Bing is bringing Foursquare to the Search Engines

So what exactly is Foursquare and how does this new Bing opportunity help your store, or put it at risk. Foursquare is known as location-based social networking (LBS) that first hit the scene at 2009 SXSW in Austin. The tool uses your mobile GPS and helps you "check-in" and connect with your friends by letting them know where you are, and find others that are at the same location. Each action on Foursquare is shared with all of the users friends (mostly through the iPhone, since 80% of users are hitting from the iPhone Ap) and has the option to be shared as a Facebook status update or Twitter Tweet. The check-ins are actually a game. You earn points for every one - unless you check-in at the same location all the time. You are rewarded with higher scores when you check-in to a new place, or add a new location to the list of locations that are set up within the system. If you check into the same place several times you will receive "Mayorship" which you can hold onto, as long as you continue to check-in at that location, or you can be ousted by others that check-in even more frequently at that location. And then there are badges, earned just like the Boy Scouts, for everything from being a newbie, to oversharing by checking in more than 10 times in 12 hours. The more badges earned will end up having a play with the Bing concept as well, as the more badges a user has is their indicator of user relevance. 

Lastly, the user can add tips and to-dos. This is where the Bing concept will come into play the most. The tips are quite frequently user feedback. Telling you what is good or bad about the location they have checked into. After having suggested to dealers, for years, that they begin using and posting customer feedback, and using it as an opportunity to show the world how they have handled that feedback and turned a negative into a positive, it appears that Foursquare may be forcing that practice to come to fruition, even though dealers are still paranoid about comments. Bing is developing a way to provide access to real-time customer tips and to dos within their feature maps. Dealer tips (user feedback) are making it into a search engine now. The tips will be ranked by the number of badges that each user has, therefore your customers that are familiar with, and frequently using Foursquare will be in control of how Bing users see your dealership.

As a dealer, what should you do? Firstly, check to see if your location has been added to the game, if not, add it. And pay attention to who is checking in, from your service department to your sales department. You may consider giving specials to the "Mayor." Foursquare is working on their next release of tools that will allow dealers to more easily offer special dealer to those that check-in, including mayors. They plan to support the dealer community with tools and tracking.