Custom Publishing | Custom Media | Imagination Publishing

I am by no means a Foursquare expert. In this way, I’m a lot like many Fortune 500 brands. Currently, the Foursquare landscape is dominated largely by small businesses—mostly restaurants, hotels and other local service-related businesses. There’s no reason why national brands of all sizes can’t utilize the service and create meaningful and ultimately profitable relationships with their customers.

For those unfamiliar, Foursquare is a social networking service that encourages people to explore the cities where they live and check in via their mobile phones. Users can then leave tips about their experience at a given location. (Ex: The teriyaki chicken wings are to die for here, but don’t expect to get a table after 7!) People can also earn reward points, special badges and even discounts from certain locations based on the frequency with which they check in.

Foursquare could be a great way for large national brands to tailor relationships specifically to local regions under their overall brand strategy umbrella. Applying region-specific touches wouldn’t only increase engagement and improve relationships with customers in a given area, but also with company employees, who could be called upon to come up with creative ideas according to local preferences.

A brand wouldn’t necessarily have to be telling people to check in at their place of business—people can’t just walk into a company like a financial services firm and check in regularly—but brands could promote a lifestyle in line with their target demo. For a financial company, for example, they could say, “The first ten people to check in from the golf tournament this weekend and leave a tip about the best hole to watch the action wins a sleeve of golf balls on us.”  This isn’t directly selling their service, but it would create a meaning relationship with the brand that customers value.

Foursquare would also be great for local contests and promotions. There could be fun weekend scavenger hunt-like races where the first person to check in at a given list of five places—consistent with the lifestyle/tastes a brand wants to cater to—wins a prize.

How large brands could use Foursquare may be hard to visualize without many case studies, but a few brands have already used the service successfully.

Pepsi used the Foursquare to support charitable endeavors. Foursquare has points leaderboards where the top explorers in each city are displayed based on who ‘checks in’ the most. Pepsi sponsored the New York City leaderboard and donated four cents for every point added to the board in a week to a local charity, raising $10,000.

Entertainment brands also are dabbling in interesting ways, allowing users to unlock themed badges and tips based on where they go based on a movie’s/character’s themes. For example, a recent Advertising Age article, “Beyond the Badge,”  mentions how followers of Valentine’s Day on Foursquare will see tips about the most romantic places and experiences in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston.

Using Foursquare as the only social marketing tool probably isn’t comprehensive enough to create an impenetrable relationship with your brand, but it could be a useful complement to your overall strategy that your competitors aren’t using. If nothing else, learning where people in your target demo check-in, and reading what tips they offer about specific locations, can teach you more about potential customers in a certain area and how to use other marketing and social media strategies to best connect with customers in specific regions.