How GroupMe Can Help Your Business?

This year’s SXSW created another must-have bright shiny object in the form of GroupMe and millions of people are grouping together and texting about it as you read this. I can hear your inner voice screaming - Another group to join? Another social channel to manage? Another community to create content for? I already use Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Groupon... How can another GROUP help me or my business?

Here's how.

Many apps add things to your fragmented digital life - more content to create, more games to play, more people to follow - GroupMe tends to simplify things by creating a useful layer on top of the way we interact already. GroupMe lets you group text/chat with a group of people on any phone. It allows people to maintain relationships in clusters and stay privately connected to friends, colleagues, family, travel groups, teammates, businesses, parent teacher associations, conference and event attendees and now brands.

Today GroupMe launched “Featured Groups” and gave us a glimpse into how they will work with brands. Brands can connect to private “Fan Clubs” and offer exclusive benefits to these intimate groups. Their  initial brand partners include MTV "Randy Jackson Presents America’s Best Dance Crew.", Oxygen “Bad Girls Club”, Bon Jovi, and the Bonnaroo and Coachella music festivals. Brands will be able to engage the private GroupMe groups by sending messages, answering fans’ questions, sharing photos or posting special promotions, among other possible activities. Sounds a lot like a Facebook page right? They say that the you will not become part of some huge group about Bonnaroo, but it will only include the people that you or your friends invite to the group. The “brand” can join your conversation and keep you all informed as needed. Imagine you are with your friends at a concert and Jon Bon Jovi himself stops by to say “hi” to just your group. For example: MTV promises that a few lucky groups will receive a "visit" each week from one of the crew members at its show "Randy Jackson Presents America’s Best Dance Crew."

In a world of millions of fans and followers GroupMe is a great way to personalize and reward your strongest advocates. Create a group for your blogger ambassadors, create a group for your exclusive media launch partners - provide intimate behind the scenes content and connection for a select group of VIP’s, create a group for clients and business contacts, the sky is the limit and public Facebook Pages are not always an option.

What do you think? Useful? Have you seen any other brands using this service well?

It’s all about incentives

While everyone these days is screaming “location, location, location”, WeReward is screaming about incentives. Their bet is that people want more than points and mayor-ships. They want cash to go along with their location based check-in’s.

Their service Sponsored Checkin™, encourages people to explore their neighborhoods and earn money for making purchases at local businesses. This allows people to earn cash while simultaneously unlocking badges and sharing experiences through their social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Keep on doing what you do, only you can get paid to do so. For all of you out there who feel a tingling of your spider senses, your feelings are correct. Yes, these are the same folks who brought you the controversial “Sponsored Tweets” and “Pay Per Post” re-branded as Social Spark.

One of the big problems with WeReward is the amount of check-ins you would have to make, to make significant cash. It’s similar to playing Skee-ball until you have enough tickets to get the prize of your dreams, which never happens! You usually go home with a plastic ring or a superball and that may not be enough to get most people to really use this service continuously.

I know we all need cash these days, but what if you could tweak the service to help raise money for local charities, communities and small businesses. If the money isn’t significant enough, we should have the ability to team up with others, to raise money in groups, for causes that we all care about. If you could be incentivized by doing good for your community and the cash is an after thought then I think we would have a REAL winner.

-

Five Friday Links

1. Has the iPhone lost its cool? (I don’t think so)2. For Facebook, the Privacy Snowball Just Keeps on Rolling 3. Jessica's "Daily Affirmation" 4. Google TV is Here 5. Who do you work for? (And who works for you?)+1 Bonus NIKE WRITE THE FUTURE - FULL LENGTH VERSION

iPad is for family

We all sit huddled together on the couch, my two year old son, my wife and I. Between us is the iPad, glowing and changing colors.

We all take our turn with Adobe Ideas, each of us building upon the others creation; it’s a collaborative effort, more like a board game, a constructive group activity with seemingly endless possibilities. We quickly change to the Eyewitness photo app from The Guardian and we can’t believe the quality of the photos and the resolution, stunning simplicity, even our son can operate it. From there, we move on to the Netflix streaming app and we watch Kipper the Dog, because once my son sees the red Netflix logo he starts chanting “Kippy, Kippy, Kippy!” He usually watches Kipper on the iMac, sitting by himself in the chair, strait up and alone, but this time we are all involved together, attentive and engaged on the couch. The intimacy that this new device creates falls into a new sociological zone. The zone is engaged family togetherness.  Your iPhone is for you, the computer is for lean forward, super focused, often hunched and cramped one on one activities and the iPad is for collaborative group sharing with friends and family. No more huddling around a desktop computer while one person holds the mouse and keyboard, this is a smooth and productive social activity. We are looking at the very beginning of a new category of digital interaction - the family social device category. A category that Microsoft has tried and tried again to get people to jump into over the years, but this time, as in the iPhone, it takes Steve Jobs to revolutionize the category and get people to buy into it.

-

Here is a list of my ten favorite iPad apps.

• NYTimes Editors Choice
• Netflix
• The Guardian Eyewitness
• Early Edition
• Zinio
• iJournaler
• Adobe Ideas
• Good Reader
• iBooks
• Free Books

What are your favorite apps and how do you use your iPad?

Archives

You can dig deeper into my past by clicking through my archives. I have decided to abstain from re-posting all of these onto this site, because I feel like this site should remain fresh and clear. For all of my activity visit my: lifestream.

-

Ideas That Spread Archive

Social Marketing Archive

Innovation Archive

Interesting Archive