Here are some great posts from the past week about social media:

1: Beyond Foursquare: What Search Engines Could Do With Location Data | New York Times

Social Mediarology thinks: This is great news for consumers everywhere. With proper integration, Google Maps may, by default, look a lot like FourWhere.com (Read our post about FourWhere here), and search results could have some great location-based tips baked right in (Check out our post about Bing Maps’ Foursquare layer here).

2: Status Update: Facebook Logs 500 Million Users | USAToday

Social Mediarology thinks: With half a billion users, Facebook shouldn’t be ignored. The good news is that more and more organizations are joining Facebook every day in an effort to leverage the platform.

3: Is Email More Important Than Social Networks? | KyleLacy.com

Social Mediarology thinks: Kyle hits some great points in his post. In the end, the channel you use to communicate with your customers should depend on what your customers want.

4: 5 Mobile Commerce Trends for 2010 | Mashable

Social Mediarology thinks: With smartphone sales rising 49% in the first quarter of 2010, mobile technologies are here to stay. Here are some trends to keep an eye out for through 2010.

This is the third in a series of interviews with local leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Scotty Wise of Scotty’s Brewhouse, an Indiana-based restaurant with 6 locations throughout the Hoosier State.

Scotty Wise – Scotty’s Brewhouse

We opened out first restaurant in 1996 in Muncie. Not long after that, we tore down the existing building and rebuilt from the ground up. In 1998 I opened a fine dining restaurant, where I lost nearly a million dollars, but I learned more over the next three years at the fine dining restaurant than I’ve learned in the 14 years of Scotty’s existence.  When we closed that restaurant down, we opened our Bloomington location in 2001. West Lafayette opened in 2004 and the northside Indianapolis (96^th Street) location opened in 2007. We opened our downtown Indianapolis location (at Virginia & Pennsylvania Streets) in 2009. Scotty’s Lakehouse opened in 2010 and we’ll be opening our Brewpub, Three Wise Men Brewing Company in Broad Ripple in late 2010. We’ve also got a project we’re planning to launch in 2011 in Fort Wayne.  We’re looking to locate in left field of Parkview Field, home of the Minor League Fort Wayne TinCaps.

When I was looking to expand to Indianapolis, all the banks told me that the 96^th street location wouldn’t work because we were a college town bar and there was too much competition, but it’s the most successful restaurant in our portfolio right now.

How has social media affected your bottom line?

The best way to apply social media to our bottom line is that we’ve eliminated every single piece of outside advertising, no print, no radio, no other types of traditional media, whereas in the past, we would spend about $250,000 each year in football ads, newspaper, and radio during Christmastime to promote gift cards. We eliminated all of that. The original reason we eliminated that was because of the economy. A year and a half ago, when the economy crashed, that was the one part of the budget we could eliminate without having to lay employees off.

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First of all, thanks to the Firebelly Digitalia blog for the great idea to do a weekly recap of some great social media-related articles.

Check out these posts in case you missed them this week!

1: Mailchimp Integrates Facebook Likes Into Email Campaigns | All Facebook

Social Mediarology thinks: What a great idea for one of the top email providers. Email isn’t going away anytime soon, but this is a great way to provide their customers with some deep social media integration.

2: 10 Dos and Don’ts for Brands on Twitter | Mashable

Social Mediarology thinks: This post is a couple of months old, but it contains some really great tips for what you should and shouldn’t do with your business’ Twitter account.

3: Experts Agree: Gen Y Will Not Grow Out of Social Networking [STUDY] | Mashable

Social Mediarology thinks: Do you STILL think that you don’t need to get your company involved in social media? There are some predictions that Gen Y consumers (Millennials – roughly considered to have been born between 1980 and 2000) will outnumber Baby Boomers soon. Do you really want to leave them behind?

4: Top 6 Social Media Mistakes and How To Fix Them | Social Media Examiner

Social Mediarology thinks: Are you making any of these mistakes? If so, they’re easy to fix.

This is the second in a new series of interviews with local leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Kyle Lacy of Brandswag, a social media training company based in Indianapolis and Oklahoma City.

Kyle Lacy – Brandswag

Kyle Lacy started Brandswag in June, 2007 with his college roommate. They started out as an identity design firm for website development and as of November, 2009, they moved into corporate training and development for social media. They work with companies with between 100 and 2,000 employees and train HR, Marketing, Sales, IT, Upper Management and other departments on the importance of social media as well as why and how to use social media. In short, they teach mid-to large sized companies how to use and implement social media.

Kyle recently published Twitter Marketing for Dummies and maintains a social media-focused blog at KyleLacy.com.

Why social media?

One, we’ve been using it for a long time. Facebook started while we were in college. We also saw a niche that we could brand in terms of being young, and we took advantage of it. I like how social media gives a voice to the consumer instead of the other way around, but we also saw a great opportunity and we jumped headfirst into it. Initially it was difficult, because people didn’t understand the concept, they didn’t understand why it mattered, but it’s getting better now and more and more people are wanting to learn about everything.

What are some next steps for DMOs in social media?

It’s not about creating profiles, it’s about figuring out where your customers are. I’ve had conversations with people where I’ve told them, “Don’t you dare go and create a [Facebook] fan page, there’s no reason for you to do it”. I think the biggest problem that we have right now is that organizations look at social and think it’s a completely separate entity from everything else. They have their marketing meeting and then they have their social media meeting, which is stupid because social is just another arm of marketing. It’s a communications platform. There’s no difference between it and direct mail, email marketing, they should all coexist with social and vice-versa.

What I would tell people is if you make a Facebook fan page, you’d better figure out if it’s making you revenue. If, after six months, it’s not making you revenue, you’re either not doing it right or you need to get rid of it. It’s cool to have the social media hype, but we’re not going to get to the past the point of just hype until people make sure this is a viable marketing platform for them. It will be a whole lot easier for everyone if they start measuring their social media initiatives.

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I’ve written about Foursquare, the most popular location-based social media game, a couple of times before, but I wanted to write about how to actually get started with Foursquare. How to create your account, how to connect your mobile phone and how to get started checking in.

What is Foursquare?

Foursquare's Newbie Badge

First of all, a brief explanation of Foursquare. Foursquare is a location-based social media game that allows you to check-in at different locations when they’re out and about. You earn points for each time you check in at a location and you can also unlock custom badges that tell your friends about some of the things you’ve done. If you check in at a particular location more often than anyone else, you’re considered the Mayor of that location.

Friends that follow you on Foursquare will see where you’ve checked in and, who knows, maybe they’ll join you at the coffee shop while you’re relaxing there in the evening. You can also leave tips at each location when you check in. Want to let your friends know about the appetizer they should order at the new restaurant in town or let them know where the best place to park for a Colts game is? Leave a tip and anyone on Foursquare can view it.

Still confused? Here’s a quick video from HowCast that explains Foursquare in a nutshell:

Why should I use Foursquare?

Part of the reason to use Foursquare is the same reason you use any other social media platform; to connect with people you know. The difference with Foursquare is that you’re broadcasting what you’re doing while you’re doing it and you can see what your friends are up to at the same time. Foursquare’s real benefit becomes apparent when you’re in a new city. Are you in Chicago for a conference and looking for a place to eat dinner? Fire up Foursquare to see what the locals recommend. By checking in and leaving tips at the places you frequent, you could provide just the help a visitor is looking for.

Create An Account:

Creating your Foursquare account is simple. Go to Foursquare.com and click on the big Join Now button. Fill out the standard account information; name, email, current location, etc. then head to the next step. You can easily add your Twitter or Facebook friends who already have Foursquare accounts and you can invite other friends who haven’t yet signed up for Foursquare.

Connect Your Phone:

Now that you’ve got a Foursquare account, you need to connect it to your mobile phone. Foursquare makes this very easy if you have a smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, Palm or an Android-based phone). Simply visit Foursquare.com on your mobile device and download the app for your phone. The Foursquare apps available for each mobile device are simple and easy to use, just fire them up and enter your login information to get started.There are also a host of other applications that allow you to check in with Foursquare, but the easiest thing is to download the official Foursquare app for your phone.

If you don’t have a smartphone but you can access the internet on your phone, you can still check-in by visiting m.foursquare.com. If you don’t have a smartphone or a web-enabled phone, it’s time for you to upgrade . Seriously, though, you can check in by sending a text message if your phone can’t connect to the internet.

Start Checking In:

Now that you’ve downloaded your Foursquare app, you can start checking in at your favorite locations. Load your Foursquare app and start checking in and leaving tips. If you’re don’t have a web-enabled phone, you can still check in via text. Send a text message to 50500 (like this: @ Ace Bar ! Playing skeeball)

Here’s some exciting news for music lovers out there:

Music discovery engine Pandora is receiving some deep social integration with Facebook, Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today at the F8 Developer Conference.Made possible by Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol, Pandora will be able to stream music directly on Facebook.com from bands you’ve “liked” across the web. You’ll be able to see which of your friends likes similar music and check out what other music they like and have in their collections.

The combination of Open Graph and the new, wide-reaching “Facebook Like” button around the web means that “liking” a band on a third-party site will register with your Facebook profile, which can in turn inform your Pandora profile even while you’re discovering music at other points around the web. It also tightly hooks your Pandora profile with your “real” social graph of friends on Facebook.

Pandora Partners with Facebook for Social Music – Barb Dybwad

For music junkies like me, this is great news. I tried out the iLike application when I first joined Facebook, but I’ve always loved Pandora. For the uninitiated, Pandora is an internet radio station that plays music you like. Create an account, enter a song, artist or album you like and Pandora will create a radio station playing similar music for you. You can give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to each song, which helps Pandora create better recommendations. You can only listen to each song once, so enjoy it while you hear it, but there’s always something new to listen to.

Facebook was smart to integrate with Pandora, as MySpace still seems to be the place to be for most bands and musicians. This could really give Facebook and Pandora the momentum they each need to stand out as tops in their respective fields.

Have you used Pandora? What do you think of this deal?