One of the things I love about Foursquare is that it gives you the ability to show that you’re a regular. In fact, you can show that you’re the regular. The guy who’s on that stool day after day, because you love the place, and they love you. It’s about belonging, it’s about loyalty, and it’s about culture. Those are the things I love about the places where I’m a regular. If you look at my Foursquare Profile you can see I spend time at Boulevard and Overwood, and that I recently lost the mayorship of Chinatown Coffee (darn you, Peter Corbett! Darn you all to heck!) but that I go a lot.
San Francisco’s known for all the promos that their Foursquare venues do for their mayors, and I’m glad to see that DC’s following suit. CommonWealth Gastropub is rewarding their mayor with a free beer (16oz) with purchase of an entree. Better look out, David C., you’re going to have some competition for Mayor, I’d bet. Better get there while you’re still mayor!
I live and work in the District of Columbia. I write at We Love DC, a blog I helped start, I work at Technolutionary, a company I helped start, and I’m happy doing both. I enjoy watching baseball, cooking, and gardening. I grow a mean pepper, keep a clean scorebook, and wash the dishes when I’m done. Read Why I Love DC.
Certainly I’m a fan of foursquare – especially now that I’ve ousted you at Chinatown Coffee Company (WOOT!). However, as a digital word of mouth practitioner/digital agency owner/marketing-dbag I have to say this:
A promotion like CommonWealth’s is one of three things a) totally lame, b) just plain lazy or c) both.
If I owned the place here’s what my promo would be:
Mayors of CommonWealth get a round of drinks on the house for them and an entourage of 3 max. Think of the competition for getting and keeping that right. How many checkings? How many tweets? How many word of mouth mentions? Do you really think those 4 people will only get a free beer? They’ll buy food – another drink – etc….and tell their friends.
Just sayin’.
Tom, I just looked at the foursquare site. I still have no idea what it is. Fill me in please?
@Peter: It’s not a bold move by any stretch, but if this gets someone else to make a bold move? Hell yeah I’m for it. The restaurant business is a tight one, with narrow narrow margins, so baby steps are warranted with something a bit risky.
@Rachel: It’s a thing for your phone. Slap the client on your phone and it figures out where you are, and you can “check in” in a location. If you have the most check-ins for a venue in the rolling 2-month period, you’re considered the Mayor. Sometimes, places give you stuff. Sometimes, it’s just personal pride. But, you can use it to feed updates to Twitter, or push messages to other Foursquare users (like your friends!).
They’ve got a bit on it on their site