The point of Foursquare?
So I’m sure most, or all of you have heard of Foursquare - mainly by seeing those very irritating status updates on Twitter i.e. @TalyaGoldberg has ousted @Dplanet as major of Vida e Caffe Kloof Str (for reals!)
Thought it was the Farmville equivalent for Twitter, unnecessary and pointless. Then I downloaded it and actually think their is a huge amount of potential, especially for restaurant / cafe / hotel owners.
Here is what I think its useful for;
When you login it picks up your location, and thus can tell you places nearby like parks, restaurants, museums etc. It is one big tourism map really, say you are stuck in an area you don’t really know, or in fact are in another city, or even another country, you login and can see all these places that are within a certain - normally walking - distance. Could really see this taking of with tourists in a big way, why buy a huge out-of-date map, when you have it all at the click of a button?
Then you can ‘check-in’ - so if you are at the Company Gardens, you can search places and check-in at that location, it keeps a record of how many times you and others have checked in and the person who does so the most frequently gets the title of ‘Mayor.’ Whenever you become Mayor or get a ‘badge’ i.e ‘Newbie’, ‘Local’, ‘Super User’ it automatically posts to Twitter / Facebook - if you initially enabled it to link your accounts. From a marketing perspective I think this is an amazing tool, you can monitor who is ‘Mayor’ of you establishment, and reward them for using your services the most, because really its all free promotion for your brand.
Another use is that when I was sitting at Vida & Voila in Green Point, a large green button popped up which I had not seen before ‘Specials’ which told me that just around the corner I could get TruthCoffee for R15, and every tenth check-in was rewarded with a cup on the house, thanks to David Donde. I think this is going to take a very very long time to take off in South Africa, because I don’t think most businesses are as tech savvy, they’re only just getting Twitter & Facebook Fan Pages now but in the distant future hopefully we will see lots of businesses using it entice consumers to them.
You can also leave ‘tips’ such as Lionel who said for the Grande Kloof Boutique Hotel, “A great place to stay while visiting SA” or Lee-Anne O for Salt said “Get a table next to the windows, sea side! You sit above the ocean.. Divine!” Obviously you have no way of knowing if these are written by the establishment/people who work there but it’s a powerful word-of-mouth marketing if you find tips by people you know / are ‘friends’ with.
Last but not least, Foursquare could also be used in brand experiences, large scale treasure hunts where people have to find particular things / do challenges, could be fun to implement it on a large scale.
Any other ideas / uses? Let me know!
