Posted by Howard Kang, Ignition Officer

Back in March I decided to go on foursquare and Gowalla tours of Harvard’s campus while I was in Boston visiting clients. I’ve never been to Harvard’s campus, so I thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to understand the perspective of a prospective student.

I’ll share my experience with you and what I learned from it all.

I’ll go ahead and say it. Location-based network tours by themselves are not effective or practical. If that’s your plan for innovative marketing, you’re more concerned with new trends vs. reaching students. Here’s why.

The image above shows where the spots for the Harvard Yard tour on Gowalla are laid out. (Foursquare doesn’t provide trips, but has a badge you can earn. Foursquare isn’t really designed for trips as it’s only location based to a certain extent, whereas Gowalla uses a precise location.)

So tell me honestly, do you think a high school student, completely unfamiliar with the campus would be able to easily navigate through these spots they’ve never seen or been to on campus with just this information? Me neither.

First issue. Gowalla does not layout a logical path for the tour. It merely provides you with the location, spots included in the tour, and approximately how many directional meters the spot is from you. If a student is completely unfamiliar with the campus (as I was), the only way to navigate from path to path is to pull up the spot, map myself there on my iPhone through maps, follow the direction to the spot (and hope the GPS locates me accurately), open Gowalla, check-in, navigate to the trip again, and start the process over again. Not exactly an easy or intuitive process. I also didn’t really know what the buildings looked like unless it was a featured spot and had a special icon (Gowalla has since added a photos feature in April which changes this) so I really didn’t know exactly where things were. (Oh, and perhaps we should have started with the fact that both tools have an extremely limited user base at this point, so the odds that your audience is using the tool to begin with is very slim.)

Additionally, GPS in mobile devices can often be unreliable when pinpointing exact locations. Gowalla users often complain about being unable to check-in to places due to their location being read as slightly off. In-fact I faced that problem while on my “tour.” I literally was touching the John Harvard statue and my phone could not locate me. I could check-in with foursquare because foursquare is quite lenient with the radius one can check-in from, but I had to recalibrate my GPS several times before I was located.

Beyond the technical glitches that hindered me, I ultimately gained little from the “tour.” The campus tour can be the deciding factor in many cases for prospective students. It’s their opportunity to get a feel for the people on campus, the culture, the lifestyle, the steps they’ll be walking, even the smell. Using a mobile device to take your tour ultimately serves as a distraction. I spent my time looking down at my phone figuring out if I was in the correct placement to even notice what was going on around me. Also, without a knowledgeable voice to look to, I was left to learn about the campus from the short sentences the descriptions told me. Essentially, what makes the campus tour special revolves around the human connection. Students want to be able to experience the campus enough to be able to say, “Hey, I can really see myself here.” If your tour guides are telling prospective students a collection of statistics that you can find on your website, that doesn’t cut it. If that’s the case, your prospective students probably will benefit more from NOT paying attention and watching the current students. A mobile phone tour by itself can’t provide that, it actually detracts from the experience (vs. walking around alone). The less technological version of a location-based network tour is a checklist of locations on a piece of paper and going through campus with that by yourself. Before mobile phones, would you trust that to represent your campus?

Harvard partnered with foursquare to encourage current students and faculty to go explore and do more on and around campus. Prospective students can’t compete for mayorships on campus (a large driving point for foursquare) as they will not be on campus everyday like current students.

Now, am I saying there’s no place for location-based networks in Higher Ed? Absolutely not. I’m simply saying, as always, “Chase the goals, not the tools.” Don’t use foursquare and Gowalla just because it’s “trendy” and “hip” if you don’t have goals or strategy to back up the time you’re expending to create these tours. Gowalla and foursquare can be used creatively to augment the traditional tour as well as help create memories (which have huge power), but again, does not work by itself.

I encourage you to go and try a location based campus tour from the eyes of an unfamiliar prospective students yourself and share your thoughts. Feel free to share your thoughts below!

Posted by Brad, Chief Explosion Officer

There has been plenty of discussion on Twitter today about the newest Facebook Pages update.  How it affects existing pages, how to arrange things, where non-fans should land, and more.

Before you get started with any of that, take a quick look at this PDF that has been released by Facebook.  It’s 10 quick pages of screenshots and information of what you need to know about the new Pages.

You’ll surely hear more from other bloggers and sites about the changes, but here’s a quick rundown:

• Pages now resemble the recently updated personal profiles.
• You can send non-fans to a specific tab rather than have them land on the main Page.
• You can include more content, and separate it by tab.
• Insights now include engagement and interaction.
• and much more.

We’re currently updating a client’s Page to make it bigger and better than ever, which I’ll be excited to share more about in the future.

And there’s no doubt that Pages can be effective in reaching an audience.  Since we’ve started working with this client, Facebook Page Fans  have increased 76% in a month for their school.

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Posted by Brad, Chief Explosion Officer

Last week I presented at the Innovative Branding and Marketing for Higher Education Conference over in Singapore. (You can find my slides and a video of the presentation at http://bluefuego.com/singapore.)

I knew that mobile technology in Asia was a big deal, but until you see it with your own eyes… wow.  If you think the teenagers you know are on their phone a lot, you haven’t seen anything yet.  I also saw several neat marketing techniques integrated into mobile technology; for example, one girl pulled out her cell phone at McDonalds and had a text message coupon that she used for a discount.  Cell Phone/Accessories stores were on nearly every street corner. I did not see much about the iPhone 3G, there were plenty of Nokia products though.

At the conference, I learned more about social media usage in other areas.  The ~80 attendees came from 41 institutions and 11 countries, primarily SE Asia, UK and Australia.  I learned that in Hong Kong, social media usage is high, but Universities simply cannot reach out to students because of students are very introverted.  In many countries, elders don’t listen to or respect the opinion of those younger than them, so it’s hard to bring up the potential of using new media and online technology to recruit students.  In the UK, iTunes U is working well, and the primary driver for traffic is using video rather than a traditional podcast.

It was great to get a global view of some of the advances and hinderances that schools are dealing with, and definitely filled me with new ideas and new ways to use several tools that are out there.

Without a doubt, I can’t wait to see how mobile technology in the US continues to advance. I think we’re in for some pretty cool stuff both in the marketing and personal interaction areas.