Hill+Knowlton Strategies

As a reasonably geeky advocate for the geolocal tip sharing and badge collecting platform, Foursquare, I was pretty stoked to see that there were 60,000 users of the platform identifying Sydney, Australia as their home.

What I was blown away with on Saturday was unlocking the swarm badge while attending the Hawthorn vs Sydney AFL match. I, like many find it easy to think about geeks checking in to coffee shop social meetups, or perhaps a tech conference. I know that 50 out of 29431 is only 0.16% of the audience, but I still think it’s pretty special.

I’d like to think that the Super Swarm (250+ users) might get unlocked by accident, and not as the result of a Union of Social Media initiative.

Exciting times Sydney! Check it out, or in…

Like 60,000 others in Australia, I’m quite partial to Foursquare, currently the largest of the geolocation platforms that have sprung up around the world. Basically, users check in to locations as they travel around the place during their day, sharing advice, earning badges and competing for mayorships. There have been a few businesses who have started to use the brand pages to deliver tactical offers and encourage their social mejia advocates to be as engaged and as vocal as possible.

Shopkick looks to be taking this one step further, rewarding visitors with kickbucks, a loyalty currency that appears to aggregate across all of your destinations. It’s definitely early days as yet, but I love the way that these technologies are linking existing sharing activity with loyalty and truly delivering a “place” for digital. I ccan’t wait to see what happens next and start using these concepts in the work we do here in Australia.