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

Posted by Tyler on 18 June 2010 @ 4am

@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?

Posted by Andrew on 18 June 2010 @ 6pm

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

Posted by Tyler on 18 June 2010 @ 4am

@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?

Posted by Andrew on 18 June 2010 @ 6pm

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???

Posted by Tyler on 18 June 2010 @ 7pm

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???

Posted by Tyler on 18 June 2010 @ 7pm

Did you ever hear anything more?

Here are some other tourism groups that are using foursquare:
http://aboutfoursquare.com/10-tourism-groups/

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.

Posted by Andrew on 27 July 2010 @ 4am