Ed plays Foursquare

Fri, 05 March 2010 3 Comments

The impact of Twitter over the past year has been enormous. It has taken most of those social media and blogging skeptics and tipped them over the edge. In fact, most of the journalists I remember knocking blogging are now micro blogging on Twitter.

But now if you are into retail marketing there is something even more exciting which stimulated demand at a local level.

Twitter’s strength is its simplicity. All you do is post 140 characters of mostly drivel or drunken rants in public or private and amass groups of friends with whom (if you’re doing it properly) you talk.

Businesses have taken to it and many have sidestepped traditional media to engage social and blogging types to remarkable effect.The challenge is to work out what’s next and where to stop. We’ve been through blogging, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Linked-in.There’s always another one showing promise but never quite managing to drag me away from Oz and James’ various alcoholic adventures on TV.

Yet Foursquare has started sneaking into my life, a social network that has some exciting commercial opportunities. If you check my profile you’ll find I’m spending more time out mainlining this new fangled specialty coffee (with a user called Slummy Mummy) than is healthy.

Foursquare is a mobile platform, part Twitter, part geo location and review service with a smattering of the Scouts and Girl Guides mixed in. Already some of the big tech blogs in the US, including Mashable and TechCrunch are recognizing the potential of Foursquare, especially the potential of geolocation services for business.

The idea is that you check-in to venues using a geolocation enabled mobile phone. The more you travel and check in the more you collect badges, the Scouts and Girl Guides element with the shorts (or short skirts). The person who has checked into a single venue most becomes Lord Mayor, who can be knocked off by anyone who visits more frequently. Users can leave tips, make to do lists and connect with friends. While Foursquare also broadcasts a users’ location and tips via Twitter and Facebook (which can be annoying and spammy).

Foursquare shows how often users have visited a venue and how loyal or promiscuous they are. And it encourages venues to run friendly competitions to stimulate visits to venues, currently mainly bars, cafés, coffee shops, restaurants and stores.The power of Foursquare is that special offers can be pitched to Mayors or to people who have checked into venues in a particular area.

Users can also broadcast tips to users in a particular area. It actually stimulates demand and creates competition between people who want to be Lord Mayor of a particular venue.

While it’s mostly being used by hospitality venues right now (the South Melbourne based coffee roaster St Ali, for instance), the potential for retail is enormous.It changes the nature of marketing from the centralised office to the local level.

The founders promise in the future that it’ll be offering venues tools that will lend insight to who's visiting, how often, where they're coming from and where they're going next.

It is exciting. And if you haven’t checked it out, you should.