After millions of people have willingly handed over their location data to a multitude of companies running location based services, I ask you this question: Why do the tools the businesses have still suck?

Why is there no simple business account on foursquare that enables business owners to interact more dynamically with patrons? I know there are business accounts, but I still see companies creating accounts and friending people. Where is the tool that lets businesses blast out geo-targeted deals, or interest targeted deals? Where is the system that alerts a business owner when regulars or mayors show up? Why can’t we be “fans” of a business?

Gowalla is similarly lacking in focus on the business end of things. Where are the options for business owners to claim their venue? Drop custom items? Create their own challenges (could be excellent for chambers of commerce)?

Maybe I’m jumping the gun and we’ll see a roll out of these services in the next few months. Who knows, maybe a cpm based push message ad system is in the works for foursquare, tied in with check-ins, and coupon redemptions and you can quickly see the $100M valuation taking shape.

Or do they just need to build out business APIs and let creative people fill these holes?

I speak about social networks, social media, viral marketing, yada yada, all the time and figured it was time to use my pulpit to dispel lots of the myths and bullshit we’re seeing out on the web these days. So here are my top five things you need to know when you’re getting started with social media. The intent of this is also to teach you sound business advice in addition to providing you with a solid web marketing background.

1. Social media is not your end solution.
If your business plan’s marketing/user-acquisition/business development section says anything like “we’ll use social media to engage/capture new users,” then you need to light that sucker on fire. Burn that shit. That is the vaguest line of bull you’ve likely written in ages. You’ve got to understand that social media should be a component of your overall strategy, not the entire strategy.

2. Social media is about evolving your business communications
Right from the get go you need to understand the premise of how social media has shifted communications so radically. It has changed your communications from being a largely mono-directional system to a bi-directional or multi-directional tool. Forget ever being able to solely talk down to your customers. That shit is over with. Seriously. You now have to learn to listen as much as you talk.

3. Quit ignoring your customers and start embracing them.
Jason Fried of 37signals fame once quipped that you should ignore your customers ideas and suggestions. This my friends is some seriously short-sighted advice. He probably meant you shouldn’t pivot at every customer request, as they haven’t been validated (from a business perspective), but you have to keep track of them and acknowledge them to those customers. It has never been easier to get instant feedback and instant advice from your customers, so take advantage!

4. Don’t dive headfirst without looking
Do some research before you launch your campaign. Do what you would do in business, research the competition, research the tools, and weigh your options. Treat these decisions as you would a big software purchase (because it is), and make sure you find what is the best fit for you. These products may be largely free to use, but if you end up wasting your time on things that may be a bad fit, they can be more costly than your previous alternatives.

5. Set yourself some goals.
You’d be amazed at how many people have no goals in their heads for their social media campaigns. Without a goal/objective, how are you going to plan for getting there? Say you want 5000 facebook fans to your company fan page. How do you get to them? What are the steps you need to take in order to get those first 500? Set goals, and plan out your strategy to get there.

So what’d I just do there? I gave you 5 social media tips that are really just business tips didn’t I? Think about that.

A couple weeks ago I was on a panel at the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce annual goals conference, and the topic was getting noticed using social media amongst other tools. On the panel with me were a PR specialist, an Advertising specialist, an Email/direct marketing specialist, and me, not really a specialist (I detest the social media guru/expert term). The audience was made up of about 100 business owners from around Coral Gables, FL (a fairly wealthy enclave in South Florida).

So as our panel got rolling, lots of good questions kept coming in about best case uses for various pieces of technology, how we integrate these tools into our repertoire and so forth. I went through the usual rant about what social media should be to them (a component of what everyone else on the panel was an expert in). We talked about simple ways to integrate, and not overwhelm themselves. We also talked about some of the fears people have. It was interesting to see how this group approaches social media in particular considering their demographic (largely older crowd [avg age 50+], these are the people who OWN the businesses after all).

A few days later though I went to speak at a young professionals group (avg age ~27) about social media. I had gone in here expecting to have a completely different experience than the previous week’s talk. Surprisingly, these younger professionals shared many of the same trepidations that the older crowd had. The big difference was the higher % of personal users of facebook vs the chamber crowd.

Something struck me in both of these talks: all the social media advice you can give is just general good business advice. I realized about halfway through the second set that I wasn’t giving people social media specific advice, I was giving them startup advice. Everything I was telling people was tips I wish I had received as an entrepreneur, not a social media marketer. You can’t really tell people in generalized terms how to be successful at social media without teaching them how to be successful at business first.

I’ll do my best to outline the things I touched upon, but the gist of it is: research, plan, measure, and then adapt.

So after getting tons of requests for people to either retweet, digg, reddit, vote on, stumble, whatever, I’ve decided I’ve had enough. Those of you who know me, know I RARELY ask anyone to rt my stuff or digg or spread my content. Maybe twice in the last year if that, have I asked people for that stuff.

So with that in mind, here is my new policy. If you ask me to lend my social capital to you, you have to adhere to any of the following criteria.

It must be something you spent time creating or working on
Its genuinely interesting
Its for a good cause
You’ve retweeted my stuff in the recent past (on your own accord)

If none of those things are applicable, then I will firmly say NO or ignore you.
If you send me a mass unsolicited DM promoting something, I will not retweet it, unless you are giving me a commission. Even then, better be worth my time.

Surefire ways for me to not retweet your stuff:
It is spammy
it isn’t even remotely interesting
It supports a cause I am not a supporter of, like Sarah Palin for president.

What are your rules for retweeting?

Or How I’d Save MySpace

But Brian, MySpace isn’t dead, why does it need saving? Hah! What’s that expression, you’re dead you just don’t know it yet. Well MySpace isn’t dead just yet, but its got the path and the symptoms of a dying site. MySpace has a number of problems that befell another famous social network 4 years ago that has only recently resuscitated as a mere shadow of what it could have been (Friendster in case you were wondering, the O.G. of social networks).

So let’s outline what MySpace’s problems are:

· Traffic is flat or down

· Engagement is way down

· Growth is gone

· Costs are still super high

· No smart way to monetize

· Marketers are losing interest

· Developers are losing interest

So some of these issues are harder to address than others, and MySpace has been making strides to cut costs (slashing most of their staff) before the Google Ad deal runs out (thereby decimating their revenue). MySpace has been diametrically opposite of facebook from a product standpoint from day one. Facebook for being such a large group of people, innovates faster than any other startup out there. MySpace on the other hand takes AGES to roll out improvements, and when they do, no one knows about them.

Step 1 – Stop insulting your users just to boost your pageviews
If your CPM on your pageviews is still hovering below $0.50 as it had in the past then its really unprofitable to keep all that remnant super low response rate pageviews. Move items throughout the site that don’t need a separate page load into on page AJAX calls. Save us some time, and improve your site’s usability at the same time. Your users aren’t as dumb as you assume they are.

Step 2 – Build small and build fast
Your platform is years behind facebook’s so you need to start over and build it for engagement and as an enhancement to the user’s experience. Right now its tacked on as though it was an afterthought, rethink it, and don’t be afraid to learn from facebook or twitter. Reorganize your team into small groups that can build out new features fast, and forget the giant projects. Facebook’s photos team is 6 people, they built an app that houses more photos than any other site out there. 6 people.

Step 3 – Focus on your core competencies
MySpace was the defacto place for celebrities and music at one point. That’s being lost to twitter and facebook because they are providing better tools for their users. Myspace had the opportunity to become the defacto clearing house for music on the web outside of iTunes, but yet it dropped the ball. Why not build what pandora and last.fm wished they could?

Step4 – Out innovate on the user experience
MySpace has allowed itself to become the next friendster which failed mostly due to a lack of a solid user experience. Take this opportunity to build better communication tools, to build more forms of self expression into your platform, and to forge stronger relations for your users social graph.

So these might just be oversimplifying their problems, but sometimes you need to look at their issues from a basic level. Let’s hope for their sake MySpace manages to come up with something.

So this friday I will be meeting up with twitter users in Lima, Peru for BeerTwit. The concept of meeting up with virtual friends in real life is one that intrigues me, and I see it gaining lots and lots of steam in the near future. Its really amazed me that users are finding each other and connecting across disparate regions of the world and using the social bond that twitter provides them to connect in real life.

Apparently this trend is happening all around the world according to my friend Diego. Twitter meetups are sprouting up everywhere from Madrid, Mexico, Sevilla, Barcelona, Argentina, and tons of other places. Those are just the spanish speaking places too!

There is even a Tokyo twitter group! 2 seconds of quick searching also revealed meetups in Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Huntsville, Buffalo,  and Venice, Italy!

So if you know of a tweetup occuring, post them in the comments.

What? Twitter can be a feature in my app? How can a web service like twitter be a function of my app?  If you look below the surface of twitter, it is a pure web service, and I mean service from an API perspective.  Lets keep that in mind as we explore this further.

So how can twitter the web service serve me in building my applications/sites/widgets? Well quite simply twitter gives us a truly portable social communications tool that is really, really flexible. Twitter should be seen as a support for your services to make them more portable and accessible.

So what do I mean by portable and accessible? Well first you need to cast away the notion that a website is only to be seen through one container (www.yourdomain.com for example). RSS, APIs, and a litany of other platforms should have changed your mind years ago.  Twitter gives you access to a number of things that are potentially useful for your endeavor:
Mobile Integration: A solid mobile platform (let them leverage the costs, last thing you need to do is pay $2k/month for an sms number + thousands in sms fees)
Jabber/IM Integration: Instant messaging based commands and controls (bots?)
Social Graph: A very flexible social graph and the ability to leverage relationships
Users: Roughly a million of them

The key to this is the ability to quickly and cheaply integrate mobile controls for your application, something no other platform is really offering at the moment.  Why not let your users post to and retrieve data from your site using their mobile phones? Why not let them interact with your application through instant messenger?  The possibilities are endless folks, you just have to look for them.

I’ve been reading a bunch of blogs on blogs lately, I know that sounds moronic, but whatever, I have to change up what I read every few weeks. One of the key things i’ve noticed, blogs aren’t evolving. they seem to be content with just writing quick little posts, but not really providing a richness to their content. Another thing blogs aren’t tapping into is the fact that they are all providing rich content, why not link to related posts on your friends sites. So here are my simple ideas to evolve the blogosphere
and give it longevity:

• Sell your own ads (or get someone to do it for you other than google)
• Cross link the hell out of your site.
• Think of your blog as a media outlet more than a journal. – People get bored with journals, media is changing, change with it.
• Network network network (kinda related to #2)
• Make your content accessible to everyone
• Accept the fact social media is changing every day, and adapt to it. Embrace social networks, and integrate your blogs into them.

So if anyone is interested in pursuing any of these ideas, email me. breslin[at]infinimedia.com

Blogging blog networks business 101 Blogging blog networks business 101Blogging, blog networks, business 101

This is more of a addendum to the previous post, rather than a self-standing post. So if you didn’t read the earlier treatise on podcast advertising figures, then check that entry first.While i thought i had carefully crafted my logical fiscal analysis of the podcasting issue earlier, i realized one thing I had missed while talking to a fellow entrepreneur about the concept of file serving and storage mechanisms for consumers. The cost is not in the storage, its in the bandwidth. The bandwidth was a factor I considered from the getgo, but had always attributed storage costs to each individually delivered podcast, when in fact its a declining cost.Think of it in basic accounting terms, if you’re going to ammortize the cost of the land (the hard drive space), you can do so over the lifespan of the property (each podcast). So instead of factoring a fraction of a cent per download ($.15/GB storage on amazon S3), you are really looking at it as a declining cost. So the initial podcast serving is the most expensive one, but everyone thereafter is subsequently cheaper to deliver (note these calculations do not account for CPU cycles or stuff like that, as I’m not even sure how to measure those).So as a result of these amortizations of costs, the storage costs are spread out across each delivery, so your costs per might go from $.005 to $.003 to $.002, which may seem like a whole lotta argument over nothing, but in fact adds up (think a million times). With these renewed figures in hand, podcasting becomes a more appealing medium for a broadcaster as his/her costs are no longer fixed at a certain fee per ad (which would’ve necessitated the CPM to be high to profit).Stay tuned for more posts this week as I will be opening up more of the details on castvertising.com, and maybe giving you guys a peek behind the curtains.

So its been quite a while since i talked about podcast advertising here (mainly because I’ve been so busy, and also nothing new was being talked about in this market).Well today we’re going to look at how the numbers break down in podcast advertising (now remember, this is based on pre-launch figures). The basic premise of podcast advertising as I see it now is something similar to radio and tv ads, in which they are passive audiences that are reached by the thousands. Unlike radio and tv, where there is no way of selling your ads to an exact number of people (you have to hope the ads you bought months prior will reach as many as the network claims), podcasting offers precision download statistics, thus making a CPM (cost per thousand) model the ideal way to go.Using a CPM model we can effectively compute the revenue we generate per podcast. So for simplicity sake, lets assume a cost per thousand of $10 (which is probably at the low end of the scale). This means for every podcast downloaded, we are charging $0.01. 1 cent folks, this is a rounding error for most people, but here it isn’t about the pennies, its about the aggregate.So now that we’ve got our income, how much does it cost to host a podcast? Well if you were to use your run of the mill shared hosting, and figured for $20/month you can host 1000 podcasts (1000 x 10MB each = 10GB of traffic), then it is effectively costing you $.02 per podcast to run this show (all other costs excluded for this argument). By using the scale we’re looking to provide at castvertising.com, you effectively group the buying power and scale advantages that large scale webhosting has to offer. So with that in mind, we can effectively lower the distribution costs to a fraction of a cent. Only through use of economies of scale can the podcast advertising be both cost effective to advertisers (you don’t want them priced out of the equation), and profitable to the podcaster himself.Got any thoughts? discuss!