Restaurant owners worried that they can’t keep up with the proliferation of new location-based social-media platforms need not despair. Those applications are set up to complement restaurants’ current social-media and digital-marketing efforts, and their customers often do most of the work creating content, said Tristan Walker, an executive with Foursquare.
Foursquare is a location-based social-media platform accessed mostly via mobile phone that lets users "check in" to restaurants where they're eating, automatically informing their Facebook friends and Twitter followers of their location in real time. It also has a competitive element, as users get points, special badges, and titles like "super user" and "mayor" of their local hangouts the more they go out and check in to different venues.
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Walker can understand a restaurant operators’ multitasking demands. The 25-year-old Foursquare exec -- who doesn’t have an official title but simply “runs business development” -- is striking deals between Foursquare and big partners like Bravo TV, Zagat Survey and The New York Times while attending Stanford University for a Master in Business Administration.
He recently discussed the benefits of location-based social-media in an interview with Nation’s Restaurant News.
How does Foursquare work for the average restaurant? If customers are the ones making a page for a restaurant, does an owner have to do anything or pay to have the page set up or maintained?
Right now, restaurants don’t pay anything. In the future we’ll find a product we can charge for. For restaurant consumers, we’re trying to make your city easier to use, and we use game mechanics to get you out exploring. We started Foursquare with the city model, putting restaurant listings data into the system, and we got probably 80 percent of the available restaurants that way. We incentivize our users to go out and add that remaining 20 percent.
Some restaurateurs have said they’re testing an analytics dashboard for Foursquare, where owners can pay to create custom offers and badges. Is that coming soon?
Yes. We hand-selected about 30 of our most passionate venue owners to test this. All of them care about two things: retention and acquisition. We help with acquisition by letting you see who comes in where, when, and where they go before and after they stop in.
What’s the practical use of Foursquare for a restaurateur?
If I own a coffee shop, and one of my loyal customers stops checking in, and then people start checking in to the coffee truck three blocks away, I need to do something. Or if I’m a frozen-yogurt place, and most people coming to my location come from a certain gym down the street, there’s an effective opportunity to cross-promote. We’re trying to find value through that kind of feedback, and we want to offer tools to get venue owners to act smarter around marketing and cross-promotion.
Speaking of cross-promotion, your users link Foursquare accounts to their Twitter and Facebook feeds to spread their updates far and wide. So social-media-savvy restaurateurs shouldn’t worry about Foursquare replacing those platforms, right?
We’re not competing with them at all. We see ourselves as complementary. We let you know where your friends from other networks are. That’s interesting content, and it gives people an incentive to do things in their city in an offline fashion. It’s the local component to all this [social media].
Does this give independents a leg up on chain competitors?
It all comes down to how you use the platform. It’s not meant to be just another tool for ad distribution. If all our venue owners crush it like Joe Sorge [owner of AJ Bombers, a burger restaurant in Milwaukee that has had success using Foursquare to drive traffic], then it allows them to have a voice comparable to a chain with a big advertising budget. Some venues treat it as an extension of couponing, and it can be, but Tasti D-Lite is doing it at the POS system and they’re running their business in a compelling way. Even if national chains want to do this, all parties will benefit, and it won’t come at the expense of anybody else.
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].