Foursquare – the game that has everyone all a twitter

Adaline Lau, reporter at Marketing Interaactive Magazine, examines the potential benefits of FourSquare as a business tool. See whether you agree with the experts' opinion:

Foursquare – the game that has everyone all a twitter
If you are at an industry party filled with digital gurus, but not sure how to break the ice, try this one liner: "Will you be my stalker? I mean foursquare friend!"

A recent Mindshare report exploring the foursquare phenomenon, predicted that if 2009 was the year of Twitter, 2010 may be the year of foursquare.

In January this year, foursquare went global, introducing the ability to add places and check in from anywhere in the world.

Tech blogger Scobleizer, says foursquare has some 300,000 users, while its rival Gowalla has more than 100,000 and MyTown at more than 600,000. So do marketers need to start taking notice of this new web fad? The answer, says Mindshare, is a definite maybe.

Its report states foursquare itself may not end up being a world beater on the scale of Twitter, let alone Facebook or Google, but the cultural and behavioural trends it showcases could have a lasting impact on how we interact with each other and with brands.

What's worth noting is foursquare has announced a number of partnership deals with major players in a wide range of sectors, including Bravo TV, restaurant-rating service, Zagat, film producers Warner Brothers, TV channel HBO and The New York Times. In the UK, it has partnered with Debenhams and Domino's Pizza.

The partnership will see the pizza chain offer free pizza to the "mayor" of its branches every week. Those who check in at Debenham on its Oxford Street store on Fridays will get free coffee.
Three digitally savvy agency professionals using foursquare in Hong Kong argue the "stickiness" or foursquare is hard to ignore, but the benefits to marketers is still emerging.

Brandon Cheung, strategic planning director for wwwins Counsulting, describes the tool as a location-based game that introduces the concept of "check-ins" to real- life locations. It uses the GPS in your phone to locate you and the people and places around you. The key difference here is that location tagging is controlled by the users as opposed to auto-tagging such as Google Latitude.

"The user opt-in approach is preferred to the follow-me-everywhere-like-a-stalker method of location tagging," Cheung says.

By inviting players to check in to their favourite locations, Cheung says a crowd-sourced list of businesses is created in each city where foursquare is played. The location-based list creates a new opportunity for local businesses to reach out and seek consumers actively.

Nic Tinworth, digital director at Fluid, which is implementing the tool to its sister company Graze Cafe, adds that foursquare is a "sticky" mobile social network as it gives you bragging rights to become "mayor" at a venue and gets you invested after the initial "fun" aspect of gaining points.

But what are the benefits? Yeelim Lee, account supervisor at Weber Shandwick, says the location-based service allows you to monitor where people are visiting. If you're the marketing director for a chain of restaurants, bars or tourist attractions, you can monitor the footfall and who your customers are.

He says it is very useful intelligence as it allows you to offer promotions directly to users or reward loyal customers. With foursquare, the action of internet search has moved beyond the local search engine. Cheung explains that as consumers roam the streets with mobile phones, foursquare can deliver a relevant list of friends and places in their location.

Given the nature of local businesses, he says foursquare provides more benefit as a sales driver. Listing yourself in foursquare is similar to placing a promoter in front of your store or restaurant to capture nearby foot traffic. Besides, the success metrics is measured by how many people have checked in or recommended your location on foursquare - a direct link between digital interaction and physical action.

Other benefits as Tinworth points out include the ability to gather behaviourial data such as who is going where, when and for how long. Some third-party developers are creating new sites to introduce behaviour-based offers and this holds expansion promises for foursquare as developers will increase buzz via their APIs.

Another key benefit is to enable hyper target messaging and offers. For example, Starbucks can send you a special offer-notice for a free drink if you check into a bookstore nearby, via the "special nearby" alerts.

Challenges ahead
Cheung says getting listed takes a few seconds, but what needs to be planned out is your business approach to creating incentives around the game.

"Some marketers may not be ready for this yet, but those that move first will gain an advantage from the passionate first-mover audience," he says.

Tinworth is more concerned that people might not be ready for a location-based application as a lot of people are private and those on Twitter and Facebook might get annoyed by the constant "I am here, doing this" status check-in messages.

He says if foursquare is to succeed, it will need an explosion of users to make it worthwhile for the average internet user to feel compelled to register and see what the fuss is about. He adds that foursquare must address safety concerns raised after a Dutch website provided minute-by-minute updates on people who had left their house.

In Hong Kong, Starstreet has listed all of its tenant locations in foursquare, but the promotional angle is still being co-ordinated.

At Graze Cafe located in Sheung Wan, it hopes to convert the virtual community into real customers by incorporating foursquare in its marketing initiatives.

While the mobile marketing potential is obvious, whether or not marketers see value in another fad in the fast-moving online world is yet to be seen.

PR in 140 characters (or less)

Below is a short article I recently wrote for the Weber Shandwick Asia Pacific newsletter:

No longer can brands bask in page-long text rich press releases, now, thanks to Twitter, brands need to communicate their messages succinctly in 140 characters or less. Although there are no official user numbers, it is rumoured that Twitter, the micro-blogging social media tool, has amassed around nine million users in its short existence.

The broadcasting of short messages to global followers is the latest explosion on the social media scene, attracting everyone from the tech savvy digerati to celebrities and government officials. It has pushed the boundaries of internet conversation, allowing you to interact with celebrities as if they were your best friend (I recently engaged with Will Carling and Stephen Fry!).

But beware, the darker side of Twitter enables viral word of mouth to spread faster than ever before – a crisis can now be communicated to a global audience in the time it takes to type 140 characters.

As a result, the communications industry has quickly pounced on the potential of Twitter as a tool for broadcasting company messages, creating communities of advocates, engaging with consumers and even an avenue for crisis communications. To bring this to life, here is one recent example of crisis communications involving PepsiCo and an ill-thought-out advertising campaign.

Huw Gilbert, communications manager for PepsiCo International, approved a Pepsi Max advertisement, which depicted a cartoon calorie committing suicide. Twitter users condemned the advertisement as insensitive to those affected by suicide and a raft of criticisms were posted. Gilbert soon caught on that Pepsi’s online reputation was taking a beating and “tweeted” the following public apology:

“We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologise and please know it won’t run again.”

Several critics saw Gilbert’s tweet and one user responded:

“Thank you...for having the guts to get on Twitter on behalf of Pepsi and give us an update on the suicide ad.”

This example highlights how companies that have a Twitter account are better prepared to respond when something goes wrong. In an era where authenticity and transparency are vital to combat skepticism, this type of direct engagement can preserve online corporate reputation.

Other well known brands on Twitter include Starbucks, Amazon, Gartner and Dell. There are a growing number of brands using Twitter to communicate messages, promote products and provide customer service.

Another example is Bob Pearson, head of communities and conversations for Dell, who recently stated that his company had generated US$1 million in computer-related sales through alerts posted to Twitter alone.

The wonders of Twitter do not stop there. We, as communications professionals, can leverage Twitter as a news monitoring tool, a crisis early warning system, a sales channel, a broadcast channel and an audience engagement tool. I consider Twitter as a vital tool in my job and make it my first port of call on my journey to work. We should be ready to identify potential problems and opportunities to effectively counsel our clients in a way that may be outside of our comfort zone.

Social Networks More Popular Than Email

The latest data from Nielsen Online shows that two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time. While search and destination sites remain the most popular online activities, social network and blog use exceeded that of e-mail, increasing their reach by 5.4% in the last twelve months.

So, for companies looking to target consumers and end users, digital communications should be considered an important element of the communications mix.

Other key findings include:

1. Time spent on social network sites is also expanding: In 2008, social network activity accounted for one in every 15 online minutes. Today it accounts for one in every 11 (In Brazil the average is one of every four minutes and in UK it’s one in every six minutes.)
2. The social network and blogging audience is becoming more diverse in terms of age: The biggest increase in visitors during 2008 to social networks came from the 35-49 year old age group (+11.3 million).
3. Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in social networking
   Nielsen found UK mobile Web users have the greatest propensity to visit a social network through their handset, with 23 percent (2 million people) doing so, compared to 19 percent in the US (10.6 million people). These numbers are a big increase over last year – up 249 percent in the UK and 156 percent in the US.