Inspiration from Foursquare 3.0 to reward your visitors

Photo by What What on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA)

Foursquare has proven pretty successful at making people do stuff they don’t really need to do. Checking in on Foursquare is like visiting a local museum or gallery: it will not save your life but it’s fun to do so once in a while. One reason, I think, Foursquare is popular is because of its reward system. In the recent 3.0 release a lot of new options have been added to earn points and be really cool.

I know a lot of places offer rewards to returning visitors, etc. Foursquare 3.0 takes this to the next level. Maybe among the many things they reward there’s one or two we could apply to the physical visitors of our museums.

• First visit to a venue
  First times are always tricky: they determine if there will be a second or not. A good first impression rocks. Foursquare gives quite some points. A museum might give a special tour, flyer, or even a discount (as people do not yet know if it will be worth their money). “First time visitors enter for free. See if you will come again!”
• Returning visitors
  Foursquare used to reward loyalty with turning you into a mayor and offering badges. Now they’re also handing out points for returning visits. My hairdresser does as well, with a nice discount if I come back within 4, 5 or 6 weeks. At museum, for instance a sign at the exit: “Don’t throw away your ticket, it’s worth a coffee next time you’re around.”
• Welcome back
  One of the best new rewards in Foursquare 3.0 are the points awarded for returning after a long time (to playing the game, to a venue). It feels like Foursquare has personally waited for my return and that feels good. So, how about inviting people with old catalogues, flyers or tickets who are not friends or members to a special opening of a new exhibition? Read the rest of this entry »

Using Foursquare to make historical contents locally available (and reach new audiences)

Ever since I first used Foursquare I’ve been looking for ways to use this platform for our museum. After some unsuccessful attempts, I believe we found a way to use Foursquare that might have potential and some conditions to use the platform well.

Our new website, and especially its integration of Google Maps, made it easy to add stories from our website to relevant places in Foursquare. About a month ago I’ve added 15 stories as tips to Foursquare. And it seems to work! Some of the tips have been done relatively often and between 0.05 and 0.1 % of our website traffic (wow!) now comes from Foursquare.

Here’s what I did (and/or should have done, looking back):

1. I looked for things on our website (stories, etc.) directly related to a location.
2. Then I looked for a venue on Foursquare at this location with a lot of check-ins (train stations seem to work best) and preferably not too much tips.
3. I added a tip with the main body of the information of the story (the length of a tip is limited, so even when you add the core of your message it works like a teaser).
4. To the tip, I added a URL. The last couple of them I’ve given the extra attribute ?source=4sq to be able to measure them in Google Analytics. (There’s no other way to measure the traffic from Foursquare as far as I know).
5. I measure success using a special Advanced Segment for Foursquare (using the ?source=4sq).

Read the rest of this entry »