Checking In! FourSquare and Foot-Traffic

Attract new customers, create loyalty and track foot traffic

Foursquare and other Location-Based Services are increasingly helping dealerships attract new customers, create loyalty, and track ever-elusive showroom foot traffic. Fun and free, these tools are growing rapidly in popularity among individuals and businesses: Overall awareness of location-based services has reached 56% of US-based cell phone users, and 39% of them currently use at least one location-based application (eMarketer study Feb. 2011).

What’s Foursquare All About?

Individuals use apps such as Foursquare to find friends, check out tips from other users and receive rewards from the different places they visit. Rewards range from vendor deals and discounts to unlocking badges, becoming the “Mayor” of a venue and earning points:

Badges: Users unlock badges for checking into specific locations or doing specific activities. Is this virtual “reward” corny? Yes. Is it effective? Very. Foursquare users cherish their accomplishments and flaunt them proudly.
Mayorships: The person who checks-in to a location the most over a 60-day period becomes its “mayor”.
Points: Every check-in earns you more points–another game element which helps foster the competitive nature of the application.

How to Get Your Dealership On Foursquare

Foursquare currently has ten million registered users checking-in to venues at a rate of one per second, activity that presents several unique opportunities for dealerships to connect with, engage and retain customers. Four simple steps make this possible:

Register. If not signed up already, do so here: http://Join.4sq.com/emiltsch
Claim your venue: Once logged in to Foursquare, search for your dealership by name and select “claim your venue.” Add your dealer’s name, keywords, address, URL, categories and tags. Be sure to add a complete description. TIP: Individuals have profiles; businesses have venues. Don’t make an individual profile for your dealership.
Create your specials: Make a special for your venue. These can be Mayor specials, for a visitor’s 1st check-in or after multiple check-ins–a free oil change on your 1st check-in, for example.
Monitor your venue: Foursquare provides a nice set of free analytics tools to track your visitor’s check-ins: day and time, demographics, frequency, etc.

You can even measure Social Reach by the percentage of users sharing check-in activity on Facebook and Twitter. TIP: Hang window clings & print fliers of your specials to share with employees and your visitors to help spread the word. Foursquare provides these resources on their website.

Capturing the Benefits

When Foursquare users check-in to venues, notifications of nearby specials are displayed within the app. Individuals can also add tips and to-do’s left by other users to their profiles, which means activity involving your dealership can extend to an online audience far beyond your core users. These benefits will only continue to expand as smartphone adoption continues to grow and more consumers will experiment with geo-location applications.

So, where are your customers checking-in?

Original post appeared on the Dealer.com Newsletter

6 Twitter Strategies You Can Really Use

People still debate the issue whether or not twitter is a channel that should be utilized for any purpose other than sharing nonsensical information.

Still have your doubts? Check out this great infographic from Olgilvy PR Wordwide. This outlines six strategic approaches by sharing the basic principles with regards to who you follow, what you should create and how you should engage. Click image to expand.

How are you using twitter now?

Which Industry Has The Most Succesful Facebook Ads?

Still wondering if Facebook is the place for your online ads to appear? Stop guessing – Silicon Valley Insider published their top performing market segments and their ad performance based on Clickthrough rate & Cost-Per-Click.

Top 5 performers:

1. Tabloids and blogs
2. Media & Entertainment
3. E-commerce
4. Travel
5. Automotive (Yup – automotive…wow)

Looks like the CTR % for tabloids & blogs may be a misprint in the chart – I’m guessing it should be 0.165% – not 0.0165%

Keep in mind, the shelf life for these ads is nowhere near as standard online display channels; they require closer management and higher rotation frequency. One item I’d like to see with this info is how frequently the most successful industries are changing their ads.

What has your success rate (or lack of) been with Facebook ads?

Amplify’d from www.businessinsider.com

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8 Reasons Why The Pew Internet Study Stinks

Image by Jameson42 via Flickr

I know, that title is too easy. I’m sure it’s not the first time they’ve heard it. It won’t be the last if they keep doing studies like this one.

For those who know me, I’m not one to argue or complain. I will, however, laugh at something that’s so obvious. Today’s Pew Research Study fits that bill nicely. Here’s why:

Location-sharing as a concept is still in the early-adopter stage. General awareness, much less usage, is obviously going to be scarce.
Limited selection choices: Survey answers were limited to Foursquare & Gowalla. Foursquare has 4mm+ users; Gowalla is still under a million.
New platforms & concepts don’t ramp to critical mass. Hasn’t ever happened. Never will.
Weak general interview questions to the survey sample (examples in article)
Even weaker: The dates of the study are at a time of the year when Internet traffic is historically low; length of the study
Interview method: The phone? Nearly 75% of current location-sharing users are between 19-35 – users who rely heavily on their Internet connection. I’d like to see results of this survey after being distributed online.
Limited user entry points: Roughly 30% of the 80mm+ cell phone users in the US have smart phones. As more people convert, the # of users should also increase.
The study limited usage to those “checking-in” – why not expand it to include individuals who also use it for marketing related activities?

I find it amusing & ironic when new twitter users, the people who snubbed it three years ago, give location-sharing services the same treatment now.

Mashable did a nice job calling it out as well. Check out their story below:

Love to hear your thoughts…

Amplify’d from mashable.com

On Location-Sharing and the Facebook Versus Foursquare Non Sequitur [OP-ED]

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Case Study: McDonald’s ups foot traffic 33% on Foursquare Day

Image via Wikipedia

More foot traffic. That’s what every business wants.

Knowing that over 18,000 people per day are signing up for Foursquare daily and even lesser known location based services such as SCVNGR signed up 100K+ in one week because of their Facebook Places tie-in, wouldn’t you want to consider the opportunities these channels may provide your brand? Yet businesses are still reluctant. Now is the time for the self-proclaimed Social Media Gurus to put their chops to work and create some serious change by leveraging the networks they (should) have been building.

A simple offer with a simple message and a small budget is all that’s needed. Start putting that influence to work. Being first to market this type of message is easy, but the window of opportunity to be that shape-shifter won’t last.

And yes, I understand that measuring foot traffic is difficult. The rest of your process needs to be in place to handle (close the sale) the increased foot traffic. Done right, more foot traffic should create a direct increase in revenue. If you’re missing that point, then you shouldn’t be using location based services in the first place

Check out the link to the entire McDonald’s Case Study below to see how their simple plan created measurable results in no time.

Amplify’d from econsultancy.com

Case Study: McDonald’s ups foot traffic 33% on Foursquare Day

Read more at econsultancy.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/ameu

Feed Your Popego

Santiago Siri created a unique social site called Popego.com back on ’07; while neat in function and in appearance it hasn’t really reached mainstream appeal. I guess you can say its still kind of cool with its psuedo undiscovered status.

Select the type of content you enjoy: Videos, Blogs posts and Website links. Create your Popego profile and push your personal pipeline to your own page – Personal Poop.

Add the usual suspects: twitter, digg, stubleupon, etc; Connect with Facebook, search your existing contacts and make your own widgets. Small touches, like the unique comments made after your choices have been, made add to the experience. Social Media Marketing and Entrepreneurship garnered me a couple “That Rocks” while Automotive yielded a “WTF?”

Locate the contacts within your network to add another level to your online relationships. Follow Popego on twitter for additional tips and updates. Their own mantra sums up their ironic simplicity: “The web is made of people, not computers.” Popego’s utility lies within its ability to let you visualize the content your contacts are most interested in…

Learn from your contacts while learning about your contacts.

How Facebook Got 6 Million Free Workers

Give it up for Facebook and their latest marketing stunt: Vanity URL’s.

Within hours, Facebook wrangled about 6 million people to convert their profile URL from,

this: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1128085240
to this: www.facebook.com/ericmiltsch

Does this help you? Sure, maybe you feel better now that your name isn’t a number. Personally, I haven’t seen my Facebook profile move up in the search results.

Who does this help? Facebook. They’re hoping everyone forwards their address to everyone not on Facebook. Imagine if half of those 6 million people sends their new URL to 25 Facebook noobs. That’s 75,000,000 new, warm referrals. Imagine if your business got 75mm warm leads. For free.

Want to beat Facebook at their own game? Here’s two ways to make either your personal, or professional brand, just a little different from everyone else. And that little bit can go a long way.

Collateral full movie Shorten your URL using any site that shrinks URL’s with the ability to customize and provide tracking. Several sites will do the trick – for this example I’ll show you what I did using BudURL.com’s service a few months ago.

Radio Flyer divx I changed my original long URL to this: http://budurl.com/fbem. The last four characters signify ‘Facebook Eric Miltsch’

Other examples follow the same naming convention for consistency:

budurl.com/dgem | Digg

budurl.com/dlem | Delicious

budurl.com/viem | Vimeo

budurl.com/twem | Twitter

budurl.com/suem | Stumbleupon

Another easy way is to purchase your own custom domain name and simply forward it to your social profile site, such as: EricMiltschOnFacebook.com or some other variation.

You need to do everything possible to promote your personal or professional brand – put your name(s) first.

We’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks when Facebook Pages can get their Vanity URL’s as well.