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Hey everybody, Mike Linville here from Black Dog Education with another
installment of office today's question came in from GJA Communications and it was about
foursquare. The question was basically to paraphrase - I don't quite get it. Don't really
understand what eating where I'm at has to do with business or how I can use that. So
what I wanted to do was kind of talk a little bit about not specifically just foursquare,
but any one of these different location based services because there is Gowalla, you can
check in on Facebook. Facebook now has deals and stuff like that so there are business
cases for each one of these. Now to stick with my typical rule of three because I have
a hard time remembering more than three things, there are three things that we're going to
talk about in terms of foursquare and how you can use that to your advantage. The first
one is brand awareness. Every time that one of your users or one of your customers checks
in they have the ability to share that with their other friends that have joined on the
social network and that's kind of the whole idea about these social networks right? I've
got a friend and when ever I do something and them my friends hear about and so on and
so forth. So with foursquare what happens is if I check in someplace now the people
I'm connected with are also going to know I showed up and what can happen is they might
say hey, Mike just check in at Black Dog Education Mike just checked in at Chili's Mike just
checked in at -- you know wherever I'm checking in at. So you start seeing that kind of stuff,
so in terms of building brand loyalty or brand awareness your name is going out there everywhere.
The first time I talk to people I ask them, well are your employees checking in when they
get to work? If they're not absolutely have them do that because now every single one
of her friends sees your business name at least one today or however often they work.
So brand awareness definitely do it. The second thing that is good for these location-based
services is that you can attract new customers. Obviously these location-based services you
have the ability to do specials or with Facebook it's called deals, and what you can do is
you can target different people so you can say hey you know if this is the first time
you checked in I'll give you a coupon for 20% off your meal or the other thing like
foursquare has is mayorship so what a mayor is on foursquare is a mayor's the person that
has checked in the most times in the last 60 day period. So what you can do is say I
have a special deal just for the Mayor so that kind of gets people wanting to come back
more often so you want to take car of them a little bit more. The third thing for foursquare
or any these other location-based services is you can reward brand loyalty and really
it's like hey if you check in more often you're going to get more stuff I was just at Chili's
the other night and they had something going on where if, it was a friend deal so if I
sat down and came in with two other friends if we all checked in we're going to get like
a free chips and salsa or something like that so you know because I hang out with a bunch
of nerds you know, we all had our phones and we're link beep beep -- free chips and salsa
wasn't a huge deal, it only saved me in a $2.50 or something off the bill but more importantly
I remembered that. I'm talking to you about right now. I remember Chilie's and it being
one of those things that whatever it is to make you stand out a little bit from the competition
and that worked. So again the three things build brand awareness, and make sure to have
all your employees check in and make sure to check in with you to work, attracting new
customers, make sure you put together some kind of deal that you can reward people for
coming in and trying you out reward loyalty for people that are coming back more often
make sure that you show them some love because you know those are the people those are the
ones that are going to be your raving fans right you know word-of-mouth is gnarly, you
want that so rewarding those people for coming in that's how you're going to be able to use
location-based services so again this is Mike Linville from Black Dog Education I thank
you for giving us a little bit of your time today if you have questions please be sure
to e-mail to us over at officehours@BlackDogEducation.com you can just throw 'em up on our Facebook
wall or you can send them to us on twitter @blackdogedu, one more thing I'm going to
ask you to do this, I'm going to ask you to leave some comments below. We want to make
sure the time we are investing in this is bringing you value. So leave your comments
below, thanks again this is Mike, and we'll talk soon.}