jill/txt

I tried out Foursquare as we were showing Rod around North Hordaland a couple of days ago. Foursquare is a location-aware social network and game - you use your GPS-enabled phone to “check in” at interesting places, you can leave tips about interesting stuff to do for other people to see, and you can collect points and earn badges by checking in at particular places. Although every tenth Norwegian apparently now has an iPhone, there aren’t too many Foursquare users, it seems. I was the first person to tag Bergen Public Library, for instance. And we drove along the coast an hour or two out of Bergen with nary a tag in site - until we got to Mongstad Oil Refinery, which had a mayor and everything. (As an aside, there’s a great photo op at the parking lot between the industrial park and the actual refinery at Mongstad - awesome postindustrial views there. Someone should shoot their wedding photos there.) I tagged Håkon the Good’s burial mound, the coastal heath museum and a good restaurant we found tucked away by the waterside - but I would have LOVED to see other peoples’ finds as we drove around exploring.

Anyway, I poked around a bit to see what there is for Chicago, since we go there pretty often. Turns out ExploreChicago has set up a whole game on Foursquare where you can earn specific badges in Foursquare by checking in at specified locations. Here’s their Foursquare profile. I’m thinking of going for the hotdog badge.

Sadly, I won’t be using Foursquare when I visit Chicago, because of exorbitant data roaming prices. Unless some of those hotdog restaurants have wifi, I suppose.

I would love for the Norwegian tourist board to launch a Foursquare campaign (or several!) - but those data roaming prices mean that foreign visitors simply wouldn’t want to use it. However, Norwegians would - and if digi.no is right that every tenth Norwegian has an iPhone, there’d surely be a market for it.

I gave a talk on social media this morning for Vestnorsk personalforum, an organisation for Human Resources professionals. Although I’ve not blogged much since Benjamin was born (he’s three months old and giggles!) I’ve been reading and thinking and I really enjoyed putting some new slides together. I tried to record my voice during the presentation to make a “slidecast”, but the synchronisation of audio and slides isn’t working right now and my voice is missing so many gestures that I probably should have rerecorded the whole thing specifically for a web audience. Maybe next time.

Right after me, Anders Øvre-Johnsen spoke about Adecco Norway’s ambitious uses of social media. Anders is the manager of Adecco Norway, and is clearly very savvy about social media. Their most obvious success so far was a social media campaign for a freshly developed iPhone app they made (a job search app since they’re a temp agency) - they made a simple YouTube video of the manager demoing the app and got 100 employees to talk about the app in their various social networks - Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on. The push worked brilliantly, and the app was in the top 25 downloaded apps in Norway for a few weeks - not a bad achievement at all. Interesting, they were able to compare this success to a more traditional ad campaign during the winter olympics. In this campaign, no social media was leveraged but they ran traditional and extremely expensive full page newspaper ads - and for a lot more money, they got far fewer downloads of their app.

Here’s my slides and audio. Next time I’m definitely going to start more forcefully - there’s some shocking umming and ahing at the beginning there, but it gets steadier after a minute or two. I’m actually not quite sure that I like audio with the slides - what do you think?