This post is exciting for me because I get to combine my two passions– social media and civic boosterism of northern BC into a single post. Here goes:
*** What is Foursquare? Foursquare is a social networking site that encourages users to share their location with friends. You do this by “checking in” when you visit a new location and are rewarded in two ways: 1. receiving badges for certain tasks (for example, “Adventurer” for checking in to 10 different venues or the “Don’t Stop Believin'” badge for karaoke) and 2. becoming the “mayor” of a venue if you check in somewhere more than anyone else. These rewards may or may not have real-world value (most famously Starbucks offers discounts to mayors of their outlets). What is Golden Raven? Golden Raven is a marketing campaign created by the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George, Tourism Prince George, and Tourism British Columbia. It brands cultural tourism destinations in northern BC as part of an overall “Golden Raven Experience” that lends itself well to cross-promotion. It also has some great visual design (my opinion). How Should Golden Raven Be Implementing Foursquare?
Very simply. They should be working with Foursquare to create a Golden Raven badge that users get from checking in to a set number of Golden Raven destinations. This isn’t unheard of by any means. The City of Chicago has an “On Location” badge that encourages users to explore the city by checking in at locations used in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Frankly, this is no-brainer. Heck, in 2008 Golden Raven engaged in an offline version of exactly this sort of thing with the Golden Raven Passport Contest. In this promotion, you picked up a passport-style booklet with some information about each of the cultural destinations. Then, when you visited a site, you got a stamp. At the end of the year, everyone who participated was entered in a contest to win cash that corresponded directly to the number of locations you had visited. Substitute “smartphone” for “passport” and “check-in” for “stamp” and there you are, with the added benefit of participants being able to share their experiences on Twitter and Facebook, thus increasing the chance of these locations being promoted via word-of-mouth advertising. Problems?
There are a few possible ones.
1. Most obvious is that people might check-in without actually checking the place out.
Of course, places that are actually offering cash value for this would be most concerned, but solutions are coming into place– and if big brands feel its worth the risk of abuse, why wouldn’t Golden Raven? If you really want it to be fool-proof, just put the physical stamp-and-passport thing in place alongside the Foursquare promotion. Trust me, smartphone addicts will still want to use Foursquare. Which brings me to number two…
2. Not everyone has a smartphone.
I don’t have stats, but my gut instinct is that people in northern BC are later adopters than Foursquare centres of New York and San Francisco. That said, the market is growing, this would attract people who are younger that might not normally take part in such promotions, word-of-mouth, blah blah blah. But if you fear alienating non-smartphone users you could let them check-in at the mobile site using public computers and/or you can offer the physical stamp-and-passport promotion alongside it. Or, you could just offer the stamp to Foursquare/smartphone enthusiasts and use other promotions for other segments (it’s not like having a badge has to cost you anything).
3. What if Foursqaure doesn’t want to work with Golden Raven?
I sincerely doubt this. Any user can suggest badges and my gut instinct is that official representatives of a regional or provincial tourism body could attract attention from Foursquare (which is still a start-up looking for name-recognition, after all). And if there’s right-out rejection, it’s not as if there is a lack of other location-based services in existence.
And even if there isn’t an official partnership in place, tourism offices should be on these geolocation services– now. It’s a great way to communicate with people who like to go out and explore new places anyways (that’s why they’re on Foursquare), share tips (the History Channel’s Foursquare page is a great example for what a Golden Raven brand on Foursquare could and should be doing), and, frankly, add a little hipness to heritage sites. It’s also a good way to make other promotions– I manage the CFUR Foursquare location, and any special you can come up with, Foursquare lets you implement. This could be anything from mayoral discounts to free visits after a certain number of check-ins– things that are pretty standard practice in the tourism marketing world already.
***
So that’s it in a nutshell. I’m actually going to email this to the Golden Raven representatives and see if they respond. I’ll let you know if they do.
Great idea, in fact, I've been talking with foursquare about virtually the same thing (as @pg4sqday) ….. When thinking about Prince George for example, I can easily think of three different PG themed badges (Mr. PG themed in fact), that would be fun, and really would encourage tourism in PG .. or, at the least, encourage locals to see more of the city / surrounding areas.
My idea, and what I have been trying to setup in my communications with foursquare, is pretty much exactly as you said – I want a Prince George page, similar to the Chicago page, or the Harvard Page, or the Mashable page. My thought was, setup something fun, get it working, get more people involved here in Prince George, and then contract Tourism PG. I would love a way to more comfortably interact with foursquare users, in particular, the users that haven't linked twitter … currently, there isn't a good way to advertise foursquare related events, let alone Prince George / foursquare related events/promotions.
From my replies, foursquare, at the moment, isn't able to support this. Foursquare is growing so quickly, at the moment, they are focused on dealing with 1M checkin's a day. I really hope in the future, and maybe even near future, this does come to be something. For the same reason Foursquare is probably slow to start, I think Tourism BC would be slow to get behind it – for the first fourquare related even in PG, we had 2 people attend. For the second event (yesterday) we had 8 (well, 6 or real, but 8 checkins total). That is a big improvement, it is still a VERY small user base. I really REALLY wanted a lot of people to show up yesterday, so I could relay that to foursquare, and have a little more "power" … with 40ish total users, and probably 10-15 active users, and 8 people showing up to events, we just aren't a large enough user base yet in my opinion – and I got the sense, foursquare agrees. This is in part related to your problem #2, but not as much as other factors. There are A TON of iPhones in town, easily 100s, probably 1000s … Not many of them are using foursquare. Foursquare, as a tech, as been slow to adopt, but hopefully that picks up.
By the way, problem 1 is being dealt with pretty well by foursquare …. their "cheater" code, which still allows users to check in anywhere, but only allows them to compete for badges and mayorship's when the checkin's are "legit" … so yeah, I think that problem is being minimized.
The real problem is a version of #3, and as I said, it's that building of this kind of promotion, for this small number of users (when we aren't able to provide huge exposure, nor can we give $$$), that they can't do, no matter how much they may want to. The big picture is, they need to work on growing their core services still, so that as their platform continues to grow VERY RAPIDLY, they don't lose any uptime. It's not like twitter, where people will tweet later (and continue to tweet more about the down time). You should only checkin as you actually arrive at a venue, which really does require constantly being active to properly support your users. I think foursquare is doing a great job at growing their service …. I just hope to continue working with them, and hopefully things settle, PG gets a bunch more users, and active involvement in events, and we can go from there.
Keep in touch, and if you hear anything back from Golden Raven, keep us all updated!!!
Tyler pg4sqday@ThePiG.homeip.net
@pg4sqday Thanks for your comments. I'm curious about number 3– if I'm not mistaken, the only cost to them would be building a custom badge with a pre-existing logo that's unlocked after a set amount of visits. I don't really know how much time/labour this takes, but I would have thought it would be fairly low-cost. Do you know? As it stands, they already allow any business owner to set up promotions where users get messaged when they've unlocked a discount, special, etc. Would adding a badge to that be that much more costly to them?
Great idea, in fact, I've been talking with foursquare about virtually the same thing (as @pg4sqday) ….. When thinking about Prince George for example, I can easily think of three different PG themed badges (Mr. PG themed in fact), that would be fun, and really would encourage tourism in PG .. or, at the least, encourage locals to see more of the city / surrounding areas.
My idea, and what I have been trying to setup in my communications with foursquare, is pretty much exactly as you said – I want a Prince George page, similar to the Chicago page, or the Harvard Page, or the Mashable page. My thought was, setup something fun, get it working, get more people involved here in Prince George, and then contract Tourism PG. I would love a way to more comfortably interact with foursquare users, in particular, the users that haven't linked twitter … currently, there isn't a good way to advertise foursquare related events, let alone Prince George / foursquare related events/promotions.
From my replies, foursquare, at the moment, isn't able to support this. Foursquare is growing so quickly, at the moment, they are focused on dealing with 1M checkin's a day. I really hope in the future, and maybe even near future, this does come to be something. For the same reason Foursquare is probably slow to start, I think Tourism BC would be slow to get behind it – for the first fourquare related even in PG, we had 2 people attend. For the second event (yesterday) we had 8 (well, 6 or real, but 8 checkins total). That is a big improvement, it is still a VERY small user base. I really REALLY wanted a lot of people to show up yesterday, so I could relay that to foursquare, and have a little more "power" … with 40ish total users, and probably 10-15 active users, and 8 people showing up to events, we just aren't a large enough user base yet in my opinion – and I got the sense, foursquare agrees. This is in part related to your problem #2, but not as much as other factors. There are A TON of iPhones in town, easily 100s, probably 1000s … Not many of them are using foursquare. Foursquare, as a tech, as been slow to adopt, but hopefully that picks up.
By the way, problem 1 is being dealt with pretty well by foursquare …. their "cheater" code, which still allows users to check in anywhere, but only allows them to compete for badges and mayorship's when the checkin's are "legit" … so yeah, I think that problem is being minimized.
The real problem is a version of #3, and as I said, it's that building of this kind of promotion, for this small number of users (when we aren't able to provide huge exposure, nor can we give $$$), that they can't do, no matter how much they may want to. The big picture is, they need to work on growing their core services still, so that as their platform continues to grow VERY RAPIDLY, they don't lose any uptime. It's not like twitter, where people will tweet later (and continue to tweet more about the down time). You should only checkin as you actually arrive at a venue, which really does require constantly being active to properly support your users. I think foursquare is doing a great job at growing their service …. I just hope to continue working with them, and hopefully things settle, PG gets a bunch more users, and active involvement in events, and we can go from there.
Keep in touch, and if you hear anything back from Golden Raven, keep us all updated!!!
Tyler pg4sqday@ThePiG.homeip.net
@pg4sqday Thanks for your comments. I'm curious about number 3– if I'm not mistaken, the only cost to them would be building a custom badge with a pre-existing logo that's unlocked after a set amount of visits. I don't really know how much time/labour this takes, but I would have thought it would be fairly low-cost. Do you know? As it stands, they already allow any business owner to set up promotions where users get messaged when they've unlocked a discount, special, etc. Would adding a badge to that be that much more costly to them?
Well, their badges are designed, and not typically taken as pure user submission (check out http://bit.ly/dm80Im for their design process) …. I mentioned the cost, not in that there would be a big cost to them per say, but more directing resources towards 20 users, rather than the entire user base, isn't something they can "afford" to do with their business currently. I think you are correct that doing it once isn't necessarily a huge amount of time, though, it may not be a negligible amount of time either, but if all 300+ foursquare meetup organizers all tried to get a page, for their "group" then they might be opening themselves up to a lot more work then they are capable of doing …. If the initiative would generate A LOT of buzz, or was going to be directly funded (they were paid, out of an advertising budget, for example), I think they could justify it …
Even trying to setup a special / discount can be a long / slow process, currently. I know of at least one business in town, that has very few foursquare checkin's, but still wants to participate – they have been waiting weeks, and still have no feedback on when their request to create a discount will be processed/activated.
I am also curious where the line is drawn, on their side. How many users make this sort of thing worth their while? How much exposure would it need to generate for them to want to participate? For myself, I only asked for a page, I was willing to do all the design, setup some tips …. work on creating timely/appropriate reminders/updates, etc …. Then, at some time in the future, I would have asked to talk about badges, because that is another fun part of the game…. but my response was that they are currently working on their scaling issues, and infrastructure projects …. so it will be fun and exciting to see when they open it up a bit more, and just how they process requests at that time …. and who knows, maybe I am mistaken, maybe all it would take is tourism PG officially asking, and not just someone, who said they will talk with tourism PG, later???
Well, their badges are designed, and not typically taken as pure user submission (check out http://bit.ly/dm80Im for their design process) …. I mentioned the cost, not in that there would be a big cost to them per say, but more directing resources towards 20 users, rather than the entire user base, isn't something they can "afford" to do with their business currently. I think you are correct that doing it once isn't necessarily a huge amount of time, though, it may not be a negligible amount of time either, but if all 300+ foursquare meetup organizers all tried to get a page, for their "group" then they might be opening themselves up to a lot more work then they are capable of doing …. If the initiative would generate A LOT of buzz, or was going to be directly funded (they were paid, out of an advertising budget, for example), I think they could justify it …
Even trying to setup a special / discount can be a long / slow process, currently. I know of at least one business in town, that has very few foursquare checkin's, but still wants to participate – they have been waiting weeks, and still have no feedback on when their request to create a discount will be processed/activated.
I am also curious where the line is drawn, on their side. How many users make this sort of thing worth their while? How much exposure would it need to generate for them to want to participate? For myself, I only asked for a page, I was willing to do all the design, setup some tips …. work on creating timely/appropriate reminders/updates, etc …. Then, at some time in the future, I would have asked to talk about badges, because that is another fun part of the game…. but my response was that they are currently working on their scaling issues, and infrastructure projects …. so it will be fun and exciting to see when they open it up a bit more, and just how they process requests at that time …. and who knows, maybe I am mistaken, maybe all it would take is tourism PG officially asking, and not just someone, who said they will talk with tourism PG, later???
They aren't doing it through the “official” brand type page, they just created a regular user and then promote with that account ….. so basically, foursquare didn't do anything for them … no special badges, and you have to add as a friend, not just follow, but probably still an effective way to connect with users…
Posted by Tyler on 24 July 2010 @ 4am
No, I didn't get any response. Fair enough, I suppose, they have no context for knowing me and Tourism Prince George just got a new CEO. I'll probably resend it after September, when he's settled into the job and see if there's a response then. Meanwhile, it may be worthwhile finding a way to demonstrate support for such a thing.
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