique visitors to its website every month.

Did you know Yelp was for more than just restaurants? 15 times bigger than Foursquare. Wow. Check it out today at http://www.yelp.ca in Canada or http://www.Yelp.com for USA or Yelp.co.uk for UK, and about 38 other domains Yelp! Inc. owns. Of course there's always the http://www.yelpsucks.com domain which Yelp was smart enough to purchase themselves -- for use, I suppose, if they start thinking their own service isn't that great. Which do you prefer? Foursquare or Yelp? Would you use a mobile device that allowed you to check in and submit reviews to both Foursquare and Yelp at the same time?

Vancouver, BC

(604) 847-3447

www.StirSolutions.com

Interested in reviewing Stir Communications Group Vancouver on Yelp? Here's your chance to submit the first review of http://www.StirSolutions new website and services

Well, Yelp (CrunchBase info on Yelp) has now copied the checkin gesture that Foursquare (Crunchbase info on Foursquare) introduced to us all and also they added badges of their own. I already am the baron of my favorite Mexican restaurant in Half Moon Bay.

This copying behavior demonstrates to me that Yelp is definitely jealous of the attention Foursquare is getting and isn’t able to innovate on its own.

This seems to be a problem for Foursquare. But is it really?

Yes.

Here’s why.

FourWhere helps you to find comments, tips for venues left by Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp users. FourWhere automatically retrieves and aggregates user comments and visualizes them on the map. To use FourWhere, provide your location, and then click on the map to see venues (locations) or tips (comments written about a particular place).

FourWhere is public service so there's no need to register or sign in. All you need is your web browser. Go ahead, start discovering the world around you.

FourWhere is built by Sysomos using the public data from Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and the Google Maps API.

Got your basic all in one geo location gizmo we've all longed for. Foursquare, Yelp & Gowalla

Advertising has been a killer Internet business model, making billions of dollars for Google and others. But a number of startup companies think there's a huge untapped market in providing automatically tailored display advertising to thousands of local businesses.

Ad slot: PlaceLocal automatically generates ads for local businesses by crawling the Web. Credit: PaperG

Yelp, which aggregates customer reviews of local businesses, has tried to provide targeted local advertising with varied success. Now a new crop of startups are hatching plans to provide more effective advertising services to local businesses. The aim is to ease small businesses into online advertising through familiar channels such as newspaper sites, and to help these locally focused websites increase revenues by making it easier for them to service small accounts.