The Power of foursquare: 7 Innovative Ways to Get Your Customers to Check In Wherever They Are

By Carmine Gallo

Connect with Your Customers. Anytime. Anywhere.

One million new users per month. Twenty-three check-ins per second. Millions of people—in every city, in every country, on every continent, and even from the Space Station—are vying to become mayors of their favorite shopping locations. What is foursquare and why has it become the hottest customer magnet ever conceived?

Foursquare is a social, mobile networking app that empowers customers to check in at businesses and share their locations with friends through smartphones and PDAs. A pioneer in location-based services (LBS), foursquare invites your customers to experiment, to compete, to share, and to have deeper, more meaningful interactions with your products and services.

Internationally bestselling author Carmine Gallo not only has had unprecedented first-hand access to foursquare’s founders, he also has interviewed dozens of business owners and marketers who have revolutionized their businesses through The Power of foursquare.

You’ll discover the ice-cream chain that heated up sales dramatically, the nonprofit organization that raised $50,000, and the matchmaker who owes her entire business to foursquare. You’ll learn from fascinating case studies of major companies with active foursquare partnerships, including:

• The American Red Cross
• Jimmy Choo, London
• Chili’s Grill & Bar
• Bravo
• NASA
• RadioShack

Your customers are out there, constantly searching for places to go, games to play, and things to buy. Leverage The Power of foursquare and your customers will be in constant competition with each other over who loves your products and services the most.

Praise for The Power of foursquare

“The power to reach buyers at the exact time and the exact place they’re looking for what you offer has massive implications for all kinds of businesses worldwide. Carmine Gallo expertly shows you how to tap into the foursquare revolution, and he does it with a practical approach you can put to work in your business right now. There’s an epic swarm and it’s time for you to check in!”
—DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT, bestselling author of Real-Time Marketing & PR

“In real estate, it’s always been about ‘location, location, location.’ This book will show you why now it’s important for everyone.”
—MATTHEW SHADBOLT, Director of Interactive Product & Marketing, The Corcoran Group

“Gallo gets it. By using case studies from around the world, he captures the fun and the opportunity of using foursquare. I greatly enjoy Gallo’s stories of the amazing people and businesses that I know are doing it right!”
—NATHAN BONILLA-WARFORD, Tampa eye doctor, founder, Foursquare Day

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Oct 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9780071775830

Carmine Gallo

Carmine Gallo is the bestselling author of Talk Like TED and The Storyteller’s Secret. He is a communications coach for widely admired brands such as Pfizer, LinkedIn, Intel and Coca-Cola, and a keynote speaker known for teaching the world’s most respected business leaders how to deliver dynamic presentations and share inspiring stories. He is a columnist for Forbes and Entrepreneur. He is the head of Gallo Communications in California, where he resides with his wife.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Connect Your Brand

We are constantly surprised by what our partners are doing and how users are extending the platform in ways that we never expected.

—NAVEEN SELVADURAI, Cofounder, foursquare

New Yorkers who are in a hurry for lunch know better than to drop by the Shake Shack at Madison Square Park in Chelsea. Yes, the burger joint offers some of the best hot dogs, fries, custards, and high-grade Black Angus beef burgers in the city, but people have to wait—and wait—for it. Between the hours of 12:00 noon and 2:00 P.M., a hungry customer can easily be kept waiting for 35 minutes or longer. In the summer the line can stretch to an hour.

How should customers spend this time? Sure, they can check their e-mail, make a call, or strike up a conversation with the person next to them. Here’s another idea: when standing in the Shake Shack line at Madison Green, look up to see a number of life-size cast-iron sculptures of artist Anthony Gormley’s body standing on buildings that surround the park. I don’t live in New York, nor have I ever visited the neighborhood before, so how did I learn about this piece of trivia when I ate at the Shake Shack for the first time? The Corcoran Group told me—on foursquare.

The Corcoran Group is the largest residential real estate firm in New York City. The company was founded in 1973 as New York City was beginning a historic transition from being predominantly a rental market to one of individual ownership. Today Corcoran’s 2,000 agents generate more than $18 billion in sales annually. The Corcoran Group embraces the spirit of innovation, and social media is just the latest tool in its arsenal.

Corcoran doesn’t wait for others to lead the way, especially when it comes to social networking tools that allow its realtors to form deeper and longer-lasting relationships with prospects and clients. As early as 1995, The Corcoran Group launched one of the first real estate websites, www.corcoran.com. Today it attracts more than four million visitors per month and produces more sales than any other website in residential real estate.

In December 2009, Corcoran introduced an iPhone app. Instead of looking through the Sunday newspaper for listings, a young couple having brunch in the East Village can simply open the app to see properties for rent or for sale in the area. It also provides more details about the listing. Corcoran thinks of it as a wonderful open-house tool. But when foursquare entered the picture, it changed everything. Corcoran had always been in the location business; now it had the opportunity of putting the full range of its unique expertise right into the hands of its customers, wherever they happen to be in the city.

A Powerful Marketing Proposition

Corcoran is a company rooted in the location business. Its agents pride themselves on sharing localized knowledge of the city’s neighborhoods. The core mission of the Corcoran brand is to communicate what it’s like to live in an area. It goes beyond the four walls of an apartment to include what’s nearby. This is where foursquare becomes a great marketing fit,¹ says Corcoran director of interactive product and marketing Matthew Shadbolt. It’s an extension of what we do offline. It allows us to share local tips specific to venues that are directly around a client wherever they are in the city. For example, we can tell you what to order at a particular restaurant, how to get into a club, or where to sit on the subway. We put Corcoran expertise in your hands as you explore the city. That’s a very powerful marketing proposition.

Here’s how it works. Open the foursquare app anywhere in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Hamptons, or Palm Beach, Florida, and it’s nearly impossible to avoid Corcoran’s tips—inside information and recommendations about local venues. These tips are available for any foursquare user to see. If you follow Corcoran on foursquare—as more than 10,000 people have chosen to do—its tips get automatically pushed to your phone when you check in to a location where Corcoran has left a recommendation or suggestion. It’s like getting a recommendation from a trusted friend. Corcoran has created more than 1,500 tips for venues in most every neighborhood in its territory:

Apple Store (401 W. 14th): You can’t leave Chelsea without a stop off at the Apple store at 14th Street and 9th Avenue, a beautiful three-story loft building with a sexy glass curtain covering it.

Manhattan Mall (100 W. 33rd): Use the mall to cut through between Penn Station and the 34th Street subway stations when it’s raining.

Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern (524 Port Richmond Ave., Staten Island): Old-school joint serving some of the best pizza in all five boroughs. Start with an order of wings or fried calamari, and then move onto the Garbage Pie.

Since Shadbolt and his interactive product and marketing team are the ones populating the Corcoran foursquare site with tips, they can add tips every week as they visit new restaurants, bars, stores, or other neighborhood venues. Foursquare isn’t static for Corcoran. It’s not an app that they create once and let go. It’s a constantly evolving program to meet the needs of Corcoran’s clients.

Foursquare allows anyone to leave tips for a particular venue, and those tips are displayed on a user’s page in two categories: recent and popular. This free data gives Shadbolt the kind of information he can use to refine Corcoran’s tips. For example, Shadbolt has noticed that the most popular tips are accessed in venues where people are expected to wait in lines: train stations, popular restaurants, movie theaters, and yes, the Shake Shack. Based on this insight, Shadbolt adds more tips to these types of venues. Here are some of the more popular Corcoran tips you’ll find as you explore New York City:

Magnolia Bakery (401 Bleeker Street): Legendary cupcakes. Absolutely get the Red Velvets! Well worth standing in line for this New York classic.

Eataly (5th and 23rd): Go right when they open, to avoid the crowds and get the best selection. Otherwise, you’ll be forced to wait in line outside.

Good Enough to Eat (483 Amsterdam): The biscuits and strawberry butter make this place the best brunch on the Upper West Side.

21 Club (21 W. 53rd): The key to power lunching is landing the right table. The left section of the dining room is preferred, and the right, known as Siberia to its regulars, is by no means coveted.

The Lincoln Center Fountain (Columbus Avenue and 64th): The fountain cycles through a water show every hour, but beware if you’re sitting on the marble edges as the water shoots up very fast and you can (and will) get wet!

Align foursquare with Your Core Mission

The Corcoran Group is not interested in offering badges, specials, or other deals (more on these later). They are not interested in rewarding mayors. They are not interested in giving foursquare users a 10 percent discount for checking in to an apartment (although 10 percent off a million-dollar NYC apartment would be very cool). Deals, specials, and rewards are not aligned with Corcoran’s core mission. The Corcoran Group is in the business of selling homes by offering enhanced client services: services that set it apart from other real estate firms. Localized knowledge is at the center of that experience.

One of the main reasons we’re on foursquare is because it’s a personalized and powerful form of marketing. A banner ad on the desktop might generate a visitor who stays on our site for a few seconds and leaves. But if someone is new to the city or a neighborhood, eats at a restaurant they’ve never been to, reads our tip about what to order from the menu, and shares that tip with friends, that’s a much more powerful form of marketing,² says Shadbolt. "Foursquare is an extension of our brand in a fun, helpful, and incredibly targeted