Double Dutch IS Foursquare for Conventions and Events

A few months ago I wondered if location-based (LB) platforms like Foursquare could be used to maximize engagement at conventions and other events. It turns out I was not alone.  Meet Double Dutch“The only white label, location-based iPhone app.” Note:  Due out this summer is an HTML5 app that will allow use of Double Dutch on any mobile phone. 2010June3_doubledutch-logo-on-black Launched at this year’s SXSW, what I like to think of as Woodstock for the tech crowd, Double Dutch is Foursquare in a white label iPhone app that is designed precisely to be branded and customized for your convention or event – to encourage engagement, and a whole lot more. I had the pleasure this week of learning more about Double Dutch with Pankaj Prasad in Business Development.  Pankaj had noticed my previous post on Foursquare, and as a company evangelist for Double Dutch, he naturally reached out to set the record straight. How Double Dutch Differs from Foursquare The team at Double Dutch is first and foremost very complimentary of the work of Foursquare and others in this space.  They understand that there really isn’t competition between Double Dutch and Foursquare. Your Foursquare friends are typically going to be your true friends.  And at any moment they are scattered across the country – or even the globe.  Just now I opened up my Foursquare iPhone app to see one of my friends is at the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, another at Washington National, and yet another at Einstein Bagels in Irving, TX.  My friends are predominantly professional speakers like me.  They travel.  This means Foursquare helps us to engage, but that engagement will most likely be virtual – from afar. In contrast, Double Dutch seeks to engage a temporary community, such as that for an event.  They understand we all have friends, and we also have what they refer to as our convention friends – those that we engage with at a specific time and place. Our convention friends are micro-communities.  We share common business objectives.  So our social engagement is typically associated with our businesses.  As a white label app, Double Dutch can be branded for any enterprise, convention, expo, or event.  In that respect its use can and often is temporary – just for the few days of a convention. However, in my conversation with Pankaj, I suggested that the added benefit for associations could be to extend the app beyond the event to encourage continued sharing, learning, and quite possibly, enhancement of membership for member associations. How Double Dutch is Like Amazon When you buy even one book from Amazon, they start to build a profile or social graph that represents a personal profile from your buying preferences.  As you make more purchases, your buying behavior reveals your interests, habits, and tendencies.   In short, it is a predictor of future behavior.  And that makes it a valuable asset for Amazon. Double Dutch does the same thing for your convention and event participants.  This tells event organizers a great deal about their core group of members, as well as those first time attendees that can be cultivated to become members. What is most interesting to me is the intensity and nature of activity at conventions.  In just a very short period of time, you develop a temporary social graph that is rich with data.  This is derived from participation at venues ranging from educational events to the types of desired social venues, such as restaurants.  And it also delivers clues to peak times and days for engagement. I have personally attended many events that seemed to be one day longer than most of us cared for.  In these times of budget restrictions, the data that Double Dutch is capable of providing can help to better manage that budget. 2010Mar18_FoursquareV2 How Double Dutch Works   Just as Foursquare is essentially an interactive social gaming application, Double Dutch is the same – with a twist of having a focus on business purposes.  The idea for effectively using Double Dutch is to establish venues for checking in that encourage everyone to maximize their involvement (and investment) by taking advantage of everything that was planned for them. Double Dutch check-ins ideally will go beyond the hotels, restaurants, and bars that are the playground of Foursquare.  Double Dutch is able to drill down to what matters most at conventions, tradeshow rental booths and educational sessions, social and fund-raising receptions, and countless other opportunities for encouraging the primary activity at events – business networking! Double Dutch customizes their platform with your logos and supports the user experience with suggested activities that make a game out of doing what participants will otherwise be doing.  The game can be thought of as a scavenger hunt with incentives provided by expo or event vendors or sponsors. If this sounds a little outside of the box, keep in mind that this is social media marketing.  It is a type of marketing that still has very fuzzy edges.  We are still defining it.  But as inherently social creatures, we know that things like giveaways and Foursquare-like badges can be the glue that can give vendors the stickiness they are looking for with the potential customers. There is naturally a fee associated with customization of the Double Dutch platform.  However, savvy organizers can easily cover that expense through sponsorships.  Given the extensive and ongoing visibility Double Dutch provides, I imagine it could actually be turned into a profit center. The Magic of Conventions If you have attended as many conventions as I have, you have discovered the magic. People let their guard down and share more than they would if they were back home. So, in the wake of all of these privacy concerns with social media, you can be assured that Double Dutch is indeed a viable vehicle for enhancing the usual outcome of your event – productive engagement. Unlike Foursquare that works through opt-in friending like Facebook, Double Dutch takes advantage of the fact that the event community is the network.  This gives you discretion that you can apply according to your understanding of your event participants. A traditional appro ach to events is to publish an attendee list.  No privacy violations there.  It’s just individual names and the companies they represent.  You could choose to plug everyone into the Double Dutch app and let them choose to activate it through engagement – or not.  Or you could make it optional. My take is that when I attend events I want an easy method for networking and learning. That’s why I dropped $200/night for a room, along with that amount times 2 or 3 for the event fee. For a small business owner, that’s a significant investment. Can an application like Double Dutch help you to to justify that for me? I think so. I don’t want to waste a single minute.  I want to share a cab ride with a colleague to the local store to buy the soundbar I liked from this article. I don’t want to eat alone.  And if there is a group that is converging from across the country that I have learned from in the past, I want to know what their plans are – so I can join in that collaboration. Double Dutch seems ripe to help you help me to engage at your event to maximize my networking and learning experience — And that highly favors my returning next year for more of the same.

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