Last night Facebook announced their play in the location-based network space (called Facebook Places) which opens the door for 500 million+ potential users to start “checking in” to real-world locations, something that only 1% of U.S. adults are currently doing with networks like Foursquare and Gowalla.

This move brings “check-in” behavior to the masses.

After watching the live video announcement, a couple of things stuck out to me. Let’s digest the business and personal implications.

Location Sorting
Foursquare and Gowalla serve up listings of nearby locations based on where you’re standing, but Facebook adds another ingredient to the proximity algorithm: Nearby places it thinks are most interesting to you. Facebook can do this because it sits on mountains of data about our lives and interests. For example, if you’re male and way into comic books, Facebook knows this, and it will potentially add more importance to the comic book shop two blocks away instead of the bridal store one block away. If a mainstream audience takes to Places, this is another step towards Facebook becoming one of the most powerful marketing platforms of all time – right up there with Google.

Targeted demographic data of users + their real-world hang-out overlay = marketer’s holy grail.

Privacy
Facebook gets beat up about privacy issues all the time and I feel like they’ve learned some lessons with this launch. To paraphrase one of the presenters, Places is “not about broadcasting your location to the world, it’s about sharing your location with friends.” You can switch your setting to share your location updates with everyone, but by default Facebook allows you to share with friends only. However, friends can tag you in their location updates – you’ll have to manually turn this feature off if you don’t like it.

Side rant: To me, privacy is a personal life management issue. It’s about having control over the flow of your information. Most people don’t realize that social networks have matured over the years to give you multiple layers of privacy controls and settings. My response to anyone hand-wringing about the privacy implications of Facebook Places or Foursquare would be to get educated on the privacy settings and the network’s terms of use, or simply don’t use these features.

If you need a walk-through, Wayne Sutton has already posted a great step-by-step guide to adjusting your Facebook Places privacy settings.

Partnerships
During the launch, Facebook announced key partnerships with Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and Booyah’s MyTown. Many of us were wondering if the Places product would be a competitor to these services, but for now it looks as if they’re going to be friends – or at least acquaintances. This “blessing” by Facebook doesn’t put the other guys (Loopt, Brightkite and Whrrl) in a very good spot. Even if check-ins become a commodity across multiple platforms, this won’t negatively impact Facebook as long as they already have the massive user base and the most data.

What do you think about Facebook Places? Be sure to leave your comments below. Here are a few thoughts from tweeps in my network:

It’s SXSW Panel Picker time of year again, and I wanted to take a moment to create a list of panel ideas submitted by Iowans. Silicon Prairie News also has a nice wrap-up of panels from the Midwest that you can check out here.

The voting process is now open, so click through the titles below, give them a read, and vote if you think they’re worthy.

Social Marketing Lessons Learned on the Farm – Nathan T. Wright (That’s me!)

Landing A Music Career in Flyover Country – Hillary Brown and Jill Haverkamp, On Pitch

How Farmers Get Serious Business Done With Mobile – Jeff Caldwell, Meredith Corporation

Real-Time Streams Need Real-Time Feedback – Daniel Shipton, BitMethod

How Can Artists Turn Web Hits Into Dollars? – Cat Rocketship & Scott (Kubie) Rocketship, make\break

The Legalities Behind APIs and Mashups – Brett Trout, Brett J. Trout, P.C.

Screenwriting from Iowa (and Other Unlikely Places) – Scott Smith, River Run Productions

In the Future, Everyone Will Be a Filmmaker – Scott Smith, River Run Productions

Rich Browser-Based Templating Through Open Source Collaboration – Neil Roberts, BitMethod

Content for Multi-Channel Consumers: Earn Affinity, Reap Rewards – Heather Rast, Insights and Ingenuity

Resistance is Futile! Assimilating Local Marketing – Deb Brown, Debworks

Big thanks to Becky McCray and Kelly Rivard who helped me refine my ideas throughout this process.

So, did I miss any brilliant Iowans? Let me know. And if you’ve got a panel that you’re behind, or just want to share one that sounds interesting, please leave a comment below – regardless of where you live.

Good luck to everyone who submitted an idea, and we’ll see you in Austin in March 2011!

Everyone loves local deals! A growing wave of e-coupon-local-deal services are giving merchants a new way to promote their businesses and teaching consumers how to harness their “collective buying power.” Local deal services such as Groupon and LivingSocial leverage the power of their subscriber bases to offer deeply discounted local deals to consumers in a wide range of cities. In most cases, all you have to do to take advantage of the deals is sign up to get their daily email, but the deals themselves are fueled by social media.

While the initial success of these online coupon deal services relies on a large subscriber base, the ultimate driving force behind the deals is social commerce. The concept of group coupon services like Groupon is that the local deal for a product or service in your city can only be claimed if a minimum number of people purchase the discount, so the services provide social media sharing tools to encourage users to tell their friends about the deals – a win-win for everyone. Consumers get the discount and the local businesses get enough customers to make it worth their while.

Groupon and LivingSocial have yet to publish any local deals in Des Moines, but Travelzoo Local Deals recently joined the social media bargain hunting scene, launching Des Moines as a test market. If you’re a Travelzoo subscriber, you’ve already seen the first Local Deals in Des Moines, including $10 — Stam Chocolate & Fine Wine: Tastings for 2 (50% OFF) and $20 — Half Off at Dos Rios w/FREE Cocktails. Travelzoo Local Deals are currently only available in Des Moines and Minneapolis but will quickly expand into 120 markets.

You’re probably wondering why Travelzoo Local Deals launched in Des Moines and Minneapolis despite the success of Groupon and LivingSocial in larger cities like Chicago, New York and L.A. It could have something to do with their existing, large user base of 24k+ subscribers in Des Moines – a user base that Groupon and LivingSocial are currently working to build up, in addition to recruiting businesses to feature special offers. In the meantime, be sure to follow TravelzooDSM and TravelzooMSP on Twitter to keep up with all of the local deals, and sign up to receive local deals here. If you’re a business owner who would like to feature a Travelzoo Local Deal, you can start here.

What kind of local deals do you want to see in Des Moines? Leave a comment below!

After three years of desperately clinging to the 4GB first generation iPhone like some old curmudgeon, I finally upgraded to the 32GB iPhone 4 this weekend. I used it to records some of my initial thoughts on video (above). The things that impressed me about the device were practical stuff: much better battery life and processing power.

Have you snagged an iPhone 4 yet? What do you think? Here’s what a few people said about antennagate in Norah’s last post.

The Lava Row FlipCam came out from the depths of our office to make an appearance at last week’s Des Moines Tweetup at el Bait Shop. Apple held an iPhone 4 press conference earlier that day, offering up an apology for the functional issues many users had encountered in getting (and keeping) reception. Naturally, we wondered if our Des Moines tweeps would consider buying an iPhone again. Here’s what they said.

Would you consider buying an iPhone? Did Apple do enough to solve the problems with the iPhone 4? How should they win back the loyalty of their customers? Share your thoughts below.

Image credit: Engadget.com

This morning I was reading a story on Yahoo! News about the Barefoot Bandit, and couldn’t help but glance down at the comments section. As usual, a flame war had broken out and somehow completely derailed off-topic into a cesspool of racist, vulgar, hateful, disgusting dialog.

This sort of thing happens all too often on news and media websites today – large and small. And it needs to be fixed.

Last February I gave a talk at the Midwest Newspaper Summit about using social features to build community, and the good and bad that comes with it. I gathered a few examples of how publications and media properties are addressing the “comment warz” problem, and I wanted to share them with you here. Without further ado, here are nine ideas for fixing the problem with comment sections:

The “Cooling Off” Period. Engadget (a global tech blog) and Pantagraph.com (a Bloomington, IL, newspaper) both temporarily shut off comments because things had gotten so out of hand. Engadget’s editor wrote:

Some of you out there in the world of anonymous grandstanding have gotten the impression that you run the place, but that’s simply not the case.

You can read the rest of Engadget’s editor comments here, and Pantagraph’s here.

Participation from editors and writers. Jeff Jarvis says a contributing factor to the commenting issue is that editors and writers don’t get into the trenches. He wrote in a March 2010 blog post:

We throw our product over the wall and let people reactwhile we retreat into the castle and shut the gates so we cannot hear them. They know they are talking to bricks and so they shout and cover them with spray paint.

If the media jumps into the conversation itself, would this temper the dialog?

Ban anonymity altogether. If a real name and avatar is required, commenters might actually behave themselves and own up to what they post. I believe that serious debate can still happen among real people with real faces, and that respected news brands can actually be eroded over time by relentless, uncivil conduct by anonymous commenters.

Allow community moderation. Letting the community enforce rules by “flagging” or “burying” bad content has been around for a while, from Digg.com to Craigslist. I wish more newspaper sites would adopt this functionality. Some have, but others are lagging behind.

Enforce the commenting policy. Many media sites have commenting policies, but how many are actually enforcing them? Staying black and white (and consistent) with the rules will help deter Internet Trolls.

Create a “hopper.” My friend Ben Godar told me about this. I can’t remember the publication he referenced, but I thought the idea was brilliant – build a “hopper” that captures (but doesn’t publish) the first three comments from all new commenters. Think of this as a vetting process for anyone new to your site, and they only get to participate after proving that they can contribute in a productive way.

Detach comments from the article. I really think that a lot of abusive Internet Trolls get off on the fact that their comments are attached to the original content. The Des Moines Register recently started experimenting with linking off to comments instead of showing them below the story. I love this because it removes the whole power trip factor.

Wipe the system and reboot. I’ve read about a few rare cases where publications have actually done this as a last resort – completely destroying the database of user information and content and starting anew. I’d call this the “Scorched Earth” method.

Pay-per-comment. A very intriguing – and possibly controversial – solution forwarded by Scott Hale while I was in Omaha a few weeks ago. Would people be more behaved if they had to pay a nominal fee to comment? Think about the mainstream popularity and comfort level with online “credits” right now. For example, users dump $10 into an online service and that gives them 100 credits to perform multiple actions – this is commonplace on stock photo sites, social games (Farmville), dating sites and Facebook. It could easily be incorporated into newspapers as an additional revenue stream.

What do you think? Can comments be improved by enforcing any of the above scenarios? Can publications ask for civility but still maintain free speech? I’d love to hear from media professionals and journalists below. Chime in!

According to a 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey, 90 percent of Internet consumers have some degree of trust in recommendations from people they know; only 62 percent place their trust in television advertisements, and the numbers are even lower for other forms of traditional advertising. So what does this mean for social media?

For that 90 percent who trust the recommendations of people they know, they’re not just taking tips from family and friends, but also from their online connections. Think about it: if you read a rave online review about a restaurant, you’re more likely to check out that restaurant on your own, even if you’ve never met the reviewer.

Our online connections influence our decisions.

From a business standpoint, tools like Google Reader provide an efficient way to keep tabs on what people are saying about your company. And by reaching out to opinion leaders in the online community, you will find people who can vouch for your company, connect you with your audience in a new way and serve as contacts in the future. (You’ll also be able to track down negative messages and address a concern right where it’s voiced.)

Here are a few tips for getting started with blogger outreach:

1. Make a list of key terms and phrases bloggers might use to reach the audience you target. This list should be pretty exhaustive—try out different combinations, singular and plural forms of words (blog vs. blogs), even popular misspellings. Use Google’s blog search feature to generate a list of results, then scroll to the bottom of the page and choose “Subscribe to a blog search feed for [search term] in Google Reader.” You’ll also want to subscribe to your company’s name, Twitter handle and any other identities bloggers might use to reference your company. As new blog posts that fit your search terms are made public, they’ll automatically be fed to your Google Reader account.

2. Look at the posts that seem relevant to your company or your industry. Identify the bloggers you’d like to reach out to, and narrow your list down by their reach and influence. Eliminate any that haven’t posted within the last few months.

3. Take some time to get to know their focus, tone and audience. Connect with them on their turf by commenting on a post or two that are relevant to your own company’s focus—this shows them that you are familiar with their blog and that you want to join the conversation. Engage with them before you need something from them; establishing relationships now will give make it easier to reach them down the road.

4. Reach out to the bloggers you select to offer your “pitch.” Stay away from form emails—this is your opportunity to show that you really want to connect with them individually. In your email, explain why they and their readers will care about your brand. Personalize it by referring to a particular post on their blog that caught your eye, or use a specific example to show how your pitch is relevant to them. Some bloggers receive hundreds or even thousands of unsolicited pitches each day, so make sure yours is compelling and unique.

5. Be prepared to provide additional information, resources and logos to them. If they’re taking the time to write about your brand, you should make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

6. If a blogger you contact does write a post about your company, promote their post through your social media channels. Not only will you share their coverage with your fan base, but you’ll also drive traffic back to their blog and reinforce your commitment to staying connected to them.

If you’re less successful than you’d like, set your sights on bloggers who may receive fewer requests. Continue to monitor your Google Reader feeds, and stay engaged with the bloggers you’ve connected with. The more authentic your relationships with these bloggers are, the more likely they’ll be willing to help you out.

What are your tips for connecting with bloggers? Share your thoughts below.

[Photo courtesy of macalicommblog.com.]