6 Foursquare Marketing Tips

We have seen a lot of improvements to theFoursquare application since it’s launch, (including major improvements around cheating) and the number of users has crossed one million.

In one of my previous blog’s on Foursquare I said that I thought it would be critical for venues on a large scale to start participating for it to be really fun.  Here are some tips for venue’s and Foursquare junkies who want to help their local venue’s get on the bandwagon.

By the way, as I was doing final edits on this post, I got the following comment on my firstpost, which I would like to share:

“It seems like an absolute waste of time as a business owner to do this.  Why do we want to give stuff away for free to someone who is already there?  Is it really building business or brand loyalty to our customers?  It just seems to me if I’m at the park and I’m throwing bread crumbs on the ground the pigeons will arrive.  So what?”

I hope it wasn’t from any of the restaurants I am a “regular” at.

Why Set Up A Foursquare Promotion?

It’s FREE …duh

First, to sign up for a Foursquare promotion as a venue, it is absolutely free.  Almost every bar or restaurant I visit has a marketing budget for free giveaways or discounts and in many cases they are printing these advertisements either internally or externally.  Yes.  I said PRINT, as in on paper.  What a waste, and printing costs money.

Foursquare has free analytics for participating venues now as well – see who was there, who hasn’t been there and more.

Pull People From Your Local Competitors

One of the coolest features of Foursquare Specials is that when a user checks into a venue, if your venue is nearby and you have a Special Promotion, the user will be informed of it, hopefully pull that customer to your venue.

6 Marketing Tips

#1. Make the Promotion Accessible & Special

I was recently in Las Vegas and I was checking out the promotions in various spots.  I thought the Wynn did a good job of making it fun for everyone who checks in.  They offered a free glass of champagne at Blush Nightclub for all check-ins.  The Palms on the other hand offered 2 VIP passes for the Mayor of Moon Nightclub.  Um, I’m just there for the weekend.  I’ll never be the mayor and therefore no incentive to visit the club.  It is great for locals, but in a town like Vegas I think appealing to visitors is probably a better bet.

I have also seen promos for a free drink on the first check-in, which can help a new venue get people in the door to check out the place.  I also like what a local eatery, Graze in Hong Kong has done offering a free cup of coffee for every check-in and then a bottle of wine every Friday for the Mayor.

Also, make your specials unique to your Foursquare users.  There is nothing worse than the let down after you realize everyone gets half price off of appetizers from 4 to 6 pm, not just Foursquare users.

#2. Educate Your Staff

It is wonderful that the marketing departments of venues are getting on board with social media tools, but if someone walks in to redeem a promotional offer it doesn’t look good when the floor staff don’t know what Foursquare is.

This has happened to me a few times.  On one occasion I spoke to four people before the manager came to apologize that they didn’t know about it and I then had to explainFoursquare to him! Unfortunately for this venue I even saw people writing in the Tips that they had no clue.

#3. Educate Your Customers

Once you have your staff on board, start telling your customers about the fact that you are using Foursquare.  A nice way to do that is like this example at Graze in Hong Kong.  They have a screen on the register that lets people know about it as they are paying.

The first users of Foursquare are people who are already users of social media tools like Twitter because they are such nice compliments.  However, Foursquare can appeal to people who aren’t interested in Tweeting if they can receive the benefits of check-in promotions.  There are a lot of people using iPhones, Blackberrys and Androids, which can use Foursquare globally.  Getting your regular customers onto Foursquare can be beneficial in a few ways: it creates community, it enforces loyalty, and hopefully they will enter tips about why they love your venue for others to see.

#4. Be Smart

It is not a good incentive to your customers to come to your venue to check-in if the Mayor is the marketing manager, the owner, the owner’s spouse or an employee.  The chances of ousting a Mayor that works at a venue are much smaller.  This goes back to my previous point about accessibility.  They need not stop checking in.  There is a simple way on the Foursquare website to give up your mayorship.

Login to Foursquare.com, view your Mayorships on the lower right and then click the X.  You will be prompted that you are about to give up your Mayorship.

#5. Leave Your Own Tips

What’s wrong with a little self-promotion? Let your customers know what your favorite dishes are or other helpful hints, facts or cool info about you venue.  Be open about the fact it is a staff member, but a little self-promotion never hurt anyone.

#6. Follow-up

After my stop at Blush Nightclub I got a tweet from their marketing department asking me if I had a good time.  That was cool.  Good follow-up is good customer service.  I would send people there.

All in all, have fun and be creative.  Foursquare Specials can be a great way of bonding with your customers.

via: penn-olson.com

Amazon EC2 troubles bring down Reddit, Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite and more

The popularity of Amazon’s cheap, easily scalable hosting is showing its downside right now, with a number of popular websites and services throwing up errors or being down completely.

Foursquare, Quora, Reddit, Moby and Hootsuite are among those affected by technical troubles on Amazon’s servers. The company’s status dashboard currently shows problems with the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Relational Database Service operations, based in North Virginia, with connectivity issues confirmed.

We can confirm connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances and increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Increased error rates are affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We continue to work towards resolution

Quora pulls no punches on its error page, stating: “We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.”

We’d ask you to leave a comment on this story but our commenting system, Livefyre, appears to have fallen victim to the problem too.

Update: In an update on its dashboard, Amazon says that “Delayed EC2 instance launches and EBS API error rates are recovering. Were (sic) continuing to work towards full resolution.”

Update 2: Over seven hours into this saga, service is yet to be restored. Amazon’s latest update notes:

“We’d like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem).

A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it’s difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances.

We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We’re starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

via: TNW 

The Facebook Effect: Foursquare Had Its Most Signups Ever Today

Leading up to Facebook’s location announcement, there were two schools of thought. Either you thought Facebook Places was going to destroy Foursquare. Or you thought that this new service would help the startup by bringing more awareness to the location field. It appears that the latter is happening.

“Just heard from The @HarryH that today was @foursquare’s biggest day ever in terms of new user signups,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley just tweeted out a few minutes ago (@HarryH is the Twitter name of Harry Heymann, Foursquare’s engineering lead).

I’ve long been in the camp that believed Facebook’s entry into the location space would help a lot of these other check-in startups — at least initially. Thanks to the Places API, Facebook is currently serving as a platform for services like Foursquare and Gowalla. And thanks to their 500 million users, Facebook is introducing the concept of location to millions of new users. It shouldn’t be surprising that some of those users are now interested in Foursquare after yesterday’s announcement (and subsequent tidal wave of press).

But.

All that said, Foursquare does have to be concerned about what Facebook is going to do in the future. Right now, Facebook’s location offering is very bare-bones, but you have to believe they will flesh it out more as time goes on. In particular, you can expect them to partner with businesses to offer deals and other incentives to Facebook members. You know, the kind of stuff Foursquare is doing.

Foursquare clearly has a plan for how they’re going to evolve going forward and stay ahead of Facebook. But they need to execute and make sure they can scale with all this new growth.

Earlier today, in an interview with the LA Times, Crowley revealed the service has about 2.8 million members right now. Given his statement tonight, you can expect them to hit 3 million shortly — perhaps even next week. Now it’s a matter of keeping those people around and engaged.

The 6 Reasons Why People Use Foursquare

Foursquare continues to grow in registered users and daily check-ins, even as the location based services industry becomes increasingly crowded.


There is more and more focus being put on whether Foursquare can become mainstream. If Foursquare’s growth does continue, and it does break out of the early adopter crowd into a more mainstream audience, it will be because of it offers broad utility.


Instead of asking “Why would the average person check in?” we should ask the broader question of “What utility can Foursquare serve to the average person?” Even looking beyond check-ins, Foursquare actually has some great utility without ever having to check-in at all.


There are 6 main utilities that will drive people to become active users of Foursquare. As marketers, being aware of these driving forces helps us be more intelligent as we experiment with Foursquare. It gets to the heart of the consumer’s motivation.

1. Playing a Game

This is the hook for a lot of the early adopters of Foursquare, the game that is built into the service. You check-in and add locations for points, you compete for mayorships, you seek out badges. This is not a long-term, consistent utility for most users. However, the competition and changing landscapes of mayorships and badges bring a layer of “New” to the service, a constantly changing reward ecosystem that users can fall in and out of favor with users as it evolves.

2. Finding Friends

The check-in adds data to a social map. When you check-in you are telling your friends “I am here, you know, if it is relevant to you.” When you view where your friends currently are, Foursquare becomes a social planning utility that allows you a snapshot of where people you know currently are. Finding a group of friends, the best party in town, or even that you and a friend are eating lunch in the same place can become a very helpful tool for any user.

3. Making Announcements

Social networks have fully embraced the status update popularized on Twitter. Foursquare contextualizes status updates around a location and an event. From mundane endorsements like “The Turkey sandwich at Cafe X is quality” to the marketing savvy Brogan-esque “I just signed 4 copies of my book at the local Borders.” Simply using Foursquare as a status update tool adds another layer of data that can be very useful to an audience. And it makes it easier for someone to add that context.

4. Getting Suggestions

The single act of seeing a friend check-in to a location is a suggestion many times. Seeing where your friends go can be a great discovery too.
Foursquare tips are starting to get more attention, but are still the most powerful and most under-publicized part of the service. Restaurants like AJ Bombers have used tips to push certain products through encouraging their patrons to leave tips. To leave a “tip” is to tell the world “Hey, there is value here.” When you go to a new city, browsing the Foursquare tips centered around your current location can tell you anything from what salon to avoid to what restaurant has the best brunch or the best happy hour specials. When someone cares enough to leave a tip, the value of that suggestion is headed by other users.

5. Getting Rewards

The most talked about utility of Foursquare is the reward systems many businesses are adopting, especially restaurants. Mayor’s get a free drink or dinner. On your 10th check-in you get a free t-shirt or on your first check-in you get free chips and salsa, as Chili’s did. This may be the biggest utility for the average person. Money is a big mover in social media. If you can help people save money, they notice. They like it. They talk about it.

6. Recording History

Foursquare has a history of everywhere their users have checked-in. This is probably the least utilized of all the utilities to date, but has great potential. Our check-in history, or “footpath” as location based service Whrrl calls it, has tons of untapped value. As a resource to find places you have been in the past. To match up with other social networking activity to add location context to the photos we have taken or trips we took. Even as historical records of events. This utility is not a big use driver today, but could be a big part of Foursquare and other location based services in the future.