3,000 Foursquare users in New Zealand (maybe).

On Saturday, the mighty All Whites drew 1 all with Honduras at North Harbour Stadium. The official crowd was 18,153. There were 12 Foursquare users checked-in there ( I checked - I was one of them).

Foursquare had a penetration of 0.0661% of that crowd. If that is true (probably not) and all other factors remain constant (they definitely don't) this implies that 0.06% of Kiwis are Foursquare users. Or : of the 3 million Foursquare users globally - 3,000 are to be found in New Zealand.

Foursquare seems made to be part of a loyalty programme. Air New Zealand's adoption of a Foursquare special attached to it's Airpoints Frequent Flyer Programme almost makes it a mainstream technology in New Zealand. But - it's not. Not yet anyway.

Maybe straight up penetration is the wrong way to view a social tool like Foursquare. In social technologies we know there's a very strong distribution operating. The most voluminous poster in a community posts twice as much as second highest poster and they in turn post twice as much as third highest poster. We also know that the 1:9:90 rule is in play :

• 1% of people post lots a frequently
• 9% of people comment on these posts
• 90% of people do nothing other than read them (and maybe in Facebook 'like" things)

Foursquare check-ins can be shared on Facebook and Facebook is now the biggest site in New Zealand (bigger than Trade Me, bigger than Google). So - maybe sharing by the few to the many is what's important here. And Facebook Places is coming : we'll all be able to share where we are Foursquare style inside Facebook (on smartphones and some feature phones).

In general : we over-estimate the impact of a technology in the short term and under-estimate it's impact in the long term (which I thought was coined by Bill Gates but is actually from the head of the Human Genome Project).

Foursquare provides mobile loyalty interactions to established loyalty programmes

It's taken a while for the mobile phone to to produce exciting innovations in the world of customer loyalty. Finally though there are two key developments that have achieved sufficient consumer adoption that programme operators are including them in their offerings. Both are products of the mobile app stores delivering cool tools to smart phones.

Cardstar

The first and somewhat more mundane of the two is Cardstar

- a smart phone app downloaded over 1.5 million times globally (Apple, Android and Blackberry). Once on the customer's phone - the app stores the bar codes of all the customer's loyalty cards (which can then be tipped out of overloaded wallets). The customer then presents the selected card's bar code on the phone's screen for scanning at checkout.

Foursquare

Foursquare is much more exciting. Its not the first of it's type of service but it's not generally accepted to be the leader with the largest installed user base. Also an app downloaded to a smart phone (and also usable over the mobile web but not as good) - it's a geo-location app that allows customer's to "check in" at retail or other locations by tapping a button their phone screen. Once in you can see which of your friends is there or nearby and what they recommend you try there (it cleverly gets your friends from Facebook). Foursquare awards you badges (on the screen) for various achievements (earn the Newbie for your first check in). You can also become Mayor if you've checked in to a specific location more than anyone else.

It gets interesting when the local coffee shop elects to run campaigns against the customers checking in. Starbucks (USA) awards Mayors $1 off a frappuccino. All they need do is show their Mayor status on the phone to the barista. In fact - Starbucks have their own barista badge to be earned on Foursqare.

Domino's Pizza in the UK cited their use of these

types of Foursquare promotions as a leading driver of a 29% increase in pre-tax profits on July 12th this year.

Pepsi in the USA is also using Foursquare while developing its own proprietary platform called Pepsi Loot based on a form of Foursquare from Zumobi (where Eric Hertz - CEO of Two Degrees Mobile - was before he hit New Zealand). While it's Foursquare play seems solid - Pepsi Loot has been panned for being "Foursquare, minus the cool and built in incentives".

And in New Zealand ?

Foursquare is just over a year old and in March

had half a million users (globally) and 1 million venues registered. It's small. But it's growing fast - it hit 2 million users on 10th July this year (that's 100,000 new users per week) and pulled funding from Marc Andreessen (who invented Netscape all those years ago). Numbers are hard to come by but in New Zealand we estimate everyone has a phone and 2% have an iPhone while 9% have Blackberrys (Android's not really here yet). Also small.

Air New Zealand has been the first (again) to deploy a Foursquare offering. Mayors at our airports get Koru Lounge access or Airpoints Dollars - an excellent programme tie in. Air New Zealand beat the Intercontinental Hotels Group to market with IHG announcing last week that customers in its loyalty programme can also earn points for checking in at the hotel venues globally.

Foursquare is now integrated through Facebook Connect and last week announced tie up with Cardstar. After flashing their loyalty card bar code at the till customers can also check in to the retail venue.

Loyalty programmes have long aspired to be able to reward interactions as well as transactions. Transactions are generally discovered through the payments cycle. This is an example of interactions being rewarded inside the framework of the larger loyalty programme.