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Posts on innovation, user experience, research and design 
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July 11, 2011
 

Online community organizer

Came across a nice writeup on A VC today in which Fred Wilson and Joel Spolsky talked about the value of a key activity within a startup, that of the community organizer. As Joel notes, this is an entirely new type of role, which has a value that is only now being recognized.

Online communities require both software and people. Sometimes the software part is the easier part. Curating communities is hard work and requires people to do it. It is an inherently social behavior. This job will be sort of like being a community organizer at a non-profit. It combines elements of marketing, PR, and sales, but it’s really something different. I don’t expect that there are a lot of people out there who already know how to do this well, so I’m going to train them, personally. Everyone who joins the program (and survives for a year) will come out with an almost supernatural ability to take a dead, lifeless site on the internet and make it into the hottest bar in town. That’s a skill worth learning for the 21st century.

It's amazing to me, as someone who entered the job market ten years ago this month how jobs have changed over the course of those 10 years. Interesting to consider what cutting edge roles might be discussed in another 10...

Filed under  //   A VC   Fred Wilson   Joel Spolsky   community   curation   online community organizer   social   startup  

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November 30, 2009
 

Foursquare: Democratizing the Loyalty Program

Reading Pete Cashmore's prediction on the imminent rise of FourSquare got me thinking about one of the key principles surrounding FourSquare's attraction: status. Just like airline medallion programs, Slashdot's karma system, Facebook's fans, Twitter's followers, status is a key component of social capital. Everybody wants to be somebody and achieving status through any of these vehicles is a visible way to demonstrate and wield social capital. 

So on its surface, Foursquare is sort of unremarkable in the social capital space because it's not very different from any of these other status-based programs, which attempt to engage their best customers. In the world of finance, some banking and investment options are only available to high-net worth clients while cards like Visa Black are only accessible to the elite few who meet certain rigorous criteria. While it feels brutally oligarchical and elitist, this approach does makes sense for these companies. Wealthy customers and clients are important for banks because these customers are more likely to have large deposit balances, investments and loans. Providing them services that reward them for keeping their business in one place is a good perk for the customer but also good business for the bank. 

It's no different for the Mike's Pub on Foursquare. Danny, who holds all of his company's happy hour functions at Mike's pub, is a key customer for Mike's Pub. Providing him status and exclusive offers is a great way to keep him loyal. But without Foursquare, identifying these customers could be a lot more difficult. And therein lies the power of Foursquare.

Foursquare provides a dead simple and engaging platform through which any small businesses can establish a loyalty program. Reading through Foursquare's information for businesses page reveals the amount of thought they've put into the matter. Customers are enticed to be loyal patrons so they can accrue status. Meanwhile businesses reap the benefits of understanding rich data about their customers. With an open API now available, the ecosystem of apps surrounding Foursquare is bound to explore. Small business owners may soon be able to harness Foursquare as an analytics tool to help them understand a tremendous amount of information about their customers. While young, I can see the potential for Foursquare to deliver a potentially huge win for small business owners.

Taking a walk back to the financial services arena, I wonder how Foursquare might be applied to banking. What types of behaviors might banks use such a localized loyalty program for? Could someone who deposits money at a certain ATM with regularity become the mayor of that ATM? Might that person then be rewarded with perks like having ATM fees waived while they were the sitting mayor? 

Just a thought but an interesting example of how Foursquare can bring loyalty programs down to a much more granular and localized level than ever before.

Filed under  //   business   finance   foursquare   loyalty   small business   social   status  

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