The New Business Model of LBS

“before this service, around 70 brands have been created every week. but now, anyone can set up this kind of pages and others can Follow these pages.” Said Noah Weiss,a Product Manager of Foursquare，up to now, there are 2500 brands here.

The business model of LBS has been a headache for entrpreneurs for a long time，now how does Foursquare’s this move provide provide us new ideas？

First let’s start with the brand page categorization, after careful observation, we can find that there are two types of brand pages in Foursquare:

One type is tradtional business such as Starbucks, McDonald, RedBull. They encourage users to sign in by vouchers or badges.
Another type is media or products, such as MTV, NewYork Times, WallStreet Daily,Windows Live. They focus on exhibiting brand images and product news.

OK，for the first type of customers(many are chain stores)，business models are clear：the function of Foursquare is a voucher printer. For the second type of customers，Foursquare is trying to be CRM (Customer Relationship Management) based Ad platform.

How will this bring any inspirations?

For example, a HollyWood movie is going to release and want to use Foursquare for ads. What things can be done?

Set up a movie specific page to abstract eyeballs.
Describe the backgrounds for specific locations in the movie and encourage fans to sign in.
Tell the background story and use Foursquare’s Relationship network to distribute.
Add Foursquare button on the official movie website and add to To-Do list after user clicks.

This way shapes the high level “interactive ad”, it’s more funny than Twitter and Facebook style embedded ads and can turn ads to sales more directly (or downloads), which is the results what ad owners want. Because of the brand specific pages, Foursquare surpasses general LBS service by extending it for other domains and usages.

“at right time and right locations for fine-grained targeted promotation”, Will Foursquare’s attempt be successful?

（From：http://www.alibuybuy.com/posts/63382.html, Translated by PeoPeo）