Good use of social media combined with traditional advertising

Foursquare – is now very relevant for restaurants and related places in all the major cities in the US.

Foursquare is a mobile app and web offering that is good at “building things that make cities easier to navigate and random Thursday nights more interesting”.

Amongst its many features, one of the leading tools is the concept of Mayorism. You can become a “Mayor” of a local deli, pub, shop, site, etc if you are an active visitor or loyal fan.  In order to win “Mayor” status, you need to gain points during a given week’s activity. The person with the most points becomes the Mayor for the week.  Points are given for normal things such as visits that week, intros to friends, tips to the audience, etc.  When you arrive at a joint, you “check in” and get loyalty points, last minute special offers, reviews and so on.

Ok.   All very social media, but what’s the point? How does this impact my business?

Simple. Give incentives to users to become a Mayor for your brand. “Free drinks” is always good.

Whilst before such an ad only got the eyeballs of the footfall, it now has the eyes of the footfall and all of their friends, networks, followers, Facebook groups, twitter lists and fellow foursquarers, with each class of friend having different access to your tastes, locations, etc. Mashable is a good example of the benefits of having multiple layers of social networking.

What to do?

Nothing fancy. Just start thinking about integrating social media calls to action throughout your traditional media communications. Don’t do it for the sake of doing it. Integrate it if it makes sense.

Declan

Update - Techcrunch view on above - 31Dec09. http://bit.ly/57Eyve