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Today I became the Mayor of Hill & Knowlton. This honour unfortunately comes with no real benefits but at least it is a small claim to fame I can lord over my colleagues from time to time.

I have been using Foursquare for over a week now and one thing I will say for it is that it’s addictive. But right now, that’s all it is. Earning points and collected badges gives a sense of achievement but nothing of genuine value. That’s where Foursquare is different to Twitter – whilst Twitter is about communication, Foursquare is about reward and right now the reward is limited.

However, hopefully this is all set to change. Domino’s and Debenhams have recently announced they have agreed partnership deals with Foursquare to offer incentives to their most loyal (or most frequent) customers – and this is where Foursquare will come into its own. For bricks & mortar brands, Foursquare provides and engaging platform to attract and reward their customers, the greater the reward the more incentive there is for consumers to use Foursquare and visit their local pizzeria or fashion retailer.

Here are 5 ways brands can utilise Foursquare:

1. Mayor Incentives: On Foursquare if you visit a venue more than anyone else you can be crowned the Mayor of that venue. This achievement could come with perks such as discounts, freebies and premium access to new products, initiatives or offers e.g. The Mayor of Hill & Knowlton should receive half price beer in the bar.
2. Brand Badges: As you use Foursquare you collect badges – I earned the Bender badge (I know, I know) today for checking-in four nights in a row. Why not have a Fast Foodie badge sponsored by McDonalds, or a Fitness Freak badge sponsored by Virgin Gyms?
3. Offer Alerts: Using Foursquare, brands could easily identify people in the area that might be interested in special offers and new launches e.g. a bar in Clapham could message everyone that tends to go out in the area with a Happy Hour notice.
4. Collect User Feedback: When you check into a venue you are invited to leave a tip which is shared with other users who check into the same place e.g. Claire at Fitness First is the best personal trainer in Putney; or try the Pad Thai at Banana Leaf. Brands could collect this feedback to make tweaks to their service. Any complaints about a dish? Take it off the menu.
5. Target Do’ers: You can create To Do lists on Foursquare that list places you want to visit. If the London Eye could see that someone had them on their To Do list, why not get in touch and offer them a 2-for-1 deal? At the minute this would be fairly limited as the number of people on the site doesn’t make it off genuine value but I expect to see this become more relevant over the next 6 months

I’m sure there are marketers across the globe plotting how best to exploit the rise in popularity of Foursquare, which is great, but only if it plays to the core of what the platform offers, which is reward. Reward your customers and they will flock.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the second Media140 event in London. This event was focused on brands and their use of social media platforms (particular focus on Twitter) and whilst it was a good event overall, like many events of this nature, it often drifted from insightful to insufferable (and back again).

The most notable thing missing from the conference was the number of brands in attendance – both in speaker slots and the audience. Whilst the likes of BA, Virgin Trains and Red Bull made a valued and insightful contribution, the event would have benefited from more case studies and brand perspective rather than theoretical hyperbole which was, at times, all that was coming from the stage.

That said, I would still recommend attending Media140 to colleagues and fellow social media enthusiasts as between the sales pitches and agency showcasing it did spark some lively debate and offered valuable face time with an inner circle of marketing bods who are influencing the way brands use the social media space.

The highlights for me included the excellent David McCandless who received the biggest cheer of the day simply by demonstrating the power that creative imagery can have on data. An example of his work is below but I urge you to read more via his Flickr channel (and buy his book in February 2010).

Also Ciaran Norris provided some excellent case studies of brands harnessing the 2.0 world, some more successfully than others. Richard Baker, General Manager at Virgin Train made us all reflect a little and appreciate that brands can be great at Twitter if they take a down to earth attitude towards it and simply try to help people.  And finally, Ted Hunt from Innocent Drinks who not only found a suitor within the audience but managed to keep his composure throughout a particularly raucous TwitterFall to demonstrate how personality is key to social media success.

Ande, who organises the events (whilst juggling a full time job I should add), kept his cool between major wi-fi outages which frustrated those in attendance and is looking to host further Media 140 events across the globe over the coming months. I would encourage everyone, if they get the chance, to attend and find out more about how brands, marketers and the media are harnessing the connected web.

As one panel member put it quite brilliantly (and honestly) yesterday, “…at the end of the day we’re all just making it up as we go along”. We are, but with events like Media140 we can at least pretend we know what we’re doing

I was catching up with some friends earlier this week, most of which work in some sort of marketing / digital / interactive capacity. During the course of dinner we noticed the array of mobile phones on the table and in particular the fact that 5 out of the 6 phones were iPhones.

The conversation moved onto how to engage consumers on the mobile platform (seriously, we have some crazy rock ‘n’ roll dinners) with half arguing that brands need to engage users through iPhone apps and others arguing that the market share of the iPhone was still too small for it to warrant such a large focus. My view, for what it was worth, was that the focus should be on non-iPhone but there is no reason why this can’t be supported through the iPhone.

Anyway, it struck me, looking at the array of iPhones on display, how important it is for us to remember that as marketers we aren’t our client’s target audience – and we shouldn’t lose sight of what is the norm for us and what is the norm for the general population. I’ve see it so often, and I do it myself, when marketers presume audiences behave in a certain way based on their own experiences.

It’s vital when preparing comms. plans whether it’s PR, advertising or marketing that throughout the planning stage we engage and understand the audience we are trying to reach. We’ve (H&K) recently hired a planner and she’s already had us monitoring tourists at the British Museum or shadowing grocery shoppers in supermarkets!

Understanding our clients’ audience’s mindsets and behaviours more deeply allows us to better engage with them and ultimately achieve cut through with our messages.