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The Next Big Thing
First off, a bit of good news. In the previous issue, I wrote about our 10th birthday celebration last week; the good news is that we've decided to continue the celebration all month! We've extended the party until January 31: meaning, you can get 40% off a Pro membership until the end of this month. The full story and details are here. Last week, the MarketingProfs management team was in Baltimore for one of our regular meet-ups. I'd never been to Baltimore and was instantly enamored. Admittedly, I didn't get to see a lot of the city (my daughter, who watches the Food Network, was disappointed that I completely missed Charm City Cakes), but from what I could see: I liked its vibe and the people were friendly (but not overly so; as a New Englander, I'm jumpy around extreme friendliness). Saturday night, as the group was at dinner at Pazo, a neat tapas place in Baltimore's Fells Point, MarketingProfs CEO Allen Weiss and I got into a conversation about FourSquare. It's a location-based social network where users "check in" wherever they might be; whoever has checked into a specific location the most is crowned "Mayor" of that location. It is sometimes heralded as the next Twitter. On the surface, FourSquare is easy to mock. (Kind of like Twitter, in fact.) So who cares who might be the mayor of Pazo, or Starbucks, or wherever, right? Yesterday, Drew McLellan wrote an interesting post on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix about why marketers should care. He offers a half-dozen ways marketers might leverage location-based networking. Opportunities and ideas abound for localized marketing through networks like Yelp and Citysearch and, now, FourSquare—proving, I suppose, that as the world gets bigger, it's getting smaller, too. What do you think? Hop on over to the Daily Fix and comment!
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