Citizen Marketer 2.1

Aaron Strout

  • Home
  • About Aaron
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Top 10 Posts of 2010

December 30, 2010 By Aaron Strout 3 Comments

Part of me hates these posts. Part of me feels like it’s important to be introspective and acknowledge what resonated with those whom I am fortunate enough to read me (even if just occasionally). What I have tried to do here is provide a little behind the scenes commentary — maybe my version of a “director’s cut — on each of my top 10 most popular posts for 2010.

  1. How Important is your Twitter Bio – Blown away by how many retweets and reads this got. It was a fairly basic post but it seemed to resonate. Not that I’m complaining…
  2. Are foursquare and Gowalla Just Shiny Objects – My favorite thing about this post was the conversation in the comments. I think no fewer than 15 new blog posts got written in the process and I learned a ton from people that are much smarter than me.
  3. What Marketers Want – This was the announcement post from our acquisition of crayon, Drill Team and StepChange earlier in the year. In some ways, this is like one of those great movies that you release too late in the season to be considered for the Academy so it ends up being a lame duck in the subsequent year’s voting. Glad to see this land in the #3 slot.
  4. Initial Thoughts on Facebook Places – Not my best post but obviously a hot topic. I’m still VERY interested in finding out how disruptive Facebook will be in the world of location based services.
  5. Brand Haiku – One of the most fun (and easiest) posts I’ve ever written. I was blown away by the fact that many of my blogger friends were willing to participate in this fun little game. Let’s just call this my 45 in 45 of 2010.
  6. Movember Time, Austin Style – Anyone that knows me, even a little – knows that I participated in Movember this year. I know, it gets old quick for those following me on Twitter and Facebook. But it was for a good cause. And we raised nearly $32,000 toward fighting cancer in men.
  7. Tale of Two CMOs: A Study in Contrasts – This goes down as the post with the most potential and the worst execution. I liked where it was heading but I immediately realized how hard it was going to be to write as a series the minute I started putting pen to paper.
  8. I See You – Maybe one of my favorite posts of all times. Riffing off the key phrase in the movie, Avatar, I loved what this post stood for. I was equally glad to see others embrace this.
  9. Pluralitas Non est Ponenda sine Necessitate – Flexing my Latin muscles a little. This was inspired by the principle of Occam’s Razor. Surprised to see this make its way into the top 10.
  10. The Power of One – the result of a little experiment I did on Twitter. I’m sure there was little to no statistical significance of my study but it was a cool concept. And I liked the comments.
So who else wrote a post that you liked a lot this year? Make sure you post it in the comments. If I get enough of them, I’ll either write a new post or at least include it in the body of this one as a post script.
Thanks again for taking the time to read and retweet me. Hope you have an awesome 2010 and if I’m lucky, I’ll see you at SXSW this year.

5 Initial Thoughts on Facebook Places

August 20, 2010 By Aaron Strout 28 Comments

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!

Recent Posts

  • How We Arrived at the What 2 Know Podcast: A Brief History
  • A Walk Down Memory Lane: My Third Ever Podcast… with Michael Arrington
  • 45 Things I’ve Learned in My 45 Years on Earth
  • SXSW Best Bars, Restaurants, Panels & Pro Tips from W2O
  • Austin Breakfast Places FTW

Recent Comments

  • jmctigue on Austin Breakfast Places FTW
  • aaronstrout on My Wife the Community Manager
  • Mike Troiano on My Wife the Community Manager
  • aaronstrout on My Wife the Community Manager
  • Samiina Mirza on My Wife the Community Manager

Categories

  • Analytics
  • Blog
  • content marketing
  • facebook
  • location based services
  • mobile
  • pre-commerce
  • social media
  • social media marketing
  • twitter
  • W2O Group

Search

Copyright © 2021 ·Stroutmeister Theme