Now you've got me

Foursquare is the newest platform to ride the Social media wave and its actually one of my favourites, especially for business. www.foursquare.com: Foursquare is a mobile application that is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide, and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. Foursquare lets you "check in" to a place when you're there, tell friends where you are, and track the history of where you've been--and who you've been there with. Foursquare challenges you to explore your city in new and fun ways by earning points, winning mayorships, and unlocking badges and specials for trying new places and revisiting old favorites.

I have been promoting Foursquare to my clients for sometime now and I can not stress enough how awesome this platform is especially for small business. My first hand experience has introduced me to specials in my area, menu items I missed and its even encouraged me to shop in stores I've walked passed a hundred times. If you're not on it yet, I can't encourage you enough to, at the very least, sign up and start using it for personal use so you can get a feel for it.

Yesterday, Microsoft launched its brand new Office 2010 Suite in Sydney's Martin Place and pinned all its hopes on the success of Foursquare, who now has 60'000 members in Sydney alone. In my opinion, this was absolutely brilliant marketing! I love watching how Social Media is used by companies, especially when new and exciting methods are used to gain our attention. 

MICROSOFT: You've got me, I'm in, I'm impressed.

I want to share the following story with you from Lisa S. It's an account of her experience yesterday as an avid Foursquare user (& an Office Mayor) and now a Microsoft Office 2010 fan as you can tell by the glowing review she has given Office 2010!


I had the most awesome lunch hour today. I am one of the REALLY lucky Foursquare Mayors who checked in at the Office Mayor Meetup 2010 in Martin Place, Sydney.There were lots of cool things about the Meetup. I got a free cupcake, a free shirt, a Free USB stick, and best of all - my very own copy of Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010.

I was so excited. All I wanted to do was go home and install it. I had seen some cool tech reviews about Office 2010 last week and I wanted to see it for myself.

It was everything I thought it would be and then some. To me, it makes things easier to do and share with others. Picture editing is awesome in Office 2010. And one feature that I can't wait to play with is "co-authoring".

But my favourite feature of Office 2010 would have to be the Outlook Social Connector. It connects you to social networking sites and it also "ties everything together".

To explain, I have used the Outlook Social Connector to connect Outlook 2010 to LinkedIn. Now, if I click on an email from a LinkedIn contact, Outlook brings up a list of all communications between me and that person- not just emails, but LinkedIn status updates, RSS feeds, and scheduled meetings. So all communications with an individual are in one list! I no longer have to waste time trawling through old emails anymore!

Outlook 2010 is a really impressive Office suite. It is intuitive, and it just makes things easy to "do" and share with others. I have only been using it for a couple of hours now, but I just love what I have seen so far!