The Boston restaurant and marketing communities converged in Dialogue’s first Eat Drink and Be Social event. Thanks to Tyson Goodridge , I had the privilege of moderating the panel on location based marketing in the restaurant business. The panel featured the CEO of Foodspotting, Alexa Andrzejewski and the mop-haired, minor pop culture icon (he’s no Justin Bieber yet, but they have the same haircut), Dennis Crowley of Foursquare. We discussed the platforms, their potential and how to activate in the space.

What is Foodspotting?

Foodspotting is media-first, location second. People take pictures of food that inspires them and then tag them with a location to share with friends. It is focused on providing a window into the entire dining-out world. The exploration options are particularly strong. Not only can you follow people and the food that inspires them, you can follow updates on places and dishes. This is excellent because there isn’t really anything like it in Twitter or Facebook. It takes advantage of tagging to improve the overall information received by the user. We are talking about the incorporation of business intelligence into the tool. Foodies are always on the lookout for the next great food destination and this could inspire them not only to try places in their locale, but travel to other places with interesting fare. It can also be used for competitive intelligence / community monitoring by restaurants.



Alexa encourages restaurants to create Foodspotting accounts to showcase their favorite dishes along with the user community. The platform is still in its infancy, but growing quickly. They have 100,000 active users in just 3 months time. Users can connect their accounts to their Twitter and foursquare accounts (and I am told Facebook is coming soon) which gives Foodspotting exponential reach.

Foursquare Activation

Location and Foursquare are the hottest things in social media and emerging technology right now so we grilled Crowley and Alexa on specific ways that people can use their technologies to promote loyalty and increase share of wallet. Mayorships are great, but they give a benefit to one person. Crowley talked a lot about Foursquare specials, which are benefits given to anyone who checks into a location on Foursquare. They are free for any business who wants one, but there currently is a bottleneck in the process. Each business needs verification to ensure that the owner really is the owner and that people are not putting phony specials on a business. Seems this is the responsibility of the new business lead, who is also trying to graduate from Stanford. Foursquare has a serious, yet dreamy problem. Everyone wants to work with them.

The queue for business verification is 10-15,000 businesses deep and they have 20 people on staff only one of whom is dedicated to new business. Per Crowley, the company is working on tools to automate the process. An interim, cost efficient step could be to contact a call center in Omaha to call businesses and verify the ownership while automation is being developed. Why aren’t they doing this already? When I asked Crowley how much it costs to use the “specials” feature, he said it was “totally free”. They are probably reluctant to place resources in a verification bucket without a quantifiable return for Foursquare.

The original question was: “How does the restaurant business activate? How can we better understand the components of your services model? How do we activate? What is the cost?” Custom services like badges for achievements are available, but his focus in answering my question was more on how local businesses, specifically restaurants can use Foursquare to attract people. What it takes to create custom campaigns and badges was a little murky and suggests that those are opportunistic and pricing, details and timing are up to the discretion of Foursquare. You need to make it easy and lucrative for them. Why is this? To paraphrase Dennis, everything is happening faster than they imagined and they are focusing their resources on scale. They are only 20 people. They are working on figuring it all out.

When Foursquare first came out, I used the hashtag #failsquare every time I could not check in. It was supposed to be funny and they took it really seriously and not personally. They have done an amazing job of keeping foursquare up and running while adding 15,000 users a day. The system is fast, lean and until version 1.8 which has had a few recent hiccups (although not near as many as Twitter in its early days), largely bulletproof.

What about you?

I asked the audience too: If you could be the mayor of anywhere, where would you be mayor and what would you want the special to be? Me? The Ginger Man in Austin, TX A beer on the house. How about you?