Foursquare and Gowalla: GPS Social Media

How do small businesses use social media like Foursquare and Gowalla? Here's how Robbie Vitrano from Naked Pizza explains it. Robbie: It's a new—- it's essentially a Twitter-oriented platform that is explicitly geography-based. So—- the old Twitter was people might Tweet “I'm at Caribou Coffee.” And so those are all set up to essentially always place you at a particular location. It's a little more explicitly useful as well in terms of flesh meets. The part of Twitter that is more young is the Tweetups where people come together physically. And so Gowalla and foursquare, which both received significant investment and people are excited by, the tech crunch crowd, are both built around recognizing the way people have used social media, and particularly young people have used social media, what is attractive about it is that it has an explicit commercial aspect to it. Which Twitter’s getting into now, especially with their tie-in with—- now that Google’s picking up Tweets as part of their Google alerts, etcetera. And by the way, I think you may know, but we've been involved directly with Twitter. They reached out to us, and we get to test drive a lot of their beta stuff. We're kind of in that little god pod of kicking the tires. Of course, Twitter’s still like 40 people, so it's a pretty cozy group. But the foursquare guys who I know, Naveen started foursquare, and I don't know the Gowalla guys, but they're all ex-Twitter guys. So with foursquare you would basically sign in when you're at the Caribou and say you're at the Caribou. And if you're at the Caribou a lot, they would make you the Mayor of Ca ribou. So if you were there more than anyone else, and as Mayor, the Caribou can now reach out to you and say “Steve, we really appreciate your patronage, here's a 20 dollar gift certificate or here's a promotion that you can send out to your followers.”
Steve: So you're really trying to attract these people who might be the social connecters.
NakedPizzaguy: Exactly, so it's cool in that way and it leverages a little bit of that social prestige. One of the problems for us is that because we're so much deliver, we're not really a hangout, so it's a little different for us.

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