Gray Dudek

Superb video using social apps and channels to show you your life can change in one evening…

When Foursquare came out I was seriously into it. Grabbing badges, setting new locations, coining in on points, etc, etc…

I held down 10 Mayorships to be a Super Mayor and unlocked some where in the region of 15 badges. Ok, not serious numbers for either but for what?

That’s the point that really escapes me now when I look at Foursquare.

Some say it’s helpful exploring new cities as the To Do’s and Tips kinda come in helpful. I sort of agree but are you going to spend £100 on a meal out at restaurant recommended by a Foursquare user (maybe the restaurant owner!) or are you going the check on TopTable – my vote goes to the latter.

Some say in very ’social media orientated cities’ (such as Chicago I was told) Foursquare is super useful to keep in touch with the like-minded.

So it’s a social tool for socialrati? Hmmm…that probably wouldn’t be well heard by Naveen Selvadurai one of the two creators.

I’m not a glass-half-empty sort of person by nature but I have to say that I am struggling with Foursquare personally at the moment. The thing that keeps me going is that one of my colleagues ousted me as the Mayor of the agency and that pissed me off – so I am back at it to boot him back out!

On a serious note though I can see huge benefits within the UK to using Foursquare when more multi and single site retail businesses become fully engaged as have Starbucks, Dominos, etc. Until we see more on the platform people will remain struggling with the “Check-in for what reason” point of view.

I was browsing eMarketer today and found an article telling me that 75% of US companies have a Social Media strategy compared to 2009 where 52% of companies were operating without any strategy. Obviously I gravitated towards it as it was a pretty intriguing headline. Below is one of the graphs I grabbed:

So that sounds good right?

Well that depends on WHAT the strategy actually is. This is the more important deep-dive question and those kind of ‘look how good things are’ headlines sort of piss me off as they are generally misleading.

To put it in context every company has a business plan – that doesn’t stop some of them hitting the wall or screwing up royally. That’s because their business plan is fundamentally wrong. The fact they have one is merely housekeeping.

The same can be said for marketing plans and sales forecasts – we all have them but that doesn’t mean they are right.

However, on the flip side I must say that with 75% of US companies having a strategy of some sort is better news for people like me (and probably you!) because it means that these 75% are realising they need to do something in the area.

I’d like to return to that very post in 12mths time and see a sub-line such as ‘12mths on, X% of them got it right too’…

And they are and apparently they are increasing their spend on social media too:

Excellent – where’s that Sunseeker brochure, I fancy a new tub to sail in…

This seriously satisfies the inner geek as it is a view from Google of their Container Data Centre which is just amazing. You get the feeling that the server farm is going to have to be pretty big but the intricacies that have had to go into designing the way the centre works, is cooled, is powered, etc is simply mind blowing.

So next you put a search into Google and it takes longer than 0.2secs you’ll have an appreciation of why the ‘internet’ might be a bit slow today…

Spotted this the other week and just thought it was a great piece of work. It’s not absolutely clear on why it was done within the film but it was created by Conscious Minds on behalf of Levis as they try to come back as brand we all consider ‘cool’ using various social and digital efforts.

All that aside, it’s just a seriously clever piece and credit to the editor(s) for having the patience to stitch it all together…