If your company has a large real estate footprint (translation: multiple locations) and you’d like to claim them all on foursquare, doing it one by one certainly isn’t a good use of your time. Here are a few tips for getting started and staying efficient.

Norah Carroll recently assisted one of our clients with the process of “bulk claiming” 370+ foursquare venues in one sweep. She found that the claim process itself is relatively easy, but there’s a lot of homework that needs to be done beforehand to make sure your location database is up to par. Here are a couple of things you need to include in your database before you submit it.

Have your foursquare user ID ready
The person responsible for claiming and managing all the venues will need to have a foursquare account set up first. Log in to your account and view your profile – the URL at the top contains your user ID. For example, my profile can be found at foursquare.com/nathantwright and my user ID is nathantwright. If you haven’t synced your foursquare and Twitter accounts, your ID will be a random number.

Twitter handles and phone numbers
Foursquare attaches phone number and Twitter information to venues, so make sure you include it. (And, it’s useful to your customers.) If your locations are empowered to run their own Twitter accounts, make sure those are referenced. Or, you could just used the main brand’s Twitter handle. Generally, just make sure all the information in your location database is up-to-date before you submit it.

Latitude and longitude
Yes, this level of detail is required for foursquare’s bulk claim process. If you’ve ever verified your locations through Google Places, you’ll likely have this information. If you don’t, GPS Visualizer is a handy resource that can convert multiple addresses into GPS coordinates.

Once you have all of this pulled together, you’ll need to request an official bulk claim worksheet from foursquare. You can get started by visiting the network’s merchant platform page.

Now, get claiming!

Despite its audience of 60 million users, LinkedIn remains widely misunderstood by the mainstream business audience. We continually meet people that have a LinkedIn account, but rarely curate it or proactively make connections inside the social network.

On Wednesday we spoke at the American Marketing Association (AMA) Iowa chapter about the nuts and bolts of LinkedIn and how to use it as a platform to showcase your reputation, get found online, and generate new business connections. Below is our presentation posted on Slideshare.

LinkedIn is absolutely one of the most important tools in our business development arsenal at Lava Row. How are you using it? What success stories can you share?

On Friday I gave a presentation called Fostering Community with Social Media at the Midwest Newspaper Summit (put on by the fine folks at the Iowa Newspaper Association). The audience was a mix of journalists and editors from regional newspapers as well as college students excited to break into the media industry.

The journalism world (specifically newspapers) is currently in a state of flux, and many are wondering if anything will be left standing five years from now. Yes, media platforms and reading habits have evolved, but the point of my session was that community equals opportunity – advantages go to those who embrace technology shifts and understand how to operationalize social networks for their gain.

While most of the audience was there to learn, I did my fair share of learning from them, as well. The session allowed me to connect with smart people who are working on innovative things, right here in Iowa. Thomas Ritchie (Online Editor at the Sioux City Journal) has put a focus on harnessing the real-time web and live-blogging stories for his newspaper, and he’s achieved quite a bit of success from it. Steve Buttry, who blogs about the future of journalism and media, sat in the front row and asked all sorts of good questions. I was also impressed by many of the college students I met, who are eager to break into the industry and tear it up using their knowledge of self-publishing tools and networks.

I have lots of opinions on where this is all going, but I certainly don’t have all the answers. What are your thoughts on the future of newspapers and news media? Please chime in below.

Last Friday I discovered that Twitter’s new retweet feature had been activated in my account. Much like Lists, they are slowly rolling this out to all users, so be patient and you’ll discover it soon. For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a quick video description and howto on the new feature.

What are your thoughts on the new retweet functionality? What interesting things could you build with this being integrated into the Twitter API?

Photo credit: Terry Anderson Photography

Two years ago, public speaking isn’t something I imagined doing a lot of in my career, or even enjoying. Fast forward to today, and in fact quite the opposite has happened: I do a significant amount of it and I actually look forward to each and every engagement.

For those who are considering getting more active with public speaking, or maybe even thrust into a situation where it’s required of you, I wanted to create a post that serves as a guide for getting comfortable, getting better, and getting more gigs. Let’s get started.

Do it for free for one year.

This exact bit of advice was given to me by Drew McLellan when I was just starting out. I stuck to this motto and accepted every opportunity thrown my way – large and small. This kept me highly visible and I slowly built up a reputation network, a few connections here, a few references there, and so on. Today, public speaking is one of our services and makes up a significant percentage of our revenue. If compensation is your end goal, remember that you need to earn it first. Nobody invites you to speak and hands you money just because. If you do a good job, word will spread, and opportunities will come your way.

(Oh yeah, it’s cool to keep taking free gigs. Often times high exposure will beat a paycheck. You get to build your own filter.)

Learn from others.

I recently attended BlogWorld Expo 2009, and while the content was excellent, I learned just as much about speaking styles (and improving my own) by studying some of the individual speakers. Jeremiah Owyang‘s solo session taught me how to keep focused on connecting with the audience and their needs, putting less reliance on slides. Patrick O’Keefe demonstrated an amazing ability to lead an efficient panel discussion and keep each panelist on task and topic. (Not an easy task when Robert Scoble is one of the participants and wants to show off Twitter Lists!)

Go out and observe other speakers. Figure out what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong, and how you can adapt some of what you learn into your own presentations.

Prepare for questions.

Honestly, Hillary and I spend more time preparing for (and trying to anticipate) tough questions than we do buttoning-up the presentation itself. If you can’t answer your audience’s questions, chances are likely you won’t be getting many more speaking opportunities. Think ahead about their specific challenges and fears, and try to predict them. Have case studies in the hopper and be flexible. (This gets easier and comes more naturally over time.) Remember, they’re looking to you as the expert, so be ready to step up.

Be ready to adjust on the fly.

Despite all the time and effort you put into preparing for a speaking engagement, the needs of your audience may not fit into the exact framework you assembled. For example, let’s say you’re giving a Social Media 101 presentation, and multiple audience members really don’t get the benefits of having a LinkedIn account, and they want you to help them dig deeper. Be ready for this. You’ll also need to stay aware of how much time is left and what to skip over. Always come prepared with more ammunition and inventory than you think you’ll need.

Meet as many people as you can.

This one’s a no-brainer. Call it old-school social networking. Get to know the people who run conferences and professional organizations. The more people who know about you, the better. I recently spoke at the MIMA Summit but made a point to get to know Jennifer Kane (a major decision-maker). Ideally, this will help me get invited back next year.

Give them proof.

If you want to seek out bigger speaking opportunities, you’re going to need proof that you’re good at what you do. Document your speaking gigs with video, photos and share your presentations on Slideshare. I’ve organized all of my material, plus some references, on a speaking page that I often refer people to. I patterned my page after Chris Brogan’s, which is awesome. This gives anyone thinking about hiring you an idea of what to expect.

Create opportunities for others.

My very first speaking opportunity was actually handed to me by Mike Sansone, who had a conflict and couldn’t make it. Along the way, you’ll come across gigs that aren’t a good fit or just don’t jive with your schedule. This is your chance to recommend someone else – maybe somebody who is just getting started but knows their stuff. This is good karma. Use it!

Be entertaining.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Even if you’re the most knowledgeable person on the topic, you can easily bore a room to death if you don’t show any personality. Make fun of yourself. Tell a funny story. This will help you make an instant connection with the audience. You’re there to inform, but you can also entertain.

Wrapping up

So, there you have it. Mr. Brogan and Owyang also have a ton of smart, insightful things to say on this topic, some of which overlap with mine. I’d encourage you to read those posts, as well.

What are your suggestions and tips on how to get started? What’s worked for you? What hasn’t? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Below is a quick video tutorial on how to add a Facebook Fan Box to your website or blog. If you’re interested in what this all means and why it’s important, I wrote about the advantages of the Fan Box back on July 17 over at IowaBiz.com.

If you’ve added the Fan Box (or any Facebook Connect features) to your organization’s site, leave us a comment below and let us know how it’s working out for you.

This week Google announced that they will start including Google profiles alongside search results, meaning that if you set up a Google profile, it can potentially show up in a search for your own name. Sure, there are already organic ways to get yourself indexed in Google’s search, such as blogging and active participation in social networks, but this is the first time the search giant has ever let users manually “inject” something that can be visible right away.

In this week’s Area 52 video, I explain how to set up a Google profile, and how this benefits the search engine long-term. For more information on this change, check out John Battelle’s post on Searchblog.

Here’s a link to my Google profile, in case you want to check one out.

Last week Facebook announced significant UI changes to it’s Facebook Pages product (also known as enhanced public profiles). Basically, Pages will now resemble and function like the individual profiles we’re all used to. Hillary created a video recapping some of the differences to watch for — especially helpful if you’re a business or public figure using Facebook Pages to connect with your audience.

For full details on the scope of changes, here’s a link to Facebook’s official PDF guide.

This morning we accepted the unique challenge of presenting to a room full of librarians at Drake University’s Cowles Library. (They referred to themselves as a “gaggle” of librarians). The audience was already well-versed on the inherent value of social media, but wanted a deeper understanding of how to get more engagement going on their blog. They were also very curious about Twitter — in fact, almost 30% of them already had accounts!

Embedded below is a copy of our presentation, which we think is applicable to any organization with a blog seeking more engagement. As always, you can’t just click a button to get more comments — it’s earned over time through active participation in other online communities besides your own.

One of the audience members referred to the “social mission” baked into the five laws of library science (put forth by Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan) and how this applies to the new tech they adopt. This afternoon I went back to the office and Googled the five laws. Number five certainly stuck out to me: The library is a growing organism.

While doing research for this presentation, Hillary discovered a ton of fantastic resources for libraries seeking to bridge the social technology gap. If you’re interested, go ahead and browse The Shifted Librarian, LibraryCrunch and The Ubiquitous Librarian — blogs that touch on the adaptation of new mediums within libraries.

Library 2.0 is a niche social network for librarians who want to connect, share knowledge and form a virtual brain trust. ASU’s Library Channel is an excellent example of an institution that has integrated social media into their web presence. Last but not least, you might want to check out the OCLC’s 2007 report: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World.

Special thanks to Scott Phillips for inviting us to present to his co-workers, and for being a champion of social media at Cowles Library. If any librarians happen to stumble across this post, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

If you follow lots of people on Twitter, you’re likely to miss out on valuable content and insight from specific individuals. One option is to swing the Unfollow Hammer mercilessly, or set rigid standards before following people back. Admittedly, I’ve done a poor job at doing this and have performed Twitter “spring cleaning” only once or twice.

Two viable solutions for filtering your Twitter chaos are Tweetdeck and Friendfeed, which we explore in this week’s Area 52 episode:

Please chime in below and let us know which tools or methods you use to manage your Twitter stream.