app development gold rush that occurred in 2007 and 2008. Since then though, the company has shifted its focus on the lucrative market of daily deals — one dominated by Groupon, which garnered over 2 million U.S. visitors last month alone. Essentially the website promotes one big deal per city per day, mostly via a daily email newsletter.

To compete with its bigger competitor, LivingSocial has assembled a $25 million warchest from U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures, and Revolution, LLC (owned by former AOL CEO Steve Case). The company says it will use the funds to expand its LivingSocial Deals platform into more cities, starting today — Denver, Raleigh Durham, San Diego, and Chicago are all now get daily deals. The latter is interesting because Chicago is the home turf of Groupon.

The daily deals market may not be all that sexy, but it has proven to be profitable and popular. It makes sense that more companies want a piece of the pie that Groupon currently dominates. With $25 million, LivingSocial is now on par with the $30 million Groupon recently raised. A daily deals war looks to be brewing.

Social Business Community is lucky to have such an amazing group of thought leaders who regularly share their knowledge of Social CRM, Enterprise 2.0 – they publish their thoughts, interviews, research papers – huge thank you to all of them… all of you!

As this field of Social Business is still an emerging space and every day we see more and more people joining I decided to start this list of Social Business Blogs. Please add the ones that should be here and are not to this list. Link will be published on a right side bar of Social CRM blog.

Thanks!

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And here is the list [so far]:

Foursquare means business. The 1-year-old startup now has a huge brand — Starbucks — using its platform to test out an experimental customer rewards program.

Starting today, frequent Starbucks visitors who check in at retail locations using FoursquareFoursquare will earn customer rewards. Although there’s no financial incentive or free coffee to begin with, customers can unlock the “Barista badge” after five checkins.

Of course that’s just the beginning; the coffee behemoth plans to use Foursquare as a testing ground for alternative reward strategies and to unlock “the pulse of the experience” for each store.

If you think this is a straight-up play to offer location-based mobile coupons, think again. The New York Times Bits Blog writes that the company is “hoping to use Foursquare to provide even more meaningful prizes, like invitations to special events, photo-sharing or online reputation scores.”

As Starbucks figures out how best to leverage the checkin, we have to step back and appreciate the magnitude of this decision. With Starbucks on board, there’s no question that Foursquare has all the tools necessary to appeal to — and reach — a mainstream audience. Plus, now that a second company (the first was Tasti D-Lite) is tapping into Foursquare as a loyalty program platform, the additional proof of concept will pave the way for other businesses to follow suit.

[img credit: Bits blog]

With over 26,000 followers, West Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre is the most popular club on Twitter. Just short of half a decade earlier, however, the fortunes of the historic venue and many of its neighbors on LA’s infamous Sunset Strip were waning and in need of serious attitude adjustment.

We had a chance to talk with Nic Adler, owner of The Roxy and the man behind the club’s transformation from “castle on the hill” to social media juggernaut, about how TwitterTwitter and other tools helped not only reverse the fortunes of businesses on the Strip, but build up a stronger, more vibrant local community.

If you’re a small business wondering how social media can be relevant to you, someone in public relations looking for creative ideas, or an organization looking to take your first steps into the waters of social media, you’ll want to read on for a resounding success story and a number of practical tips. If you’re a music fan, don’t touch that dial or miss a slice of history.

The Roxy’s Social Media Transformation

The Roxy Theatre has been graced by numerous musical legends in its 37-year history, from Motley Crue to Nirvana to Bob Marley to a venerable pantheon of who’s who in rock history. The Rocky Horror Show and Pee-Wee Herman were launched there, and the upstairs bar was a regular hangout for folks like John Lennon, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, and John Belushi.

Fast-forward to the mid-2000s though, and the grunge scene had come and gone, displacing a good chunk of what was once perceived as an unstoppable draw to the Strip — one that had easily brought in locals and tourists alike. “The Strip has always been busy and always had relevance, but in the last 10 years we hadn’t had our best 10 years,” says owner Nic Adler, son of one of the club’s founders (Lou Adler, legendary manager and producer of artists including The Mamas & the Papas, Carole King, and Sam Cooke).

Part of the problem? The “velvet rope” mentality. “We on the Sunset Strip just thought we were on this golden hilltop, that we don’t have to listen. And we just created these walls around the venues, almost like these castles on the hill, and stopped talking with each other, and didn’t really participate with each other.”

What ended up turning the fortunes of not only The Roxy but a good chunk of other businesses on the Strip? A creative and unique social media campaign that began to build offline community using online tools. “We switched over to a blog format about three and a half years ago, and started to understand that there was this conversation going on. And that we could participate,” says Adler of their first steps into social media.

Local Business: Cooperation or Coopetition?

Early on, the club faced the question of how to approach their nearby neighbors and ostensible competitors for the time and dollars of Sunset Strip clientele. “We got on Twitter pretty early, May 2007, and we got up to about 10,000 followers. The Viper Room had just gone through some new ownership and they popped up and started tweeting. We had this conversation in the office, wondering ’should we retweet them?’ We have these 10,000 followers who would probably be into the Viper Room — do we do this ‘coopetition’ thing?”

Deciding to retweet them ended up being the best choice, because shortly afterward, a new bond was formed and other clubs on the Strip began to take notice. The Comedy Store down the street got on Twitter and joined the conversation, and “from there it just went from one business to the next, and it just grew. And because we had started this new relationship — a clean slate — it didn’t have anything to do with the bookers, or who had more people at their show, or anything. It was a whole new relationship that was created online with the clubs.”

Beyond revitalizing an audience of patrons (which we’ll talk more about in a bit), the Sunset Strip’s embracing of social media led to a regrouping of business owners who are taking a fresh approach to their local community. From creative adoption of Twitter and other tools, The Roxy and its neighbors discovered “we can revive ourselves and take a fresh look at what’s happening out there and not only get the actual customers back, but even affect the government — I know that sounds crazy, but literally, we go down to the city council meeting together and there’s 40 business there. And we’re all talking together and we’ve become a really strong voice within our city to get things done.”

Getting Creative With Twitter

From rewarding loyal club fans to transforming customer service, Adler relayed some creative and unique initiatives that The Roxy and other businesses on the Strip have employed to great effect. A “Tweet Crawl” event was first held in July 2009, where several businesses partnered up to invite the Twitter community for an all-night mosey down Sunset Boulevard with free access to clubs, food and drink specials, and hidden prizes and giveaways handed out via clues on Twitter. Now in its third incarnation, the most recent Tweet Crawl grew the participating crowd from 40-50 up to around 100 crawlers. “Something I miss from my youth is seeing people walk on the Strip and go from business to business. So not only are we doing this community thing online, but we’re actually getting these people to go to these places.”

Another initiative, Club Rox, sold 100 “all-you-can-eat” annual passes to the club for $100 each. Buyers get as many shows per year as they want to attend, front-of-the-line access, a special custom drink menu, and half price deals on everything at the bar. The passes, only advertised on Twitter, sold out in three days and had a far more positive effect than Adler and his team expected. “It created this group of 100 people who are so passionate about The Roxy, and there are people who have come to over 20 shows already this year. We thought we were getting something maybe financially, but we ended up getting this voice of this group of people who are super positive about The Roxy and love music.”

The group avidly uses the Twitter hashtag #ontherox to represent themselves. “They’re one of our greatest assets. They talk about the shows all the time, they always tweet when they’re here,” says Adler.

Also just launched is the Sunset Strip VIP Pass program, which gives any customer staying at participating Strip hotels free front-of-the-line access to participating clubs. The initiative runs for the next six months through the summer, and encourages tourists on the Strip to stay in the area instead of hopping in the car to drive over to Hollywood or Universal City. “Personally I’ve done it a million times and it’s one of my favorite things to go see three or four bands in a night and hang out on the Strip,” says Adler of the VIP program.

The Real Sunset Strip is a weekly weekend Ustreamustream show that aggregates the news and events of the week from around the various venues on the Strip. Photographers send in photos from the week’s events, celebrities come down for interviews, and Adler et al grab passersby on the street for short segments. Sometimes they’ll broadcast right from within the venue. “The club is going on but there’s a TV show happening right in the middle of it. That’s been a great way to tie the different businesses together.”

Adler had a robust Wi-Fi system put into The Roxy specifically to encourage patrons to livestream during shows, share photos from the club, and generally get content out surrounding what’s going on at the venue. Licensing issues prevent the club from doing the official livestream events it has long been interested in. Lots of companies are also interested in partnering on livestreams, but “you can’t get any bands to do it because they don’t have the right to give away their own music when they show up here, and who’s going to get a lawyer to go through contracts with all these bands?” So instead, the in-house Wi-Fi provides a platform for the audience to do their own livestreaming, and The Roxy will retweet the links. Adler says, “I’ll go down during the soundcheck and do 10 minutes of Ustream on the phone and people love it. They eat it up.”

And of course, giveaways are also a popular and frequent method of both bringing in repeat business and giving something back to loyal customers. Offers like “the next 5 people to hit us up get two pairs of tickets and VIP passes,” or “the next person to hit us up gets a month of Roxy shows,” often do well. The people who win are the ones who actually show up. They’re happy about the experience, and they tell their friends. “It’s a positive cycle that’s starting to happen not just at The Roxy but all over the Strip,” said Adler.

Other Social Media Tools

While Adler doesn’t see more traditional methods of marketing going away any time soon — “We still have a publicist, we still have a street team that comes and picks up their fliers on Tuesday to distribute them. I don’t think you can totally write it off,” — he sees social media as essentially a no-brainer for businesses to get into. “It’s a [much] better way to do business. Be honest and keep that conversation going.” Nevertheless, it might not be any singular tool that will do the trick, and it behooves companies to investigate what methods their audience uses to find them and make sure they have a presence there. “People find you in many different ways, and you have to find out how people do that — it’s constantly changing.”

Tools like FoursquareFoursquare are becoming more relevant especially to local business, although Adler still sees that as something “on the horizon. I would love that Foursquare were stronger.” Nevertheless, depending on the nature of your business, diving into emerging tools might help you reach the right audience. “With LA, it’s a different kind of market than Main Street America. If you have that person who’s on Foursquare, it’s usually someone that’s a first-adopter — someone that other people are listening to and watching to find out the next thing.”

FacebookFacebook is another staple these days, and Adler had great things to say about the social network’s ad platform and its ability to finely target a desired audience. “I discovered how amazing the ads are on Facebook. If I can get that target number down to 5,000 people, that’s who I want to be advertising to. I don’t think it really helps to go to 100,000 people; I think your ad gets lost. Getting very specific works.”

Still, Twitter remains a primary tool for The Roxy and other clubs on the Strip for a number of reasons, one of which is immediacy. A patron’s tweet about a weak gin and tonic earned her a visit from Adler and a complementary drink refresh. “It was kind of an awkward moment because she’s like, ‘Oh, are you stalking me?’ [laughs] But it turned into a good thing because she ended up being happy. It’s actually brought [customer service] at The Roxy to an amazing level … Having that relationship will really bring people back.”

Having a large number of followers and clout on Twitter also becomes a draw for the bands that play at The Roxy. “Our social media is starting to be a reason for bands to play here because they want that Twitter contest, or whatever influence we might have out there on Twitter — they want a piece of that. That part makes Twitter important.” Twitter is used to knit together the entire experience of a show as well. These days, many bands and their individual members are on Twitter, in addition to the audience. “We do maybe two or three actual tweets [per] day, maximum, and then the rest of them are really using other tweets to tell our message — whether it’s a fan that’s talking about the band, or the band talking about their experience, or connecting up the people who are thinking of coming to a show. It’s a little easier and faster to connect on Twitter than on Facebook.”

Mobility is also key, and access to Twitter from almost any phone, whether smartphone or not, simply makes it more accessible in that regard. “Facebook to me is someone at home, whereas Twitter I feel is someone on the go. They’re either coming to the venue or figuring out where to go — it’s more mobile.”

Advice for Local Businesses and How to Get Started

What if you’re a small business just trying to get started with social media? Adler had some good advice on how to dive in, and primary among the concepts is to start slowly. “It almost sounds old school now, but just starting with a blog was a huge step into everything. It’s like Twitter in slow-motion. For someone that is just coming into this, it teaches you about content.” It’s also a great introduction to bi-directional conversation for brands. “…the comments on the blog — it was my first time listening to what people had to say about what I was putting out there. It’s an awesome moment.”

Adler also speaks to defining your business’s personality as a key component in developing a voice online. “The personality — whether it is on your blog or Facebook or Twitter — make sure that the personality of your business is apparent. That’s a huge step for a lot of businesses because a lot of them don’t even know their personality … What if your business was a person? How would it act and interact with people? Most businesses probably couldn’t give you that answer. But I think defining that and learning what that is was a huge part of our growth here.”

Using Twitter to gather information is also a powerful way to bring the huge amount of new data that’s out there to bear on your business knowledge. “Being able to track the bands in the weeks coming up to the show is great. You can learn a lot about a band and their fans: What kind of drink specials should we have? Is this a Dewar’s crowd or a Bud Light crowd? There’s a lot of data out there we collect. Also when people leave, we want to hear that exit comment. And we’re the first to do something about it — if it wasn’t a positive experience, we want to fix it.”

Building an audience online also helps solve one of the problems that’s often referred to as a business’s number one fear about embracing social media: What happens if and when people are making negative comments? Building up a supportive community can help crowdsource a way of dealing with that. “If someone tweets something like ‘The Roxy is old,’ I can’t wait to retweet them and say, ‘anyone want to tackle this one?’ because literally 40-50 people will tweet back with supportive messages. So you have this awesome community that starts to back you once you define yourself.”

Overall, for businesses just getting started with social media, the key point is to start slowly. “Starting small was key for us. We went from a calendar-style website that was one page and hadn’t been updated in 2 years, to a blog and all of this.” At first, “I thought it was advertising — that doing the blog was an advertising tool. It turned out to not be that. It turned out to be more of a roadmap of what we should be doing and who we are.”

Nic Adler joins The Comedy Store’s Alf LaMont and The Viper Room’s Nathan Levinson at SXSW 2010 for a panel entitled “A Social Media Case Study of L.A.’s Sunset Strip” on Thursday, March 18 at 3:30pm.

Connect with The Roxy:
- On TwitterNetalab on Twitter
- On their home page
- On MySpace
- On YouTube
- On Flickr

[Image Credit: Totallylikeduh!]

Last night, Reuters released their social media policy, which includes instructing journalists to avoid exposing bias online and tells them specifically not to “scoop the wire” by breaking stories on Twitter.

The strict instruction makes it clear that even though news continually breaks on TwitterTwitter first — especially in disaster scenarios — Reuters journalists are to break their stories first via the wire and not on Twitter.

The social media policy in question also addresses a number of other Twitter, FacebookFacebook, and online concerns, offering up instructions and recommendations whenever possible.

For example, journalists are advised to get manager approval before using Twitter for professional purposes, have someone double-check their tweets before posting, avoid disclosing personal biases (especially political), and to separate professional and private activity with separate accounts.

The policy as a whole is a fascinating read and exposes that Reuters, as a media organization, is torn between encouraging employees to use social media and the realization that the online behaviors of their staff put them at risk, a sentiment expressed in the comment that these tools, if misused, could “threaten our hard-earned reputation for independence and freedom from bias or our brand.”

In their eyes, a reporter that exposes their political leanings on Facebook, even privately, is no longer free from repudiation. A journalist that follows sources on Twitter or friends them on Facebook risks sharing those identities with the competition.

What’s interesting, though, is the idea that social media poses a threat to the traditional news cycle and notion of journalism has been around since the days when blogging first surfaced. As other news organizations, reputable or not, continue to break stories on Twitter and even mandate social media usage, it will be interesting to see whether or not Reuters can maintain their relevance and position atop the news chain.

A judge has taken Pink Floyd’s side in a court battle between the band and its label, EMI, and digital downloads are at stake. The band says its 11-year-old contract only permits EMI to sell complete albums, not individual tracks, but the label has been offering downloads of individual songs through online services like iTunes.

The word “record” was used in the contract, which EMI believes implies physical media. Therefore, the label thinks that it can do whatever it wants as far as digital downloads go. The judge was quoted in Bloomberg saying, “There is nothing in the terms ‘album’ or ‘record’ to suggest they apply to the physical product only.” The court seems to support Pink Floyd’s goal to preserve the art