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.

We're Writin' a Book

Okay, when I say "we're writin' a book," it's a Dummies book. Which of course is a real book. But it's not like we're creating the next great American novel. More specifically, the "we" is my good friend and geo-location savant, Mike Schneider and me. And the Dummies book (Wiley imprint) we're writing is Location Based Marketing for Dummies. To my knowledge, it will be only the second printed book on this subject. Our friend, Simon Salt's book being the first.

In the book, we plan to cover a broad array of topics including:

• Choosing the right platform(s)
• Building a LBS campaign
• Creating a relevant offer
• LBS as part of your loyalty program
• Integrating LBS with other marketing efforts
• Developing a monitoring strategy
• KPIs and Measurement

Mike and I have started writing the book already and plan to have the book wrapped up in March of 2011. The book is scheduled to be published in June of 2011. God willing, we'll start the pre-orders around May. As soon as there is a link up on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, we'll be sure you know about it.

By the way, I'd like to give a special thanks to our acquiring publisher, Amy Fandrei. She's not only super smart but she knows her stuff and has already done a fantastic job at "herding kittens" so to speak. Let's hope she's not sick of us by the end of this process.

So How you can help?

I'm glad you asked. If you're a LBS platform or vendor, we are interested in access to your executives, platform and case studies. If you see a new LBS hit the scene, send @schneidermike and I a tweet with the hashtag #LBM4D. You can also keep checking in and letting us know if you discover cool offers, glitches, Easter eggs and any other LBS topics that might be noteworthy. Tell us if you have specific things you think the book should cover, we are always listening.

And of course, you can read the book!

5 Initial Thoughts on Facebook Places

My guess is that I'll be 50% wrong about what I'm about to say in this post... In baseball that's a fantastic batting average. In surgery... not so much.

In case you didn't hear, Facebook made it's foray into the world of location-based services yesterday with it's announcement of Places. If you haven't checked it out yet, it's pretty straightforward. To checkin, you must use the most recent version of the Facebook iPhone app or the iTouch mobile site for Facebook. Although I've discussed the potential negative impact Facebook could have on existing location-based service providers like FourSquare, Gowalla and Whrrl, I'm going to change my tune a little (this is where the 50% wrong part could come into play).

To that end, here are my five initial thoughts about Facebook Places (hat tip to friend and fellow LBS enthusiast, Mike Schneider, for helping push my thinking on this front):

1. Facebook 'likes' boring - I had an epiphany yesterday after ReadWriteWeb's coverage of the Places announcement yesterday. Facebook doesn't want to crush the players in the location-based field, it wants to provide the scale and infrastructure that they've been sorely lacking. Most telling was RWW's interview with former Facebook engineer, Yishan Wong, who theorized, "My guess is that Facebook's product tries to commoditize the 'boring' parts of location while providing a platform for the 'real' location-oriented companies (e.g. Foursquare, Gowalla, Booyah, Yelp) to build real products off of. Based on what I've heard from various sources, companies like Foursquare find the 'venue management' business to be quite tedious and not the real source of differentiating value... so commoditizing this aspect of their business doesn't threaten their core value proposition."
   
2. Businesses will seize the opportunity - It took all of 24 hours before all-in-one checkin rewards  site, Topguest, announced that it was including Facebook Places in its service. It won't take long before others follow suit. The potential access to 500 million members/eyeballs/customers will do that.
   
3. Places appeals to the masses, not the early adopters - Mike Schneider and I were going back and forth earlier on Twitter about how disappointed he was in the lack of innovation on Places. My Quick'n'Dirty podcast partner, Jennifer Leggio, and I had a similar conversation yesterday on our weekly show. My take is that Facebook intentionally didn't include any sexy new features for two reasons a) they want to appeal to the masses so keeping the UI and functionality as simple as possible was essential and b) if bullet number one above is correct, Facebook wants other LBS players to do the innovating while it does its LBS platform thing.
   
4. Facebook will make a killing in geo-targeted ad revenue IF Places takes off - I may hate ads, but the more relevant and geo-focused they are, the more inclined I will be to react to them. Check out eMarketer's post yesterday for more details on this topic including forecasts.
   
5. Places will create a privacy nightmare for Facebook - I bet you thought I was going to yadda yadda over this one. Nope. This is the thing that could make or break Places. The major sticking point being the ability to check people into a location. While I personally like this feature in theory (and it is unique to Facebook as far as I can tell), this will cause plenty of problems down the road. It will only take 1-2 times of someone being checked into a location that you either don't want to be checked into or weren't actually at... but by the time your friend/parent/significant other sees the update, it will be too late.

How about you? I'm sure I'll get some push back on some of my predictions. But you know me, I welcome the discussion!

Quick’n'Dirty 55 – ‘What’s the ROI of this Tweet?’

In the spirit of centralizing the recaps from our weekly Quick'n'Dirty podcast, Jennifer, Rich, Ken and I have launched TheQuicknDirty blog. To that end, this week's recap is over on that site. However, for the regular readers of our blogs, we will keep lite recaps coming.

• Social app of the week: SCVNGR - "a game about doing challenges at places"
• Guest of the week: Forrester sr. analyst, Augie Ray - focused on whether or not our addiction to Facebook was good or bad, the death of Google Wave and the ROI of social media.
• Twitterer of the week: Mike Schneider - VP at Allen Gerritsen. Humble, smart, LBS genius.
• Point / counterpoint: Can Google do "social?" Special guest co-host, Kyle Flaherty and I took off the gloves on this one.

Listen to the recording of this week's episode. Or download it on iTunes (go to iTunes and Search for Quick'n'Dirty). And if you want the full recap, head over to our new TheQuicknDirty.com site.