In Gowalla Branding Coming Soon?

Looks like Gowalla is getting close to releasing these branded trip/badges/passport stamps I was talking about yesterday. One of the founders, Josh Williams (@jw) (not the one from KC), tweeted here and here today about the new National Geographic tips where they have allowed them to do this.

So when do the rest of us get this?

More Ideas for Locals

So my post about the Roasterie’s menu screens ended up introducing me to Danny O’Neill (the owner of The Roasterie) as well as Will Greggory (@wgpr), who runs PR and Social Media for them, along with some other food and drink clients in town. If you follow me at all on Twitter - you’re well aware of my love for food and drink. So Will pretty much has my dream job. Anyway - I had coffee with Will at the Roasterie yesterday morning to talk about those ideas. That’s where I met Danny as well - who appears to be 8 feet tall and was a super nice guy.

We discussed the idea of setting up a new monitor on the wall that would be more of that window into social media. It could run twitterfall (or something like it) on news searches, mentions of the Roasterie etc. I touched briefly on this stuff in my last post, and it sounds like something Will is going to push for. I’ve kind of fleshed this out a little more and expanded on it, like tapping into The Roasterie’s physical network to have group tweetups centered around events and hashtags, and I will get into those soon - but I kind of wanted to jump to a different idea. It was an idea I was thinking about for a different local beverage company - that I kind of thought would work for the Roasterie too and passed on a little to Will.

A couple weeks ago I heard one of the founders of Gowalla, Scott Raymond (@sco) talk about the origins of Gowalla, as well as the future of it, at Free State Social. I was not very familiar with Gowalla* at the time as I use Foursquare and just assumed they were pretty much the same thing. They are not. I won’t get into all the details about Gowalla and why it’s different - but instead just wanted to talk about one of their features.

*Every time I try to type “Gowalla” I type “Gowallace”. They should totally change the name.

In Gowalla you can set up a trip. Basic idea - I can join 5 (or more) different locations together in a trip. You collect a badge at each stop when you check in and when you have hit all the places on the trip - you earn the trip badge. The first people I thought of was Boulevard Brewery (@Boulevard_Beer). Seems prefect for them. Not only do they have their own base location (the brewery) where they put on events - but they distribute to pretty much every bar and restaurant in town. They need to set up trips all over town and reward people for completing them. Create multiple trips. A Waldo/Brookside Trip, A Downtown Trip, on and on. Even have a massive Marathon like trip that takes people all over the city. A dive bar trip, a fine dining trip. I can stop right...you get the idea?

These are things that do not have to be accomplished in one day, but over the course of time (except for a few brave souls that I hope flag down a taxi at the end of the night). Now to make this better - when you earn the trip badge - you should get something for it. I don’t know what - that can be figured out later. What you would like is for there to be a virtual reward given on Gowalla - that could be taken somewhere to cash in for a real reward. Gowalla is just starting to play with these types of things from what I understand - so I don’t see that option yet. But I know they have experimented with things in the past like this for people. The good news...Scott Raymond, one of the founders, is from Kansas City. So maybe he can be talked into experimenting on this idea with a local company on the verge of national attention.

You end up getting some good buzz for being the first person to do this. You essentially are giving out a reward/carrot to your customers. If Boulevard did this correctly - getting on one of these trips could be good for business for these bars and restaurants. Give them a sign/decal to put in the window that they are “A Stop on the Boulevard Beer - Gowalla Dive Bar trip”. (See if Gowalla will co brand those signs with you).

So that’s that idea. I mentioned to Will that he could pull the same thing off with the Roasterie. The Roasterie is not just a Cafe, but the premium coffee brand in Kansas City (and growing outside of KC according to Will). The coffee is in a ton of restaurants and served in other coffee shops all over town. So you can do the same type of trip - one that ends at the Roasterie for a free cup of coffee. Reward the other establishments that buy from you, reward your customer for seeking out your coffee and get some good buzz along the way (pun noticed - not intended - but noticed).

Will tells me the Roasterie’s plant and Boulevard’s brewery are right down the road from each other and these two local drink companies started at about the same time. I think you could set up some great cross promo coffee/beer trips together.

Taking this collaborated Gowalla trip idea further, I saw Chef Celina Tio (@crtio) while I was at the Roasterie (sorry I did not come by and say “Hi” Celina - you looked like you were in a good conversation). Celina is a James Beard Award-winning chef that recently opened up a new restaurant in Brookside called Julian’s (@juliankc). It’s one of my favorite places in town and the crispy pork shoulder is so ridiculously good I can’t put it into words (although she tells me it’s not on the summer menu - I’ll be stopping by soon to see if this is true). Celina prides herself on serving local Boulevard Beer and uses a seasonal brew in one of my favorite appetizers there, her Bowl o’ Mussels. Celina is an avid Twitter user and gets social media. I’d like to see the Roasterie, Boulevard, Julian’s and maybe a couple other businesses in Brookside get together create a trip. A trip that ends with me getting the crispy pork shoulder preferably.

I’m done.

Update: Celina says the Pork is still on

Another Update: Turns out Celina's conversation was with Brent Anderson (@andbrent) who does her branding. He does amazing work - check him out at andbrent.com.

Pssst - I was talking about you

If I write a blog post about someone, or mention them on some other network, I feel like I need to send them a tweet letting them know I was talking about them. It’s not that I really care if they read it or not, but If I don’t tell them about it on Twitter - it seems I was somehow talking about them behind their back. Like Twitter is the only real legit channel of communication or something. I't's weird. Or I'm weird - whatever.

The only time I did not do this was when I wrote a post on how the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum was missing the boat on social media. I had to send an email to them. I couldn’t tweet them, because they did not have a twitter account - and holy cow I just checked and they still don’t. As a matter of fact, go to their website and the only contact options you are given are mailing address, phone and fax.

I better send a fax over to let them know I just mentioned them again.

Looking for a Social Media - E-Commerce Coordinator

I work for a company called Strasburg Children. I know - you've never heard of us. We have over 70 children's clothing stores around the country in the major malls. We are in a ton of Dillard's locations. So at some point you should have heard of us. But you haven't - and we need to change that.

That's where you come in. We are going to be looking for an Social Media - E-Commerce Coordinator to help us get this word out. This is a full time, junior level, position that will work closely with myself and our Marketing Director here in Kansas City (Lenexa, KS to be exact). We need a point person to head up our plans, as well as bring some new ideas to the table.

You're going to have your toe in a lot of pools in this position - so you'll learn a ton. But I see two of the biggest things being Social Media and SEO. Just some brief info on those two areas.

Social Media

We want you to understand the tools, be outgoing, social and ready to get involved, and most of all love our product and the people that buy it. We can work with you to take these skills and qualities and create a social strategy around it for our business. But if I have to explain why Twitter matters - your not the person for this job. You have to know the tools. Some basics:

- Work with the appropriate tools (FB, Twitter, blogs, etc) to build our community.

- Get involved in our customers online communities (comment, comment, comment).

- Be our evangelist (this means you are going to have to love the product).

- One of our biggest projects, a "superfan" advocate blogging program, is just getting started. You need to grow this into something big.

- Be creative. For example. we are not asking you to just tweet for us. We are asking you to find different ways to use twitter (etc) to build our brand, get our customers excited, and introduce us to more people. This does not happen by just tweeting our latest sale out.

SEO

You don't need to be a SEO wiz (although the more you know the better). But I need you to at least understand the basics and be open and excited about learning more through reading, online training and being involved in the SEO community. Basics:

- We have over 70 stores around the country that have partnerships in their communities. Work these partnerships to generate more inbound links.

- Keywords. Keywords. Keywords. Be able to write copy around our keywords.

- Work with marketing to target different keywords/campaigns depending on the season.

- Google Analytics!

There are so many other things we need you involved in like working with other sites (amazon, etc) to feed our product to them. You need to devour Google Analytics and figure out where we are missing business. Find the blogs and sites our customers frequent and negotiate ad buys and promotions with those sites/blogs. A little graphics experience is nice - but more important you need to have an eye for design. The list goes on - and if your interested we can talk to you more about it.

Don't send me a resume right now. We can look at those later if we need to. I just want links. Send me your LinkedIn profile, twitter and especially your blog if you have one. Don't worry - I'm not going to freak out if you drank a beer or cussed on twitter. I do that all the time.

Too Much Thought About Coffee Shop Menus

We stopped by the The Roasterie Cafe (@theRoasterie) today after the Brookside Art Annual and noticed they had four 50+ inch  Hi-Def displays behind the counter showing their menu instead of the old menu board that had hung there in the past. My first thought was “cool” my second thought was “that’s stupid”. I mean, I guess it would make it easy to add or take things away from the menu - but that seems like a silly reason to spend that much money. My wife and I discussed it briefly. She agreed, it did not seem to make a lot of sense. I’m sure at this point she never thought about it again.

I starred at the screens for a long time thinking that something must be changing on them and I’m just missing it because I am looking away. So I looked up at them and tried not to blink for a minute, but nothing changed. At this point, any other person would have decided to move on and stop thinking about it.

I went a different direction. I started thinking maybe they switch one over to TV and show the news every once in a while. But looking around, over half the people in there were working on laptops. They probably don’t want Kieth Olberman yipping in their ear while they work/study.

And of course, few of these people probably get their news from TV anyway, but instead twitter and the web. So hey - that would work. You could run a Twitter search on one screen. Or maybe set up a list of hand selected tweeps to display. Local people, coffee people, mentions of @theroasterie. Maybe pipe in foursquare check ins in the Brookside area to the stream.

Or how about this…over half the people on there are on computers. Come up with a hash tag like #RoastChat (or #coffeetalk) and throw out a topic for discussion. Let everyone join in that wants and the others that don’t can follow the discussion on screen. Of coarse open the discussion to people not there as well.

As I’m writing this I just ran across this tweet from Jerimiah Owyang (@jowyang) who I just met at Free State Social (@freestatesocial) last week (yeah…I just geek name dropped. But to level it out, let me also mention that he forgot me shortly after talking to me and thought I was someone else not but an hour later). So these menu screens are starting to pop up in other places too - even though these seem to only show the menu as well. He mentions they could eventually show customized info for the customer. That could be interesting. But what about showing customized info about the customer instead. I have a frequent customer card they swipe at the Roasterie when I go in. So maybe they swipe my card and it shows my Twitter profile pic, recent tweets, last couple drinks I have ordered, etc. Maybe even auto checks me into foursquare or gowalla. Kind of introduces me to the other customers currently in the Roasterie. Takes that social media junk and applies it out there in real life and introduces me to real, in the flesh, people.

Or maybe that’s just too much info to be giving out to everyone drinking coffee. That might get creepy.

And this has been way to much thought on screens hanging on the wall at the Roasterie. I’m a little ashamed to have even written something this long on it. But they have to have bigger plans for them that just showing the menu. Because that seems like a waste of money and opportunity.

I like Google Buzz, but...

I want the option of looking at Buzz with a List view or Expanded view (or user specific view - talked about below). Just like Google reader. Give me the the first 140 characters like twitter, and then let me pop it open if I want to read more, or see all the comments. No pictures or videos at first glance please. 

Mute needs to work like it does in Wave.  If I mute a conversation I don't want to see it again unless I go looking for it. Seems like currently the idea is I wont get notified of the anything in Gmail if I mute it. But I don't consider Gmail my Buzz inbox. The main stream is my Buzz inbox. If I mute it, I mean mute it from my stream. If you want to keep it that way (where mute is affecting your Gmail inbox instead of my Buzz inbox/stream) then you need to allow me to delete a post. And once it is deleted, it does not show up in my Buzz stream again. If I want to see it again, I would have to go to that user's individual stream and view it there, or undelete it there to allow it back into my main stream. 

I need lists or something. Actually, in true Google fashion give me labels/tags. There are too many people I don't really want in my everyday stream. Some people are just too noisy. I get it - you like Star Wars and Legos - I don't want to see every picture you found of that shit on the web today. But I still want a list of all you freaks to check in on from time to time.

Give me stars to tag favorites with and I want a quick click button toolbar on each Buzz post. I don't want to click down arrows and select stuff. Let me click and keep moving.

These are all things that are already part of other Google products. Seems easy to bring them over here (seems easy because it's not what I do).

But here is where it would be nice to see Google put in a little extra effort. I want better user/follow settings.

I would like the ability to tag a user as a certain type and that would dictate how their buzz showed up. Maybe a ranking (or super star) system. If I rank someone a 1 - then no matter what they post I see the whole post and a large chunk of comments below. If I tag them a 2, I get the 140 characters of the post with icons letting me know there are pics/videos, how many likes and comments attached to the post, etc. If I tag them a 3, I see their name collapsed behind other Buzz posts, just letting me know that they had something there but with no other info on it in my way. I can click to see more. But no matter what - I only see them in my stream when they post. People commenting on their post does not elevate it to the top of my stream again. 

To make this work, I need a small tool/link bar that runs across the top of each user/post so I can make changes to their classifications on the fly. On the left side of this bar there is a 1, 2, 3. I click on that to move that user around in the ranking system. I can only have one of these selected at a time. Obviously we can do better than numbers, but you get the drift. On the right of the tool bar is a star, a mute and an X. The star makes it a favorite, the mute makes sure I don't get notified about it in Gmail and the X makes it go away forever (unless I go undelete it on the users page). 

And dear god, don't give me a "follower settings" page. If you make me do that, or go to a list view of the people I follow and decide how much I care about them - it's worthless. I need to be able to mark/tag them on the fly. Everyone starts as a 3 when I follow them. As I see their posts more (and how much they post lolcats and avatar shit) I can just reclassify them as I move through my stream. And as soon as I move someone from a 3 to a 1, all the post in my stream should reformat to the new setting (oK - that seems kind of hard - so I'll just refresh after making a change if I care that much).

On a side note - I really like getting a Buzz update in Gmail and it works like I was on the Buzz tab. I want that with Wave too. I want a Wave to come to Gmail and act like a Wave when I have it open. 

Then after Buzz does all that, I would like it to make me a burrito.

A lot going on - but not a lot of time to talk about it.

I have not been terribly active as far as blogging about technology, software and social media lately. I have a lot of things I want to talk about as far as Google Wave goes, and I'm currently in the middle of a roll out of cloud based Point of Sale software for 70+ retail locations, which should be providing tons of information as well. Not to mention we just rolled out our new site (www.strasburgchildren.com) and are getting ready to start the social media phase of our re-branding online (which by the way, I'm looking for a e-commerce/social media coordinator if anyone knows of someone). Oh yeah - and I'm moving our entire organization over to Google Apps in a couple of weeks. Even with all that going on, or because of all that going on, I've been too tired to get anything out there lately. 

So follow over at wallacewilson.net instead, it grabs what I'm doing off the web, which is not a lot right now - but still more than what's going on here.

I'll be back over here eventually.