If you haven’t factored this into your business yet, you’re already on the endangered list!

Jennifer Van Grove has captured the essence of the way in which Foursquare is leading the charge in this arena. Her Mashable post is titled 5 Ways Foursquare is Changing the World, and in it she sets out how this location-based service is playing out in the real world.

The five key points that she makes are:

1. Social Media as Currency -  customer loyalty, as she points out, is stuck ina pre-digital plastic quagmire of cards and anachronistic point tallying. However, Forsquare’s check-in model is leading to social media being treated as a currency and we predict a major shake up of loyalty systems.

2.  Gaming social activity -  thanks to Foursquare, Twitters initial “what are you doing” has morphed into “who has the most interesting life“.  Foursquare mandates that you check into physical places, which means that your friends can be notified not only what you are doing, but also where you are doing it. Exponentially,  this maps out into significant benefits for those who participate as well as the economy as a whole and for individual businesses.

3.  Localized brand loyalty –  Jennifer points out that Foursquare is redefining what it means to be a regular:

…mayor-only rewards are cropping up everywhere Foursquare is played (which is now nearly everywhere) and they’re creating customer loyalty battles that are good for regulars and great for businesses…. Foursquare has found a way to make being a regular at your favorite pizza joint mean something tangible.

4. Personalizing place –  businesses are able to engage with their ” socially-active customers” at a much deeper level through services like Foursquare, while also using this engagement as a way to market themselves more widely. As Jennifer points out this two-way street builds community “on a whole new level”. Expect to see a healthy growth curve over the next 18 months in the number of people who can be defined as being socially-active. Consider as a benchmark where we were at in this respect circa mid 2007 and you’ll see how more social, more transparent people have already become.

5.   Verticalized game mechanics –  universities should all see themselves as ” more than classrooms and buildings…(as) an interconnected community of people, ideas and experiences, and (and should) actively (pursue) ways to enhance those connections.”

Jennifer is quoting (above) Perry Hewitt, Harvard University’s Director of Digital Communications. They have pulled a campus-based game based on Foursquare as a way to build connections between students, staff and other members of the broader Harvard community.

It looks like 2010 will be the year that game mechanics  is elevated beyond being seen as purely consumer-based gimmickry.

Cosby: I said to a guy, “Tell me, what is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful,” and he said, “Because it intensifies your personality.” I said, “Yes, but what if you’re an asshole?”

Scott’s message is that “social media is the cocaine of the communications industry“. If you have crappy products, if your company behaves like an ahole…people are going to find out about it way quicker through social media. The glass half full stance does point to the same holding true for great products and companies too.

It’s a memorable analogy, but the key take out for me from this interview is Scott’s comment that for Ford, “social media is absolutely key to everything we are doing“.

Take advertising, for example, Ford has moved to using 15 second spots with real people telling their stories. “Advertising is social mediaesque“.

Scott also essentially defined social business design: Its about humanizing the company at every turn, whether in HR, product development, customer service, PR or other areas.

Richard MacManus has a great introductory piece to the concept of brandstreaming over on ReadWriteWeb.

As defined by Pheedo, brandstreaming refers to the consistent flow of content created by a brand.

I believe that taken as a concerted effort and part of a portfolio of word of mouth engagement, brandstreaming is both a very useful identifier of brand influencers and propagator of conversations. It’s not a platform in itself, but a key piece of the overall social media brand puzzle.

[Picture courtesy of brentjholmes]

How many times have you borne the brunt of shocking customer service only to find that you either have no forum for venting or seeking recourse.

South African independent complaints management service getclosure! provides a forum for complaints and tracks and manages them on behalf of both the consumer and the brand.

In this session of Metarand Unplugged we talk with one of the getclosure! team, Richard Wright.

Stream the Session in Quicktime:

here

Stream the Session as an mp3:

here

In this session of Metarand Unplugged, we talk with the CEO of Geneva based coComment, Matthew Colebourne.

As an aggregator of millions of comments across the web, Matt has a good understanding of how brands are beginning to grok that markets are conversations and that there is a huge opportunity to build deeper brand engagement through conversations.

Stream the mp3:

here

Stream the Session in Quicktime:

here

Playboy has dived head first into the social media arena, setting up partnerships with Break, Howcast, Metacafe, Veoh and YouTube.

The entertainment-lifestyle brand sees this move as a great way to leverage off of the success of “The Girls Next Door” and create the Playboy Audience Network.

Mixercast will also be developing ad-supported content and contest widgets for use on the network, which will move to short-form content franchises. This suite of marketing and interactive content widgets will be used to extend Playboy-branded experiences to social networks and also to blogs and start pages.

A talent search is currently underway on YouTube to find the 55th Anniversary Playmate.

Playboy is aiming to create more of the interactive engagement in their digital business that they’ve achieved through the high-touch world of parties, events, location-based entertainment venues, and retail stores.

Identify target. Engage.

Think about this imperative statement set from the perspective of a marketer. Marketing is simple, right.

Now factor in the myriad methods for identifying targets. And overlay that with the exploding number of ways to engage with identified targets.

Whew! I know how you feel – seems overwhelming doesn’t it?
Where do you start?

OK, step back for a second and repeat after me” “Marketing is simple, right.”

This is the message being preached by Emmy award winner, Brad Jakeman. Take a look at the landscape.

There have never been more communications channels, yet it has never been harder to connect with consumers.

Brad believes marketers have become obsessed with the channel and forgotten about the content.
Consumers want brands to participate in their conversations, they want to engage and be engaged. For them the medium is peripheral to the experience.

Now let’s go back to our opening statement.

Identify target. Engage.

Flip this around and think about it from the consumer’s point of view. Given all the ways they could connect it’s also a question for them of which device, program, solution they decide to engage with.

Do I use my iPhone to twitter through twinkle, do it via my desktop on twhirl, dive into one of my browsers and send a message in 140 characters through a Facebook app or on Friendfeed?

The point is that the process of identifying and engaging is a dialogic one. It is two sides of the branding coin, one for marketers, and one for consumers.

To quote Brad, marketers need to create things people want to SEEK out, not SCREEN out. And the key marketing word of the moment: ENGAGE.

[Pictures courtesy of mleak]

The folks at Cakke have created a compilation of recent viral Internet hits.

Awesome stuff. Thanks Laurel for the tip off.