Public relations practitioners in the fashion world have been using Twitter, Facebook Fanpages and blogs as a part of their social media repertoire. Foursquare is quickly becoming the new frontier for social media activity. Foursquare is a location based social networking application for cellphones. Users sign up and then “check in” to locations, earning badges and titles the more times they check in to each location.
Retailers have taken notice of this social media frontier, and are coming up with creative ways to use online resources to drive offline activity. Foursquare was recently used at the last New York Fashion Week by American designer Marc Jacobs. Foursquare users who checked into the Marc by Marc Jacobs store received the “Fashion Victim” badge, and four of those lucky badge-holders were given tickets to the runway show. Lucky Magazine also partnered with Foursquare during New York Fashion Week and gave insider tips about where the best places were to hang out between shows and gave users badges when they checked into any of the over 700 retailers listed in Lucky’s shopping directory.
Retailers can purchase badges from Foursquare to be awarded to the “mayors” (most frequent visitors) of their stores. Also, retailers could apply discounts or giveaways to mayors, which would help motivate people to visit the stores and talk their location online. Foursquare offers venue analytics for free, which is awesome for tracking and evaluating the effectiveness of your brand’s social media strategies.
Check out Marc Jacob’s runway show that the lucky badge-holders got to see!
