New location-based social media game is a big hit in Vancouver
By Gillian Shaw, Vancouver Sun October 2, 2009

Stalker central or a social boon?

Foursquare, the latest geo-tagging social media phenomenon to hit the Web, has arrived in Vancouver, and people are scrambling to take part. It’s a location-based game in which you earn points, badges and popular standing for “checking in” when you visit a venue or location.

Stop by enough times and you get to be mayor of a place – whether it’s your local coffee shop or a favourite beach.

Users love it – it can be addictive chalking up points and badges, checking the whereabouts of friends and hearing their brief comments – like “buy steamed pork buns” at a bakery. For businesses, it’s social media meets customer loyalty in a tangible and measurable way.

And while the prospect of sharing their whereabouts has some critics worried, Vancouverites are embracing the latest social media entrant, adding record numbers of new venues to the site and proving to the New York-based company Foursquare that Vancouver was deserving of the distinction of being the first Canadian city added to the service.

“It is the first city we have done in Canada and the second international city,” said Dennis Crowley, whose startup recently raised $1.35 million US in first- round financing and is adding a fourth employee to its ranks.

Crowley said that in other cities where Foursquare has been launched his company has used data sets from listings providers to populate the site with venues. Foursquare wasn’t successful in making a deal to get similar data here so, based on a flurry of interest and petitions from Vancouverites, the company decided to launch its Vancouver site and let users add venues on their own.

“The expectation was that when we turned it on in Vancouver everyone would spend the first day adding their favourite places,” said Crowley. “We were talking about it and we said if we got them to add 250 places then that would be successful.

“By three weeks there were more than 3,000 venues and 1,500 users [in Vancouver],” Crowley said.

Foursquare has a total of 50,000 people signed on in the United States, Vancouver and Amsterdam.

Foursquare has an iPhone application out, one for the Android phone and a BlackBerry one is in the works. While it shares characteristics with such user-generated review sites as Yelp, its GPS-locating, snappy one-line comments and competitive game model are giving it added cachet among social media fans.

Chris Breikss, president and co-founder of Vancouver’s 6S Marketing, who coordinated the push to get Foursquare launched here, checked in at his local Blenz coffee shop so often that he was named mayor of the venue – a cyber-honour that can be trumpeted to friends on Foursquare and other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook integrated right into the service.

Within minutes of the news being broadcast through Breikss’ social networks, the president of Blenz, George Moen, e-mailed to say congratulations on the bloodless coup.

“What was hilarious was one of my staff came in and said, ‘Do you know we have a mayor at Blenz in Yaletown,’ ” said Moen. “They tried to describe it to me and I said, ‘I just don’t get it.’ ”

It didn’t take long for Moen, by now a social media veteran who regularly converses with customers on Facebook and Twitter, to log on to the new service. It will be the focus of his company’s social media push among Blenz coffee shops around the province this month.

“I think it is the beginning of commercialization of social media,” said Moen. “Whether they are successful or not time will tell, but they are on the right track.”

Moen said his company is working on its Foursquare strategy but for now, every week there will be a draw among Foursquare members who have been named Blenz mayors with the winner getting a $15 gift certificate.

“I think it is the next big thing in social media,” Breikss said. “The reason I think that is because it is unique, it is not its own platform like Twitter or Facebook, but it works with those platforms.

“It is also mobile-phone-based and it will become more GPS-based.”

So what about cyber stalking?

“The only ones who get to see your location are the ones you approve,” said Crowley. “I don’t think anyone wants to participate in a stalking tool.”

All the same, Breikss points out if you are going to broadcast your location at a club at 2 a.m., don’t be surprised if your boss has little patience if you’re dragging the next day.

Vancouver Web marketing consultant Adam Killam doesn’t mind sharing his whereabouts with friends on his social network. When he tweeted his intention to meet a friend at Earl’s in Yaletown and checked in with Foursquare when he got there, the manager sent free beer to their table.

“Especially being in the technology community, we all hang out in the same places and we want to meet. If you have a secret meeting in a shady part of town you may not want to share it,” he said, laughing.

gshaw@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun