I tweeted about Check.in a few weeks back after seeing some stuff on the BrightKite blog.
TechCrunch has early access and posted some glowing tidbits that, as usual, kicked off a flurry of other posts related to Checkin’s potential impact.

When you load it up, the browser asks for permission to pull your coordinates, and a few seconds later it pulls up a list of venues it believes you’re near. When you click on one, the app does some “magical matching” to find the venue across the various services."

‘Fatigue” seems to be the description “du jour” when describing the process of checking in, and if you’ve used any of the existing services like BrightKite, Gowalla or Foursquare, you can relate. Not to mention it always seems a little rude to stop in your tracks after a handshake and tell someone to hang on while you check-in. But I digress.

As far as Check-in’s impact, you can see Henry Blodget’s speculation in the embed I included. He hints that the ones to beat — Gowalla and Foursquare — could be relegated to a “dumb pipe” status should something like Check-in catch on. He cites TweetDeck’s use of Twitter’s API as an example.

But I think his second point is a clearer indication of where things are headed. With business accounts looming  in the backdrop from Twitter and an improving Google Buzz, both companies pose a much more potent risk to location-based app providers. Twitter, for example, may tread lightly when deciding whether to add a similar aggregation element, but ultimately it’s a must-have.

Businesses large and small will pay for consumer analytics, especially ones that help distill online behavior and drive opt-in. Location-based services are accomplishing both of those things very well – and tied into a larger network – become even more compelling.

If Check-in does anything, besides breathe life into BrightKite, it’ll provide a clearer roadmap of  what all of us are willing to share and illuminate some of the challenges we still face with the open web and things like privacy.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

• Top Mobile Phones, Sites and Brands for 2009 [Nielsen Wire]
  I’ve owned handsets 1 and 2.
  (tags: nielsen+online mobile stats research brands)
• Understanding Social Media Using Sentiment Analysis [Eyefortravel]
  (tags: sentiment+analysis social+media+measurement social+media+monitoring)

• Measuring Social Media Marketing [New Marketing Labs]
  (tags: socialmedia business strategy consulting measurement roi metrics)

• Four Studies That Ponder the Road from Here [Futurelab]
  (tags: research sustainability CSR environment climate+change)
• 300 Case Studies of Social Media Marketing [Wendy Tarr's Blog]
  (tags: socialmedia marketing casestudies casestudy socialmediamarketing)

  

• Inside Facebook Pages [Sysomos Blog]
  "On average, a Facebook Page has 4,596 fans." — higher than I would have guessed.
   
• (tags: socialmedia facebook research analytics statistics stats sysomos fanpages)
  
• 35 social media KPIs to help measure engagement [Econsultancy]
  (tags: socialmedia business marketing analytics roi measurement metrics)

Any company that provides better ROI for media buys will certainly garner some attention these days. Peerset’s approach makes a lot of sense as another way of targeting users. The company pulls streams, profiles and other clusters of data together and applies its "targeting algorithm" to render relevant matches.

"Peerset scrapes data from millions of sites, profiles and status messages and compiles a series of word clusters. While seemingly unrelated, Grey’s Anatomy, John Mayer and Starbucks coffee are clustered together simply because a large number of users have expressed interest in all three topics."

The time it would take to pull together this type of data would seem to easily justify the expenditure. You could hire an analytics or media services firm to try and aggregate this type of data but in the end you still have to make sense of it — which brings you back to algorithms, metadata and other analytical tools. That’s a big reason I like Peerset’s approach.

As the infrastructure and search have improved, Twitter has become the go-to site for real time media. But can the company make a Facebook-like leap?

That got me thinking (along with all the great questions and reTweets) about the future of the microblogging service.

One of the comments astutely points out that the real-time web is opening up quickly and might not provide the advantage some imagined for Twitter. That’s valid, but I think one of the real questions will be how it evolves its roadmap for business services. I saw a story yesterday that claimed 20% of all Tweets mentioned a brand. That’s big right? It’ll only be big if Twitter can monetize things like that with the right mix of web data, (analytics/monitoring) advertising and other services that can influence or facilitate online and offline commerce. The other X factor is guessing how much revenue lies in the Twitter ecosystem. What if it had an AppStore?

Having said that, don’t discount the brand equity of being the world’s hottest internet company. Is that worth a billion bucks?

Image by luc legay via Flickr

• How social networks are transforming TV – Anthill Magazine
  "..only the conversation will be one to one. It’s measurable and testable. It’s direct marketing for TV."
  (tags: internet web+tv social+networking advertising ondemand interactive+tv)
• Common Sense Media Group: Twitter: The Move from “Why” to “What” to “How” and soon to “Where”
  Good thoughts on Twitter’s evolution.
  (tags: CSMG twitter social+networking social+technology digital+strategy online+marketing)
• Digital Execs Say Metrics Are in ‘Crisis’
  "too many publishers fixated on driving up the metrics that advertisers care about — such as page views — without considering their sites’ user experience"
  (tags: metrics online+marketing online+advertising media+buying media+strategy measurement)
• Needed: A National Innovation Agenda – BusinessWeek
  "It is more important to network today’s innovators from every imaginable silo, sector, and discipline in purposeful ways."
  (tags: innovation public+policy technology collaboration)
• Sears and Kmart Try the Social Media ‘My’ – MarketingVOX
  Lots of debate these days on the right approach for aggregating reviews and other UGC content.
  (tags: user+generated+content customer+reviews social+media social+commerce)
• Corporate Re-brand: (Good Case Study on Scotts.com)
  "The sites were organized around the way the company operated rather than around the way consumers thought about gardening or how they operated online."
  (tags: scotts online+marketing digital+strategy brand)

Image via Wikipedia

• 10 Tips for Marketers From the CDC’s Swine Flu Response – Ad Age Digital
  "We can learn from the ‘big, fat, impenetrably slow and bureaucratic’ agencies out there. Suck it up and take action."
  (tags: marketing socialmedia twitter communications online cdc swineflu crisis crisis+management)

• Does Anyone Trust the Media? – eMarketer
  "people now trust the information they get from online news—roughly to the same degree as news from television and information from friends."
  (tags: socialmedia marketing media blogging research news emarketer wordofmouth)
• Social Media Ad Metrics
  "This document specifies standard definitions for Social Media Metrics."
  (tags: IAB metrics social+media digital+media measurement advertising)

Image via CrunchBase

• Corporate Blogs and ‘Tweets’ Must Keep SEC in Mind
  Blogs and Twitter posts need governance too.
  (tags: twitter corporate+blogging SEC compliance corporate+communications)
• GO2WEB20 Blog: 10 Services with Realtime Functionality
  Zemanta, Monniter and TwitZap are my top 3.
  (tags: web2.0 tools realtime friendfeed twitter internet information+management monitoring)

Image by Esthr via Flickr

• BriefingsDirect Analysts list top 5 ways to cut enterprise IT costs …

Analyst guests make 5 recommendations for cutting enterprise IT costs amid the economic downturn.

Related articles

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Cathy Taylor has a good pitch for killing the focus group in her recent Social Media Insider column. I’m not ready to say R.I.P. to Focus Groups just yet, but clearly there’s more to listening than rounding up your perceived target market and observing them behind close doors. I laughed a bit looking at the quotes below, especially the one describing the Sci-Fi Channel’s recent re-branding effort.

"The testing we’ve done has been incredibly positive." -David Howe, president of the Sci Fi Channel to The New York Times on Monday about its proposed new name, Syfy. So far, a post on Sci Fi’s own blog about the new name contains more than 900 mostly negative comments, and has more than 1500 Diggs.

"What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research." -Neil Campbell, president, Tropicana, North America to The New York Times upon pulling its revamped packaging in February after consumer complaints.

Related articles

Image via Wikipedia

• PR firm launches Twendz: A Twitter trend analyzer
  Good move by WagEd to move further into the digital domain. I like the customer acquisition strategy – clients want to see digital savvy.
• Report highlights increased demand for online marketing agencies
  Almost 7 out of 10 companies are striving for more pull interactions from things like social networks.
   

Hat tip to the Twecosystem (again) for pointing me to this gem from David Meerman Scott speaking at the Inbound Marketing Summit earlier this month. He was asked “How do I make the case to start doing inbound marketing in my organization?

Rightfully so, he takes a jab at some of the traditional ROI questions and compares them to real-world situations.

“What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?” and “What’s the ROI of the army of Guatemalan landscapers now raking the bushes around the building?”