Foursquare as a Marketing Tool

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on March 9, 2010 • apps foursquare location • 3 COMMENTS

By now, most of you have heard of Foursquare, the location-based app that lets you virtually check in to a location. You let the application know where you are and in return, you receive badges (bragging rights) and work your way to becoming the mayor of your favorite venue. You are also encouraged to leave “tips” for others letting them know what you loved or didn’t love about the particular venue.

Foursquare is very similar to visiting a website online except it’s real life. Many website owners will use analytics on their site to learn more about the behavior of its visitors for market research, so it comes as no surprise that business owners may want the same type of analytics for their venue.

This feature is now available for a few select businesses – Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses [via NYT].

It’s amazing the amount of data that is available through Foursquare and the advantages it can provide to businesses everywhere. The obvious error with these analytics is that only a small percentage of people use Foursquare. The children and elderly will most likely not appear in the data.

However, what they will receive are a core of young adults who may be social media gurus and can persuade their entire social network to visit (or not visit) your business. This new tool offers a direct personal relationship with your customers so the lesson here is to let them know they are valued customers and offer them incentives to keep coming back. Foursquare is just a location-based game for most people but is also becoming a valuable marketing tool for businesses.

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Another Google Lab Experiment: Public Data Explorer

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on March 8, 2010 • google visualization • 2 COMMENTS

Google’s latest lab creation is their Public Data Explorer. Similar to GeoCommons Maker! and Gapminder, Google allows you to visualize data as a line graph, bar graph, bubble chart or a map. The visualizations will also dynamically change as the latest data becomes updated and available through their service.

It’s simple and can be useful but is still very limited in the number of data they currently have and is lacking the ability to export and download the data. But as with any Google Lab experiment, their Public Data Explorer is only a prototype and can easily be developed into something more powerful by their many engineers.

The following is an example of seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the US.

One thing I’ve noticed is the increase in services we’re seeing that allows us to visualize data based on cultural geographies. What I’m referring to is data separated by countries, states and cities. Despite this growth, there are still large numbers of datasets that cannot be captured by these cultural boundaries but are equally as important (i.e. climate and deforestation). Knowing how each of these are changing over time is crucial to understanding our planet yet only account for a small percentage of existing data.

Interactive Atlas Goodness

by BRITTA RICKER PETERS on March 8, 2010 • geoweb map visualization • 1 COMMENT

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) is an organization that focuses on environmental issues across North America. This secretariat was formed as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to ensure that environmental degradation was being monitored fairly and carefully across the continent. One of the many noteworthy CEC initiatives is its new interactive atlas. The CEC works with the environmental ministries from Canada, the United States and Mexico to aggregate environmental data from across North America. They have developed an online atlas to show how environmental phenomenon does not stop at political boundaries. On this atlas you can view conservation areas, species habitats, pollution and waste depositories and other intriguing data sets for the entire continent. Check it out here. http://www.cec.org/atlas/

The CEC also has a featured video. You can see the back of my head around 2:05! Enjoy!

Kumiko is also building a beautiful open source interactive atlas that will be released soon. This atlas will be an exciting way to communicate and visualize a variety of information. The users will be able to navigate through the data at their own pace and hopefully gain new knowledge through this fun geospatial application!