Last week, for example, a single checkin on Foursquare by The Wall Street Journal pushed notifications to approximately 2,600 phones during the Times Square evacuation scare. Clearly, Foursquare can no longer be considered just a game.
With all the recent hype, journalists and media companies are itching to find their own ways to use location-sharing apps to bolster their trade. You can get started with the following seven tips, then share your own ideas in the comments.
1. Finding Targeted Contacts
Additionally, when you check in at a venue on Foursquare, you can see who else is there at that moment. Blogger Paul Bradshaw recently wrote about serendipitously finding a contact via checkin:
“David Nikel, a political candidate in Birmingham, ‘checked in’ at Birmingham New Street train station 5 minutes after I had. Although I hadn’t ‘shared’ my check in via Twitter, because Nikel did, his automatically generated tweet said that I was there too. This alerted me and led to us meeting.”
2. Breaking News
How many followers were actually in Times Square and diverted from harm’s way by the Journal’s checkin? Probably not very many. But the incident illustrates the potential Foursquare has for passing along urgent news updates as the service grows.
Zach Seward, The Wall Street Journal outreach editor, said that Foursquare works particularly well for breaking news that is specific to a location. After initially partnering with Foursquare on its local New York badges and tips, the organization was looking to further explore the breaking news potential.
“Foursquare, of course, is all about your location, so we thought it could work really well for news that’s important to people in the vicinity, but less important to people who aren’t close to the action,” Seward said. He makes the point that it wouldn’t work as well for, say, coverage of a presidential election.
So what did the Journal decide was the best way to notify its followers on Foursquare? Seward said they had initially considered breaking news in the form of a tip, but ultimately decided it would be more effective notifying them through a checkin.
A user has to be your “friend” in order to see your shouts, meaning he’ll have to authorize you to see his whereabouts before you can send him updates. Clearing that privacy hurdle might be a challenge for journalistic organizations, but once they do, the app can be very useful for news delivery.
3. Sourcing Information From Tips
4. Learning About People You’re Profiling
If you can get your profile subjects to agree to “friending” you on Foursquare, it’s easy to monitor their activity and get a clear picture of their habits. And every Foursquare checkin is essentially an invite for friends to join up somewhere, which makes dropping in and observing profile subjects and their pals in their natural habitats a piece of cake. Call it “opt-in stalking.”
5. Discovering and Monitoring Trends
For example, if there are suddenly many people checking in to a restaurant that was never popular before, a reporter might learn that it’s because the place reopened after renovations. That might be a newsworthy lead to follow.
6. Publishing and Distributing Content
Individual journalists can provide similar value by offering their expertise in tips and linking to content that they have produced for more information.
7. Crowdsourcing News and Rewarding Readers with Badges
One idea is to reward users for contributing to crowdsourcing projects. For example, offer readers badges when they send in news updates surrounding local events or locations. You could even develop a system that rewards different levels of contribution (contributor, freelancer, reporter, senior correspondent, etc.). This could be a fantastic way to get readers involved in news gathering, keep them engaged, and reinforce positive feelings about your brand.
The Wall Street Journal, once again at the forefront of Foursquare experimentation, recently launched a badge campaign that rewards readers for checking into places the Journal has recently written about. We’ll see in time how well it encourages user engagement with the brand.
Conclusion
Foursquare can be a fantastic tool for journalists, but it isn’t the only location-based social network that news organizations can leverage for sourcing and reporting. Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, Where, Hot Potato, and several others are absolutely worth monitoring as well.
It should also be noted that as early as late May, Facebook will introduce a new feature which will allow users to tag their location in their status. With Facebook’s huge existing user base, this will be a big development in the location space, and something journalists should definitely have an eye on.
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