what is foursquare?

well, EMA took over a couple foursquare accounts. and it might be something you want to catch-up on, you know, in your off time.

the client was Qdoba Mexican Grill. the suit was Brian Perry in the Charlotte office.

and, well, we now have access to a number of foursquare accounts. for those unfamiliar, foursquare is a location-based game. people check-in to locations to obtain the mayorship title or points. with each check-in, their social network of choice is informed of their location. up until a six months ago, it meant nothing.

now, it’s a way to reward your loyal customers.

but i’d never seen the back-end of the foursquare platform personally. and i’m betting that neither had you. here’s our sneak-peek.

there’s a simple way to manage the profile. the one draw back is that you cannot (as of tonight) delete a falsified user-generated location.

stats available about who tweeted, who facebooked, who visited the most, who visited recently. as most people won’t drive across town for a QSR option, we can reasonably expect that this location is somewhere near work or home.

when are they checking in? and who were the last checkins? pretty powerful stuff, folks. the classical madmen–hames, bulger, mower and ogilvy–spoke about this decades ago.

much of the discussion has been around how we separate employees from customers. foursquare players think it’s decidedly unfair that the mayor works at the location. well, we had a little idea…and we’re excited to try it out. reward employees for checking in, but segment them from the consumer.

so, that’s foursquare for you. we’ll soon be rewarding customers with things like, “it’s your third check-in, show this screen for a free drink”. Or maybe we’ll handing out queso for every 10th checkin?

and, because the average twitter user has 120+ followers and the average facebook user has 130 friends, we’re hoping to see a little spike in activity in the Charlotte market.

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mobile tagging is hitting some big-time brands.

WARC announced today that Pepsi, Coke, and Campbell’s Soup have launched mobile tagging initiatives.

Pepsi has chosen stickybits–an app based tag that allows users to participate in the dialogue. Coke has chosen a more controlled approach. They will use the tags to deliver content they’ve posted…then roll out user uploaded content further down the pipeline.

A third version in all of this is MicroSoft Tag, downloaded and used by close to a billion businesses/users since it’s launch.

This is truly a remarkable way to transform the static outside world into an engaging brand experience…deliver deals at point of sale, entertain commuters with co-branded videos, drive loyalty during a consumer’s downtime.

Did you know we’ve proposed all three solutions at EMA in the last six months? Or that we’ve successfully launched a MicroSoft Tag initiative?

What is it that your clients’ offer that could modify prospective customers behavior out in the real world?

Related:

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• Pepsi Hiding Video’s in Barcodes. (theworldison.blogspot.com)

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