Free tool helps identify brand trends on Foursquare

For those skeptical about geolocation, speculate no more. Last week, Foursquare secured $20 million in venture funding after passing the 1.8 million user mark and recently reached 1 million check-ins in a single day. Geolocation is more than just seeing where your friends are, it allows customers to be rewarded for its dedication to merchants through specials and rewards. As businesses take geolocation more seriously, Awareness, Inc. (a provider of social marketing management software) has stepped up with its free foursquare Perspectives tool that allows users to help identify trends and insights on Foursquare.

The foursquare Perspectives tool reports key statistics such as total venues, total check-ins, unique visitors and total mayorships, and presents that data through comprehensive charts, graphs and maps to help marketers easily visualize key market trends among Foursquare locations.

With this type of data, Starbucks or any merchant can pinpoint its most popular Foursquare venues and cater its marketing campaigns based on demand. Not only is this tool incredibly useful but it is also incredible that it is free.

This comes right after Awareness announced the addition of a Foursquare channel support to its flagship product, the Awareness Social Marketing Hub, to allow enterprise marketers to manage Foursquare venues and publish tips to all or a targeted segment of venues through a single interface.

Along with foursquare Perspectives, Awareness has published two eBooks available for free download (The State of foursquare2010 and Top 10 Ways Enterprise Marketers Can Leverage foursquare) to any enterprise marketer looking to learn more about foursquare and how they can include it as part of their marketing efforts.

You may follow foursquare Perspectives on Twitter at @4sqPerspectives.

You may also read my notes after seeing Foursquare Co-Founder Dennis Crowley speak about merchant relations at My Take Away From Eat, Drink, Be Social.

Sarah Wallace is a research analyst, blogger and podcaster. To learn more about her, click on the tabs above.

Blippy: Are you ready to broadcast your credit card transactions?

Are you ready to broadcast your credit card transactions? Well, Blippy is the platform that will allow you to do so. Privacy watchdogs are up in arms but advocates say it is a great way to learn about new products and good deals.

Released publicly in January by entrepreneur Philip Kaplan and the backings of the likes of Twitter’s Evan Williams, Blippy takes the ‘sharing era’ to another level by broadcasting your credit card transactions. So, a friend can see that you have purchased a new DVD on Amazon for $14.99 or a new iPhone app on iTunes for $2.99. The purpose is to create conversations around these purchases.

Users can manually review each item before it is published or set up certain substreams. For the time being, Blippy founders say they are not interested in aggregating data or geolocation.

What I find interesting is the set of Rules that Blippy has listed on its web site. Perhaps from lessons learned, this platform immediately states no Serial Accounts, Name Squatting, Malware/Phishing, Social Network Spam or Deceptive Links. Whether or not Blippy catches on, time will only tell. And, if it grows in popularity, it will be interesting to see if it can enforce its rules.

Sarah Wallace is a research analyst, blogger and podcaster. To learn more about her, click on the tabs above.