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Social Media Wave

28 Jun. 2010 | Author: Ben Broshi | german

Using social media outlets as a way to draw in customers has pretty much become mandatory for even directories worldwide. Directories, local search engines, rating portals – they’ve all got the social media fever. An interesting example is the Herold in Austria, who introduced the Facebook application “Locations ilike”. Users don’t only have the capability to search, find, and save favorite locations, but can also rate them and share them with friends.

With the online service “Find It Now”, users can search for the best addresses in categories such as automobiles, education and family, health, weddings, and events. In addition, users can rate all locations and share them with their friends on Facebook.

YellowPages.com is storming the
smartphone market with a mobile app offensive. Whether for the iPhone, iPad, Android, or Blackberry, the easy to handle mobile applications, of course with “share it on Facebook®” or on Twitter® capability, putting their sights on the ever growing mobile users with their always on devices.

On the contrary, the rating portal Qype developed their iPhone app “Qype Radar” quite awhile back and has been continuously improving the app, with which users can find nearly every bar, restaurant, and shop in the world. Users can also share all the information with third parties, even mobile; from ratings to photos, the iPhone app does it all, even direct enquiries to the author of the rating. But Qype has gotten some competition recently from tupalo.com, a web service based in Austria, which also runs off of ratings and suggestions, or as they say “social opinion sharing”, and which also works together with the Herold and with Fonecta Oy, Finland’s #1 directory. Due to the large amount of ratings from users in Finland, the Netherlands, and even in Germany and in Austria, tupalo.com has established itself to the largest online city guide and is continuing to grow.

Microsoft is also taking its share of the social media market. There’s a new Windows Live Messenger application for the iPhone, which aside from the typical chat and email capabilities also offers a link to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Contacts from these two social networks can now control everything from the messenger, including status updates and photo updates. Bing Maps is also becoming social, Tweets have been localized on the map in the US version for quite a while, long before Twitter officially released its Geo-Function.

Even Foursquare, though only about a year old, is considered a main competitor in the social media world. Fourquare offers its users the capability to download mobile apps, with which users can update their current position by “checking in” (I’m here). For this, users can collect points and the so-called “badges”. A high score list allows users to compare themselves with their friends and with other users in the city. The most frequent visitor in a given location is given the title of mayor, which in some shops may prove to help save a few pennies. The mayor of say, Vapiano, or Starbucks, may get a drink or two on the house or may generally receive a loyalty discount. Apart from virtual and real awards, Foursquare has become more than anything a buddy finder in the USA, showing where friends are or were. Locations can receive tips from the users, which is a form of a positive rating. Foursquare has woven itself pretty well into the social media basics with local and mobile marketing concepts and makes a game out of the entire thing for the users.

All of the about mentioned examples have one thing in common: they show that everyone wants a share. Nothing’s for certain but one thing is clear: Social media is a must-have for 2010.

Social Media Wave
Posted in Lokale Suche per Smartphone, Social Media, Web Communities, Local Search per PC, Local Search on the go, Local Search per Mobile phone, Localization technology, New Search Machine Interest, Local Search Engines, Virtual world | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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  • mobile Apps:
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  • Qype Radar:
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