Foursquare is not only a powerful geo-location service but also a way to integrate the social dynamics triggered inside its network for a larger Social CRM strategy.
In this article we will decline Foursquare features into the seven business objectives proposed by Altimeter Social CRM framework in order to illustrate how Foursquare now seems to work very well in providing insight, developing social media marketing strategies and optimizing the sales process.
The Altimeter Social CRM framework
The Altimeter Social CRM framework proposes seven business objectives which are illustrated in the following picture:
Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.
- Paul Greenberg
Social Customer’s Insight – The quantitative and qualitative data related to Foursquare can be integrated within a strategic social media monitoring process allowing more thorough and detailed analysis of key aspects such as key influencers, trends, tips and users’ sentiment. With this in mind, Sysomos recently launched Fourwhere service, allowing you to track and monitor comments and tips not only from Foursquare but also from Gowalla and Yelp.
Social Marketing – Foursquare lets you design strategies involving marketing on social media like the now famous treasure hunt by Jimmy Choo. This said, successful social media marketing strategies applied to Foursquare need two well defined features: a multiple-platform approach and a marked gaming dynamic.
Some 90% of buyers trust peer reviews and 70% trust online reviews.
- American Marketing Association
Social Sales – The sales process can be developed with Foursquare through loyalty programs such as the increasingly popular special offers dedicated to mayors or to everyday visitors of the venues.
Beyond this type of promotion it’s worth mentioning the increasing integration between Foursquare and Square offered by Hutch Carpenter: merging Foursquare social and playful dynamics with online transactions enabled by Square, finalized to the monitoring and analysis of the identity of customers as well as their frequency of geo-location use and their buying behavior.
Social CRM involves companies collaborating with their customers to create advocacy by improving customer experiences.
- Chess Media Group
Social Service & Support – For San Francisco users BART uses Foursquare to provide detailed and up to date information about things to do or places to see in the areas around the main stations. Their support service in not in real time, but it could well be implemented through better integration between Fourquare and Twitter, where Bart channel is already active.
Social Innovation – Starbucks, in addition to being a lovemark, is considered one of the best examples of the use of Foursquare in marketing and promotion of sales. But Starbucks is not using this channel in terms of social innovation as it already does, and successfully, inside My Starbucks Idea. Using a system of idea-management (both internal and external) as the one offered by Spigit would integrate the insights of Foursquare in a more functional process of listening – reaction – cocreation.
Collaboration – With collaboration we mean not only the cooperation between brands and users, but also and above all the cooperation between the various departments within the same company. The data, signals, user opinions coming from outside should land on a reactive company, ready to change its business processes in order to respond proactively to the requests coming from the users.
Customer Experience – The difference between a traditional CRM and a Social CRM is, in first place, the need to place the consumer (the social customer) in a central position for any strategy aimed at improving sales, marketing or support. In this way you invest on customer experience and you “recruit” people, turning them into testimonials for the brand. Engagement strategies that may implement a brand outside the company though, need to be replicated even within the company, because the experiential continuum on which the Social CRM is based can’t present an interruption between inside and outside, between the Enterprise 2.0 and social media marketing.
Conclusion
So, although potentially adaptable to all the business objectives we identified, Foursquare right now seems to work very well if used to provide insights, to develop social media marketing strategies and to optimize sales processes.
Benefits and cases of integration of Foursquare in support strategies and social innovation appear to be less obvious instead, at least at present time. The same applies to the last two goals, collaboration and customer experience, where Foursquare is not yet sufficiently mature to be integrated as a tool into specific strategies of change management that should lead the company to develop, often from scratch, engagement processes aimed both internally and externally.
You can create various kind of interactions between the items of the navigation bar and a certain page visited by the user. A simple interaction consists in changing the status of a specific tag to “active”, for example, if the current page is the home page or if the current post is in a specific category which is present in the navigation bar. In the picture, the current post is in the category “Apple” and the tab “Apple” in the navigation bar is “active”.
