Ok Ok,

 It's time for me to embrace the hype and join Foursquare, so if you any of you are foursquare users in the NYC area get in touch and help me get started by finding clool places to check in. If you not familiar with Foursquare check out this great article on Mashable.

 Foursquare is a Location Based Microblog network like Brightkite except witha large game built around check-in at different locations, and checking in regularly which makes the experience for engaging which solves the problem of "why should I check in?"

 In the mashable articles they introduce the idea of creating customer incentives to check-in at your location, which introduced the alrger idea of creating a reason for customers to embrace your social media tools, which in turn increase customer engagement with your brand.

 Whether it be rewards customers for retweets, or rewarding them for creating photos and videos around their brand, there's a way to use any social media platform to engage your audience, and you missing the boat if your not doing so.

- Alex Merced

Hey Guys,

 I finally disabled all the automation on my main twitter account, http://www.twitter.com/alexmerced , orignally when I set it up I wasn't much of a twitter user so it seemed a good idea to keep up with it using auto follow and auto reply. although what soon happened was more of a hastle than it was worth.

 Cause of the autofollow feature, bots of many other marketing "experts" would add me knowing they'd get auto followed sending me and automated message which wasn't so much a big deal, but my twitter stream got quickly congested with people I could care less about, which made it not so much fun to read and hard to participate in the conversation.

 So the bottomline, auto follow is a bad idea unless the twitter account in question is soley a broadcast tool, but more and more I'm using my account to communicate with friends so It became a hinderance.

 So I still think the auto respond is not a bad feature, long as you make sure to still converse using your account, but auto follow opens a can of worms.

- Alex Merced

Hey Guys,

 I just wanted to continue my series on different microblogging platforms, and today I want to talk about Brightkite.com. You can view my Brightkite Profile Here. So let's talk about what makes brightkite very interesting.

With Brightkite I can still make my typical microblog posts like I can on twitter and the other platforms I've talked about but I can use GPS and pinpoint the location of what's occuring in my posts. A really killer feature is being able to click on a location and see all the brightkite posts that were posted from that location.

This is useful in many ways:

- It creates ways to connect with people in your local market and see what they are talking about to the very location

- You can use the features to create contests and event that can motivate people to create messages from a central place and in result create brand community on top of the in general conversations online

- If you get kidnapped but still have your phone you can post your location...

- This could also be useful in conjunction with forming meetup groups as a way for people to check in with  each other at a central location

So brightkite has some killer features that will definetly probably give it some bigger wings as more people adopt smartphone technology and post from activity to activity.

Hello,

 Here we go with some more discussion of Microblog platforms, marketing, and reconiling the two. So far we've discussed the mother of microblogging platforms, twitter, and the different ways you can use it to reinforce or define brands, and we've discussed how to use Ping.fm to distribute information and meda to several microblog platforms. Today, I want to discuss creating your own microblog community using the white label solution, ShoutEm.com.

 Think of shout'em as a Ning for Twitter, like Ning is great for creating niche communities, so is shout'em so don't think your going to take out twitter but if you have a topic with an active comunity this might be a choice community platform (vs. a Ning Network, or a forum)

Like I've created CreativeNYC, which is a microblogging community for people in the NYC area to post events and discuss the arts. What are some of the benefits going this route for your website or brands community home?:

- The ease of Microblogging is a lot less intimidating than a full fledged network or forum

- Integration of facebook connect and other universal ID standards makes it easier for your target community to participate

- since twitter doesn't have a groups feature, this has the same effect and as well has built in photo a geolocation features to enrich the microblogging experience.

Now you do you need to create your own small community outside of an already established platform all depends on the dynamics of your target market, but if your dealing with a market sophistcated enough to move beyond the usual spots and go to a more private space for a deeper conversation of the brand or topic, then this is one way to create that private space.

An active passionate community that you hold the key too, in the end is every marketers dream :).

- Alex Merced

Hey Guys,

 In the next volume on my series on marketing using microbloging in your marketing communication is ping.fm. Now now only is the crafting the message important in marketing but also it's distribution ("place" in yur marketing mix) and this is where ping.fm excels.

 What makes ping.fm sucha  great service it let's post to many microblogs, bloging services, and social networks with extreme ease and creates a great way to distribute your marketing message, the pitfall is since your broadcasting the message to so many places at the same time you miss out on any conversations that may occur in some of the locations you broadcast too.

 This is why I always make sure you have your target spots where you really develop a community of (Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, BrightKite are my favs) in which you use site specific clients to manage, but still use ping.fm to get you message everywhere else you can't be all the time.

 Ping.fm has now also added support for photos, support for social bookmarking services like Delicious and Diigo and is constantly adding new aspects to it's service, making probably one of the most powerful distribution tools online.

 In my next post I'm going to talk about particular service that has ping.fm funtionality, Shoutem.com, which let's you create your own microblog communities. Enjoy!

- Alex Merced