Archives for April 22, 2010

Foursquare has taken off in popularity, for the geeky mobile tech gadget user anyway, however, for the business owner who is actually too busy working to even have a clue what foursquare is all about, how do you take ownership of your business listing on foursquare and perhaps more important, how to offer visitors a special discount, freebie, or special offer?

Creating foursquare specials for your business is relatively  easy thanks to an update to the process by foursquare. Here’s a quick primer on how the whole process will work. Foursquare has a section devoted to the Business Owner – see http://foursquare.com/businesses/. To accomplish this you’ll need to locate and Confirm your business information and Create your first special.  Start off  by logging into your foursquare account – if you don’t have one yet then create one – no doubt many business owners may not have one yet. Then you can start your claim for a business.

Start at the Business Page and use the search for a business name to identify your business or see if it exists in the database – create it if it doesn’t exist (note, your business may already exist although it could have been created by a foursquare user who paid you a visit – if so you’ll want to correct/valifate the info). Then you start your claim, this is where you can add details, verify metadata, and add useful information and even specials (like a freebie offer for visitors). Currently foursquare has a somewhat archaic, albeit manual verification process so once you claim a business you’ll need to wait on some form of verification performed by the foursquare team. Interesting to note that there is an option for a marketing firm or third party rep to claim the business on behalf of the owner. The most common form of special currently is a prize offer for the Mayor… somewhat cool I guess, although I have my doubts about this one and would prefer to see reward style discounts to customers for repeat use… for example, get a discount or free cookie for every 5th checkin!

Add A Venue to foursquare – a form enables you to provide contact information, address, phone.

As a testbed, I created a new Venue for a special event. Now attendees will be able to discover and check-in to the venue while attending the event. We also have a special offer for anyone who checks-in!

I also suggest adding your business to CitySearch