centreforelearning

Is location-based marketing a no-brainer now Foursquare has 10m users? Brian Solis certainly thinks so. In this piece, our favourite dapper guru investigates the data Foursquare released to celebrate reaching 10m users. A couple of choice quotes: “Services such as Foursquare bring the Yellow Pages alive”.

Google+ is already indexed and searched by Google, making marketing searches much easier than other platforms. Just drop “site:plus.google.com” before any search in Google, and you’ll see what people are saying about you inside the platform.

Don’t think “social network.” Think “communications backbone.” This tool allows for private collaboration (privacy is much easier to understand here, but it does require some learning), and permits a “one stop” kind of area for talking internally and externally without causing problems. And it works with email, not in lieu of email.

Google+ evolves from Gmail. No matter what the kiddies say, email is still the digital communications backbone of the modern world. SMS might feel like second place, but it’s a distant second. Google+ is very tied to Gmail, with hundreds of millions of users. It feels very natural as an extension in a way that Twitter and Facebook do not.

New study reveals the prime motivators behind why people follow brands If you’re still looking to justify your social media activity to the board, perhaps the following stat will help: 97% of people say that social media has influenced their decision to make a purchase of a brand or product. Pretty emphatic. And one of several very interesting findings from the team at get satisfaction. They’ve recently released a new infographic on why people follow brands. If part of your role is encouraging people to follow your brand, then it’s worth having a look.

To be fair, things are changing. By the end of the year, 75% of US-based companies expect to use social media for customer service. It’s a reaction to the changing game. Gone are the days when social media was all about marketing through Twitter and Facebook. It’s now an integral tool to ensure you are responsive not reactive, contactable not aloof and authentic not robotic. And increasingly, it’s about solving customer’s issues in real time through social channels, showing your dedication and transparency to your customers.

Thanks to search engines, most simple facts don’t need to be remembered. They can be accessed with a few keystrokes, plucked from ubiquitous server-stored external memory — and that may be changing how our own memories are maintained. A study of 46 college students found lower rates of recall on newly-learned facts when students thought those facts were saved on a computer for later recovery.

One small but intriguing effect in the new study involved students who were less able to identify subtly manipulated facts, such as a changed name or date, when drawing on memories they thought were saved online.

Time for BMT for you new generation iPad soldiers of tomorrow! Fall in at mrbrownshow.com!

The Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library provides an iPhone static library, a Mac OS X framework, and source code that make it easy to access data through Google Data APIs. To get started with Google data APIs and the Objective-C Client Library, look at the overview slides, read the introduction and study the example applications.