Today during his keynote at the Location-based Marketing Summit, Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, announced the agency’s first product; FourScore.
Still in beta, FourScore is a “tool for businesses and marketers who wish to understand the impact of consumers’ adoption of location-based services on their business, across the enterprise.” For now, the service focuses only on Foursquare and allows businesses to input their venue information to see a plethora of data related to consumers’ interaction via Foursquare. Schafer said other LBS platforms will be supported eventually.
FourScore aims to answer the questions many businesses are facing as LBS becomes more popular, including; What do check-ins mean? Do I have a lot of check-ins? What is the value of these check-ins? Should I treat my mayors special? Should I allocate resources to location-based marketing? If so, how much? Should I do it evenly across all of my locations? Should I offer my suppliers access? If so what would it be worth?
The service helps provide a way for serious marketers to start to understand not only the significance of their location-aware audience, but the size of that audience relative to their competitors. At present, FourScore offers two measures of how one’s Foursquare activity compares to that of its competitors:
- COMPETITIVE FOURSCORE: A measurement (index) of Mayorship turnover. If your Competitive FourScore is 600, your venue has 6x the “mayor” turnover of your competition. If your Competitive Fourscore is 0, it means that there is not a mayor of your venue (yet), or there has been no turnover at all.
- CHECK-IN FOURSCORE: A measurement (index) of how the volume of check-ins at your venue compares to others in your category. In other words, if your Check-In FourScore is 600, people are checking into your venue 6x as often as your competition.
It’s an excellent concept, and one that plays nicely with the notion that businesses are still largely unaware of the impact LBS imposes. For businesses who are just now getting a grasp of the concept, FourScore can provide much needed context to how LBS can be best be used to one’s advantage. The service is just now getting off the ground, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on it to bring you the latest updates. In addition, a Slideshare of Schafer’s keynote delivered at the LBM Summit, dubbed “We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges,” is available here.
