4 ways professionals can maximize the free tool Foursquare…

July 20, 2010  |   Posted in Blog, travel tips   |   View Comments   Tags: foursquare

I am consistently asked by professionals, business owners and sales executives about Foursquare, a location-based service where users like you and me essentially “check in” whenever we are at a location… Let me preface this by saying this is not a Foursquare-how-to… For that, you can visit http://www.foursquare.com

What this is, however, is a post about BEYOND the how-to and more of the WHY…

For a business, it can be used for marketing and advertising and leveraged as a customer loyalty tool. I personally think it’s silly to not be using Foursquare to enhance one’s marketing but that’s just me… It’s free marketing, it’s useful, it’s timely and cultivates loyalty. An amazing amount of loyalty… I visited a coffee shop over 20 times to try to regain my “mayorship” which would yield me no benefits aside from the satisfaction of knowing I was “mayor”… Imagine the power if that coffee shop had some incentive to BE Mayor, like the current Starbucks campaign? But I digress…

In fact, Foursquare shares that these ways four ways it can be used for:

1. “Easy Tools to create engaging specials”
2. “Promote in-store specials”
3. “Real-time venue stats”
4. “Promote specials across the mobile experience.”

You can read more on these here. http://foursquare.com/businesses/

Here are the four ways that I use Foursquare.

1. Keep track of whereabouts BETWEEN appointments on the calendar… You would be amazed at how many things one does (or places we go to) between the scheduled morning meeting and afternoon meeting… Wouldn’t it be nice to know all the things you really  do each day?
2. Track my mileage - No matter how hard I try, I fail at consistently writing down my mileage… Now, I can track my whereabouts and have an actual, printable log of my calendar and addresses so that I can route my mileage for tax time using Mapquest or Google Maps. No more stressing about whether my calendar shows all the details I need.
3. Get tips on local do’s and don’ts. When you pull up Foursquare, you can see a list of places around you. Often, I will pull up the listing for a local restaurant or hotel and get very valuable, uncensored and genuine feedback, such as dishes to order or stay away from, warnings about busy days and other tips you might not know otherwise…
4. To facilitate chance encounters with my network. This one has been so valuable that I considered making it an entire post of it’s own. When you access Foursquare, you see where other people have checked in. If you are traveling, it shows if other people in your network have checked in at nearby locations… Almost every time,  I end up finding another person in my extended online network who is in the same city at the same time. This can sometimes turn a personal trip into a business trip if you can coordinate and have a legitimate business meeting. Also, I have found others in my network at the airports at the same time… as well as people at the same coffee shop. This helped facilitate a business meeting once where an upcoming speaker for my organization and I had been emailing back and forth over the course of the week to get together. I was working at a coffee shop and noticed he checked in! He had literally came in, ordered and left… but when I Saw the check-in, I contacted him immediately and he turned back and we got tohave our meeting right then and there…

Do you use Foursquare? How do you use it? If you don’t, what’s holding you back?

photo credit - DP Styles