Last week, Dave was contacted by a reporter who wanted to interview us about our use of foursquare, the location-based social networking service.
I spoke with the reporter, Stephanie Miles, this week to answer a few questions. The interview is featured online at StreetFight.com, a site that looks at the business of hyperlocal. Read it here!
We haven't done much with foursquare lately. We were one of the first businesses in Lawrence to use it, but it's hard to figure out a special to offer customers when you run a bar. Liquor laws in Kansas don't allow us to discount drinks unless everyone is entitled to the same discount, all day, so that kind of defeats the purpose of checking in on foursquare.
The first special we ran rewarded frequent customers: for every third check-in between 5-9 p.m., the customer could show their check-in to the bartender and get free jukebox credits. People love our jukebox, so this seemed like a fun way to reward them for coming in regularly on a shift where we aren't usually very busy.
Another special that we ran didn't reward the customer with anything but warm fuzzies, but it was a success. We borrowed the idea from the Legends shopping center in Kansas City. For every check-in during a period of time, we donated a buck to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. We raised almost $100 with this special, which is great.
Other exciting achievements (for us, anyway) with foursquare were when we unlocked the swarm badge for having 50 people checked in at the same time, and the night we hit 1000 check-ins and rewarded the customer with a T-shirt.
We aren't currently running any foursquare specials, but if we can come up with a good one we'll certainly do it again.