Social Media and the Fitness Industry - IHRSA 2010

Many health clubs struggle with how to use Social Media tools like Twitter to grow their business.  In particular, club facilities have a hard time finding people in their geographic area to tweet.  In less populated  areas the number of Twitter users is generally lower, making it more difficult to drive business.  Soon this will become less of an issue, as location based features are emerging in the near term on Facebook and Twitter.

At IHRSA this year, I'll be addressing trends in social media among other aspects of how technologies will impact industry business models. See more in the video below.

With Twitter use increasingly many bricks and mortar businesses, like health clubs, are beginning to realize its potential to help drive revenues.   Check out this interview with Restaurateur Joe Sorge of AJ Bombers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to learn about how Twitter has improved his business.

Joanne Burgess recently shared 3 applications to help bricks and mortar businesses utilize Twitter more effectively. Here are the findings from her recent post:

To build your local twitter following, investigate these 3 applications:

1. Twellow.com

Twellow is the Twitter Yellow Pages.  As a brick and mortar, you can not only create a great profile for yourself or your business on Twellow, but if you click on the ‘Twellowhood’ tab at the top of the page, you will be able to create targeted searches within a specific geographic area.  Within Twellow, you can even follow people on Twitter and start to grow your network.

Helpful tip: When creating your own profile, make sure you click on ‘expanded bio’ and include all relevant info for your business and make sure you maximize your exposure in the categories section. You are allowed 10.  Make good use of them!

2. Nearbytweets.com

Nearbytweets allows you to search by location and by keyword. By keying in these two items, Nearbytweets will produce a stream of tweets from that and surrounding area that include that keyword.  This is great not only for finding new prospects, but as a business owner, this is great for reputation management.  You can really keep your ear to the ground and listen for any tweets that have to do with your brand and respond to them quickly.

Helpful tip:  Nearbytweets will allow you to save your locations and keywords to streamline the process. You will find this under the preferences tab.  Nearbytweets also allows you to click on any individual tweet to get more information or review an individual’s profile. You can then follow that person/organization from there.

3. Chirpcity.com

Chirpcity is another app that will do location searches for you. It will bring up the image, username and individual tweets.  If you  click on their image, you will be taken to their page, where you can then review their profile and follow them if you so wish.

Helpful tip: If there is one particular tweet you are interested in, you can press ‘view tweet’.  This will take you to the individual’s profile page where that one tweet will be displayed and you can reply to or retweet that particular tweet right there. That’s a handy option. Saves you sifting through all their tweets.

There are other applications out there however, many have pitfalls.  Tweepsearch for example,  has a great concept in that it will bring up the person/organizations bio, and show you their followers, friends and updates, but they are sorely out of date.   It says my last recorded update was 4 months ago. Actually it was more like 2 hours ago and my friend/follower information is also incorrect.   So you will want to choose apps that are current and give you the most accurate information.

OK GO, The Video Pertains to a Brighter Future

As the world grapples with shifts from old to new brought on by radical technology advancements, legacy players attempt to erect road blocks to a progressive future with the primary purpose of protecting self interests. In no case is this more evident than with media companies justifying their dinosaur like existence in the midst of a digital revolution. Its time leaders of these institutions change their views and public policy be molded to let the new build upon the old, lest we delay the important opportunities new ways of doing things offers us all. The recent OK GO video below is a part of this battle; read on to learn how.

The fight involves economics; money; the haves and have-nots. Its important to understand that many industries and businesses, like publishers, created value being risk aggregators; a vital service in the past and still important today. By footing the bill for a large number of people to produce something, books for example, these organizations spread risk and recouped investments extracting huge profits from the few opportunities that reached mass appeal. A classic example of pareto economics and legacy of the scarcity paradigm. An aggregator's value lied in production and distribution costs being significant barriers to entry. With those costs in steep decline the game is changing and risk arbiters value mitigated. Yet the aggregators greed compels them to expect their cake while eating it to; benefiting from cheaper costs while maintaining hefty margins.

Mathew Ingram of GIGAOM wrote eloquently on this topic when he recently commented on a blog post by John Sargent, CEO of book publisher Macmillan. Macmillan is the company that recently had all of its books briefly yanked from Amazon’s electronic store a while back, as the two fought over pricing of e-books. Here is what Ingram said, among other things:

"In effect, Macmillan is trying to do exactly the same thing that many other media companies are desperate to do — from newspapers to music labels to movie companies — which is to replicate the pricing model of an analog, real-world business in digital form. In other words, it is trying to artificially reproduce the kind of scarcity (and thus pricing power) it used to have in one medium in a medium that doesn’t even know what scarcity is. Sooner or later, that attempt will fail (among other things, iTunes appears to show that flexible pricing actually leads to lower sales). For now, Macmillan and other publishers have managed to convince Amazon and Apple to accept the new agency model, but those sandbags aren’t going to last for long."

I particularly like this line from Mr. Ingram's piece, "If you want to see someone frantically struggling to defend an existing analog business model against the disruption that comes from digital, look no further than a blog post today from John Sargent." Mathew is right and Mr. Sargent’s post, like a good “T Rex”, is self serving and wrong. Creating scarcity in the new digital world requires obstructing barriers to cheaper production and distribution and this is what many businesses who can't get with it are spending increasing time and resources doing. A case in point is musician Damian Kulash of OK GO, who has been vocal about his views on the issue, both in an interview last January and a more recent New York Times editorial. Hence the connection with the video above.

In the end choices of creators and consumers will dictate needed change. In the interim, lets make sure the dinosaurs aren’t able to create an inordinate barrier to what technologies can provide for the greater good. If we are having these difficulties with things like videos, music and books you can imagine the barriers old school institutions are creating for more compelling challenges of education, medical care and poverty. The same type of backward thinking that is blocking progress in media business models are the same as that which is keeping us from realizing answers to more important questions. Let's not let that happen.

 

Mobility's Coming Impact on Innovation

With hundreds of millions of smartphones being used, the merger of the physical and digital worlds continues and its practical application is starting to be seen in a variety of forms. The proliferation of mobile devices and Internet ubiquity are creating unique opportunities for innovations that will bridge the divide between bricks and mortar space and the web.

A recent NYT article "Cellphones Let shoppers Point Click and Purchase" identifies the trend:

...a technological transformation is coming to many of the nation’s retailers. They are determined to strengthen the link between their physical stores and the Web, and to use technology to make shopping easier for consumers and more lucrative for themselves. The main way they plan to do it is by turning people’s mobile phones into information displays and ordering devices. Can’t find the flour at the grocery store? Grocers will offer phone applications that tell shoppers exactly where to go. Is the department store out of size 8 jeans? Retailers want to make it simple to punch a couple of buttons and have the desired size shipped home.

Technology in this space is seen as an opportunity for competitive advantage, with some big retailers being reluctant to discuss their plans. The Sam’s Club division of Wal-Mart, Crate & Barrel, Kerr Drug of North Carolina and Disney stores are among retailers confirming they were testing various mobile technologyies or plan to do so soon. These retailers aren't the only concepts driving innovation around mobility. Health clubs, hospitals, restaurants and other bricks and mortar businesses will begin similar forrays into this space as smartphones continue their surge in the marketplace.

Watch the video below that demonstrates Scanlife technologies, an example of this unique and innovative trend.

IHRSA - Technology and The Future of the Fitness Industry

Preparing for the IHRSA convention and my presentation on Saturday at 1:30 pm PST on technology and its impact on the fitness and wellness industry. I will also be on a panel discussing group fitness trends and how cardio gx from polar is a great solution for cutting edge facilities. I'll be sharing my presentation on this site immediately following the show. Its going to be a great event with a lot of important content and interesting thought leaders. See the video below for more information and I look forward to seeing you there.

Bloom Energy - The Potential for an Energy Evolution

The majority of our energy systems rely on a highly centralized structure; creating tremendous inefficiencies from the loss of power along the grid. A decentralized approach would increase efficiency greatly but the technologies for this type of solution have not emerged.

Now comes Bloom Energy. While it is uncertain if Bloom has actually overcome cost and reliability issues with fuel cells, CEO Sridhar recently told BusinessWeek, the Bloom box could reach “grid parity” for home use, or competitive pricing with conventional electricity sources in 3-5 years.

In two days a scheduled press conference will provide more technical information. Simply scaling down a natural gas plant and providing similar costs and reliability would be a huge accomplishment let alone achieving a home use solution. The press conference is highly anticipated and the Bloom web site has a count down to the conference.

Fortune Magazine recently reported Bloom Box's technology is based on ceramic plates stacked atop each other to form modules that can be assembled into a unit of any size.  With about $400 million in venture funding the company has been working on the technology for about eight years. Kleiner Perkins and other major Venture Capitalists are backing Bloom Energy.

Google

told Fortune that it has a 400 kilowatt installation from Bloom at its headquarters in Mountain View, California and Earth2tech reports Bloom’s first customers are big tech companies like eBay and Google that have been using the large Bloom Boxes, which cost between $700,000 to $800,000, to power campuses and data centers (or power for 100 homes so about 1 megawatt). Bloom CEO Sridhar told 60 Minutes that in 5 to 10 years the company hopes to deliver a smaller Bloom box for under $3,000 for the residential market, an aggressive claim.

The potential for both achieving reductions in pollution relating to our inefficient power supply and distribution systems while delivering greater effiency more economically holds out great hope for our future. In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a power source that's inexpensive and clean. Watch the 60 minutes story to learn more.