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How Can Businesses Take Advantage of FourSquare.com?
Over the past few months, I have had a number of retailers call me about FourSquare and what it all means. If you are in the retail space or a local service provider, FourSquare is an increasingly powerful service for leverage some of your most vocal customers and their online social capital. To that end, it's pretty straightforward. The bigger question for this audience is how would a B2B vendor capitalize on this location-based movement?
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3 Answers
Brian -
The larger question is what impact will real-time or near-real-time location based services have on local businesses?
Today, FourSquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Twitter are four check-in capable applications that allow location and time to matter. Once you start to get your head around the impact of these initial offers you need to step back and think about the impact Facebook will have when they go live with location based services sometime in the next 90-days.
From a macro perspective, the most important decision for a business is to determine if consumer location matters. For some companies, it will. For others, it will simply move too quickly for them to be able to handle ... regardless of how badly they want to 'play' in the 'social' game.
As a B2B vendor, the market opportunity seems to be one of smoothing out the real-time location based services game. Rather than providing more solutions to complicate already stressed local businesses, simplify the opportunity by working with them to integrated location into their core operations and systems.
Whether it's marketing programs, customer service, etc. - how do their existing processes and systems 'connect' to location to allow them to improve customer volume, revenue per customer and customer satisfaction?
Until the preference and location information these applications provide is understood and integrated into existing processes, it's going to be too overwhelming for the local businesses to manage.
Leveraging this new movement will be a moving target. Because these sites are new and changing vendors need to be fluid with their strategies. But the vendors themselves need to be active on the platforms to understand the mindset behind it all. Having said that, experimenting with campaigns could be fun for both the store and the visitors. The B2B wholesalers could sponsor giveaways to raise brand awareness through retail outlets etc.
Great post from Chris with a key point being "Does location matter?" to a B2B company. Here are a few specific examples of how your B2B business might work with location-based advertising
First, a straightforward example. There are definitely times when a B2B company wants to capture foot traffic. For example, hosting a party adjacent to a trade show or want somebody to visit your booth? Well, when people check into the venue, invite the users to your booth, event, party, etc. w/ mobile advertising .
But Location can go beyond capturing foot traffic. What about using location-based advertising to target your advertising where location identifies the specific demographic you're looking for. For example, let's say there is an upcoming cloud computing conference and attendees represent a sweet spot for your marketing efforts. Maybe you're not even at the conference. Why not target event attendees as they check into the venue with a mobile ad introducing your product or service.
And there are many ideas beyond just tradeshows and events. Think about what message you might deliver to people checking into your own company location or a competitor's company locations. Creativity knows no bound here.
Michael.
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