When @gillianmckeith picked a fight last month it was interesting for two reasons: firstly, there was a massive flurry of activity on Twitter and secondly, it prompted a respected journalist to suggest that he might sue the Twitter account holder for libel (although probably not).

Incidentally – I am saying @gillianmckeith when referencing what was said on Twitter instead of Gillian McKeith because at the time of writing, it’s not 100% clear that the two are the same.

Here’s what happened in a nutshell: someone started taking the piss out of Gillian McKeith because they felt that her PhD is not a 'real' one (whatever that means). They made reference to a chapter in a book by the medical doctor, broadcaster and writer, Ben Goldacre in which he discusses Ms McKeith.

There then appeared the following Tweet from @gillianmckeith: “How sad a life to enjoy reading lies about another by an ass who makes money from pharmaceutical giants.” 

The result? Well Ben Goldacre asked her to contact him and, according to the BBC, asked for her to retract the statement by saying: “Bad Science by Ben Goldacre is not lies”

What then followed, again in a nutshell, is a series of bizarre distancing by @gillianmckeith and the Gillian McKeith website . They removed any mention of being able to follow her on Twitter from her website. Apart from they didn’t really. The last time I looked, the code for following her is still in the source – it’s just been commented out. (For those of you who don’t code, that basically means that the bit of code has some parenthesis around so it is not shown on the page, but at the same time hasn’t been removed completely – the idea being it can easily and quickly be reinstated at a later stage if needs be). @gillianmckeith also started posting statements such as “Do you believe this is real twitter site for the GM?” (sic). And since 14th July…. nothing at all and all her followers and all those she is following have disappeared. It's as though none of this ever happened. Apart from it did.

The point here, is not whether Gillian McKeith has a ‘real’ PhD. (If I were her and felt that my professional integrity was being rubbished publicly, I'd be pretty cross too). But the way in which it was handled. For me it always comes down to transparency.

Ideally, she (or whoever had access to the Twitter account) should have thought a bit harder before writing a potentially libellous statement. It seems there is still a sense that Twitter, because of its immediate and informal nature is not something that is taken seriously. But a person is libelled if someone discredits them in their trade, business or profession. It makes no difference whether that’s done in a newspaper, book or online.

Once the damage was done, she (or those advising her) should have explained her position - if for no other reason than just wanting to clear things up - (did she say it, or did someone else posing as her, was it a simple mistake), apologised if necessary, retracted the statement and above all, been seen to be transparent and open. Instead, according to several commentators, the whole event has been denied, deleted and ignored.

Maybe denial works in the real world, but in the online world, it’s very hard to totally delete anything you have done or said. It’s potentially there forever. And how much less of a story would this have become if the response had been forthcoming? Perhaps people would have had some sympathy. After all, we’re all human and we’ve all said things in haste we later regretted.

Whilst completing my masters in IT and Marketing in Paris two years ago I wrote a dissertation on mobile social networks and their marketing opportunities (you can read it here although it is in French...). I was convinced that the meeting of mobile and location based social networks would become THE next big thing and help businesses to deeply connect with consumers. Today, I am glad and not so surprised to see location-based services going mainstream!

Location-based services are defined as applications delivering relevant information to users on their mobile depending on where they are based. The LBS market is burgeoning with two types of players:

1. The check-in based companies like Foursquare, Where.com, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Rummble or Yelp... These are the ones currently leading the way. Just to give you an idea, Foursquare reached the 1 million members in April and it appears they have just crossed the 2 million users mark yesterday!
2. The more established players like Twitter, Facebook and Google have recently entered the market as they see location-based services as a massive revenue generator in the future. GigaOm estimates the potential value of the location-based services market could be worth up to $20 billion (see infographics here) and according to Juniper Research, revenues from mobile location-based services market are expected to exceed $12 billion by 2014! These revenues will mainly come from advertising, retail coupons, business sponsorships and local search marketing which will be exciting news for brands.

Whilst mobile marketing has been around for a while with SMS, MMS, banner ads etc. it has never really taken off before because it was targeted for users and lacked that special social element. However, the improvement of the wireless carriers' network infrastructure (3G), as well as the increasing proliferation of internet and GPS-enabled smartphones combined with the need for consumers to always be hyper-connected has led to a promising future for mobile advertisers. Location-based services use specific location information for delivering the right message to the right person at the right place AND time. The consumer only receives information relevant to him which should engage and encourage interaction with advertisers. Location-based services are opening up a range of new marketing possibilities improving experiences and relationships between people and businesses.

An example of location-based service: Foursquare

Foursquare is a free game available on a variety of mobile platforms. Once you start using the service on the go, you are presented with a list of locations around you and the whole point of the “game” is to check-in to broadcast your location in real-time at the various public venues you visit each day to your inner circle of friends, family and colleagues. The location can be anything from bars, train station, restaurants or work. If you can’t find a venue, you are invited to add it and you are rewarded for your crowdsourcing effort. You can also create notes/reviews for others about the venues like promotions, recommendations or tips. Every time you check-in to a venue, you are awarded a number of points based on how many times you have come there. The more often you do that in the same location the higher you are ranked in the leader board. You can also unlock badges such as newbie, adventurer, explorer, local, or superstar. The user who checks-in more than anyone else becomes “mayor” of that location. Mayorship encourages real competition between users and is very addictive. You can check Louis Gray’s article to see if you are on your way of being a Foursquare addict :)

So how can you tap the power of the “check-in” for your business?

Specials Offers

Last year some venues started rewarding their Foursquare mayors with special deals like free cocktails instant discounts. Foursquare loved the idea and realised that the check-ins were not only benefitting users in their quest for badges and mayorship but also businesses by giving them a chance to engage better with their loyal customers! They therefore built support for this type of deal and started offering Foursquare Specials for business. This is where Foursquare gets interesting as a marketing platform, especially for retailers selling physical merchandise. You can claim your venue from a foursquare venue page and once your business is verified you can start offering specials to your customers. There are 4 types of Specials:

• Mayor Specials: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days). Example: "Foursquare has deemed you the Mayor? Enjoy a free order of French fries!"
• Check-in Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times. "Foursquare says you've been here 10 times? That's a free drink for you!"
• Frequency-based Specials: are unlocked every X check-ins. "Foursquare users get 20% off any entree every 5th check-in!"
• Wildcard Specials: always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the Special. "Show us your Foursquare Swarm badge and get a free drink!"

You can also get Foursquare to provide you with some window clings so you can market your Specials to customers in your venue. Foursquare also provides you with free real-time stats about your venue: most recent visitors, most frequent visitors, time of the day people check in, total number of unique visitors etc. Valuable information for every business trying to learn more about their customers and track their behaviour patterns and habits.

This is a real win/win situation, on one hand users get engaged into a free and friendly competition over the mayorship of your venue and potentially get the chance to win freebies and discounts. On the other hand, as a business you get the chance to monitor and identify your customers, give them special treatment and encourage frequent visits and loyalty!

Some other thoughts on how to leverage Foursquare

1. Give tips to your customers – it is a good idea to leave advice in the tips section. This could be some info on a new menu item, an upcoming event or tip on how to avoid busy times. For example the History Channel has started using Foursquare to give its users tips at various venues around the United States to coincide with its show, America The Story Of Us.
   
   
   
   
   In the same way, Louis Vuitton is partnering with Foursquare to offer users tips on their favourite locations around London. Check some of their tips on the Louis Vuitton account
2. Create your very own official badge for your business - Starbucks created a Barista badge for caffeine addicts which you can get if you check in at 5 different Starbucks.
   
   
   
   
   Bravo, Fashion Victim badge by Marc Jacobs for the Fashion Week 2010, Time Out - Happy Hour (New York) Badge, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and some cities like Chicago are also good examples. But don’t be intimidated by the big names cited above, it doesn’t matter what size your business is; you could do the same thing to promote your product or service and engage with your customers.
3. Listen and learn from people’s comments – remember the user now has the power to talk and say what he thinks. Don’t ignore this and leverage Foursquare to gather users' feedback and show you are listening and improving. You could even use the ‘to do’ list facility to show your customers what you are going to improve.
4. Hold an event or a party for customers to earn the Swarm Badge – 50+ people are also checked-in here - it's a foursquare flash mob! The best example is probably AJ Bombers restaurant which hosted an event for customers to help them earn Swarm and I’m on a Boat badges (difficult badges to obtain). They managed to attract 161 foursquare users at the same time and their typical Sunday sales more than doubled, with an increase of 110% that day! You can’t do much better in terms of harnessing the power of location-based services. By using Foursquare, this restaurant owner not only achieved record sales but also managed to build a sustainable and real-time word-of-mouth which will probably have an impact on long-term sales as well.
   
   
   
   
   Read the full story on Hubspot blog
5. Think outside the box... The only limitation is your imagination! – Early this year Jimmy Choo, the fashion shoe retailer used Foursquare in a very interesting way organising a real-time treasure hunt around London via the location-based service for the launch of it's new trainer range. The idea was simple and fun, the audience was hugely engaged and a lot of PR was generated.

Whatever your current digital marketing plan is, don’t underestimate the power of location-based services. Unlike the current social media marketing activities, services like Foursquare and Gowalla are able to bring to life online and offline relationships and experiences to unlock a city’s true treasures. So, are you now ready to check-in?

Further reading:

• Nice Slideshare presentation - How Foursquare Helps Consumers and Business Owners
• Check out some more examples - Ten Foursquare marketing campaigns and 21 Unique Location Examples from Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, and MyTown
• If you still don’t understand why people are checking-in, this article could help you out - Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks
• Some more exciting news coming from Foursquare HQ last week - Foursquare Launches Location Layers - This is Big and Foursquare Unlocks ‘$20 Million in Funding’ Badge

Brizzly is a popular third-party Twitter & Facebook interface, built by Thing Labs, that launched in 2009. We caught up with them at the recent Chirp Twitter conference in San Francisco and demoed our Webcam Snapper application - which they loved! (a demo of the Snapper in our Twitbooth website is in the video above)

So without further ado they bought the widget and integrated it straight into Brizzly. So far it has proved to be a hit with the users as well.

This is the second large platform we have integrated Snapper with after White Label Dating in Autumn 2009. We are also talking to the major Twitter photo sharing websites as well so stay posted for more updates soon!

South by South West in Austin, Texas is the largest web technology event in the world. I had been sponsored by the UK Digital Mission to go there and launch DASH our web app product for streamlining the process of setting businesses up online. Despite the global recession the event has grown rapidly over the last few years from several thousand to 15 000 delegates. This was the first time the event had taken over the entirety of the ACC - Austin's gargantuan conference centre.

Before I went I had a vision of distributing thousands of flyers, talking briefly to hundreds of eager new users desperate to blog and tweet about my stunning new app and returning victorious with a database full of new DASH clients. As you can probably tell I am normally the guy building the tools for other people to go out to market with. This was my first experience of product marketing and I was in at the deep end.

Unsurprisingly I wasn't the only guy out there with something to sell. In fact I think virtually every tech company I could name had a presence there and they were chucking money at it. The trade show felt like a busy Souk with every trick in the book (free t-shirts, Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, booze, celebrity endorsement) being employed to grab the attention of the delegates. Additionally this was a festival of learning, most people were here on their own time and money, so likely to be a little resistant to direct sales unless I was wearing hot pants and handing out beers.

By the end of Day 1 I had given out 10 cards and done 5 lengthy demos. Plan A - Connect directly to end users - Scrapped.

Practicing what I preach a little more I decided to try and target a selection of key influencers and journalists. The poster boy for the start your own business crowd (DASH's primary audience) is a guy called Gary Vaynerchuk. The problem is that everybody wants a piece of him. Whilst I chased him from room to room I noticed a few regular faces, his support staff and PA, and although I actually got to my man in the end it will be those guys that I try and schmooze on twitter now.

I then started to look at the fringes of the conference and made appearances at events called "core conversations" where audience participation is encouraged and the speakers are the up and coming Garys of tomorrow rather than the social media celebrities of today. I used my insights as a web designer to contribute my thoughts on branding and technology which built a platform for talking about DASH. At the end of those sessions I was handing out 50 cards a go. (I should give a shout out here to the fantastic Ian Sanders for inviting me to talk in his Unplan Your Business session

I began to use the same tactics with journalists at the conference by effectively trading my personal commodity - content - in exchange for plugs on DASH. Look out for me on Techfluff.tv and Computer Weekly shortly!

Finally good old fashioned networking at the parties created some of the best opportunities. By not overtly thrusting DASH down peoples' necks and bonding with them personally I am pleased to say we will now be working with one of the world's top interface designers (who is also pals with most of the bay area startups), an advisor to angel investors who is bored on gardening leave and feels like a challenge and the promise of a few mentions on the larger tech blogs.

From a business point of view the success of this trip will be judged by moments in time rather than hours of hustle.

We are really pleased to announce the re-launch of our popular Twitter application - Twilert - at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin Texas as part of the UK Digital Mision.

Twitter search alerts via email

Twilert is a Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service... well any keyword you like really! In a nutshell, its like Google Alerts, only on Twitter.

Why the need to re-launch?

Last year Twilert was unfortunately a victim of its own success. It was featured in publications such as Twitter Marketing for Dummies, numerous high profile blogs, as well as being regularly mentioned on Twitter itself and it began to hit issues scaling against the demand of the number of users we had. Sadly we had to switch the service off and rethink the architecture.

The platform has been completely re-built to perform much better and scale efficiently against the Twitter API. We have also developed a more user friendly web interface to help you manage your Twilerts and add new ones really easily.

Have a look for yourself! www.twilert.com

If you have any suggestions or feedback please feel free to get in touch on support@twilert.com and we will do our best to help you out. Thanks to all our users for the support so far and we hope you enjoy using the new service.

"Build software for yourself

A great way to build software is to start out by solving your own problems. You'll be the target audience and you'll know what's important and what's not. That gives you a great head start on delivering a breakout product.” Excerpt from Getting Real by 37 Signals

It’s not exactly a tough concept to get your head around but the best businesses are usually born from a problem rather than a brainstorm on “What the World needs now” (is love sweet love?)

At Codegent we have worked with a lot of start-up companies and without fail their first task is to setup email services (we use Google Apps like everyone with a sane mind should), a holding webpage with sign-up form, Blog, Twitter account, Facebook page etc. so that the client can start pimping their hot new idea. Gary Vaynerchuk discusses the need for this in his fantastic book Crush It! 

Recently I had done this work for Tepilo & BIMA and I was moaning to Luke, our technical director, that it takes me ages to do, is a bit fiddly and that surely there should be a faster way of doing it? With all the DNS tweaks, server config & testing it can easily be a day and a half before we are all sorted.

Fast forward a few 4am-ers later and Luke invented DASH – Steamlined Online Business Setup.

What is DASH then?

DASH is a Web Application that facilitates the registration, setup and integration of all the online services you would typically want when launching a new venture. Of course you can choose to use as much or as little of it as you want – one size certainly does not fit all. The process ends with the generation of a basic but fully integrated website (Gallery powered by Flickr, Videos courtesy of YouTube, Subscriptions via Mail Chimp etc.) that you can content manage and manipulate as much as you like.

How long does it take? 10 minutes

Cost? $90

Here is a handy list of (some) initial features in DASH

• Domain Registration (or configuration of existing domain)
• Google Apps Core Services – Email, Calendar, Docs
• Social Media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Rich Media – Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo
• Content Managed Website & Blog – Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous
• Email Subscription & Mailshots – Mail Chimp, Camapaign Monitor
• Monitoring & Optimisation – Google Analytics, Alerts, Twilert, Feedburner

I could go on telling you about storage, backup, surveys, e-commerce, event management, accounting… but I hope you get the picture.

If you want to be one of the first users to use DASH (we will be giving away some free accounts) then please sign up on getdash.com. I will be launching the product as part of the Digital Mission to SXSWi in Texas this March. Email me if you want to hook up for a coffee, chat and sneak preview.

“When you solve your own problem, you create a tool that you're passionate about. And passion is key. Passion means you'll truly use it and care about it. And that's the best way to get others to feel passionate about it too.” (another one from Getting Real by 37 Signals)

I am very excited to announce a new business venture for codegent in 2010. We have partitioned the agency, focusing a small team of developers in our Bangkok office on building web applications.

Our ambition is to launch around four apps this year with a target audience of Entrepreneurs, Digital Marketers and fellow Developers. You can find out more on why we are doing this and what our initial ideas, such as DASH, are on codegent.com/apps. I will also be blogging and twittering frequently as things begin to take shape in the next few months so do keep an eye out for more.

STOP PRESS!

The apps business has already received a major helping hand in its quest for world domination by being chosen to represent the best of the UK Digital Community as part of the Digital Mission to South by South West Interactive in Austin, Texas. To quote the Press Release:

"39 of the UK’s leading digital companies have been selected for the second annual Digital Mission to South by South West interactive (SXSWi), taking place in Austin, Texas from 11-17th March 2010. [...] The successful companies were chosen from over 120 submissions by an advisory board of industry experts drawn from the UK community including: VC’s, export specialists, journalists and industry pundits to take part in the Digital Mission to SXSWi."

We would like to thank chinwag and UK Trade & Investment (one of our clients!) for making this possible. Personally I can't wait to get out there to start marketing our work to the wider world.