24 Usable Hours » Foursquare

Location Based Social Networks and the Arts

Devon Smith — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:50:59 +0000

I’ll be teaching a workshop in a few weeks on Location Based Social Networks and the Arts in San Francisco. We’ll be chatting about Google Places, Yelp, Facebook Places, and Foursquare. I know there will be total novices in the crowd who’ve never used (or maybe heard of?) some of these, and other folks who think check-ins are old hat. So here’s where you come in dear reader. Take a gander at my slides. What kind of questions would you have? Are these the LBS you would expect me to talk about? Is there more research you’d like to see? Other cool case studies you’ve heard about? I’ve still got 2 weeks until the workshop, but I need to shift over soon to creating the deck for “The Mechanics of Measurement.”

A Social Media Measurement Plan

Devon Smith — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:42:37 +0000

Measuring social media is hard. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by minutia, there’s yet to be a measurement site that even comes close to adequately tracking people & content across social media platforms, and there are no standardized benchmarks to know if 43 (fans, comments, @mentions, whatever) is good, bad, or average. And the truth is, social media is more art than science. Not to mention we’ve become obsessive about measuring this just because we can (or at least, we think we can). Besides, when’s the last time you checked the ROI of that poster you put up, the press release you sent out, or the postcard you mailed?

Let’s talk about a new way.

Putting people front and center in your measurement plan.

What if every day, or week, or whenever, there was a list of people delivered to your inbox. These are the people who commented on your blog, or your facebook comment, or began following you on twitter, or favorited your slideshare presentation. The list would include the actual text of their comment. In v2.0, you could give values to each of these activities. As in, 5 points for an RSS subscriber, 1 point for a facebook like, 2 points for a delicious tag, etc. And the measurement tool would know the network size of each of these people. Total score is a function of the weight of the user’s action, and the size of the user’s influence base. The list delivered to your email inbox would be ordered by descending total score. In v3.0 this is not only an email, but an entire database. Search by comment keyword, by “most influential/engaged facebook fan” or how a user’s score has changed over time. This is as much a customer relationship management tool as a social media measurement tool.

But wait, that’s not all.

How is your content doing online?

You want to care about this for a few reasons:

If a piece of content is suddenly doing well, maybe there’s something you could do (like responding to a tweet, taking a photo, adding tags to a YouTube video) to increase the momentum.
If you can discern a pattern to the characteristics of the content that is doing well (or for that matter, is doing poorly), maybe you could build on the thing that’s working, or fix the thing that seems to be broken.

This list of content items would be emailed to you. You’re probably going to want to segregate new content items (recently posted) from recurring content items that continue to get pageviews or comments long after you’ve first posted them. In v2.0, you’d be able to tie the size of your network to each content item, so a blog post that you also tweet about to your 10,000 followers would have a higher score than the comment on your flickr photo that gets 4 views a day. In v3.0, if a recurring content item jumps some x% over last week, month, etc, then an emergency email would be sent to you, with the assumption that there’s probably something urgent that needs your attention. Clearly, these emailed lists would also benefit from a database that was searchable, and showed trends over time.

But wait, there’s more.

How did people arrive at your content?

The two big categories here are links and search terms. Within links, you’ve got to consider referrals, direct links, and embedded content you’ve got elsewhere. Within search terms, you’re going to want to know the search terms people used to find your content, the search terms they’re asking for on your site, and the hashtag & list terms they’re associating with you on twitter.

So this is your 3rd email of the day, week, month, etc. At this point, you’re probably asking yourself not how people arrived at your content, but why you should care. For links: having the opportunity to thank, and more generally connect with, the folks that are sending traffic your way. For search terms: to both guide future content creation decisions, and refine any SEO/SEM that you might be doing. And again, with the descending scores, and the searchable database. In v2.0, it would be nice to group similar links, and similar search terms together. In other words, I know that search phrases including the word foursquare drive quite a bit of traffic to my site, as do many different links from Beth’s blog and Ian’s blog. There are some nifty tricks in Google Analytics to combine each of these sets of links & terms, but I want a simpler solution.

Finally we arrive at the place where most folks seem to start.

What’s the size of your network?

You’ve got your people, your engagement, and your traffic. These are big aggregate numbers that are best tracked over time, and hopefully compared to your competitors.

It’s probably not the case that a subscriber to your slideshare account is ‘worth’ the same as a fan of your delicious tags. So again, it would be nice to be able to give a weight to each of these types of people, engagements, and traffic. And you’re probably going to want to see that “people” score as a total of all platforms, or by several platforms at a time. Like in Google Analytics, it would be nice to attach annotations to these aggregate trends.

It’s impossible to do all of this measurement though right? A total pipe dream. An analytics package that would be impossible to implement? A fools errand to try to connect so many platforms, so many third party tools, with so many divergent goals?

Probably.

But here’s the tools you would need to do it.

True, some of these cost money, and less than half the platforms have open APIs, but let’s at least take a quick gander at each of them. These are, of course, in addition to the many one-off possibilities I’ve mentioned previously.

WordPress Stats Plugin

*You’re going to need to install the plugin to get these stats.

Google Analytics

*GA has a TON of data to dig into. It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole. I’ve been promising a more in depth post on this for months. It’s still in the works.

Feedburner

*of particular note: check out the publicize tab to know who’s subscribed to your blog via email.

Facebook Page Insights

*Only page admins will get access to this data.

BackType

*of particular note: this is the only way I’ve been able to figure out the amount of Facebook buzz my content gets from folks who aren’t my friends/fans.

Twitter RSS Search Query

This one’s a bit of a hack. You can “subscribe” to an RSS feed for any search term on Twitter (like @yourname). This is a great record of all of the people who mention/retweet you. Google reader will then graph for you the number of “posts” by day of week, time of day, etc.

Bit.ly

*If you haven’t already, please give TweetDeck (or HootSuite, or CoTweet) your bit.ly API, and it will shorten and track all of your links automatically. For added bonus, connect bit.ly > TweetDeck > Packratius > Delicious. More on this soon. It’s magical. You can also stalk other people’s bit.ly link stats by adding a “+” sign to the end of the link.

TweetMeme

*Especially useful to track twitter links that might not mention your name, or anything specific to your brand.

YouTube Insights

*These stats get pretty confusing. Referrals go missing, the numbers don’t add up, totally unpredictable when or how videos will go viral. But work with what you’ve got.

Flickr Stats

*Sadly, only available to (paid) pro account users.

*Just learned this one last week. If you upgrade to a (paid) pro account, you can see the actual names of the folks viewing your profile.

SlideShare

*Pro (paid) accounts get additional analytics. But I couldn’t find any examples online, so it’s unclear how much more detailed the stats get.

Foursquare Venue Analytics

*You’ll have to claim your venue to get access to this data. Do it now.

Alright, quick review

Measurement is hard. Don’t get distracted by the numbers, and lose sight of the people, content, links, and search terms; in other words, text > numbers.

WHO: Focus on active relationships: people engaging direclty with your brand by commenting, liking, joining, etc.
WHAT: Keep track of content: especially new items, and recurring items that spike in traffic; search for patterns
WHY: Pay attention to passive relationships: people engaging more indirectly with your brand via linking to your content, or searching for your keyword terms.
HOW MUCH: Spend the least amount of time on the size of your network: but don’t ignore it completely. Compare your stats over time, and to your competitors.

There’s a plethora of tools. One day someone will integrate them all. Until then..if you’re interested in getting a copy of this prototype document, just send me an email (Google Docs didn’t handle the images & formatting very well, or I would just post online).

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Theatre & Social Media: TCG 2010

Devon Smith — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:56:32 +0000

The Theatre Communications Group 2010 National Conference wrapped up last night. I heard word it was the largest in the conference’s history, clocking in at just under 1,000 attendees. A sizable chunk of those folks live tweeted several breakout sessions, mostly under the #TCG2010 moniker. My presentation, Social Media Strategy: Why ROI Isn’t Enough went quite well. I’ve received so much great input from folks over the past four months about what I should talk about, and was overwhelmed with gratitude from the many good luck emails in the days leading up to my presentation. So without further ado, for those of you who couldn’t be with us in person, and may not have caught the original tweeted link, here goes nothing:

TCG Social Media Presentation Draft 1View more presentations from Devon Smith.

You can also check out the live tweeting commentary. A few folks requested my notes, since I rattled off a bunch more stats.

Shortly after my presentation, my interview podcast with Technology in the Arts also went live! It in, I discuss the most significant findings of my social media research for theatres.

Speaking of, now I’m off to gather my thoughts on speaking at Americans for the Arts next weekend in Baltimore about Branding Yourself Through Social Media with the estimable Ian David Moss.

Possibly related posts:

Foursquare’s (Lack of ?) Growth

Devon Smith — Sun, 09 May 2010 20:10:30 +0000

There’s no doubt Foursquare has grown substantially since the last time I posted data about them in January. In the first three months of the year (Jan 11 – Apr 11), at LORT theatres:

check ins have more than tripled
unique users checking in have almost tripled
the number of theatres with any checkins has grown 30%
average check ins per person has grown 41%

The number of mayors, tags, and notes at each of the venues has also increased in line with the growth in users. From the below graph, you can see that not only are the most active venues (left most data points) growing, but a whole bunch of the “somewhat” active venues (middle data points) are growing even faster.

Because there’s a high degree of variability among theatres’ check in data, we should be able to take a stab at finding predictive measures of success on Foursquare. You can see some of the lines below skyrocket upwards, while others are mostly flat. Now the question is why.

*note: 1 data point excluded (Jan: 300; April: 608)

So now we can talk a little more specifically about the top 10 theatres, and try to figure out what they’re doing (if anything) to encourage Foursquare usage. First, we’ll talk raw check ins:

Guthrie Theater
Alley Theatre
Lincoln Center Theatre
American Conservatory Theatre
Portland Center Stage
ACT Theatre
Center Theatre Group
Berkeley Rep
Fords Theatre
Alliance Theatre

The Alley and the Alliance broke into the top 10 in April, replacing Intiman and Denver Center. Guthrie leads the pack by a factor of 2 with 606 check ins. So what can we say about these theatres?

Is it the size of the audience?

They’re all TCG Budget group 5 or 6 theatres (meaning, they have annual operating expenses of >$5 million), so presumably they have among the largest theatre audiences walking through their doors each month. But, these aren’t simply the 10 largest theatres. And only 3 are located in country’s top 10 largest cities. So being big helps, but doesn’t seal the deal.

Is it Foursquare’s popularity/longevity?

Foursquare first rolled out in Austin, Texas in 2009. At the time, it was only available in 12 cities in the US. In July, it opened up to 8 more; in December another 15, in early January 2010 another 50, and just a few weeks later to any city anywhere. Only 2 of the top 10 theatres with the highest number of checkins weren’t in the initial March 2009 launch. Those two didn’t get access until round 2 in July 2009, and happen to be the two who broke into the top 10 in April (Alley and Alliance). However, there are notable theatres located in “first round” Foursquare cities that didn’t make it into the top 10 list in January or April (I’m looking at you Arden, Arena, Court, Geffen, Goodman, Huntington, Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout, Shakespeare Theatre Co, and Wilma). Especially since only 3 of you aren’t a group 6 theatre. Again, being located in an early adopter city helps, but doesn’t ensure success.

Is it what the theatres are doing on Foursquare?

Only 6 of these 10 theatres have listed their Twitter handle on their Foursquare venue page. While all theatres had notes written about them by users, two theatres don’t have any “tags” listed by users (Berkeley Rep and Seattle Rep), and only Fords has a promotion running on Foursquare (and only then, because of a History Channel affiliation). Adding a depressing counterpoint, Kansas City Rep has the only official Mayor Special listed, but grew at about a third the rate of the average theatre venue. So there’s simply not enough data points to provide evidence either way that what a theatre does on Foursquare matters.

What about the number of Foursquare users?

While the total number of check ins matters in terms of exposing eyeballs to the theatre’s brand (assuming Foursquare users are linking check ins to their Twitter feed), so is the number of users important to create network effects. The top ten theatres by users:

Guthrie
Lincoln Center Theater
American Conservatory Theatre
Center Theatre Group
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
ACT Theatre
Fords Theatre
Seattle Repertory Theatre
Goodman Theatre
Denver Center Theatre

Now, the Goodman and Denver Center are our only new faces. And comapred to the January top 10 list, Goodman kicked out Intiman, otherwise everyone’s just switched a few places. Guthrie still leads the pack with 312 unique users, and Denver squeezes in with 58 users. Unfortunately, I don’t think we learn anything particularly interesting here.

Don’t we care about engagement?

Ok, yes yes. Engagement is the magic word in social media after all. So let’s check out average check ins per unique user because theoretically this would be a measure of loyalty:

Alley Theatre
Milwaukee Rep
Cleveland Playhouse
Florida Studio
Portland Center Stage
Asolo Rep
Northlight
Alliance Theatre
The Old Globe
George Shakespeare Co

Whoa. Where did all these folks come from? The Alley averages 9 check ins per user, while Georgia Shakes averages about 2.5. In order to get that high of user engagement on Foursquare at a theatre, you may start to suspect that it’s staff members checking in more than audience members. Which is not necessarily a bad thing after all; Yale Rep’s marketing, development, and general management staff have been in a race to see who can become mayor of the University Theatre (the building we all work in). If Foursquare keeps your staff having fun, and wanting to come to work, it’s easily worth its weight in gold.

What about how quickly they’ve increased check ins?

I excluded any theatre that had fewer than 10 check ins back in January (otherwise, the percentage growth numbers get all wacky) and was left with just 17 theatres. Of those, number of checkins had tripled on the low end, and increased 7 fold on the high end.

American Conservatory Theatre
Fords Theatre
The Old Globe
Goodman Theatre
Shakespeare Theatre Co
ACT Theatre
American Repertory Theatre
Center Theatre Group
Repertory Theatre of St. Louis
Seattle Repertory Theatre

Here again we see a handful of new faces, but these folks had extraordinarly low check in numbers back in January.

Interestingly, no theatre actually makes all 4 list, but ACT (both the Seattle and San Francisco versions), Center Theatre Group, and Fords make 3 of the lists (sacrificing check ins per person for raw numbers of check ins, people, and growth in check ins). The problem is, there’s no clear indication about why this is so.

Putting the pieces together

So let’s step back a moment here. By April 2010, just over 2,000 people had checked in to a LORT theatre venue. Somewhat impressive considering many venues had only been available for checking in since January, but compared to the hundreds of thousands of tickets sold over that time, and the (tens of?) thousands of Twitter and Facebook interactions, Foursquare check ins are still small potatoes in a very large garden. And much of the 3-month growth seems out of the control of the theatre (budget size, when Foursquare was released in their city). So what could/should we be doing?

Honestly, probably not a whole lot. On the one hand, Foursquare is a pretty simple social media platform for a theatre to manage. Add a badge to the front page of your website, create a mayor deal, post a sticker on your front door, add a Twitter handle to your venue page, and check the analytics every few weeks. Foursquare makes it dead simple; perhaps an hour of your time and you’re off and running with very little ongoing maintenance. Compared to the several hours each week you’re spending on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube, this is nothing. In short, Foursquare users don’t expect you to engage with them, they just want to play the game and maybe find a few good deals in their city.

On the other hand, unless you have a coffee shop/restaurant/bar in your theatre, I doubt Foursquare is bringing in any new or repeat business. As a relatively active user myself, I do care about winning the Mayorship of a few key locations around town, but I’m more interested in winning badges and points–both of which happen most often by checking into a variety of locations, not just one location repeatedly. And when I see a discount for $1 off a Tasti-Delite cone, I’m happy to drop by for a snack, but no way would a Mayor deal entice me to drop $50 on a theatre ticket. And unlike a bar, if I see a friend has checked in to a theatre nearby, I can’t just drop in on them to chat and hang out.

So what’s the point?

Well, now we’ve got a few clues about why and how and when we should be using Foursquare.

Upsell concessions/merchandise to the people already in your building
Engage your staff in a quick fun distraction (what else were you planning to do this summer?)
Watch out for venues in your area that are offering Mayor deals with whom you could partner
Monitor the “tips” users are leaving about your venue–these could give you great insight into how your audience perceives customer service, other features of your theatre
Wait it out to see who wins the “location war“

And what we shouldn’t expect:

Offer a Mayor deal and the Foursquare users come banging down your door
High Foursquare usage just because you’re in a big city/theatre
Low Foursquare usage just because you’re in a small city
Very high user engagement (check ins/person)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a Foursquare believer. It’s as addictive as Twitter, it’s growing fast (more than 1 million users in its first year), and it provides legitimate value to users and to venues. And given the small amount of resources it takes to make a substantial presence on Foursquare, managers should think seriously about investing a few hours, if just to show users that your theatre is ahead of the technology adoption curve (if you think that fits with your brand). But it’s useful to take pause about Foursquare’s mainstream potential.

For those who are interested in experimenting, there are some good models out there to copy:

There’s a few caveats I should mention. Several theatres have more than 1 venue, or the same venue listed multiple times. In this case, I tried to use the most active record. Back in January, I appearantly missed two venues (MTC and Pittsburgh Public; I can tell based on the venue ID numbers listed in their URL)–it’s entirely possible I’ve missed other venues in this second round of data collection. TCG budget categories come from an amalgamation of the most recent Fiscal Surveys, Theatre Profiles, and IRS form 990s I could find. I don’t think any of these inconsistencies call into question my ultimate conclusions. But here’s the raw data, just in case.

Do you have a good Foursquare story? Wanna argue my interpretation of the data? Do you work at one of these theatres and want to explain more about what you’re doing on Foursquare?

A Foursquare Strategy

Devon Smith — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:29:54 +0000

Foursquare is taking off like gangbusters, and it’s got me excited about combining social media with actual social interactions. Last week, Rafael Gallegos of New York Theatre Workshop asked me, “We have foursquare checkins, but I’d really like to run a deal for the mayors but don’t know how to begin. any thoughts?” So here’s what I would do.

The BACKGROUND:

NYTW “provokes, produces and cultivates the work of artists whose visions inspire and challenge all of us.” They’re about 30 years old, located in the East Village, and have roughly a $5 million annual budget. They’ve got 2,756 fans on Facebook (posting about twice a day), 992 followers on Twitter (also tweeting about twice a day), just under 5,000 views total from their 6 YouTube uploads, and have thus far had 29 check-ins on Foursquare from 15 users.

Top Secret is their next production; tickets go on sale to general public Jan 29, and first preview is Feb 24, closing March 28. A shortened description of the play: It’s 1971 and the nation is at war. A federal court blocks The New York Times from publishing the top-secret history of US invovlement in Vietnam. Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham has a single day to decide whether to print these Pentagon Papers. More here.

Foursquare is just under a year old location-based mobile social networking game. Last known user count was ~ 200,000 but the press loves them, and they’ve got wicked cool ideas on how businesses (and users) can use them. Most importantly, they’re open to suggestions.

The MISSION:

Introduce new people to New York Theatre Workshop
Have some fun with current NYTW audience members
Establish connections with other interesting local businesses (and their employees/customers!)
Test a new model for marketing

The SET UP:

Think secret scavenger hunt + free ticket give-away + social media. Users unlock “Top Secret” badges by checking in at businesses far and wide all over NYC (maybe elsewhere too?). Unlock enough badges, and users win free tickets to the show. Easy to adjust this one: start the game with 5 pairs of free tix to the first 5 folks who get to the final badge. If there’s tons of interest, enter everyone else into a contest and give away 5 more pairs. So…badges. What do they look like? Maybe something like

Muckracker: for checking in at the new york times and the village voice
Presidential Pardon: for checking into a police station after 8pm
Watergate Watch: for checking in to 3 hotels in NYC
Theatre Nerd: for checking in to 3 places tagged theatre in NYC
Spook Alert: for checking into the UN and a kinkos in the same week
Pulitzer Prize: for acquiring all 5 badges above

The GAMEPLAN:

Contact Foursquare to help with the ‘badge across businesses’ idea. They’ve already done similar in Chicago and Las Vegas.
Refine the Gameplan ideas above. I’m not a dramaturg (ok, sometimes I am, but not now) and I haven’t read the play. There are most definitely better clues and names that involve users with the contents of the play. Anyways: these are all preserved for prosterity online, and thus not very “secret” anymore.
Put a foursquare widget on the front page of NYTW.org.
Establish a dedicated twitter hashtag (#topsecret is already being used. #topsecretnytw is too long/confusing. maybe #topsecret79?)
Tweet clues to users once a day. Make it fun. When folks start unlocking badges, congratulate them via twitter. Host a Twitter widget on the Top Secret page of NYTW.org that consolidates all of the hashtags so users can see what’s going on in real time.
Post (google image) photo clues to your Facebook fans. Encourage them to plot together collectively.
Encourage users to upload YouTube video about their search for the Pulitzer. Grab a flip cam yourself and make some clues video-based rather than just text based.
Inspire some inter-city competition by inviting American Repertory Theatre and Portland Center Stage to copy the model and use it for Paradise Lost and 39 Steps (both conveniently opening the same weekend).

The tools to MEASURE:

Every day count @nytw79, #topsecret79, FB engagements, YouTube videos. The every day part is important because you’re constantly testing out which promotion strategies are working best (text v. video v. photo, and on which platform)
At the end of the game, compare the total ticket sales of Top Secret, the “new ticket buyers” for Top Secret, and the number of press articles generated by the game.
Post game, survey (you remembered to collect email addresses, right?) users about their experience with the game. Is there increased awareness of NYTW? Are they more likely to consider going to NYTW in the future, even if they didn’t attend Top Secret itself? etc. More questions will arise as the game is played out.

Why I think this will work:

NYTW has a staff member who is passionate about and interested in Foursquare
NYTW is located in an urban environment with a relatively high penetration of FS users
NYTW has some degree of experience using other social media platforms
Foursquare is in search of interesting business/non-profit uses of the game

Want to learn more about Foursquare? Check out my survey of theatre’s use of it.

Any thoughts?

Foursquare’s Ubiquity

Devon Smith — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:40:00 +0000

Foursquare might just be the next Twitter. My initial research focused on social media platforms Yale Rep had a legitimate chance of using this year. Since we didn’t yet have a Facebook page, Foursquare didn’t exactly make the cut. None-the-less, I’ve been curious to see if any theatres are doing cool stuff…

For those who haven’t started playing with this app yet, Foursquare bills itself as 50% friend finder, 30% social city guide, 20% nightlife game. Specifically:

People use foursquare from their smartphone to “check-in”, which is a way of telling folks your whereabouts. When you check-in someplace, Foursquare tell your friends where they can find you and recommends places to go & things to do nearby. People check-in at all kind of places – cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, homes, offices. You can also leave notes for anyone at any of these locations.

Every foursquare check-in earns you points. And as you start checking-in to more interesting places, you’ll start unlocking badges. There are badges for discovering new places and for traveling to far away places. Spending too much time singing karaoke or been hitting the gym consistently? Yes, there are badges for those too

And that’s where things get pretty interesting. People who earn the most points of anyone else checking in to a particular location become the “mayor.” Local businesses are already offering free stuff to these mayors (and occasionally discounts for anyone who checks in). See where I’m going with this?

Recently, Foursquare became available worldwide, and opened up its API to developers. Which means developers can build their own apps that use all of that Foursquare data (which is how Twitter has become virtually ubiquitous). Mashable’s listed 6 apps they want to see developed, and one of them got me thinking:

EventSquare: Teens and party-going twenty-somethings have plenty of disposable income to make this app worthwhile. Build them an application that shows where the nearest parties, concerts, or events are going on at any moment, based on their location. Great for those bored Friday nights, this app could really help you find something to do any time you want.

Not that you should be developing the latest app (because I know you totally have the time and skills), but you should know that foursquare exists, and apps like the one mentioned are coming soon.

Like Twitter, your audience is already talking about you on Foursquare. They’re giving each other advice about

where to park
what to order from your cafe
which bar won’t have a line during intermission
when your PWYC nights are
and which shows are a ‘must see’

And competition to be a Mayor has become fierce.

You could think of Foursquare as virtual postering. If there’s a popular restaurant nearby, you can bet people are checking in. If you make special offers available to folks on fourquare, the company will reward you by promoting your venue to anyone checking-in nearby.

It’s also a dead simple way to reward loyal customers, and you can tailor it any way you want: anyone who checks into the cafe 5x gets a free drink, mayor of the 2nd stage gets a free ticket to bring a friend, anyone who checks into the gift shop gets 10% off, the staff member who checks into the office the earliest this week gets a day off next week (if only wishing made it so!)

And don’t forget that audiences aren’t the only ones checking in—so are guest artists, admin staff, and vendors. And some are linking their foursquare activity to their facebook and twitter pages. So whenever they check into a foursquare location, they’re also promoting that venue to all of their facebook friends and twitter followers.

There are a few issues already cropping up. Since anyone can add locations anywhere, some theatres already have multiple listings (with slightly different name spellings). And if your theatre venue has a different name than your organization, which should you use? It’s also not that difficult to check in someplace without actually being there (essentially overriding your GPS).

But here’s the thing—you spend 10 minutes making sure your theatre is listed on foursquare with the right info, think about adding a reward for the Mayor, tweet about it a few times, and see what happens. Let the users do what they do best: promote your brand for you.

So if I still haven’t convinced you, maybe this guy will.

And now for the data. By this time, you know the drill: I’ve stuck with the 76 LORT theatres. Of them:

51 are on foursquare (meaning at least 1 person has checked in, regardless of whether the theatre has any idea)
734 people have checked in to one of these theatres
There’s an average of 22 check ins per theatre, but this is largely driven by Guthrie, Lincoln Center, and Berkeley Rep’s high numbers
The average person has checked in to a theatre 1.3 times, but Portland Center Stage is averaging more than 4 check ins per person.
23 theatres have Mayors (and 75% of them are male)
Kansas City Rep is offering rewards for their Mayor

If you want to see details, I’ve added a foursquare tab to my social media raw data.

What do you think? Any ideas for other ways theatres should be using foursquare?

UPDATE: And now Tech Crunch brings us more numbers:

Foursquare’s traffic is now averaging a check-in a second
Only 200,000 are estimated to be currently using foursquare, but these early adopters are a valuable customer segment

UPDATE #2: Tasti D-Lite launches a loyalty program via Twitter and Foursquare