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It’s Foursquare Day! (4 squared=16, and today is 4/16, get it?) Even though in my boring suburban mama lifestyle I won’t be heading out to the City to get my Swarm badge, it seemed like a fitting day to talk about Foursquare and muse about ways to creatively use it.

I have to admit that Foursquare is my latest social media obsession (late to the party though I may be compared to some). What is Foursquare? Well, in colorful metaphoric terms you could describe it as “what hatched after the Twitter bird, Yelp and an Eagle Scout got drunk together over a Monopoly game and decided to make an app”: lots of updates about where you are and what you’re doing combined tips/reviews and a competition to collect the most cute badges and become the “mayor” of your little world.

In a somewhat less colorful description, it’s a “lo-so” network (“lo-so” = “LOcation-based SOcial network”)--other ones include Gowalla, Loopt and BriteKite). In a “lo-so” network, you have “friends” like on Facebook, but it asks “where are you” rather than “what are you doing” or “what’s on your mind”. Foursquare allows you to “check in” to a venue (which can be a school, a grocery store, a bar, a doctor’s office…wherever) and leave “tips” about that venue for others to view when they check in there. You get points and earn different sorts of badges for checking in to places, which you can then compare against your friends if you’re the competitive type. You can view your friends’ check-ins, and you can publish your check-ins to Facebook and/or Twitter (or not, as you please). It’s totally user-controlled--don’t want people to know you’re at your therapist’s office or your girlfriend’s house? Don’t check in there (or hide your location if you simply must get more points.) Someone who checks in the most at any given venue is the “mayor”--and sometimes gets special treatment at that venue.

Just to provide some context here, let me say that in general, I resist jumping on the “new/shiny geek trend” bandwagon (I don’t have an iPad, for example, and I’m only just now finally catching on to how much fun RockBand really is). And even though I truly enjoy relationship building and networking, I’m actually relatively conservative when it comes to spending time with social media --I can barely keep up with my Twitter and Facebook feeds these days, let alone find time to blog or spend time with my LiveJournal peeps.

But after hearing about Foursquare from three different and wildly divergent sources over the course of several weeks, my curiosity got the better of me. I’d been meaning to explore the “lo-so” trend for awhile, but a couple of weeks ago, I finally logged on to www.foursquare.com and made myself an account and started checking it out.

And you know what? It *is* pretty fun to see what your friends are up to and get random tips when you visit a venue (plus what girl--let alone boy scout--can resist colorful badges?), but that’s not what really excites me. What excites me is the way that this tool can be creatively used as a relationship builder and market research tool for the non-profits and small businesses we work with. Here are just a couple of the possibilities:

1. Sure, restaurants, bars, and other nightlife places are working with the straight up commercial possibilities of offering special coupons or deals to customers who are “checking in” at their venues--and this is cool. But what if you were say, a non-profit who wanted to award particular badges for volunteering at an event or for using their services? It could be a fun motivational tool for volunteers, allow people to show their support for a cause they believe in, and help create a sense of community among the people who all support a particular cause or organization (similar to the reasons why people become “fans” of causes on Facebook).
2. There are even now applications being written that can aggregate the data that Foursquare and other lo-so networks provide, and give us some really interesting insight about consumer behavior. Where do people go before and after they check in somewhere? Imagine if you could figure out where your customers or clients go after they visit you, and create a cross-promotional program with that other venue.
3. Non-profits and/or the businesses who sponsor their causes could tie donations to check-ins at events or venues--for example “for every check-in we’ll donate $.10 to the cause”.
4. Non-profits could create tips that relate to their cause that pop up at certain venues--for example, at a grocery store, LIFT for Teens (www.liftforteens.org)  could offer healthy nutrition tips or facts about whole organic foods vs. processed snack foods.

Here are a couple great articles on Foursquare and “lo-so” that I’ve recently enjoyed:

• 9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing (Mashable)
• Foursquare: Novelty or Buzzworthy? (frogloop)
• 6 Tips for Getting the Most out of Foursquare (Mashable)
• Are Location Geeks at Where 2.0 Off the Path to Real Money? (Scobleizer)

I think we are only just beginning to see Foursquare and its fellow “lo-so” networks hit the “tipping point” where enough people are beginning to use the service, and now is a great time for some creativity in the use of it. I think it’s something worth examining, especially for those who want to be “thought leaders” or just playful and creative with their marketing.

What do you think?

Julia is now proud to report that she’s the mayor of all the places in her life that she regularly visits, even though most of them are prosaic and boring.