Has Foursquare Jumped the Shark?

Is Foursquare the Next Twitter?

No, not really. But the incredible buildup of attention and hype surrounding Foursquare is starting to worry me. When any product, service or brand gets this much attention this early on, it can be a harbinger of bad things. As a lover of foursquare, and a persistent evangelist on its behalf, I am beginning to sense a great deal of fluff.

Twitter had a very tough road to climb when they started, and the service existed in relative obscurity until earlier this year when traffic began to explode and Twitter became a cultural phenomenon, joked about on network sitcoms.

Foursquare hasn’t had this tough road to climb and yet its already being anointed the next big thing.

For a few months now I’ve had a Google alert setup to track foursquare mentions. This, by the way, is one of the easiest and most comprehensive ways of tracking a brand across the internet. For most of that period there were one or two updates a week. Now I am getting closer to 10 emails a day with blog posts, mainstream news articles, analyses and the like. Most are typical primers, explaining foursquare to, what I must assume is, a still mystified public.

So for all the hype and excitement over the possibilities of Foursquare, I have yet to see much actual application of it. Mayor offers? That’s childs play. Ok great I can get a free cup of coffee or a beer for checking in or becoming mayor of a venue. That’s nice. Some establishments are smartly scaling up their rewards for more frequent visits (for every 10 checkins, dinner is free for instance). But these are infrequent.

Foursquare School

It seems Foursquare is spending much of their time on developing their applications for the iPhone and Droid, and of course the Blackberry app that should bring a whole ton of new users into the service. But what Foursquare doesn’t seem to be doing at all is teaching and instructing vendors and businesses in how to use the damn thing. I mean, in 2 months I have not seen any creative uses of the Mayor offerings other than the most basic.  It’s really past time that Foursquare started working with vendors and businesses to push the creativity index up a notch. If they are assuming that non-tech restauranteurs and business owners are going to get creative, they are wrong.

Foursquare and Chain Businesses

In late september, Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove penned a blog post about Foursquare that garnered, as all Mashable articles do, a great deal of attention. 618 Retweets! Here is what Jennifer had to say about Foursquare’s announcement they had signed Tasti D-Lite, a New York City yogurt chain, to a test marketing campaign tied into Foursquare’s service:

It’s absolutely genius and here’s why. Say you’re out and about grabbing your morning coffee. You check-in to get your points and Foursquare shows you one of several possible deals: a special mayor offer for the location you’re at, a special mayor offer for a location nearby, or nearby check-in discounts. As is the case with Tasti D-Lite, a check-in will net you a pretty nice discount that other customers aren’t privy to.

In return, businesses like Tasti D-Lite will be able to gain insight into total check-ins, deals redeemed, who’s visiting, how often, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going next. In fact, BJ Emerson, Director of Information and Social Technologies for Tasti D-Lite, is a big fan of the beta program and believes “the potential for us to engage in this way is huge. I believe the potential analytics related to this could make for the most effective localized campaign creation.”

Jen’s article gave the impression that tons of big businesses would start integrating Foursquare providing all sorts of rewards and discounts. But guess what? It hasn’t happened. I still see the Tasti D-Lite offers all over Manhattan, but not once have I thought about going in.

More importantly, have any businesses actually been able to make sense of the data that foursquare provides? Out of about ten sources in NYC, none have even glanced at their dashboards. Foursquare needs to teach these businesses how to examine their data and then come up with creative solutions to make the most of what that data is telling them.

Are people checking in a lot on Wednesdays late night? Or early Friday afternooon? Where are they going after? Or where did they come from?

For the first time in the history of the hospitality business, their is incredibly rich data at the disposal of businesses. But I haven’t seen any indication that they are using it.

Until that begins to happen, expect to see more and more articles detailing the promise of Foursquare. What you won’t see is articles detailing success.

Tagged as: foursquare, social media experiments