The Spin Cycle, 5/13

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

The Yelpification of Foursquare: Foursquare just may become relevant again -- was it ever truly relevant? -- with its new Explore feature, which gives users personalized recommendations for restaurants and other venues. I've never used explore but I am a heavy user of Foursquare, though it reaps me few benefits. I've redeemed a handful of check-in specials, and we've used it effectively at work to hype events. Foursquare users who cross-post their check-ins to Facebook, Twitter, and, God forbid, LinkedIn probably do the service no favors by friends and followers who find these status updates annoying.

RIM's lame flashmob: The maker of the Blackberry tries to employ another fading relic of the digital age to get some attention and poke a stick at Apple: a flash mob, and a lousy one at that. Really, a flashmob? People are still doing those? It raises the question, what if someone attempts a PR stunt in the forest and no one notices except for PR bloggers? It's always so cute when someone updates their Facebook status with a Blackberry, like people who still use AOL email addresses.

Is Facebook 2012 the same as AOL 2001?: Speaking of the Internet graveyard, my friend and former colleague Dave Copeland wonders if the Facebook juggernaut is headed for the same kind of fall as America Online, which once stood astride the digital world like a colossus. Certainly Facebook can't take its success for granted. It's a service that millions use but, in my experience, few actually love. In that way, it's the Microsoft of social networking, another rather foreboding comparison. One key difference between AOL and Facebook is that while the former tried to offer users a unique way of experiencing the Internet and the web, those are open systems to which numerous competitors, regional and national, offered access. Facebook offers features that, as of now, haven't been replicated all in one place, and is closed to nonmembers. If you want to be part of Facebook, you have to be part of Facebook.

The Chronicle of Higher Education Stands By Its Woman, Until it Doesn't: Higher education's leading trade publication finds itself in a crisis-control mode after ditching a conservative blogger who take a broadside at black studies. I don't offer any comment as to whether the publication was in the right or in the wrong. That would pose a severe conflict of interest for me and my employer. I will say that it is always fascinating to see the tables turned on a news outlet, which is used to asking the questions, not answering them.

Checking you out when you check in

The New York Times recently explored the gap between businesses and consumers when it comes to the use of location-based social media services, which have been embraced by the former but largely ignored by the latter:

Data about a person’s physical location would be immensely valuable to marketers and retailers, say analysts. But sharing information about where you are can seem creepy or, worse, dangerous, as the Web site Please Rob Me showed earlier this year when it demonstrated how easy it would be for potential thieves to use social networks to find homes whose occupants were away.


Meanwhile, the upside of the transaction is unclear to many people, said Melissa Parrish, an analyst at Forrester Research. None of the efforts so far have reached the “sweet spot of coolness and utility” that will get people to share their data, she said. (link)

I have a few thoughts. Yes, the creepiness factor is one problem. I'm a fairly avid user of Foursquare, but I don't often link my activity there to Facebook and Twitter, because I don't necessarily want to share my location, particularly when I'm out with my family, with the whole world. Recently I vacationed at Disney World, where I checked in a few times. I soon had friend requests on Foursquare from total strangers. That's fine on Twitter, where I share little personal information and don't often use the location feature. On Foursquare it is off-putting.

Also, as the article notes, there doesn't appear to yet be enough value to checking in on Foursquare and its rivals. I actually think too few businesses are making use of Foursquare to offer specials and reward customer loyalty. Often, I only check in to see if such benefits are available, and the fewer I find, the less likely I become to make regular use of the service.

Finally, I think social media burnout may be at play. There's only so much time in the day to fiddle around with social media, even if it is to briefly check in somewhere with your mobile device. How many services can people keep up with? That may be where Facebook Places has an advantage over stand-alone services, since legions of people and organizations already use Facebook. (Though privacy concerns give people pause here.) To entice customers tired of keeping track of their profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., business and social media services are going to have to offer a real return on users' time -- besides the thrill of being mayor of the mall.*


*All that said, we are active on Foursquare at Robert Morris University, where I work, but alas we are ahead of our students at this point.

Odds and ends and Arcade Fire

Mashable looks at the next check-in craze, and as a follow-up to yesterday's Johnson & Johnson post, here's a breakdown of the company's response to the Tylenol scare of the 1980s.

Finally, my friend Dave Copeland, teaching a college PR class in the fall, sends along this nugget about Arcade Fire that deserves a closer look. Seems some of the band's hard-core fans are irked over Arcade Fire's aggressive marketing tactics and sudden commercial success. Frankly, I've never understand why some people don't want the artists they love to succeed. All that matters is the integrity of the product, and the band seems to have taken care of that, at least for now, by owning their own music.

Besides, it seems to me that it's never been easier to stick to your roots and still enjoy a measure of commercial success as a recording artist. Call it the long-tail effect if you want, but it has less to do with the Internet's on-demand inventory than with the democratization of marketing. Relatively few people know how to go about purchasing commercial time on television, or how to effectively target a press release distribution, or how to put on a press junket. But a lot more people know how to put together a good Facebook page, or use Twitter to drive you to their web site, or create a clever YouTube video that ends up in one of those annoying email forwards from your dad.

On the other hand, having Amazon sell your CD for $3.99 can't hurt.

Burn baby burn

Jet Blue finally made a statement about its take-this-job-and-shove-it flight attendant. I haven't been paying as much attention to this story as everyone else in the universe, so honestly I hadn't noticed that the airline had been silent. But come on guys, this is PR 101. I once attended a presentation on crisis communications by an FBI spokesman. A news story is like a fire, he said, and information is its oxygen. If you feed it carefully, you can keep it under control and make sure it does you no harm. But if you do nothing, and someone else adds fuel to the fire, who knows what it will burn down.

In matters unrelated to flight attendants who escape out the emergency exit with brews in hand, here's an interesting look at how UNC Charlotte is making good use of Foursquare.