At a 2009 music festival in Austin called SXSW (South by Southwest), two remarkably similar social networks were charging ahead at full speed.  Gowalla and Foursquare were both social platforms that allowed users to check in to various locations, letting other people know where they were and what they were doing. Soon, Gowalla vs. Foursquare was the biggest battle in geolocationally based social media.  However, as time went on, the two companies went in very different directions.  This guide will help you understand the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare, so that you can better anticipate how social media trends will affect companies in the future.

Gowalla vs. Foursquare: How They Began

Both Gowalla and Foursquare started as ways for people to connect with others about where they were, where they were going, and what venues they enjoyed.  If you were at a location, you could not only check in, but also see other users that were in the same place.  This allowed people to connect and gather in ways that had previously been difficult or impossible.

Gowalla vs. Foursquare: Where They Are Now

The Gowalla vs. Foursquare battle continued as the two networks gained users.  Foursquare's executives were able to form relationships with some major corporations, including Starbucks.  The Foursquare team worked on making their system capable of doing charitable donations for companies who wanted to use charity drives as a marketing campaign.

Gowalla, on the other hand, used innovative design, but could never capture as much market share as Foursquare.  As Gowalla realized that it couldn't keep up with Foursquare, it decided to use the old adage: “if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.”  It made itself into a service that could actually post location information to Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare as well as to other Gowalla users.  Gowalla's service also allowed users to see cross-platform check in activity for all of these social media platforms.

No matter what Gowalla tried, it couldn't seem to win the Gowalla vs. Foursquare traffic war.  It first became a subsidiary of Facebook and tried to exist within that social networking site.  In early 2012, Gowalla's doors closed for good, leaving Foursquare as the undisputed champion in the Gowalla vs. Foursquare war.

Gowalla vs. Foursquare: The Discount Difference

Why did Gowalla fail where Foursquare succeeded?  One of the biggest differences had to do with Gowalla being unwilling to capitalize on discounts and other types of direct marketing offered by companies.  This lack of promotions and discounts was a design choice on the part of Gowalla's design team, but resulted in businesses having fewer reasons to really make use of the service.

While both of the services offered various badges (and many critics felt that Gowalla's badges were actually more innovative—some even entitled users to real-world prizes), in 2012 the quest for badges seems to have lost its luster for many users.  Instead, it seems like most users now have gotten over the novelty of social connection and are more concerned about getting deals from the companies they shop at.

Gowalla vs. Foursquare: The Location Difference

Location, location, location is the realtor saying, and it turns out that location made a big difference to the Gowalla vs. Foursquare showdown.  Gowalla was headquartered and founded in Austin, Texas, which is a technologically well-developed and hip city.  However, Foursquare located itself in New York City.

Why did the location make such a big difference?  Because the New York City location of Foursquare made it much easier to attract an initial critical mass of users.  People tend to go to the social websites where their friends are.  This was made clear by another social networking battle—Myspace vs. Facebook.  The more users that a service has, the easier it is to attract even more.  Even a slick design couldn't save Gowalla from its poor location choice.

Gowalla vs. Foursquare: The Usability Difference

While most critics agreed that Gowalla had a beautiful interface—significantly less cluttered and more intuitive than Foursquare—Gowalla wasn't always as usable as Foursquare.  For several months, many users complained that the location requirements for Gowalla were so tight that they didn't realistically work with most contemporary GPS systems.  People had a difficult time checking into any locations except the very largest.

As Gowalla went into decline, the same critics who had praised it originally seemed to understand what had gone wrong.  Some speculated that in the Gowalla vs. Foursquare wars, Foursquare had actually wanted to connect people with their service while Gowalla used it only as a place to show off their interface and design.

Gowalla vs. Foursquare: What It Means For Marketers

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the Gowalla vs. Foursquare saga.  If you're a law firm marketing professional, you need to decide which social networks are most important for you to use, and be willing to pull the plug on services that seem to no longer be bringing in new business.  Social networks have a tendency to come and go, and it's a good idea to keep up with what's happening with them, so that you know when it has become a waste of your time to keep developing marketing campaigns for an app or website that is becoming increasingly useless as a marketing tool.

How do you know which social networks will survive?  Gowalla vs. Foursquare can give us a lot of insight in this area.  What we can learn from the Gowalla vs. Foursquare battle is that usability trumps design, every time.  No matter how beautifully designed or intuitive an interface is, it won't be able to overcome usability problems if it has a more usable competitor working in the same niche.

Gowalla also illustrates some of the patterns of social networks that are circling the drain.  When you see services expand their offerings, try to combine with other networks, and so on, you should be thinking about whether they're really growing or whether they're just getting desperate for new users.
 

Not every website marketing strategy is a winner.  In fact, many website marketing strategies that seem on first glance like they'd save you money and be effective have unforeseen negative consequences.  In this guide, we'll take a look at eight of the most common website marketing strategy mistakes that law firms make.  You'll learn why each is a mistake and how to avoid the problems that each of these website marketing strategies can cause.

Strategy #1: Letting Someone Else Make All Your Content

In the interest of expediting a website redesign, a number of law firms have had outside marketing companies making everything for them, from attorney biography pages to content about the law.  This kind of hands-off website marketing strategy is a bad one for attorneys.  It's absolutely possible to have website marketing strategies that incorporate some off-site content production, but people will also want to see a personal touch on at least some of your site.

Even if you're having someone else make a lot of your website, you should take charge of your attorney biography page.  Studies show that this is the page of your website most people are likely to visit immediately before placing a call to your firm—and that means you need to seal the deal with you, not content someone else made.  Make sure your brand image is conveyed, but also the real personality of the attorney you're writing about.  Professionalism doesn't have to come at the expense of a good sense of humor or a vivid storytelling style biographical narrative.

Strategy #2: Being a Late Adopter of New Tech and Platforms

If you keep waving off new ideas for website marketing strategies, saying that it's a fad and you'll look at it again in a year or two, remember this: in the web world, a lot of strategies really only have a useful life of a few years.  By getting in on technologies and platforms late, you risk spending money on a new marketing technique just as it's getting past its expiration date.  That's not a position that any law firm wants to be in.

Consider taking a more daring approach to your website marketing strategy this year.  Often, website marketing strategies that employ new platforms are relatively inexpensive to deploy because the user bases and costs are still smaller.  By getting in on the ground floor of a new online community, you can make sure that you're gathering up market share before your competitors even realize the place exists.

Strategy #3: Market to Everyone

The more people you'll market to, the more people will call your firm and the more cases will come in, right?  Well, not exactly.  It's incredibly difficult—and, moreover, incredibly expensive—to market to everyone.  Expensive and very popular keywords aren't a good strategy for most attorneys.  Instead, remember: you know what you're good at.  Your website marketing strategy should target the kind of people who would be interested in what you do best, not people who are unlikely to need your services.

Targeting is among the biggest website marketing strategies that too many attorneys are missing out on.  There's nothing wrong with selling to a niche instead of to the whole world.  Optimizing your site for people who are looking for your exact kind of lawyer lets you engineer a targeted website marketing strategy that will pay dividends for months or years to come.

Strategy #4: Set It and Forget It

One thing that many attorneys have started to do when they get busy is to use “set it and forget it” programs to update their social media on a regular basis.  While it's fine to set some updates, the second part of that rhyme is something you should avoid at all costs.  Never forget what you've got scheduled and coming up.  Why?  Because when companies do that, they can end up making an embarrassing faux pas when a news event happens and their pre-made content now seems to be ignoring the event or even mocking it.  This is the kind of public relations disaster that you want to avoid at all costs in your website marketing strategies.

Strategy #5: Social Media Marketing in a Hurry

To cut down on time spent making social media updates, some firms have implemented a social media strategy involving cross-posting.  This means that they're posting the exact same status update or content on all of their social media channels.  These website marketing strategies may seem to save time, but what they really do is visibly communicate with consumers who follow you on multiple websites that you don't care to take the time to really engage with social media.

Strategy #6: Eyeballing and Ballparking

Just trying to guesstimate whether a particular website marketing strategy is actually working for your company isn't enough.  You need actual analytics using real data gathered from your site visitors in order to understand when your website marketing strategies are succeeding or failing.  Estimates are notoriously inaccurate, and confirmation bias can play tricks on you if you want to believe a particular website marketing strategy is successful.

Strategy #7: Ignoring Your Competitors

If you think that you don't need to pay attention to what competing firms are doing, and that you should just run your own strategies without checking, think again.  One of the most effective ways to learn about the holes in your website marketing strategy is to do real competitor research.  Don't be afraid to learn from anyone who knows what they're doing—even if that person is a rival or competitor.

Strategy #8: Neglecting Your Offline Presence

Just because website marketing strategies are a big deal doesn't mean that they operate completely on their own.  Your offline reputation and trustworthiness matters a lot to whether people will be referred to your website.  You need to make sure that you're visible enough in your community that you're building both online and offline contacts.  Website marketing strategies work best when they also take into account your referral clients, who may be checking out your site not to decide between you and a competitor, but whether to trust a referral they've received from a friend or relative.

Building a devoted audience online is one of the best routes to a steady stream of online referrals, high search rankings, and growth even in tough economic times.  However, audience development can be difficult to do—and it only takes one or two mistakes to lose significant portions of even the most dedicated and loyal followers.  Here are seven strategies for building engaged readers who will be happy to become your brand ambassadors.

#1: Let Your Audience Know Who They're Talking To

Too many law firms try to have a neutral looking and sounding profile, and they try to make sure that their content doesn't seem to come from any person in particular, choosing to use “we” instead of “I” and so on.  This is an easy mistake to make, but the truth is that people like for their internet updates to have personality.  It's easier to let that personality shine through when your profile makes it clear who's doing your posts, whether that's an attorney or your social media professional.  Audience development can only happen when you're transparent about who's communicating with who.

#2: Don't Make Everything All About You

Nobody likes the person at the party who talks about nothing but himself—his job, his house, his kids, his pets, his political views.  But when it comes to making online profiles, too many law firms become “that guy.”  They start posting only about their achievements and accomplishments, making their Twitter account look like a brag list and their Facebook feed read like a supplement to a CV.

That's not how you want your social media accounts to look, because that's not how to do real audience development.  What kind of audience, other than the families of the attorneys working for your firm, just wants to see a list of bragworthy items?  Sure, it's fine to have the occasional shout-out about a successful case, but you should also be talking about items in the news relating to your practice area, cases in other areas of the country, and common questions and misconceptions.  If you're not actively helping other people understand what you do and what the law is, you're not doing all the audience development you could be.

#3: Be Real, And Don't Sound Like a Script

Which kind of commercial do you remember better—one with a neutral point of view that calmly tells you a list of facts, or one with personality and a real voice behind it?  The worst thing you can do for your social media brand is to make it too neutral and bland.  Audience development requires developing a brand personality that is outgoing and positive.

This also means you can't sound like a customer service script.  Too much jargon and not enough talking like a regular person will mean that your statements are simply harder to believe.  You can use technical language where it's appropriate, but talking in corporate buzzwords is a sure way to kill your audience development before it's had a chance to take off.

#4: Handle Criticism with Professionalism and Grace

One place where a lot of smaller businesses fall apart is when dealing with critique.  Criticism can actually generate fantastic opportunities for audience development, but too many attorneys squander these opportunities because they let their egos get in the way.  Forget the ego—if you make a mistake, the best thing you can do in social media is own up to it as quickly as possible and move on.  The internet has a short news cycle, and what may have seemed scandalous for a moment is quickly forgotten if a sincere apology is quick in coming.

The worst thing that you can do is personally attack the people criticizing you.  If you are receiving comments that are harassing or defamatory, you can delete these comments and even report them to the social network where they were sent, but you should never act rude to anyone.  It makes you look like you've lowered yourself to the level of your defamers, and that's a position professionals should never put themselves into.

#5: Be Careful When Making Jokes

Something that seems like a good moment of levity during a staff meeting may become offensive when it's broadcast to the public.  Make sure that any jokes you make in social media aren't inappropriate, or you could find your audience development efforts stymied.  It's fine to use humor as part of your audience development strategy, but the humor should never detract from your image as a responsible and professional person.  For example, making jokes about natural disasters should always be considered off limits—this may seem obvious, but several companies including American Eagle found out during Hurricane Sandy that people don't think hurricane jokes are very funny when people are dying, especially when the joke-makers are high and dry.

#6: Open the Floor for Questions and Discussion

When you're posting a link to your blog content or someone else's writing, don't just present the link without comment.  Describe something about it, and then open up with a relevant question for your audience to answer.  Audience development relies on creating a rapport with audience members, and this can be tricky if you're not making posts that lend themselves to comments.

By opening the floor for discussion of a question, you're also making it so that you'll have more comments than you would have otherwise.  Make sure that you have someone watching social networks so that you don't lose out on the audience development opportunities from joining in these conversations.

#7: Moderate Comments Made in Bad Faith

Don't be afraid to delete comments from a discussion if they're not adding anything productive.  Name calling and specious arguments can make people arguing in good faith feel like they're outnumbered, and you want to keep the level of discussion high.

This doesn't mean, however, that you should delete every comment that argues with someone else.  As long as the argument seems to be proceeding without anyone getting too angry, it's probably good for your audience development to let it unfold.  You may want to moderate with some factual information if either or both parties are using misconceptions to inform their views.

Foursquare is currently the #1 source for geolocation based social search, after beating out several competitors.  With 10 million users so far in the United States and a rapidly growing user base, Foursquare has received a lot of attention from marketing blogs.  In this guide, you'll learn what Foursquare blog writers have said about the app and how it's being used in 2012.  Every blog about Foursquare has a different perspective, and some of those perspectives may be biased.  We'll try to strip away some of that bias to look at major trends through the eye of Foursquare blog writers.

Foursquare's Biggest Change: More Local Search

One of the biggest things that Foursquare blog writers are talking about in 2012 is a brand new feature.  In October of 2012, every blog about Foursquare erupted with the news: Foursquare would no longer just allow its local search results to be open to users who were making use of the app and check in procedures.

Instead, Foursquare has decided to market itself in a wider way—a way that has made Foursquare blog writers very happy and that puts it into competition with bigger social media empires, like Yelp and Google+ Local.  Anyone can now look at Foursquare's local search results, regardless of whether they have registered with the service or not.  According to nearly every blog about Foursquare, this is a major development.

With the new focus on providing local search to all users, Foursquare has decided to position itself as a social media leader.  Not every blog about Foursquare is convinced that this expansion is a good idea.  Some Foursquare blog writers believe that this additional competition will cause Foursquare to lose sight of its original mission and stop catering to the audience that made the site popular in the first place.

Foursquare's Major User Expansion

One of the things that nearly every Foursquare blog agrees on is that local search will mean a big expansion to a service that already has been growing at a very rapid rate.  When they blog about Foursquare today, many writers have mentioned that the traditionally very young user base of Foursquare is going to be giving way to older users as the service expands.

This is very good news for attorneys and legal marketing professionals.  If it's possible to reach older segments of the consumer market, as many Foursquare blog writers now claim, then it's much easier for lawyers to actually get to their target market.

Another discussion going on in more than one blog about Foursquare expansion is the geographic expansion of the service.  While Foursquare started in New York (and many Foursquare blog writers originally felt it would never be successful outside of the city), today's Foursquare offers a huge number of badges in places from Manhattan to Ghana.

Foursquare Eclipses the Competition

Foursquare blog writers had a huge moment in early 2012, when Gowalla, its biggest competitor, announced that it would be shutting down operations permanently.  It seemed like every blog about Foursquare wanted to analyze the differences between the two services, so that they could figure out lessons about having a successful social geolocation based service.

Today, Foursquare has over 20 million subscribers worldwide, and most Foursquare blog writers believe that number will continue growing for the foreseeable future.  At this point, most writers who blog about Foursquare will tell you that it's now the only geolocation based social networking service that your business needs to use.

Fewer Games and Badges, More Tips and Search

While the Foursquare blog world started by talking about check ins and badges, today's Foursquare users are changing.  As they change, each blog about Foursquare is starting to realize that users no longer care as much about earning badges.  This was primarily a focus of the early adopter group of Foursquare users.

Today's users aren't necessarily social media hounds, though many of them are.  Blog writers who blog about Foursquare now emphasize the necessity of promotions and providing information.  Businesspeople who don't offer promotions, discounts, or up to date information about their business are likely to find themselves without many new clients from Foursquare—even if they try to play the kind of social games that Foursquare marketers were successful with at first.

The Usefulness of Geo-Fencing Tactics

One of the most innovative aspects of Foursquare in 2012 is the ability to geo-fence.  According to writers who blog about Foursquare, geo-fencing is a new technique that allows you to draw an invisible “fence” around a particular locational perimeter.  After this fence is drawn, you can create promotions that will pop up for any Foursquare users who are inside of your perimeter.

This can be very useful for targeting people who are already very close to your law offices.  You may also, if your practice involves working closely with another type of business, want to target locations around that business with your geo-fence.  This is one of the easiest ways to ensure that your advertising is being displayed to the exact people who are most likely to be able to take action as a response to seeing the ad.

Using Your Blog and Foursquare Together

Don't neglect to combine some of your social media experiences.  By using your blog and Foursquare in combination, you can advertise discounts and specials two different ways and reach different audiences.  Blog audiences tend to be slightly older, in general, than Foursquare, and blogs are more likely to attract other professionals and fellow attorneys.

Your blog and Foursquare can work symbiotically, each helping to promote the other.  For example, you can promote your law blog using Foursquare tips and responses.  What's more, you can also make sure that potential clients know that you have updated your business information on Foursquare, and you can ask former and current clients to help you by providing positive Foursquare tips regarding your legal practice.

One of the hottest social media apps for smartphones is mobile Foursquare.  Foursquare is a service that helps people connect to businesses and other venues that are in their immediate area.  Not many attorneys are yet making use of Foursquare for marketing purposes, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be.  Particularly if your clientele skews toward young urbanites, you may do very well by using mobile Foursquare to promote your business and get a leg up on your competition.  Here are seven quick tips that can help you get the most out of your Foursquare strategies as 2012 draws to a close.

Tip #1: Use Mobile Foursquare Individually First

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a business is trying to use a new social media service without really acquainting yourself with it first.  You'd be surprised how much norms can differ, and what kinds of faux pas you can commit if you're not truly familiar with how users relate to the service.

For this reason, it's usually a good idea to build your own individual account first.  This will let you check out the service and learn the ropes without putting your law firm's reputation on the line.  Having a personal account will help you to have more relevant and less generic campaigns when you use mobile Foursquare.

Tip #2: Learn How Competitors Use Foursquare

When you initially build your individual account, you should first check to see whether any of your competitors have already been listed on Foursquare.  If some of them are already using it to make promotions and special offers, or to advertise with a new campaign, you should monitor their mobile Foursquare presence to see how they're doing and what kinds of campaigns they've been successful with.

You should also keep track of what people are saying about your competitors.  If people are praising a specific aspect of your competition when they submit mobile Foursquare tips, you may want to see if you can incorporate that aspect into your own law firm.  This kind of competition research is one of the biggest advantages of using social media—without social networks, it's incredibly hard to get that kind of data without resorting to unethical tactics.

Tip #3: Make Your Website Mobile Ready

Before you make your corporate account so that you can use mobile Foursquare for business marketing, have you updated your website recently?  It's very important that you have a mobile friendly website if you're using Foursquare.  Keep in mind that consumers are very likely to want to look at your website before they make any final decisions about which attorney to hire.  Mobile Foursquare users will not be likely to commit to hiring you if your website doesn't work for mobile users or is very difficult to navigate for them.

You may want to set up a redirect that puts mobile users onto a specially designed mobile website.  If you do this, make sure that there is an option to use the desktop site, as not all mobile Foursquare users will like the mobile site equally well.

Tip #4: Make Promotions and Discounts

One of the best uses for mobile Foursquare is creating promotions and special offers.  You can get a pretty good idea of what's being offered by checking out the Foursquare presence of other attorneys.  You may want to offer a free or discounted fee consultation, or you could even advertise some kind of classes about how to defend yourself against criminal charges or avoid a lawsuit.

Providing promotions and freebies increases goodwill toward your company, and makes it much more likely that mobile Foursquare users will help you out by spreading your content virally.  You can also use Foursquare to help direct people to useful videos and legal forms on your website.

Tip #5: Watch What People Say About You

Keeping an eye on what people are talking about can make it much easier for you to make needed changes to your law firm.  Mobile Foursquare allows users to make “tips” about any business or venue, whether that tip is “this place is fantastic” or “stay away, these lawyers are scumbags.”  If you're not already using mobile Foursquare, you could already be receiving tips from users without even knowing about them.

If negative reports are coming into your website, don't immediately get defensive.  If the tip appears to be a real one, someone has just provided you with incredibly valuable information about how to improve.  You don't need to follow feedback slavishly, but it's a very good idea to at least give people the benefit of the doubt and try to respond to any negative mobile Foursquare tips made about your law firm.

Tip #6: Report Fake Tips to Foursquare

Not all negative tips on mobile Foursquare are actually real.  In some cases, it's possible that one of your competitors has placed the negative tip there simply to make sure that you're not as successful.  Be honest with yourself about tips—own up to the ones that are real—but if you spot an obvious fake, be prepared to report it to Foursquare.  

Unlike some social networks, Foursquare takes fake tips and reviews very seriously, and you will usually be able to have the false tip removed from mobile Foursquare relatively soon after you report it.  However, if you never report it, it will stay up—and that can mean some serious damage for your law firm.

Tip #7: Integrate Foursquare With Other Social Networks

It's much more useful to make Foursquare part of your marketing strategy when you've already gone social in other ways.  Twitter and Facebook can help you cross promote your Foursquare deals.  Make sure that you're not spamming other social networking feeds with posts from either your individual or law firm Foursquare accounts.  Spamming behavior is likely to lead to you no longer being followed, because people don't like to be inundated with dozens of updates every single day—especially from businesses.