Topics for 8/1/2010 Show

Here are the proposed topics for this week's episode of The BeanCast, and as usual we'd love to hear your thoughts and questions.

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Please keep your comments succinct. Wordy comments need to be interpreted and I may not capture the essence of what you are asking. That's why I encourage the Tweet option to help keep the question or thought targeted.

This week's panel will be Jeffrey Hayzlett (Author, The Mirror Test), Mike Monello (Campfire), Scott Monty (Ford) and Lee Odden (Top Rank Online Marketing).

TOPICS

The Dilemma of Foursquare: Location, location, location. We've been hearing the cry of location-based applications for some time now and at the head of the pack has been Facebook. Then this week Forrester released a report saying that maybe brands should hold off before investing in the platform. What's at the heart of the Forrester argument? If the report can be believed, the numbers of users are minuscule -- isn't that enough of a reason to be cautious? One could say that Twitter was a bit player only a couple years ago -- shouldn't brands embrace early? Is part of the problem not lack of audience awareness, but lack of employee or operational awareness? Couldn't a program create strong buzz and involvement even with a small audience if the employees are fully bought in? Isn't that where Starbuck's stumbled with their Foursquare effort -- the promise was only haphazardly fulfilled on, because store employees didn't even know what Foursquare was? What is preventing Foursquare from moving beyond its core base? What do all these players in the location-services space need to do to prove themselves -- is it simply gaining critical mass of users or something more?

Social Enough for Facebook?: So you have 10 million likes. Now what? Facebook advertising have been struggling with how to capitalize on fan engagement for some time. And Facebook, for its part, is coming out with the message to "be more social." But that's hardly an answer. What's at the heart of bridging from acquisition of likes to engagement with your audience via Facebook? We've speculated many times on the show why big brands have such a difficult time "getting social," but we have two people with big brand experience on the panel, so what would each of you say are the roadblocks? We've often talked about how ignoring the social side of Facebook only gets you half the value of the investment, but at a scale of half a billion users does it matter -- doesn't Facebook just become a great place to run my banners? (We'll also work in the story about how most brands are considered irrelevant on Twitter.)

Social Gaming's Growing Fortunes: And while we're on this social news juggernaut, let's talk about social gaming which had a huge week. Social gaming company Playdom had a $563 million pay day from Disney, showcasing the huge interest in the casual gaming space. Google's talking to the top three providers, Playdom, EA and Zynga, about a gaming push presumably for their new Facebook killer. Even MTV snapped up a social gaming network. The question is, what are the opportunities for advertisers, if any? The revenue model for most of these games are based on virtual items -- can this model be sustainable without ad revenue somewhere? Will greed for more inevitably push them toward ads or will the typical thing happen -- users are used to it ad free and will revolt over ad introductions? Is it important to think of more integrated approaches in these platforms -- virtual logo t-shirts, items and the like -- or do we need to create new avenues of interruption rather than product/logo placement?

Measurement Bites Hulu: The darling of Internet video got hit bad by ComScore's new methodology this week. From May to June they went from 43.5 million unique viewers to 24 million. What does this indicate -- that Hulu's audience really is much small or that ComScore doesn't know what it's doing? It's been the contention of many, not least of whom is Jim Louderback from Revision 3, that video sites have been cheating advertisers with erroneous measurements -- so is ComScore's new system the answer or do we still have a ways to go?

Smaller is More Elite: And finally, the New York Times asked a compelling question this week: What do K-Mart and Marc Jacobs have in common? The Journal of Consumer Research says, small logos. While mid-priced clothing brands have large logos, the high-end and low end have logos that are inconspicuous. The study poses some answers, but what would you say the reason is for this oddity?