Darby Sieben -

There is no doubt about it, if you follow the online local space that Check-In is “In” for 2010. A recent article on Mashable, “Foursquare’s Growth Not Slowing Down: 725,000 Users, 22 Million Checkins” definitely proves the point for this 1-year old startup organization.

In February I did a post on my FourSquare experience that you can read on my initial experiences and the impact on local.

A couple of days, one of my work colleagues, Mohamed Kahlain, follow him on Twitter, sent me the link to CheckIn Mania, a mashup that features checkins from FourSquare, GoWalla and Britekite. This was originally posted on Mashable.

In a nutshell what CheckIn Mania does is allows you to enter any city, click on the map and select a business. Once you select a business you can see who is the mayor of that place + how many checkins to that business and any tips. You also have the ability to select the “Search by Map” which is a neat feature that allows you to move the map and the locations update as opposed to updating the locations by click.

Here is the screenshot with one of my favorite restaurants (of which I am in the Mayor in Calgary) called Spicy Hut.

It is no secret that any of the location based services listed above have the highest penetration in major US markets like San Francisco and New York, but what about Canada?

Are Canadians checking in?

So I decided to spot check some businesses in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal to see how active Canadian’s are. I decided to focus on Restaurants. My selection criteria for which restaurants and spas to choose was as following, In Google I did a local search and selected business #3 in their 7-pack. In YellowPages.ca, I selected the #8 business and in Yelp.ca I selected business #6. This would give me a random sample of businesses. I also limited this to FourSquare as this is the most popular check-in service.

Here are my findings.

Vancouver Restaurants:
C Restaurant (selected from Google) – 9 checkins
Tojo’s Restaurant (selected from Yelp) – 33 checkins
Top Of Vancouver Revolving Restaurant (selected from Yellowpages.ca) – 17 checkins

Calgary Restaurants
Calgary Marriott Hotel (selected from Google) – 21 checkins
Capo Restaurant (selected from Yelp) – 5 checkins
Karma Fine Indian Cuisine (selected from YellowPages.ca) – 2 checkins

Toronto Restaurants
Bistro 990 Restaurant (selected from Google, this is actually listing #4) – 11 checkins
Pomegranate Restaurant (selected from Yelp) – 8 checkins
The Real Jerk (selected from YellowPages.ca) – 34 checkins

Montreal Restaurants
Restaurant Toqué (selected from Google) – 5 checkins
Santos (selected from Yelp, actually #8) – 40 checkins
Arahova Souvlaki (selected from YellowPages.ca) – 15 checksin

The only thing that surprised me about the above results is Toronto. I would have expected to Toronto to come in closer to Montreal in terms of checkins because of population concentration and smartphone penetration. However, this might be a result of the fact that Toronto does not have the density of Montreal (land mass to population size), which might also explain why Vancouver is more comparative to Montreal. Calgary actually holds it own, relative to its population size and the fact that Calgary.

Although comparatively to the US, Canada is not at the 1/10 rule (see some US results below), it is pretty clear to me that Canadians in the large urban markets have started to embrace checkin. This group, like in the US, are the ones at the start of the product curve and the big question going forward is whether checkin services will hit mass adoption.

How does this compare to the top US cities. Here are the results for San Francisco and New York using the same process as above. I used YellowPages.com as the 3rd source.

San Francisco Restaurants
Zuni Cafe (selected from Google) – 459 checkins
R & G Lounge (selected from Yelp) – 296 checkins
Cote Sud (selected from YellowPages.com) – 6 checkins

New York Restaurants
Spring Street Natural Restaurant (selected from Google) – 495 checkins
La Sirene (selected from Yelp) – 52 checksin
Serendipity 3 (selected from YellowPages.com) – 236 checkins

Popularity: 3% [?]

In doing some research work this afternoon using ComScore Media Metrix, I noticed the Cross Iron Mills mall in the results. This got me thinking; which Calgary Shopping Mall website is actually the most popular?

Here are the results:

This is only a 2009 view, but what was interesting is that Cross Iron Mills was getting some incredible web traffic from the time it registered in September and peaking in October and from a web perspective has established itself as Calgary’s leading shopping mall.

In September, Cross Iron Mills had more web traffic than both Market Mall and the Chinook Centre had combined. In October, same thing, Cross Iron Mills dominated the landscape but notice the spike in traffic to the Market Mall website.

Was this a result of the fact that Cross Iron Mills was the first shopping mall to open in 25-years or the fact that they were investing heavily in all forms of traditional media advertising. I suspect a combination of both.

Now if you are from Calgary you are probably asking yourself about the other malls, SouthCentre, Deerfoot and Sunridge. These malls do not have their own websites, instead they resolve to Shopping.ca – so if I included the numbers for shopping.ca it would have skewed the pure results.

What I can tell you is that the shopping.ca network of mall sites, which includes all the Cambridge Ivanhoe properties in Canada has only 311K visitors registered in October with the best month of the year in being May at 455K. Considering in October that Cross Iron had 82K or 26.37% of the traffic of shopping.ca (with all the properties), it is safe to say Cross Iron is still the king in terms of traffic in Calgary.

The other malls in Calgary that have independent websites are not registered in ComScore, hence they were not included.

Links related to this post:

Market Mall – write a review at darbysieben.com
Chinook Centre – write a review at darbysieben.com

Get driving directions at YellowPages.ca for Market Mall or Chinook Centre.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Over the past two months I had have the pleasure of meeting a lot of new marketing candidates who have joined Yellow Pages Group Canada. The range of experience and quality of people is absolutely. This past week, I had the pleasure of meeting Martin Aubut who is a clear leader in social media, check out his linked profile.

Since I joined YPG in 2006 (as an employee, been working with the organization since 2001), I sometimes have to remind myself how incredibly lucky I am to be surrounded by high quality people. It is true that at the heart of any great company is people and YPG is not short of talent, which is probably one reason why YPG has been recognized as one of Canada’s Leading Employers.

I am currently looking to hire 2 Senior Managers of Business Development for YellowPages.ca, Canada’s Leading Online Commercial Directory. I need one located in Montreal and one located in either Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto. If you are interested, please check out Yellow Pages Group HR Page and search for Job #1802 if interested in Montreal or #1836 if interested in Calgary/Vancouver or #1954 if interested in Toronto.

Here is a snapshot of some other interesting performance marketing roles.

The Performance Marketing Training Specialist will be part of a team of experts (Performance Marketing Delivery Team) mandated to provide dedicated support to sales representatives in achieving their targets of print and online products, with particular emphasis on Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media. Check out the YPG HR Page and if you are interested in Calgary, search for posting #1811 and if you are interested in Burnaby search for posting #1795

Check out all the positions that are currently being recruited for.

If you have any questions about working with YPG, please feel free to post a comment.

Popularity: 4% [?]