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FourSquare and the Venue Sponsorship Multiplier

Everybody that’s anybody in social monitoring has been talking about FourSquare, Gowalla, and other “social geolocator services” over the past couple of weeks. Following the South by Southwest festival and some pretty astounding user growth rate reports from FourSquare, popular digital media channels such as Mashable and ReadWriteWeb have been pushing the importance of this new trend. Add reports that Facebook will be soon entering the location-based services game – in addition to Google’s long-standing Latitude feature – and there’s probably more to this than just hype.  (For the record, we at Cymfony have measured a SUBSTANTIAL jump in FourSquare mentions over the past 2 months.)

There’s plenty of public information already available on the value of location data. After all, customers are effectively saying “I’m visiting your business…right now” from their social-enabled mobile devices. Aggregate this data for a particular industry over time, look at “Top Visitors” for specific locations, or mash it up with Google/Bing Maps. There is no scarcity of analytical or customer engagement possibilities.

I’d like to take a novel slant on this issue, however – namely, the effect location-based services have on venue sponsorships. Over the past several weeks, we have been discussing the importance of Twitter/FourSquare posts in client reporting following the jump in volumes. Beyond brand mentions of retail locations (i.e. “I’m at so-and-so store”), there are a staggering number of mentions of brand-sponsored concert/sports venues as well: the Bank of America Pavilion, TD Garden, and Comcast Center (these are just examples in/around my Boston locale, so don’t read too much into them). 

Here’s how it works:

·         Primary venue sponsors are featured prominently as part of the venue name.

·         These names naturally find their way into the FourSquare/GoWalla location directories, including the brand name itself.

·         When users visit these venues, they “check in” to let others know their location

·         As a result, thousands of “check ins” are published to FourSquare, and users inadvertently drive brand impressions on behalf of venue sponsors. Because most novice users default to publish their “check ins” to Twitter, this channel can become easily flooded as well.  Example.

At first, we were reluctant to use these posts for analytical treatment – the customer wasn’t visiting the brand’s location but rather an unrelated venue. But many marketers at global companies know there’s a lot more to branding than retail visitation. Having thousands of people Tweeting, updating their Facebook status, or otherwise mentioning your brand (in a positive context) has value, even if it’s just to relate “the great time we’re having at the Stones show.” Like the giant signs and advertisements at the Garden, the name of this game is “more eyeballs,” and in this case, every location tweet counts.

Then, should marketers re-value their venue sponsorships based on this extended branding? Should venue owners charge an additional premium for sponsors? Can we come up with a “venue sponsorship multiplier” to quantify the effects of FourSquare and other location services? We’ve been mulling over these questions and others… what do you think?

(Worldwide FourSquare Day is held annually on April 16th… Four, Squared…  get it?)

Posted by Omri Duek on April 16, 2010 at 12:48 PM | Email this post Permalink

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