In fact, US electronics retailer Radio Shack claims they spend 3.5x as much money as  non Foursquare users.   According to Radio Shack’s social media director Adam Parker, foursquare users will generally buy higher priced items, which makes them extremely valuable to retailers as many prefer to sell fewer big money items than deal in volume.

Parker says Foursquare users are “more tech-savvy, they’re younger and they have a higher disposable income.”   As a result that makes them more interesting for an electronics retailer as they are in the market for the latest gadgets.

Radio Shack has 28,000 Foursquare followers.   Looking at Foursquare brands, its surprising how many brands do have large numbers of followers.   Top in terms of retailers is Starbucks with 47264.

Foursquare users as of 9pm, 12 April – 8,566,370

How many users does Foursquare have?  An answer I found on Quora:  Go to  http://foursquare.com/user/8100000 and increase the number at the end until it directs you to an error page rather than a user.

As a result, I now know that as of 21:00 London time on 12 April (4pm EST), there were 8,566,370 users with Veronica S from Racine Wisconsin being the latest person to sign up.

Related articles

• Radio Shack Says Foursquare Users Spend 3.5X More (clickz.com)
• CHART OF THE DAY: Foursquare Users Doubled Since Facebook Launched Places (businessinsider.com)
• Foursquare: Profitable Business Tactic or Waste of Time (mnprblog.com)

Today is the last day of the SXSW Interactive festival and conference in Austin, Texas.  If you don’t know what it is, it’s probably the biggest social media trade event in the world.

However the chances are, assuming you didn’t go, you’ve been bombarded by a stream of SXSW-related tweets and check-in updates.

But for anyone thinking of going in 2012, do it.   Speaking as the director of a small London agency that doesn’t have endless financial resources it was easily worth every penny and benefitted both us (and by extension our clients) enormously.

Here’s why and this is the bit to forward onto your boss:  Yes, of course you can find out a great deal anyway by reading mashable or RWW, attending the odd trade conference, networking on social media and so on.

But SXSW is much more than a conference and networking opportunity.  With 15-20k social media practitioners and assorted other geeks taking over a five block radius around the Austin Conference Centre it’s a chance to experience social networks in their most optimum real world setting.

That kind of 1st hand experience brings everything to life in a way that a conference can’t.

For example – at Rabbit we certainly believe location based networking has a future and it’s important for brands to get on board.  But for now, only around 4% of Americans use them if Pew stats are to be believed.

By comparison, SXSW gave us a live insight into what the world would look like if location based check ins were the norm and not the exception, with every bar, venue, restaurant and hotel encouraging you to do so helped by some fairly high profile activity from Gowalla and foursquare.

By exposing us to that, it naturally helped us think about how location based services could be used more for clients.

Similarly on the flight over from London we were debating the uses for Hurricane Party, a start up that allows you to create and geo-tag parties and events on the fly.

Hurricane Party showed us, by using their app to organise a Japan benefit event in 24 hours.

Sure, I hear the criticism that in the social media community we sometimes look at life through the wrong end of the telescope, and we need more and not less exposure to life outside the bubble.

Yet the experience of being in an immersive social networking environment for a few days every year can’t be beat.  It brings everything to life in a way that listening to a conference speaker or reading Mashable never can.

Finally if you want to put this on your bosses’ radar, be sure to tell him / her to pay for several of you to go!

Last year I went on my own, which was great, but I personally got much more out of it by having two fellow Rabbits with me to share and discuss what we’d seen and experienced.

Coming up – social networks that impressed us at SXSW.

Photos from (Rabbit) Cat Turner’s amazing SXSW Tumblr

Related articles

• What’s Trending At SXSW Interactive? (npr.org)
• Trends at SXSW Interactive (blogs.cisco.com)

I rarely use this blog to big up work we’ve done at Rabbit, but this is an exception as it’s something I was particularly thrilled about.    It turned something that’s normally seen as an inconvenience – construction hoardings – into a public information point for (London) Gatwick Airport.   And that information is presented in a different way, through giant mobile barcodes.

Eventually a series of these codes (you use the free Stickybits app to scan them) will appear around the airport and together they will form a ‘Gatwick Discovery Tour’ that will bring the airport’s £1bn ($1.58 bn) investment programme to life through images and video.

We deliberately decided to use Stickybits as opposed to the QR codes, because we thought people would respond better to the type of barcode they see day in, day out on household products, and I’m not convinced that most consumers would be able to identify what a QR code is.

Kevin Dugan has used this as the basis of a post where he calls QR codes “marketing’s scan-gasm”:  “QR codes are getting the buzz worthy of a shiny new object, but the consumer’s awareness of barcodes is a great point. There is education required regardless of which you choose, but Stickybits offers the marketer a bit more flexibility and a level of engagement that QR codes seemingly cannot.”

Obviously I’m biased, but I think his conclusion is right – look behind the “shiny new aura” of QR codes.   Might ‘standard’ ones work just as well in supporting marketing activity?

Related articles

• Gatwick Airport Unveils ‘Discovery Tour’ Using Barcodes (thedenveregotist.com)
• QR Codes — Marketing’s Scan-gasm (prblog.typepad.com)
• A Quick QR Code 101 (prsarahevans.com)
• Giant barcodes at UK airport to lead visitors on “Discovery Tour” [TNW UK] (thenextweb.com)
• RedLaser Now Scans QR Codes (mashable.com)

This  accompanying promotional video (via SoundLounge) explains more:

Collaborative Consumption Groundswell Video from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

Some stats from the video:

• The estimated worth of the car sharing market by 2015 US$12.5 billion
• ‘Freecyle’ is now the third most searched environmental term after global warming and recycling but ahead of ‘earth’
• Over 9.1 million items are gifted every year through freecycle, piling them in a rubbish / garbage truck would result in them reaching 7x the height of Mt Everest
• Local farmers’ markets in the US?  In 1994 there were 1755, in 2009 there were 5274 meaning there are now 1000 more farmers’ markets than Walmart in the States
• Peer to peer lending is predicted to reach $5.8 billion by the end of 2010 = 10% of the US personal loan market
• Couch surfing (where you go on holiday but stay on someone’s couch) gets an average of 40 million online page views a day

It’s a simple truth that the vast majority of blog posts such as this one draw on existing news stories and then build on them in some fashion.    Hence the statistic from the Pew Research Center that 95% of stories with ‘new information’ originate from the traditional media, particularly newspapers.

Conducted in the Baltimore Maryland area, researchers found that 83% of stories were ‘repetitive’, with the other 17% that were new coming almost exclusively from what’s termed traditional media.   General interest newspapers were responsible for 48% of ‘new news’, specialist titles generated 13%, TV in the Baltimore area was responsible for 28% of new content, while new media only generated 4%.

It’s a fair point: Our society depends on organisations who have the resources and professionalism to delve into and uncover the stories we all need to know about.   Very few people who work in the digital media space would argue otherwise.   Instead in response to this research I’d say:

For non professional and online media outlets to break almost 1 in 20 news stories is quite high.   And there have been some major ones – for example, here and here

Even if social media doesn’t break news, it does have a role in moving it along and magnifying it considerably.   For example, look at what happened to Eurostar (the train service between London and Paris / Brussels) before Christmas

No one realistically thinks social media will ever replace traditional news gathering outlets, whether they publish in print or online.   But it is a game changer, and the organisations themselves seem to think so as evidenced by Sky News installing Tweetdeck across journalists’ computers.

Social engineering doomed to fail?
One thing that I do question is social engineering to ‘make’ people read newspapers.   True, giving 18 year olds free (print) subscriptions has had some impact in France, but I wonder how successful these sorts of schemes will be long-term.

Paid Content has an article about the (opposition) Labour culture spokesperson in Scotland, Pauline McNeill advocating a similar scheme North of the border.

The article also includes some stats about the mountain Scottish newspapers face, with ‘The Scotsman’, the paper that holds itself up as Scotland’s national quality paper, seeing a circulation drop from 75,402 to a pretty shocking 46,300 since 2002, and The Daily Record (the main tabloid), dropping from 626,646 to 323,01 in the same period.

Image – Swanksalot

Related articles by Zemanta

• Newspapers and Traditional Media Still Produce Most News (marketingpilgrim.com)

I rarely put posts up where I talk about myself, but this will be the exception.

That’s because from today I’ve got a new job.  The former digital division of Cow has been hived off into a separate agency, Rabbit, which I now head.

So, nine years after being one of the team that started Cow, I’m back in start-up mode!

Cow (where we remain part of the group) has done some incredible things, going from a £10,000 loan in 2001 to agency of the year in 2008, while remaining completely independent.   That’s thanks to the amazing group of people working there.

The awesome Louise Doherty has come over from Cow Digital to help me make Rabbit happen and we’re drawing on five more Cows in Cape Town and London – really we can be as big as clients need us to be.  But, if with Rabbit we achieve just a fraction of the success that Cow has had, I’ll be happy!

Why a separate agency rather than a division?   Three reasons really, two commercial and one personal.

I know there’s been chatter that this year could see the end of division between digital and traditional agencies, but from experience, we’ve lost out on business due to some brands still preferring to give online business to someone they saw as a specialist.

Having said that, we have backgrounds in traditional comms and marketing and don’t believe in working in silos.   Whatever we develop will be designed to have traditional media legs as well as online ones.   In fact, ideally we want to become the lead creative agency in campaigns.

Then there are certain advantages in being able to build up our own client base.   Some clients we’ll of course share with Cow.   Others will be our own.

And from a personal point of view? I just fancied trying this all over again and concentrating on something that’s become a specialism of mine.

We like carrots, not sticks

Finally why Rabbit:

Because of the Cow link we wanted to choose an animal, but we took one that was as likely to be undomesticated as live on a farm.   Then there are the obvious Internet connotations with ‘rabbit, rabbit’ and ‘breed like.’

Want to find out more? Check us out online, follow us on Twitter, or send us a mail – hello at therabbitagency.com….and, oh,  did I mention exactly how excited we are about all this?!

Image – Svadilfari

Bob Knorpp of the Beancast (which I’m on tonight) alerted me to this statement by Yates Buckley of Unit 9, made to coincide with last week’s Creativity and Technology event at London’s Saatchi Gallery:

“If you are a creative and don’t know about technology you’ll be out of a job soon.”

It’s a statement that I imagine touched a lot of raw nerves as it zeroes in on the debate raging in agencies today.  In fact, I’d point to another quote made by Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade the other month that nicely encapsulates it.   Greenslade talked about the fundamental divide between those who think the digital media revolution is transformative, or whether it’s tactical.

Substitute the word marketing in place of journalism here:

The split (in the pro and anti camps) is both philosophical and practical.

“There are those (with whom I agree) who believe that the digital media revolution is in the process of transforming journalism and those (such as Murdoch and most traditional newspaper publishers) who believe the net is merely another platform rather than an instrument of transformation.”

It’s a complex argument, but the truth as always surely lies somewhere in between.

I tell the 20-something execs at Cow that the skills set they’ll need in ten years time is different to the skills set they have now (and we have a responsibility to help them get there).   That’s due to consumers, and so agencies, straddling the old and new media divide, meaning that you still need to know about the old way of doing things while also embracing the new.

Beth Harte in fact expresses it perfectly in her post ‘PR 2.0 will double your workload‘.

Perhaps the voice of sanity in all this comes from Iain Tait of Poke, an agency that’s squarely at the forefront of digital marketing.   Iain talks about the dangers of getting carried away with technology for the sake of it:

“Now that we’ve been invited to the party and have money, influence and power, I worry we are like a bunch of kids with the keys to the sweetshop.   Do we need all that?  People like things that are free and simple – money likes stuff that is slick.   Building big things is fun and impresses people, but it has no value.”

Image – Sammy0716