A few days ago I wrote about how to get started on Foursquare, but today, I want to show you how to use Foursquare as an organization. There are many benefits for organizations to get involved in Foursquare and tourism entities of all types – restaurants, hotels, attractions, Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and more – can benefit the most.

In our increasingly connected and mobile world, visitors to your destination are using printed guides less and less and are relying on the internet, social media and their mobile devices more and more. While Foursquare is still used primarily by early adopters, new users are signing up every day – especially as people begin to realize how they can benefit from using Foursquare.

Claim Your Business:

Check out this post for more information about how to get started with Foursquare, but once you’ve created an account and are signed in, do a quick search for your organization. Once you’ve found it, click on Are you the manager of this business? Once here, you’ll need to copy and paste a link to your business on Yelp, Google Maps or a similar service. If your organization isn’t listed on any of those services, you can also fill out your name, email address and phone number and a Foursquare team member will be in touch to verify that you are, indeed, the manager of that business.

Why do you need to claim your business? If you don’t claim your business, you won’t get access to back-end analytics (click on the image to the left for a closer view) and you won’t be able to create a special offer at your location. Starbucks gives mayors at each individual store $1 off Frappuccinos and Scotty’s Brewhouse (with locations in Indianapolis, Bloomington, Muncie and West Lafayette, Indiana) offers a 10% discount to ANYONE who checks in during lunch (Mon-Fri).

Create Your Special:

Once you’ve claimed your business you can set up specials for people who check-in at your location. Foursquare actually offers quite a range of different ways to set up your offers. You can offer discounts to Mayors only, like Starbucks, or you can offer discounts to anyone who checks in, like Scotty’s. You can also offer a special to customers who visit a certain number of times within a set time period (ex. Free Coffee if you check-in 3 times in 1 month). You also have the choice to offer a special on every X check-in (ex. 5% off your bill on every 5th check-in). The final, and most flexible, option is to offer a special to a customer dependent on whatever you choose (ex. Free burger if you check-in during the NFL season and are wearing a Colts jersey). You can also offer more than one special at a time. This kind of targeting allows you to decide which kind of offer works best for your business.

In fact, Foursquare recently blogged about the successes that some businesses have seen since implementing Foursquare Specials.

Promote your Special:

Now that you have claimed your business and you have a special up for customers, you have to let people know about it! Promote the special through Facebook, Twitter and your blog. Put it in an email letting people know you want them to check-in when they get to your location. You can even fill out this form to request a window cling to put in your storefront. You can also download this pdf that you can print out and hang in your store.

Get creative, think of other ways you can promote your new Foursquare Special and make sure to keep track of your redemption rate. With the analytics available as a manager of a location on Foursquare, you can see who has checked in to your location, when they checked in and how frequently they check-in. Keep a close eye on those metrics to make sure you’re getting the most out of Foursquare.

This is the second in a new series of interviews with local leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Kyle Lacy of Brandswag, a social media training company based in Indianapolis and Oklahoma City.

Kyle Lacy – Brandswag

Kyle Lacy started Brandswag in June, 2007 with his college roommate. They started out as an identity design firm for website development and as of November, 2009, they moved into corporate training and development for social media. They work with companies with between 100 and 2,000 employees and train HR, Marketing, Sales, IT, Upper Management and other departments on the importance of social media as well as why and how to use social media. In short, they teach mid-to large sized companies how to use and implement social media.

Kyle recently published Twitter Marketing for Dummies and maintains a social media-focused blog at KyleLacy.com.

Why social media?

One, we’ve been using it for a long time. Facebook started while we were in college. We also saw a niche that we could brand in terms of being young, and we took advantage of it. I like how social media gives a voice to the consumer instead of the other way around, but we also saw a great opportunity and we jumped headfirst into it. Initially it was difficult, because people didn’t understand the concept, they didn’t understand why it mattered, but it’s getting better now and more and more people are wanting to learn about everything.

What are some next steps for DMOs in social media?

It’s not about creating profiles, it’s about figuring out where your customers are. I’ve had conversations with people where I’ve told them, “Don’t you dare go and create a [Facebook] fan page, there’s no reason for you to do it”. I think the biggest problem that we have right now is that organizations look at social and think it’s a completely separate entity from everything else. They have their marketing meeting and then they have their social media meeting, which is stupid because social is just another arm of marketing. It’s a communications platform. There’s no difference between it and direct mail, email marketing, they should all coexist with social and vice-versa.

What I would tell people is if you make a Facebook fan page, you’d better figure out if it’s making you revenue. If, after six months, it’s not making you revenue, you’re either not doing it right or you need to get rid of it. It’s cool to have the social media hype, but we’re not going to get to the past the point of just hype until people make sure this is a viable marketing platform for them. It will be a whole lot easier for everyone if they start measuring their social media initiatives.

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