Devon Akmon

Last November I reported on the advantages of managing your business using the Google Local Business Center (now Google Places). It’s an excellent tool for updating and managing business location information, including hours of operation, pictures, videos, and coupons. Additionally, there are numerous beneficial tools to learn about your customers.

Foursquare is now offering businesses an excellent new service as well. The service, a business dashboard, is exciting in that it allows business managers the opportunity to re-imagine the concept of a customer loyalty program. Rolled out earlier this year, the new business dashboard lends itself well to rewarding loyal customers with discounts and prizes. Further, it provides business managers with excellent real-time information on customers.

Getting your business setup on Foursquare is really quite simple. When visiting a venue on the popular location-based social networking site, a button asking “Do you manage this venue? Click here” appears above the check-in statistics. If you’re an owner or employee of the business, you can click this link and begin the (relatively simple) process of claiming the business on Foursquare. After completing the verification process – which takes a total of about five minutes – business managers can begin creating rewards programs for visitors who check-in at the location.

Currently, there are four types of rewards that a business can offer:

• Mayor Specials: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue. Who’s the Mayor? It’s your single most loyal customer! (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days)
  (“Foursquare has deemed you the Mayor? Enjoy a free order of french fries!“)
• Check-in Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times.
  (“Foursquare says you’ve been here 10 times? That’s a free drink for you!“)
• Frequency-based Specials: are unlocked every X check-ins.
  (“Foursquare users get 20% off any entree every 5th check-in!“)
• Wildcard Specials: always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the Special.
  (“Show us your foursquare Swarm badge and get a free drink!“)

In addition, the business dashboard provides excellent real-time statistics. This includes information on most recent visitors, most frequent visitors, the time of day people check in, total number of unique visitors, histogram of check-ins per day, gender breakdown of customers, and portion of foursquare check-ins broadcast to Twitter and Facebook. That’s not a bad set of analytics.

The business challenge for this new program is to find interesting and exciting ways to energize customers. Further, it could prove to be a useful tool for developing and managing promotional campaigns. I’m curious to watch and see how businesses, particularly museums, embrace the dashboard. Further, I’m interested to know if businesses will work together to promote other businesses or offer reciprocating benefits for customers in a particular location. For example, a museum could partner with a local restaurant to offer discounts on meals or other rewards.

We started a business profile for our institution earlier today. Our first reward is for visitors who check-in three times. Further, we are exploring the idea of creating a small quiz or scavenger hunt in the “tips” section. If guests can complete the task correctly, we will offer additional rewards as incentives. There is much potential for Foursquare’s inherent game mechanics.