MTV’s public health campaign encourages young people to get routinely checked for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The Associated Press reports, “MTV says the idea is to remove the stigma attached to getting checked out for STDs.”
While this is a nice idea in theory and I applaud MTV for fully integrating mobile into their campaign outreach, I think most people, no matter how much they typically share via Foursquare, are unlikely to publicly broadcast their appointment for STD screenings.
This Foursquare partnership would be more successful if it was linked to MTV’s political campaign, “Rock the Vote” which encourages young people to register to vote and make their voices heard. If they offered a badge for checking in to a voting location, I think the response would be tremendous.
What do you think? Can MTV leverage Foursquare for such a person declaration?
This week Facebook announced the launch of a new feature – Facebook Places. Much like the mobile application Foursquare, Facebook Places will let you “check in” to your current location via Facebook on your smart phone. It will display your location updates to all of your Facebook friends.
You may find yourself asking – doesn’t this same application already exist with Foursquare, Gowalla and others? Why yes, yes it does. However, the Facebook Places application is also going to allow your friends to check you in to places, whether you like it or not.
Of course you can alter your Facebook privacy settings to disable the ability for other users to check you in, but the Facebook default settings will indeed allow your friends to check you in.
Facebook Places does allow businesses to “claim” their venue and provide updates to users who check in via the application (exactly like Foursquare).
While it may seem Facebook is simply duplicating an application that already exists by another provider, what the real concern is here is how Facebook is increasingly making moves to become a one-stop-shop for online and mobile activities.
For example, more people upload photos to Facebook than competing photos services like Kodak Gallery, Snapfish or Shutterfly. Facebook also has the Marketplace application which aims to compete with Craigslist. Businesses now consider their Facebook fan page as vital, if not more, than their company website. The addition of Facebook Places is another intentional move to gobble up competing online players.
Can Facebook extinguish enough competitors to ultimately become the singular destination for online and mobile sharing? What do you think?
If you’re a foodie, you have a login for restaurant reservation website OpenTable. If you’re gadget savvy, you may also have their mobile app on your smartphone. The popular reservation service has seen great success thus far in 2010, confirmed by their recently quarterly earnings announcement.
In a post by Erick Schonfeld of TechCruch, he reports “OpenTable is installed in 14,128 restaurants and seated 15.6 million diners last quarter, up 27 percent and 52 percent, respectively.” Not only is OpenTable becoming the go-to source for reservations, but users are also raising their level of engagement with the site.
Schonfeld wrote, “Those diners have now written more than 7 million restaurant reviews. As a point of comparison, Yelp has a total of 12 million reviews across all local businesses, and CEO Jeremy Stoppleman considers the those reviews to be Yelp’s single most important competitive advantage.”
Digest that for a second. Yelp, which reviews all types of businesses, not just restaurants, has 12 million reviews, and OpenTable, which exclusively provides restaurant information has 7 million?
OpenTable clearly understands the value of creating a site users want to spend time on, not just log in and log out. By allowing customers to write reviews of their dining experiences the site becomes about something more than just reserving your table.
Additionally, OpenTable is hopping on the “group buying” bandwagon and offering a new weekly special they are calling “Spotlight.” This will operate the same way Groupon, LivingSocial and BuyWithMe do, and offer specials like “$25 dollars for $50 dollars worth of food at Grill 23.”
As RaceTalk commented in a post last week, the group buying concept entices customers to try places they normally wouldn’t because they are being offered a discounted price (recession, anyone?). Additionally, the sites incorporate social media channels allowing users to post their purchase on Facebook, Twitter and more. Some sites also offer referral bonuses to customers who bring in new users.
Should OpenTable decide to incorporate social media sharing on their site and explore referral bonuses, the company’s growth potential is exponential. OpenTable is paying attention to emerging trends and adapting quickly.
Social Media Michelin awards OpenTable three stars!
RaceTalk posted on Tuesday about the Apple/Gizmodo conflict involving a break in at the home of Gizmodo editor Brian Chen to recover an iPhone prototype. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show’s take on the situation (which aired last night) is a hilarious, sound bite filled segment titled “Appholes.”
Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune’s BrainstormTech blog wrote in a post today that his favorite Stewart rant was, “Apple, you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming The Man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man!”
RaceTalk’s favorite segment gem asks, “The cops had to bash in the guy’s door? Don’t they know there’s an app for that?”
Enjoy Stewart’s plea to Apple to return to innovation, and step away from the home invasions.
Mercedes Bunz of The Guardian had an interesting piece last week on how media companies and newspapers are evolving into technology companies. It opened with a poignant quote from New York Times executive editor Bill Keller (even if you don’t necessarily believe it).
“The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company.”
While we might expect this sentiment from other forward-looking media outlets, the idea that the Times values technology as much as quality journalism is telling. Of course they’re hardly alone. Every traditional media company is examining the technology opportunities that lie in front of them. Bunz’s piece also looks at the success that CNN had with driving engagement and crowd-sourcing through its iPhone application and specifically its iReport button. Wired magazine drew praise at SXSW for its technological interpretation of a digital magazine on the forthcoming iPad. Everywhere you look there seems to be another media company testing a new technology.
While the “media meltdown” hasn’t directly affected public relations and communications agencies quite like it has media companies, the same focus on technology is pressing for the industry. After all, communications, and marketing as a whole, are tied at the hip to the future of the media industry. Just as technology is becoming more and more an integral part of doing good journalism, technology is becoming more and more an integral part of doing good PR. I’m not just talking about run-of-the-mill uses of existing and mainstream social platforms, such as: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. I’m talking about re-envisioning how to reach media and more importantly consumers in the digital age. Much in the way the New York Times has to think about the problem.
These are not only the tools and services that agencies should be looking at from vendors, but the technology that they should be investing in to create on their own.
The agencies and practitioners that will be around for the next technology bubble will be those who can honestly say like Keller (without PR spin), “we’re as much a technology company as we are a communications agency.”
Some waking from a coma this week might think the Apple Tablet is able to find the cure to cancer or create world peace due to all of the attention that it’s getting. There are articles popping up left and right telling us all about this new tablet, even though we still don’t have real confirmation that it exists. It’s overshadowing everything, including President Obama’s speech tomorrow – which seems to be a lot more important then Apple’s rumored new device. Has a gadget ever received so much attention before it was launched or confirmed?
Sure, the Apple Tablet sounds cool – I admit, it should be good for newspapers and magazines if it can provide them with a decent revenue model, but it’s not like people are going to need to purchase this product – it’s very much a luxury. First, it will likely be very expensive, just like all of Apple’s products. This means then a very small percentage of the population will actually purchase one. Second, is a tablet the right product for right now? People have been purchasing smaller mobile devices (smart phones), not larger ones. Since the Tablet won’t fit in your pocket, it simply replaces a laptop, or becomes another gadget for the living room.
I understand that people follow Apple’s every move, but this time it seems a bit overdone (how funny would it be if tomorrow’s announcement is about a completely different topic!) Can we please see the Tablet for what it really is: another device Apple wants us to purchase and add to our collection of gadgets so that we can post tweets and brag about which gadgets we have and how cool they are.
I’m not against the Tablet (although the constant talk is getting pretty old at this point), I’m just questioning how it can possible live up to the hype. If it was some other lesser known company that was developing it, there would be a lot of questions brought up instead of people drooling over the chance to see some photo-shopped picture of the device.
So let’s take a step back and see what the Tablet is all about before we credit it with changing the world.
Disclosure: Racepoint Group works with Sony’s eReader division.
Last week, only a few days before Apple declared record sales for its iPhone, The White House entered the fray of iPhone applications. The administration’s iPhone app “puts the latest information from the White House in the palm of your hands,” according to its pitchman – White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
In addition to listing out the applications functions, such as: accessing exclusive photos, videos and Webcasts; Gibbs takes the opportunity to take a lighthearted shot at the White House press corps.
“In fact, if you want to see me set the White House press corps straight every day, live, now there’s an app for that,” Gibbs coyly delivers before walking into a daily press briefing.
This morning the Associated Press reported that MTV has partnered with Foursquare to offer a special badge to users who check in to health clinics via the mobile application. The new Foursquare badge is part of MTV’s “GYT: Get Yourself Tested” campaign.
