Resources for Foursquare
What is Foursquare?
Foursquare is a social networking application for your cell phone that relies on your location to provide information relevant to where you are located at any given time.
Foursquare works on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or Palm. If you have another phone with a web browser, you can use their mobile website. If you have a phone that doesn’t have a web browser, you can use our SMS. The system works in the US only for now.
Check-in to places
People use foursquare to “check-in”, which is a way of telling Foursquare your whereabouts. When you check-in someplace, Foursquare tells your friends where they can find you, and recommend places to go & things to do nearby. People check-in at all kind of places – cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, homes, offices. As your friends use foursquare to check-in, you’ll start learning more about the places they frequent. You’ll also start to learn about their favorite spots and the new places they discover. Foursquare makes lists of your favorite things to do and lets you share your experiences with friends, and even suggest new experiences to seek out. As you check-in around the city, you’ll start finding tips that other users have left behind. After checking-in at a restaurant, it’s not uncommon to unlock a tip suggesting the best thing on the menu. Checking-in at a bar will often offer advice on what your next stop should be. Every tip you create is discoverable by other users just by checking in.
Earn points and unlock badges!
Every foursquare check in earns you points. Find a new place in your neighborhood? +5 points. Making multiple stops in a night? +2 points. Dragging friends along with you? +1. And as you start checking-in to more interesting places with different people, you’ll start unlocking badges. There are badges for discovering new places and for traveling to far away places. Spending too much time singing karaoke or been hitting the gym consistently? Yes, there are badges for those too.
Become the mayor! Unlock some freebies!
We all have our local hangouts. Foursquare keeps tabs on who’s the most loyal of all the regulars. If you’ve been to a place more than anyone else, you’ll become “the mayor”… until someone else comes along and steals your title. Foursquare provides a list of places that are offering freebies to “mayors” – free coffees, free ice-cream, free hotel stays, etc.
So that’s about it – ready to sign up?
| Joe Marchese, Mar 09, 2010 03:00 PM |
| A great local Web experience has long been promised by the Internet, but very rarely delivered. However, with the rise of services like Yelp and Foursquare, and continued improvements in geo-filtering tools, it appears that local will finally live up to its potential.
How big a deal is figuring out local? Think of it this way: Google was built on local advertisers, through use of what was called the longtail. The struggle for local marketing and user experience has always been a question of content. Local merchants rarely have the resources to develop a quality digital presence; even when they could, the information would be out of date very quickly. Enter social media local sites like Yelp and Foursquare, which have turned tagging and reviewing local merchants into a game. Getting hundreds of thousands of people to do the work to create up-to-date local content has always been the missing link. And the fact that services like Foursquare make it not only easy, but fun, to use your GPS-enabled phone is the final piece of the puzzle. Why is this important to national marketers? Because, like politics, all marketing is local. Papa John’s advertisements during various national sporting events had me thinking pizza. So my next step was to find the local Papa John’s. While I was going through the online ordering experience (which is fantastic), I decided to check out this Papa John’s Yelp rating, and was very disappointed to find that after seven reviews, my local Papa John’s only had one star and a number of customer complaints. That would usually have led me to pick someplace else to order from, but I wanted to see if the delivery service was as bad as Yelp said. So I ordered. After an hour with no pizza, I decided to call the Papa John’s that I’d ordered from, but no one picked up the phone. I called multiple times; still no answer. An hour and a half after ordering, my cold order arrived — or at least, part of my order. We all know that customer service is always important, but what I learned from Yelp was that my experience was not an isolated incident for my local Papa John’s. I also developed an even deeper trust for Yelp reviews when it comes to making service decisions. For Papa John’s, Yelp offers an opportunity to keep up with what people are saying about its stores locally, so the company can best capitalize on the money it spends to advertise nationally. In short, blending local reputation and national advertising will be key to digital marketing success. Source: Mediapost Online Spin – Social Media Will Finally Make Local Marketing Work |
