Are Facebook, Twitter and Flickr starting to look a bit old hat to you? Wishing you could do something a bit newer and groovier with your online presence? Then it could be time to look at Foursquare.

If this geo-location craze had thus far passed you by, think yourself lucky: for many of us, it’s registered only as an annoying way for our mates – before they work out how to control their accounts, in any case – to clog up our twitterstreams with inane pronouncements like “I just became the mayor of Burger King”.

Yes, at first glance, it’s little more than a game, where users ‘check in’ wherever they may go, and gain points or badges for doing so. However, there is more to it than that – and even some marketing potential. Take a look, for example, at the search results on Foursquare for our local area, Notting Hill, and you’ll see what we mean.

Each of the entries on that list represent a place that a Foursquare user has seen fit to register: straight away, one can see its usefulness for people new to the area, looking for cafes or pubs or any one of the many local businesses in the locale.

Now take a look at an individual listing for a local coffee shop: remember, this is not created by the shop itself, but by its customers. You can see that it has been ‘tagged’ with descriptive words like ‘bakery’: clicking on these will bring up other listings in the same category near the user’s location.

Equally important is the ‘tips’ section: purportedly for users to leave advice for others, this has become, for many businesses, a kind of review space. Again, as the owner of the business, you have no control over this: the age of user-generated content is truly upon us.

There is one area where you can have control, though, and really leverage Foursquare to your own advantage. Click on ‘are you the manager of this business?’, register, and you’ll be able to place special offers right there on the page. You can be as imaginative as you like: free services for anyone who mutters the secret password perhaps, or one big reward for each succeeding ‘mayor’?

It may be a short-lived craze, or it may evolve into something more complex, but for now, Foursquare is definitely a low-cost way to reach the early- and mid-cycle adopters. And since their money is as good as anyone’s, we’d advise you to go for it.

It was over a year ago that we first heard about Facebook, the movie, and now, at last… a trailer. Not that it, nor the accompanying official website is letting much slip, yet.

Those who sit through the trailer will be treated to some corkers of lines, including:

“The site got 22 hundred hits within two hours?”
“Thousand – 22 thousand“.

Which made me laugh, because – and forgive me for saying this – such statements might go down as high drama in our own office, but they do seem a little lame as the selling point for a blockbuster film.

Naturally, the dialogue is accompanied by the usual soundtrack of frantic fingers on a rattling keyboard, possibly from the same sound effects disc once utilised by Tron, War Games and You’ve Got Mail.

We’ll certainly reserve judgment until release, and we’ll happily risk wasting a couple of hours at the cinema – after all, we’ve already frittered away half our lives on the real Facebook – but it’s hard to deny that almost all films centred around computers, let alone websites, have to provide an awful lot of dramatic tension to make up for the lack of stunning visuals. If director Fincher is wise, and we’re sure he is, he will of course focus on the people behind the platform.

Come to think of it, there’s a lesson for us all there. Yes, Facebook is a remarkable phenomenon; yes, it’s ripe for your marketing initiatives. But it is the people on there, forging and strengthening real-life friendships, marriages, events and all the other dramas of real life, that create Facebook – and it is those real people that we need to market to.

Oh, and don’t forget the immortal truth provided by the film’s strapline:

You don’t get to 55 million friends without making a few enemies.

Many thanks to the Wall for pointing us towards Eloqua’s Social Media Playbook [PDF] – “playbook”, we assume, because while a workbook entails effort, everything to do with web 2.0 is, of course, fun fun fun!

Eloqua is a big-bucks customer engagement software company, and apparently this booklet was first produced for circulation amongst its own staff. In a fit of generosity, they’ve decided to share, and it’s certainly worth a read.

Most readers of our blog will be familiar with the basics of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These are all covered, but the guide goes more in-depth, too. Give it a read and we’re sure you’ll learn at least one new thing.

We all know the benefits of having a presence on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and so on, but the fact is that any interaction you have on there may not be seen by visitors to your main website.

We’ve been looking at a neat piece of code that you can add to your own site and encourage interaction on the spot: it’s called Echo.

Whether you’d like to encourage feedback or ratings on your products, or simply aggregate questions and answers, this auto-refresh software gives your users their own space. Neatly, it integrates with a number of social networks, so you don’t lose the viral benefits of those platforms.

To us, it looks like an easy way to key in to all the advantages of having peer reviews and ratings on your site, with the minimum of development. We’d be happy to help you add it to your own site if you require – or talk about other options if this one doesn’t seem quite right.

Fancy fifteen minutes of power? Then you may want to send David Perez a tweet this week. This hapless Advertising Recruiter is promising to do everything – provided it’s legal – that his Twitter followers suggest, for a week. What’s more, he’ll be wearing webcam enabled glasses so you can follow his escapades.

Hmm. We’d be the first to say that our lives were sometimes ruled by social media: we can’t resist dipping in to see what people are up to, perhaps that little bit too frequently. And there’s no doubt it can act as a hive mind, helping influence our decisions on everything from where to eat, to the best holiday destinations – but we think that Perez may be going just a little too far. Will he really do everything he’s told to, by bored office workers looking for a cheap laugh? We suspect he’ll fall at an early hurdle. Naturally, we’ll enjoy watching him do so.

You may have heard of Macmillan Cancer Support’s magnificent annual fund raising campaign called the World’s Biggest Coffee Morning.  People are encouraged to hold coffee mornings at work, school, in their own homes, etc., to raise money for the Charity.  Last year 43,000 people registered their coffee mornings and a total of £7.9million was raised.

We held our coffee morning in the communal area of our office building, inviting not only everyone that worked in the building but also members of the public, via the Macmillan website.  Everyone enjoyed a good chat, delicious pastries, freshly brewed coffee (our MD makes an excellent Macchiato), a choice of teas (including fruit and herbal) plus fresh juices.  It was fun but we want to do even better this year in the money raising stakes.

This year’s national event will be held on Friday 24th September and we want to get the word out as soon as possible.

We will keep you updated and will provide a form for you to register your interest in attending. However, for now, please put the date in your diary!

From today, Google offers users the option to see properties for sale and rent as an overlay to UK maps.

This free service is clearly of great benefit to the many small businesses who operate as estate agents or letting companies: Google says “We are completely open to working with any company”. A link will be provided back to the property website at no charge.

It’s good news for Google’s users, too: surely anyone in the market for a new house these days consults Google Maps, Streetview and the satellite view to fully case out a property and its location before making a visit.

See the new overlay by going to Google Maps and selecting the ‘more’ drop-down beside the search box.

Following my own advice on this very blog, I was updating a company’s presence on Google Places today (previously Google Business Centre; basically, the interface that you update if you want your business to appear on Google Maps).

The company in question is a language school which offers exam courses, including a well-known (in the TEFL world) product known as IELTS. As this is a unique selling point of the school, of course I wanted to mention it.

Well, it turns out Google wasn’t having it. “Excessive capitalisation is not allowed”, it told me, in a strident error message, clearly mistaking the well-known acronym IELTS for a SHOUTY MESSAGE IN CAPITALS. Well, I’m as opposed to poor style as the next pedantic apostrophe obsessive, but frankly, Google, I thought, I’ll be the judge of what constitutes excessive.

It was a small moment, and I overcame it by referring mysteriously to ‘exam courses’ in the end – but there’s a message there for us all (isn’t there always?). Examine your interface, because what seems a reasonable restriction to you may well be a serious impediment to trade for your customers. If you can, get a user group to try out all your website’s functionality, and feed back their niggles – and do so regularly.

Having said that, I’d be pretty sure Google do much the same. Maybe they just can’t account for every eventuality; maybe they’d rather alienate one language school, but still have the benefit of cutting down on listings which use capitalised, shouty imperatives to BUY NOW SALE ON TODAY, or whatever. Your customer base, however, is smaller, and almost certainly more uniform. Make sure you aren’t inadvertently annoying them.

Google’s homepage is the most-talked about blank space on the internet. Renowned for its one-option interface and clean minimalism, the page is often cited as a great example of ‘less is more’.

It came as a great surprise, last week, then, to see that Google had transformed itself. The page that logged-in users saw was taken over by a large photographic image, much in the style of its rival search engine, Bing.

Even more of a surprise came a few days later, when the white homepage returned. “Remove Google background” was apparently the seventh-most searched for term during the intervening days (the image can be removed, but a bug had prevented the link giving this option from displaying).

Read it how you will – panicking behemoth trying to imitate its competitor, then pulling the move when it realises it has blundered? Or service that listens to its users, and is uniquely positioned to do so, given that they are revealing their inner thoughts with every search?

Either way, it’s good to know that Google responds to the people who use it. The story, while amusing, shows us one of the strengths of the web – that you can try out something new, and change it sharply if it turns out not to be working for you and your business.

If you’re only just getting your head round PPC advertising, you may be dismayed to know that Google are several steps ahead – and that very soon, there will be whole new advertising platforms on which to promote your business. Yes, mobile advertising is the next big thing, underlined by Google’s recent acquisition of the Admob network.

As internet usage moves more and more onto smartphones and handheld devices, it makes sense that online advertising should follow. And since it is, most likely, an actual phone that the users are browsing on, it makes sense to deliver adverts with ‘click to call’ or ‘click to download’ functionality. These allow immediate action – either calling your business, or downloading, say, a special offer or directions to your premises.

These adverts need not appear only in search results, either: increasingly they are being seen on free apps and mobile-ready websites. You need only make them relevant and compelling, and you’ll have tapped in to the lucrative smartphone sector.

If it all sounds a bit confusing, do not worry. We can manage your mobile adverts as readily as we can your PPC campaigns. Just give us a ring – the old-fashioned way, if you prefer!