With FourSquare everyday tasks are Social

FourSquare is getting a lot of press lately.  The service is a cross between location tracking, reviews, social network, and game play.  As you travel around your city you enter tips and reviews of the places you frequent.  Leaving virtual notes for others to find.  The more notes you leave the more points you earn.  Points turn into badges that add the element of game play.  It’s a compelling concept that may have some legs, but most likely this is an early example of things to come.  The big picture is that Social Game Play will be applied to everything.  Some ideas:

• Community TV Watching.  We all know it is coming – but how cool would it be if there was a social game element to LOST.  The first person in your social group to find the hidden item in the scene wins!
• News / Local News:  When will the major news outlets start to reward the amateur news gatherers?  CNN already provides them fame as part of the iReport.  Next step it Fox giving “badges” for the first person to submit that cop beating video.
• Shopping:  This is obvious and is already happening.  But soon it will happen in a big way via your mobile phone.
• Work:  Non-competitive companies could create “work-groups” that allow sharing of best practices.   Imagine if you were connected to 10 other internet marketers across the country that work in different companies but work together on campaigns.  Then have those work-groups compete against other similar work groups for fame and fortune.  (this sounds a bit out there — but there might be something here)
• School:  Let’s think about bringing social game elements to education

Expect a lot of Social Game Play to seep into all facets of our life.   From major things like retirement investing to simple entertainment like BeJeweled.

I like companies with “Play” in the name.  I also like companies that have started to crack the micro-payment model in the US.  Playdom just announced a funding round that raised $43M while Playfish made off with $275M from EA.  This amounts to some interesting validation of the Social-Causal Game / Micro-Payment Space.  Details are sketchy but it looks like these guys are pulling in $40M to $60M a year in micro-payments fueled by their Facebook and MySpace games such as Mob Wars and Social Life.

We’ve seen excitement with this kind of thing before — remember the Beenz and Flooz craze?  But this is different.  This is a new low risk / high engagement way for consumers to pay for casual games — and soon other things too.  Why ask the consumer to pay $20 once up front for a game or service while you could ask them for $1.00 at a time 5 times a day for everyday they use the game/service.  Expect this new payment method to be proven and profected in the game space then move into consul and handheld games, online video, social networking, news, and maybe to TV.

There are a couple factors at play that make the micro-payment model compelling to producers and consumers.  But two overlooked factors are environmental trends and the decline in consumerism.  The next generation may feel completely comfortable with sending a $1 virtual rose bouquet on V-day rather than spending $40 of on handful of flowers that were cut from the ground to whither and die just for that special someone.

Check out this example of Augmented Reality from a current Papa John campaign.  Augmented Reality (AR) has come up a lot in the last month.  And there has been some interesting uses — so far my favorite is Lego’s use of AR with an instore kiosk.  Hold a Lego box up to the kiosk and see what the Lego set build in 3D.

I’m not sure that AR is the novelity dejur or here to stay.  If it is here to stay it needs better execution than this example from Papa John.  There’s something interesting to the technology — it will be interesting to see it develop.  Keep an eye on this space to see if it is a potential tactic for a promotional campaign or online/offline product.

Mindless Games on the Rise

Causal Gaming is a huge opportunity for those marketers looking to reach Moms and working women — yes, we’ve discussed this before and it’s true.  These are not games for kids — they are there is give working women and Moms 5 minutes of serenity.

Now that the economy has officially sunk past the 3rd ring of the abyss all of the Casual Game sites are on fire.  In a good way.  Figure the worse things get the more people look for escape.  The numbers posted here from eMarketer tell the story.

SpongeBob on the iPhone

Nickelodeon working with the development shop Mobui has launched a SpongeBob iPhone Ap.  More Nick character aps are in development.  Check out the press release here (link)  and a Mashable post here (link). This ap quickly rose to the top 10 iPhone ap list with over 3000 downloads per day.

I’ve been keeping an eye on iPhone aps mostly because I’d like to do one but haven’t found a way to justify it.  As iPhone sales continue to grow the users will start to include the target audience I’m after.  I’m wondering why Nick went with this — I’d guess that after 10 years on the air SpongeBob has a pretty large audience of 20 year old that are now carrying around iPhones.  But that doesn’t explain why Nick will soon be releasing Dora and iCarly aps. Another thought is that the dev shop was building Advergames for AddictingGames.com and Shockwave.com so why not tweak the code a bit and get an iPhone version.

The big picture here is that all phones will be iPhone or iPhone knock offs within 3 years.  Unfortunately, they will probably all have their own development code (unless Android takes off).  So there will be huge opportunities in reaching the mobile consumer through aps but they will be costly to develop across phone platforms.

Thoughts:

• As I’ve written before (post),  Mobile Aps as a marketing strategy will become HUGE!  Keep an eye on this space and consider the benefits of getting in early rather than waiting for the field to become very very crowded.
• Aps are great at connecting consumers with your brand in a very engaging way.  When developing these aps think about making them viral so fans of your brand can share their love with their friends.
• Also think about how the ap could drive to sales.  For example, could this SpongeBob Tickler ap tie into a physical product?