What Is Foursquare?

If you hadn’t heard of Foursquare, it’s a GPS-based application that lets you “check in” to the network whenever you visit an establishment of any kind. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, or having a slice at the local hole-in-the-wall pizzeria: simply open your Foursquare app (or the website), tap “check in,” and find the name of the building you’re in on the list once it refreshes.

If it’s not there, you can add it, and it becomes a permanent inclusion. Then, “check in” to that building and get some points for doing so. Your points accumulate and give you serious e-cred (once again, if you’re a nerd) amongst the community, and you can be designated as the “mayor” of a building, location or establishment if you’ve checked in more than anyone else through time.

Beyond this, you can leave a comment. Much like using Twitter, these “Foursquare tweets” can be reviews, comments or anything else you’d like. You can view others’ comments, and they can view yours. This can either be great for business, or a real curse if your service, food or products suck. It’s a big score for humanity, since it adds another incentive (or threat) to those who do bad business anywhere.

The Foursquare Subculture

Foursquare, to a major degree, has a huge subculture that is best compared to Twitter users and their “Tweet-Ups.” Foursquare’s gimmick are “badges,” which are earned by doing various things: checking in X amount of times, being the first to check in to a place that hasn’t been noticed before, checking in to multiple locations across regions, etc. There’s even an online store where you can buy wearable pin or patch versions of the classic Foursquare badges and wear them on your backpack or jacket. Believe me, it’s big, and getting bigger by the week.

I still don’t see Foursquare as being a threat to Twitter, or even a competitor. They both serve different functions. Now that Twitter is jumping on the geo-location bandwagon, it’s possible that they might be going into a similar direction, but Foursquare has already established its roots in the local “check in and comment” market, much like the way Yelp has become the official place to rate any business. Speaking of which, Yelp already treads on Foursquare’s turf with its own “check in” feature. Oh, and there are also more “check in” competitors like GoWalla, BrightKite, Loopt, Rummble and others…hell, even Google stepped in the ring with Google Latitude. This will be an interesting battle, to say the least.

Foursquare’s Still In Its Infancy

It’s early 2010, and one thing is for sure: Foursquare is in an obvious “neanderthal” phase. More than half the time, the buildings I check in to don’t even exist in their database, and I have to add them. Other times, you’ll notice how multiple Foursquare users have inputted the name of a place (i.e., “Vince Lombardi service area,” “Vince Lombardi rest stop,” etc.) more than once, with different punctuation or wording, yet, they’ve all made it through the system. This is indeed a problem, and a sloppy one at that. For the future, Foursquare should clamp down on legitimate names of businesses or some sort of uniformity that will disallow “sloppiness.”

The service has huge implications for what’s to come. Will businesses notice and contact, hire or reward “mayors,” or run promotions for customers who check in to their stores? Most likely.

Personally, I can’t wait to see new CMSs or even Joomla or WordPress plugins that will let us create our own “check in” feature for our own local sites.

In case you haven’t heard of it before, Google Webmaster has an option that lets your domain name “target” a specific country. This feature may give your site some preferential treatment in the country you choose. Located in Site Configuration > Settings, you’ll be able to click a checkbox next to “Target users in:”, unlocking a massive drop-down of countries. Choosing one will geographically target your site to that country.

This won’t mean that you’re guaranteed anything, or that you’ll get boosted in that country’s SERPs, but it does help Google associate your site more specifically with that region. One thing it might do is put LESS importance on your site in other countries.

Benefits of Geographic Targeting for Domains

One of the most helpful cases where the geographic targeting feature makes sense is in affiliate marketing. Say, for instance, you’re running an eBay affiliate site within Canada. Knowing how eBay Publisher Network (eBay’s affiliate program) evaluates your performance in terms of clicks vs. earnings, you’ll want to keep your clicks as low as possible. That means being “unseen” in as many countries outside of Canada as possible, as any of those international clicks will never amount to a sale on eBay Canada. It’s especially beneficial to a Canadian webmaster running a .com site, instead of a .ca site.

I’ve done this myself: using a .us domain name (which is automatically geo-targeted to the USA, like it or not), my site only received occasional visits from Canada and the UK, with an overwhelming majority in the US. That’s exactly what I wanted, too, since all of my affiliate links were strictly going to eBay – not eBay Canada or eBay UK.

Note that if you’re using any other country specific domain extension, Google Webmaster will automatically bind your site to that country. There are a few exceptions, including .tv and .me, which can be geographically changed to any other country you want.

With the rise of localization this year, expect “being local” to be one of the biggest deals in internet marketing. Got plans to go international? Create subdomains like uk.mysite.com, fr.mysite.com, etc., and geo-target each one specifically to a separate country in Google Webmaster (remember, subdomains count as separate domain names!)

One final thing to note: this is Google Webmaster, so, it only works for Google. Your geographic targeted domain name won’t get the same treatment on other search engines, like Yahoo & crew.

As for your Google.com strategy: let the geographic targeting feature be an initial step toward getting the visitors you really want, and remaining a little more hidden to the rest.