Activ8Social

We’ve all checked in somewhere or at least seen a friend check in to a restaurant, sporting event or concert, but have you ever wondered what demographic is powering the social media check in and auto tagging their location? Well, we’re here to shed some light. Visible’s research in the infographic below was taken from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

10 million? 10,000,000? 7 zeroes? We’re impressed. Social media has always had strength in numbers, and 10 million users or consumers of any product or service is a big deal as far as we’re concerned. Foursquare recently announced they have officially reached 10 million users, and when you step back to think about this feat, it becomes even more impressive when you consider the obstacles the NY start-up has faced to date.

Zeta Interactive has analyzed over 200 million blogs, message boards and social media sites looking for keywords devoted to each of the 68 (so bizarre that this number isn’t 64 anymore) teams in the NCAA tournament.  They called their rankings the “positive online buzz rankings”.  Zeta not only searched for mentions of the teams but positive or negative buzz words associated with each of the teams to give them positive and negative scores.

For example, “Boston University is going to hang tough with Kansas” would be a positive mention while “Boston University is going to lost to Kansas by 90″ would be a negative mention.  Each team’s positive and negative buzz words were customized so that somebody saying Duke would only go to the sweet 16 would be negative while saying Richmond is going to the sweet 16 would be positive.

The battle for Geolocation supremacy in 2011 is just beginning. Just this week (and of course in tandem with SXSW), Foursquare 3.0 was rolled out to more than 7.5 million users globally while SCVNGR (which touts 1 million registered users by comparison) swung right back with their new mobile app called LevelUp.

For the past year, NYC city based Foursquare has enjoyed their top position as the number one “check-ins” service, but according to the The Guardian, the Google Ventures backed SCVNGR has said they will not let their “hyper-local” rivals Foursquare, Groupon, LivingSocial, (and Facebook Places) win without a major slug fest. SCVNGR claims their new mobile application is more user friendly for the general public while not compromising their unique place in the market. P.S. Does anybody remember Gowalla? Must be difficult for the Austin, TX based geolocation service to watch Foursquare this week at SXSW.

In honor of the new year, our final Social Mashup of 2010 takes a brief look back at five of the most important social media trends of the last 12 months. Here at Activ8Social, we believe that you should pay special attention to hyper-localization, social retail, deals, check-ins, and mobile … you are going to be hearing a lot more about innovation in these spaces from both fresh startups to establish players like Facebook and Google. Happy New Year everybody!

Grocery retailer Safeway and PepsiCo have teamed with popular geo-location service  Foursquare to offer location based rewards and check-ins.  The idea behind this strategic partnership is basically that Safeway Club (VonsClub) members link their Foursquare accounts with their VonsClub account to receive Pepsi deals.  The deals are based on where shoppers have previously checked in and purchases they have previously made.  The coupons are shown at the check out and applied.  The deal really works for both sides as it closely ties in customer loyalty for VonsClub members and for Foursquare users.