For many years now, companies have been trying to find ways to unlock the potential power that mobiles present for marketing and so far, nothing has really taken off.
I believe that this is has the potential to change with the growth of Foursquare – a brand new social networking platform that has GPS at it’s very core, providing unique services that have so far not been exploited.
By signing up to Foursquare, it is a requirement to download the Foursquare app to your mobile device, owning a Blackberry, this is what I did. Once you’ve downloaded the App, you simply log in with your newly made account and you’re presented with a few options.
The main option is to ‘Check In’ – this fires up your mobile devices GPS and hones in on your location, which then updates your current location to your Foursquare friends, so that they can see where you are. Upon ‘Checking In’ you also get presented with a list of nearby points of interest, whether that’s Cafe’s, Restaurants, news agents, retail stores, whatever. From this list, you can then click on one of these places to find out more information including a map, and if you actually end up using their service, you can ‘Check In’ to their Foursquare account, rewarding you with points.
There’s also a ‘Shout’ feature, much like tweeting on Twitter, allowing you to post real time updates about what you’re up to.
So what does this mean for mobile marketing? To me, this clearly is a powerful way to pull online and offline marketing strategies into one conversion process. From the online perspective, you’re able to log in and see where your friends are via your mobile device or through your computer, you can see where they’ve recently been and any tips that they may have left for that attraction.
This, coupled with rewards for visiting nearby locations in the form of points, allows you to compete with your friends to earn the most, and therefore explore your nearby area at the same time, simply by ‘Checking In’ via your mobile device.
What businesses are able to do in an offline manner is to provide rewards for visitors using Foursquare. For example, a Cafe could offer a free Coffee between 12pm and 2pm for all people who check in between those hours, showing the staff their mobile device. When these people check in, it will be published on their Foursquare live feed (and Twitter / Facebook if opted in) viewable by all friends.
The ‘Checking In’ feature also allows businesses to reward regular visitors with discounts through their Foursquare account, for the Forsquare user who has visited the most, they become the ‘Mayor’ of that venue, until someone else overtakes their visit number, providing businesses the ability to treat their most loyal visitor and allowing you to become an authority for that business, just for being loyal.
These are just a few self proclaimed opportunities that Foursquare can provide businesses, and I’m sure as it increases in popularity, people will become innovative in the way that they use the service.
What I’m more excited about is whether Foursquare will be able to harness the powerful location data that users will build up, and then use it to create a targeted advertising platform, providing businesses the option to target local ads at users regular to a particular area, at a certain time, to their mobile device, such as a voucher code.
