I hope you can tolerate more appreciation and thanks.

On behalf of my fellow conference co-chairs, Pierre Berthon and Ian Cross, thank you very much for your presentation at Going Local With Social Media. The energy in the room was electric, and you were absolutely key to the great success of the conference!! Not only was it a fully packed auditorium/house with folks sitting in the aisles, but also, there were about
another 100 viewers of the live stream from all over the country. And, it didn’t hurt that the conference was a trending topic on Twitter via #CMTSocial. You are a gifted presenter!! See you about on Twitter and hopefully again in person sometime. Again, many thanks.

Best regards,

Bruce
–
Chair, Marketing Department
Bentley University

My point of view is that normal, everyday people just aren’t going to invest that hard in a new service unless the return is immediately clear. Early adopters like you and I are different, of course. In the case of Foursquare in particular, I have gotten some great recommendations from Explore recently and I think it has a chance to change the game, for Foursquare at least.

Your analysis of private check-ins causing traffic changes sounds entirely plausible.

In any case, I’m writing all this because I want LBS to go truly mainstream – at the level of a Yelp or a Wikipedia, not because I think the concept has no merit 8) – just talking about the means, not the ends.

I don’t think your argument that your wrote the article before foursquare 3 has any merit. Whrrl was doing almost the exact same thing (making discovery recommendations) for nearly a year before foursquare 3 was out. Where has also been doing those for a while. Again, though I think that rises out of our different definitions of a checkin. I say any time you log activity (i.e. marking a favorite venue in Where or clicking Want on Whrrl) from the real world into a digital product, you’re checking in–GPS or no GPS. The foursquare Explore feature is not new, it’s just now starting to happen with foursquare’s location-based checkins. If you were listening to the interviews Dennis Crowley was giving starting in November 2010, he was talking about foursquare’s recommendation engine in depth. foursquare 3 was no surprise to the LBS world, it was just fulfilling a prophecy.

I believe increasing private checkins are the reason why according to Compete, web traffic on foursquare.com has dropped, while registered users have grown. Fewer people are posting checkins to social sites, so fewer people are clicking the links attached to the checkins. Sharing has become a secondary interaction.

Recommendations CAN be offered immediately after a checkin, but, like any personalization service, it takes time to build personalized profiles. It’s a long-term game if you want recs to work perfectly.

Hope things went well at Where! Lots of news, I see.

1. I wrote the draft prior to to Foursquare 3 and there is no doubt that is a very significant advance on the discovery theme I mentioned. But checkins are not just about Foursquare – there are a lot of other checkin services out there and as yet I think discovery is not clearly solved.

2. Yes I would also be very interested to see data on private checkins – that is certainly my most common behavior.

3. Check-ins do aid in discovery as data points, as I mentioned – however, the person doing the checking-in doesn’t necessarily receive the benefits of better recommendations immediately – this will be interesting to watch.

4. It should be an interesting day tomorrow at Where – I think I better bring my flak jacket 8)

From what I can tell, the mainstream consumers are VERY concerned with people knowing where they are “all the time.” For that reason, I’m convinced the future of LBS exists in the private exchange of data between consumers and brands. It’s not about broadcasting. Forget broadcasting; it’s not interesting. Private, secure sharing is the future.