We like to invest time in tracking trends and exploring possibilities with new innovations, so through our blog, I’m going to be posting regular snippets of the best stuff that’s out there, and which you could adopt, to further connect with your online audiences for the good of your brand. Currently, there’s a new crop of location-based social networks that are rapidly growing in popularity. These services use your location, and those of the people around you, to create new connections and experiences online. With location-enabled mobile devices ever increasing, it has now become a reality that information can easily be used to keep people you know up-to-date on your whereabouts and recommendations.

Foursquare primarily focuses on location enabled mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Palm to enable you to “check-in” to public venues that you visit. Along with checking into venues, you’re are able to see which of your Foursquare friends have checked into venues nearby and you can also leave “tips” for other people who are visiting the venue to use on their visit.

What makes this interesting for arts, culture and leisure, is that Foursquare has recently enabled venues to gain access to their statistics, so that you can track and do something with the knowledge of these online visitors. You can find out; Most recent visitors, Most frequent visitors, The time of day people check-in, Total number of unique visitors, Demographic breakdown of visitors, Portion of Foursquare check-ins broadcast to Twitter and Facebook.

If this data alone doesn’t create a fire in your belly – think about how arts, culture and leisure venues can benefit from adopting Foursquare in their visitor model? It can aid you in getting the word out about your current exhibitions, events, productions, etc, with a wealth of opportunity to then reward and provide incentives to your most frequent Foursquare visitors. Here are a few ideas:

A Mayor special offer: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue. Who’s the Mayor? It’s your single most loyal visitor (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days). For example: “Foursquare tells us your the Mayor, enjoy this free ticket to our next event.”

Offers based on check-ins: unlocked when a user checks into your venue a certain number of times. For example: “Foursquare says you’ve been here 10 times? On your next visit why not bring a friend for free?”

Frequency based offers: are unlocked every set number of check-ins. e.g. “Foursquare users get a free coffee every 5th check-in!”

So what have you got to loose? Get your team around a table to see how Foursquare could be part of your visitor model?

This entry was posted on Thursday 19th August 2010 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Digital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.