Do you have many Foursquare Badges?

For some Foursquare adoptors, earning badges adds a whole new dynamic to the game.  Some are funny.  Some are more serious.  Some don’t make much sense at all.

Aside from being fun rewards of the game mechanics Dennis Crowley has used to gain fast adoption of his platform, I believe badges might have a larger purpose in regard to business.

Yet, if you stop to examine Foursquare badges more closely, you begin to see that each badge signifies a specific behavioral pattern related to certain geographic locations.

For more info on some of the more hard-to-find badges, here’s a not-so-comprehensive list that I like.

What’s Do Foursquare Badges Say?
Each badge has certain requirements that you must first complete to unlock it on your Foursquare profile.

For instance:

• Adoption and Usage of Foursquare – The top row of badges uses trophies and signifies various levels of check-ins made by the user.  One could assume that if someone has unlocked all four badges, they are a power user, and the data gained from their use is somewhat accurate.  There is, however, a large margin of error as it’s fairly easy to game the system on Foursquare.
• Bender, Crunked & School Night – As silly as it seems, the combination of these three badges seems to tell a story.  Users who unlock these badges are ingrained with social activities that cause them to frequent local watering holes, with the school night badge indicating late nights out on weekdays.  For a local bar, this might be good information to know, as it could potentially reveal more frequent patrons.
• Super Mayor - This badge indicates that a user holds more than 10 Mayorships at their favorite locations.  One might classify this type of user as a brand loyalist and leverage that information to find out how to create loyalty around their own establishment.
• BFF – Users get this badge by checking in more than 10 times with the same person.  The BFF badge could indicate that a new, dating-centric relationship has been formed, opening up marketing opportunities for movie theaters, fine dining and even parks.
• Jetsetter – This badge might indicate that a user is a busy, traveling business executive.  That information could be valuable to companies like Citrix Online (makers of GoTo Meeting) or Samsonite (makers of all kinds of luggage).
• Warhol – Users who unlock this badge check in frequently to art halls and museums.  In combination with other badges, what could this say about the income or education level of a specific user?
• Pizzaiolo – To unlock this badge, a user needs to check in at more than 20 different pizza shops.  Seems that pizza shops would do well to identify who their avid pie connoisseurs might be via the Pizziaolo badge.

Certain combinations of badges may be able to cue retailers, restaurant owners and possibly even business-to-business marketers how best to target specific groups of customers.  To get there, we will need:

• More badges tailored to specific segments of consumer personas.  An example might be building a badge based on the typical daily behavior patterns of stay-at-home moms.  Where do they eat?  Where do they shop?  Where to they workout?  What parks do they take their kids to?
• Robust analytical tools that can identify, capture and report on badges held by specific user groups.  I’m willing to bet there are already tools in development to parse this type of data.  Do you know of any?

This post is meant to be nothing more than a conversation starter.  That said, what do you think?  Is there merit in looking at Foursquare and other location-based services from the data-mining paradigm?

Go ahead and leave a comment if you have an opinion.  I’m curious to get your take on this…

nateriggs

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