What could possibly come on the heels of Social Networking apps like Facebook and Twitter? Well, they are already here. You just might not know about them yet.
Got a smart phone? Go get one – because the next NOW wave is Location Based GPS games. What???? … Games that use your GPS location as a primary factor. There are dozens of them out there as you can see here. But the ones I want to talk about are the ones that are all the rage right now. I’m sure there are others, but I want to highlight 2 of them.
Brightkite (which is NOT new) is the first one I heard of. You download the app to your smart phone and “check in” when you visit a certain site like a bar, restaurant, Home Depot, or anywhere. It’s social because you can follow people and they can follow you. You can build a network, post updates, pictures, and the like. You can, “Get to know people around you”.
Now, Foursquare really takes it up a notch. Foursquare turns location based GPS into a competitive game. You get awarded points for visiting each location. The counter re-sets every week, so no one player can just dominate over time and make it boring for everyone else. But there’s more…
Foursquare stiffens the competition by awarding the prestigious honor of being the “Mayor” of any location to the person who visits there the most. But Foursquare takes it up another notch by awarding “Badges” for your first, 10th, 25th, 50th, etc. check in. You can also get badges for going out 4 nights in a row, or visiting 4 stops in one night. There are many more badges, I just have not seen them yet.
Can you imagine how a bar, restaurant, or other business might use this to their advantage? If I owned a bar, I would Tweet that whoever checked in the most during a certain month would get X number of free drinks (for them and their friends) the following month.
Consider the fact that Foursqure can automatically post your “Check-ins” to other social media sites like Twitter ……. Just imagine having 50 Gen Y’rs all competing to visit your venue as many times as possible during a month, tweeting about it, and competing for the honor of most visits – and the coveted prize of free drinks! What a marketing opportunity. Think of all that FREE publicity! It is for this reason that I see Foursquare getting bigger and bigger and not going anywhere for a while.
So get on, start playing, and have fun. And if you are a Shop owner of any kind, you could be using Location Based GPS games such as Foursquare as part of your marketing plan.
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