Last night I moderated a panel discussion at the University of North Florida called Strictly Social. The purpose of the event was to bring together professionals in Northeast Florida who use social media every day in their jobs, but who each do very different jobs.
By doing so, I hoped to bring together people with different enough backgrounds, and diverse enough expertise, to facilitate a quality conversation about a range of topics. Now that the event is over, I believe that I was successful.
I’d like to thank both UNF’s PRSSA chapter, and UNF, for both inviting me to speak, and for hosting the event. Without them, it would not have been nearly as successful!
Today Foursquare added a new feature to its web site: Buttons.
This means the most to businesses actively using Foursquare, because it makes it possible to create buttons for individual locations and embed them on a web site as a button. Here’s the official word from Foursquare’s blog:
Talking about how great new innovations in social media are, is fun and easy. You can do this and you can do that. Isn’t it great?
More often, however, the difficulty comes in when trying to explain in clear terms what the benefit of these new social platforms is to business. Businesses want to know: What’s in it for me, how can we use it and how long will it take to see results.
Each of those questions is tough to answer definitively, because a certain amount of trail-and-error is required to know for sure.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces Facebook Places
Last week Facebook debuted their latest product, a geolocation feature called Facebook Places. In the months leading up to the formal announcement, there was a lot of talk that Facebook was developing it, just no-one from the company would say so in any official capacity.
At the moment it is only available to Facebook users who have the iPhone application. Users had to download the latest update in order to get the new Places feature, which now appears directly in the middle of the menu screen on the application.
I had the opportunity to begin using the new feature on Thursday last week, while out with friends. We visited a few different locations, so I was able to try a few things out.
Back in June I wrote about how restaurants can use social media on a daily basis to drive customers in, and generate conversation online. My example breaks the day down into different parts, and offers an explanation of what could be done for each.
Today I came across a broader explanation, in the form for a flowchart.
It was developed by Spork Media, a New York-based consultancy that caters (no pun intended) to the restaurant industry, to help restaurant owners develop their business’s digital and social media footprint.
