As long as the stamps are free

We Dutch collect everything. Stamps, miles, stickers. As long as it is free. Dutch TV commercials are all about orange stuff you can collect for the next Soccer Championship. So now we Dutch deeply believe that Foursquare will be the next big thing. Haven’t heard of Foursquare yet? It’s an online community where you check in your physical whereabouts. You can collect badges for checking into 10 different venues or for checking in 4 nights in a row. But just imagine what this could do for your brand?

Yeah, yeah, sure. First thing people do is start denying the entire concept. Why would you check in your physical whereabouts? Isn’t that like giving the key of your front door to thieves? The Dutch group Forthehack warns against sharing too much information in Please rob me. There is some truth in it, but if you are that person, living alone in a badly lit apartment with poor locks and a top notch stereo, laptop and your family jewelry (or you own any important painting and live in France), you may want to look at some other issues first.

In my honest opinion this fuzz is all the first phase of technology acceptance: denial. I have written about this before: Twitter acceptance in 6 stages. If Foursquare becomes successful, we will find a way around these issues and further develop our online personas and strategies.

Back to the really interesting part: using such a technology for your loyalty programs! Probably this is still a stage 3 application of the new technology, doing what you always did but in a new medium. But I think it will have its merits and with any new technology you have to learn how to walk before you can run, right?

Just imagine all these people on Foursquare, collecting check-ins to all your different stores and in one go, telling all their friends they are engaging with your brand in such a way. Because that is what they do: they do not only engage with your brand in a way you could barely manage to organize in more traditional ways, but they communicate this activity to all their friends through Twitter.

So who is engaging in such a way? What is the target audience? Not me unfortunately, I would have to get a life first. But the always online generation that has never seen a phone with a cable attached to it other than for charging the battery, they are the target audience. The people that move around, check out stores as a pass time, visit amusement parks, and go all kinds of interesting places either for work or pleasure, they are the target audience. Are they your target audience as well? Then you’d better be out there on Foursquare getting your act together.

Just for fun, just google ‘Foursquare partners’ and check out the brands mentioned there. Also note the publication dates for each of these press releases!

I like the way Foursquare combines online and offline. I like how it takes the Twitter success and brings it further by including the things we love in the physical world. How it plays with our playfulness and our desires to belong to a group and to collect. Don’t you?

But I have known about this for a few months now. I am getting restless already, because I must have missed out on the next trend already. It must already exist, somewhere out there. Isn’t this a great era to live in?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 09:16 and is filed under marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.