Bizzy Checks Out

Over the past few months, my co-author, Mike Schneider, and I have been keeping a closer eye on local business recommendation engine, Bizzy. Mike and I have both know VP of marketing, Ryan Kuder and community manager, Elysa Rice for a while. And I was lucky enough to have Ryan on the Quick'n'Dirty podcast show a few months back (Ryan was definitely one of our more engaging guests).

The reason I bring up Bizzy is that they are announced a groundbreaking new feature today called the "check-out." Yes, many of us that use location based services like foursquare and Gowalla are quite familiar with the concept of "checking-in" to a location. But checking out? What's that all about. Well, the key is that Bizzy doesn't care which service you use to check in. But when you are ready to check out, you can leave a simple review. As you can see in the screen shot to the left, this can be as simple as picking one of the three faces to let you know what you thought of the business you just patronized. Or, you can leave a Twitter-esque review that gets added to the tip of that particular venue.

Bizzy was kind enough to let Mike and I play with this functionality for the last week or so. My initial thoughts are that I like the new functionality a lot. In particular, I liked the ability to add my $.02 on the location I was visiting which I often forget to do when I'm checking into a venue. The interface was very easy to use given how simple and straightforward it was.

With that said, there are a couple of things I'd like to see in the future:

1. It would be nice if Bizzy physically checked you out of the location using the service you checked in with e.g. Gowalla, Facebook Places, foursquare. I know this is tricky because I don't believe any of these services currently offer up a "limbo" or "I'm not checked in anywhere" state which would be required.
2. I know I was testing an alpha version of the product (using a very cool development environment called Test Flight) but sometimes I couldn't always find the venue I checked into to check out of. For instance, I went to a local festival here in Austin on Sunday and while I was able to check in on Gowalla [Austin Kite Festival at Zilker Park], I wasn't able to check out on Bizzy. Hopefully this is a matter of expanding the geo-database over time and making it more real time.

If you don't use Bizzy yet, I'd suggest checking it out. They provide some great local recommendations based on information you provide. And with the added bonus of the check out, you can now review all your favorite (or un-favorite) venues in seconds.

Quick-n-dirty Social Media Podcast: Episode 9 Recap

After a week off for a little family vacation, imagine how relieved I was to find out that I still had a job as a cohost of Quick-n-Dirty podcast. Apparently, Kyle Flaherty, did an admirable job filling in for me but my partner in crime, Jennifer Leggio, decided that he's more fun to make fun of than me so he was the odd man out (sorry Kyle).

For anyone new to the show, here are the recaps of episodes one, two, three, four, five. six, seven and eight. Not that the first couple of shows weren't good but we really started to hit our stride around show five and six so if you're digging back through the archives, you might want to start there.

If you missed this week's show, you can listen to an archive of episode nine here. If you're more of a reader than a listener, you'll find a recap of this week's show below:

1. Featured Social Network: Friendfeed. To be honest, we focused more on the contraversy surrounding Friendfeed that came up a couple weeks back when blogger/uber Tweeter, Aaron Brazell pulled the plug on his FF account. Friendfeed evangelist and big time tech blogger, Robert Scoble was less than pleased because when Aaron pulled the plug, it wiped out all of Scoble's comments. Rather than take my word for it, read Scoble's and Brazell's accounts of the story.
2. Special Guest: Michael Feferman, director of digital for C3. No, we didn't just have Michael on the show because his name is fun to say. But we did invite him on Q-n-D because he works in a job where music meets digital, and in particular, social media. What I liked most about our interview with Michael was his candor around the music industry's need to embrace some of these new ways of embracing their communities.
3. Case Study: EMC thanks to friend, Len Devanna. During the show, I shared the following bullets with the listeners:
   
   * About 18 months old now.
   * Greater than 50% adoption across a global workforce of about 38k.
   * It’s been instrumental in breaking down internal walls (geo, divisional, organizational, etc.)
   * Among initial intent was to drive proficiency with E2.0 across global workforce. I’d say we’ve done that in spades. Many of our current public bloggers honed their voice on EMC ONE pre going public.
   * We’re seeing more and more movement away from traditional processes and migration to online collab via wikis, etc.
   Len was also kind enough to pass along these two links that highlight the importance of EMC | ONE to the company.
4. Featured Twitterer: Ryan Kuder. What was cool about this is that both Jennifer and I know Ryan (her IRL and me via Twitter). I think Ryan was one of the first 250 people I followed on Twitter so he of course has a special place in my heart. What is particularly cool is the fact that Ryan was one of the first people to publicly tweet about his experience of getting laid off from a major company... in this case, Yahoo. If you don't follow him yet, make sure you do because he's smart, funny and always helpful.
5. Point / Counterpoint: Sponsored blogging. Yeah, don't get us started on this one. To be honest, neither Jennifer nor I am a huge fan of sponsored blogging. I am a little softer in my stance around sponsored Tweeting -- something Jennifer has very little tolerance for. One interesting point that Jennifer brought up that I liked a lot was that if companies want high profile folks to talk about their company/products, they'd be much better off hiring subject matter experts -- paid or unpaid -- to support their brand. We didn't mention this but certainly Wal-mart's Eleven Mom's program would fall into this category.

Up next week, we'll be talking about social network, Aardvark and bringing on special guest, personal branding expert, Dan Schawbel. Of course we'll have a featured case study, tweeter and point/counterpoint as well. Be sure to join us!

What, this recap wasn't enough? Well go and listen live or download archived podcasts here.