Location Based Commerce Tripwire - Web, Twitter, Social Networking & Foursquare Thoughts. For a while I’ve been meaning to buy a birthday card. We’ve got some at home but this one needed to be special. But I kept forgetting (doh!) I even went to the big newsagent in Newport (WHSmith) and bought some printer cartridges….but I forgot I needed the dagnammit birthday card. This got me thinking… What if I could have laid some sort of ‘gelocation tripwire’ (via Foursquare checkins etc) which reminded me if I went to WHSmith’s and alerted me to “get a birthday card”? Or, better still, if I tweeted my “location based-do-not-forget” and indicated that I needed a birthday card then ANY venue, which could fulfil this need, would step up to offer it’s services WHEN I checked in to some place valid (or closed to a relevant venue).
I’m not saying that you would use this geolocation tripwire for everything you needed to buy/do – just those dang things you keep forgetting. (…yes writing a shopping list on a piece of paper would help but hey!) Joel Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device. Foursquare now lets venue managers impeach their mayors. One of the biggest reasons businesses name for not setting up a foursquare special is cheating, especially for mayorships.
Foursquare now lets venue managers revoke the mayorship of their venue, either by adding the mayor as an employee or for “other reasons.” Managers of many venues, especially small businesses, know their regular clientele. If someone checks in there often enough, it’s likely that the manager would at least recognize their face. If a manager sees a mayor they don’t recognize as a regular, there’s been no way to report that person as a potential cheater without going through foursquare’s overworked business support channel on a case-by-case basis. This option makes it easy for the venue manager to deal with the problem on their own. According to fousquare, “other reasons” could include that “they’ve never really been to this venue, they check in when walking by, or check in from far away.”
Has mayorship cheating been a problem at your business? Cool Or Not Cool: FourSquare Divides The Web. I’ve spent the past three days with elevated blood pressure, shaking hands and having nightmares about my friends checking in and out of new locations and cluttering up my Twitter feed. People can’t stop talking about how FourSquare is changing the world and I’m afraid I might hurt myself. All of a sudden I’m like a resistant Twitterer in the year 2007. I hate FourSquare and I’m not afraid to say it! I know there’s been lots of Twitter debating and fighting this week, but I want to have a civil discussion, okay? First let me back up a bit. I think location-based applications are going to be awesome. They present a HUGE opportunity for business, especially small businesses which, as you may know, are very near and dear to my heart.
To acknowledge the awesome, Tony Adam wrote a post yesterday explaining why he’s such a huge fan and outlines just a few marketing and monetization opportunities on FourSquare. From a business perspective, I get it. Why do I hate FourSquare? Unfiltered noise. Foursquare Beats Twitter to Local Advertising Goldmine. Foursquare is the mobile social game that you play by checking in at various locales while out and about. The location-based application has managed to strip the fat out of other location-aware mobile ideas, find just the right formula for encouraging check-ins, and hit at the right time.
Now, they're sitting pretty with funding and a trajectory that resembles Twitter's rise to glory. Foursquare, however, isn't wasting any time on monetizing and has just beat Twitter to the business services market. Today marks the launch of their beta advertising platform — Foursquare for Businesses — designed to provide retailers with an opportunity to highlight specials to Foursquare users who check-in nearby and get data based on the location-based campaigns. Foursquare for Businesses is a natural extension of the product that we knew was coming.
It's absolutely genius and here's why. Cheap Beer If You Check-In… Or Just Tweet. One of the most compelling aspects of the location-based service Foursquare is that they are increasingly enticing users to check-in to venues by partnering up to offer special deals to those who do. A person who checks-in at a coffee shop and shows the barista, may get a free coffee, for example.
It’s a win-win for both the service and the venue because it gets people using the app more and gets people visiting the venue more. But what if users and venues go around Foursquare and start using Twitter for that? That has started to happen recently, as venues are getting wise to the idea of using these special deals. For example, Patxi’s Pizza, a Bay Area-based restaurant, recently announced that it would offer a special deal to anyone who simply tweeted that they were at the restaurant, and showed their server the tweet.
To be clear, they also have the same deal in place if you check-in on Foursquare, but using Twitter in a way similar to Foursquare is interesting.