Social Media | Nate Riggs Blog | Content Marketing and Social Media for Business

Location-Based Marketing: 5 Critical Lessons from Last Night’s Retail Experience

Sarah and I are watching the skies for storks ready to drop dancing peanuts any day now. So last night, we made a trip to one of our local Babies R Us locations in order to cash in a few gift cards we’ev received from family and friends. Since I’m a internwebz geek, I’ve gotten used to checking into retail locations on apps like Foursquare, Yelp and Facebook Places. The chance of finding a hidden deal or discount is exciting enough to keep that habit in the top of my mind Finding Location-Based Treasures As I checked into the store on Foursquare, I was immediately rewarded with a digital coupon for $25 off of a $100 purchase of clothes, shoes or accessories. Win! And, being that we had lots of baby accessories to buy, we were delighted to dig up this little location-based treasure. To our disappointment, the deal was bunk and we never received our $25 discount as promised. First, the polite older lady at the checkout had never seen a customer bring in this type of deal to the counter, and frankly had absolutely no idea what Foursquare was. She did believe us though, as I was able to show her the date, address of the exact Babies R Us location we were standing in and the promise of the offer. What she couldn’t figure out was how to actually enter the deal into the cash register. And so, we waited for reinforcements… Consulting With the Store Manager After a few minutes we were greeted by the store manager. She curiously looked at the deal on my phone, puzzled in the same way the checkout clerk was. Once again, the manager had never seen this type of coupon before, but didn’t debate the legitimacy of the deal in that all the information was correct. I smiled, and explained to her [...]

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Google Plus Photos: 5 Reasons Why This G+ Feature is an Amazing Blog Tool

It’s well over a month in, and the web is still buzzing with content about Google Plus. Fascination of early adopters, most with their own blogs, has produced pages of ideas, experiments and reviews of the social network. We know that G+ is having some type of effect on our other web properties, but it’s still to early to say just what that will mean a year from now. For me, plus.google.com is now in my top five referral URL’s and a few of the posts I’ve written about Sparks and Hangouts have become some of my most popular posts in terms of traffic. What’s interesting is that in the month of July, the URL’s Google.com and plus.google.com have accounted for 28.28% of my referral traffic traffic. I’m comparing that to the 30.13% of my traffic that’s been referred from Twitter.com, Facebook.com and Hootsuite.com combined. All three of those referring URL’s have reigned supreme in my Google Analytics for the last two years. So what does that tell me then? Any way you look at it, I spend way to much time on social networks. One company now owns roughly the same amount of traffic referrals as three separate competitors. I’m spending about 1/4 the amount of time distributing content on Google Plus, and getting nearly equal traffic referrals to my blog. Everyone and their brother is still searching for information on Google Plus. The nature of my content makes sense for what I perceive the G+ crowd to be — mostly business folks, early adopters and other regular social media users. Plusers, as were now being called by some, are the folks who would tend to read my blog regularly. While I wonder if that same type of attention would be had around non-business related topic areas, it’s pretty apparent that using Google Plus as a distribution network makes [...]

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Google Plus Photos: 5 Reasons Why This G+ Feature is an Amazing Blog Tool

It’s well over a month in, and the web is still buzzing with content about Google Plus. Fascination of early adopters, most with their own blogs, has produced pages of ideas, experiments and reviews of the social network. We know that G+ is having some type of effect on our other web properties, but it’s still to early to say just what that will mean a year from now. For me, plus.google.com is now in my top five referral URL’s and a few of the posts I’ve written about Sparks and Hangouts have become some of my most popular posts in terms of traffic. What’s interesting is that in the month of July, the URL’s Google.com and plus.google.com have accounted for 28.28% of my referral traffic traffic. I’m comparing that to the 30.13% of my traffic that’s been referred from Twitter.com, Facebook.com and Hootsuite.com combined. All three of those referring URL’s have reigned supreme in my Google Analytics for the last two years. So what does that tell me then? Any way you look at it, I spend way to much time on social networks. One company now owns roughly the same amount of traffic referrals as three separate competitors. I’m spending about 1/4 the amount of time distributing content on Google Plus, and getting nearly equal traffic referrals to my blog. Everyone and their brother is still searching for information on Google Plus. The nature of my content makes sense for what I perceive the G+ crowd to be — mostly business folks, early adopters and other regular social media users. Plusers, as were now being called by some, are the folks who would tend to read my blog regularly. While I wonder if that same type of attention would be had around non-business related topic areas, it’s pretty apparent that using Google Plus as a distribution network makes [...]

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