I’m up to my old tricks

Organizing a bar tour. The A-Z bar tour worked well in Philly. I’ve got my Santa Crawl going like gangbusters in State College (approaching 100 people now). And now I’m about to start another one.

I had this inspiration about 3 weeks ago. Are you familiar with Foursquare? It’s the current hot thing that some are predicting to be the new Twitter/Facebook. It’s a location based game/social network where you check into establishments via your smart phone. If you meet certain criteria, you earn a virtual “badge”. The person who checks into a location the most number of times over the last two months is that location’s “mayor”. The NYC based company was founded a year ago and has really taken off in the last few months (they have more users signed up than Twitter did in the same time frame). They are going through a second round of capitalization and the VC companies are throwing money at them Rumor has it that Yahoo wants to buy them for 100 million (not bad for a year’s work) but I don’t think they’ll sell.

Businesses love the concept because it helps them identify and reward their best customers so there’s a natural business related side to it. It doesn’t have the monetization issues that things like Twitter have struggled with.

I’ve been playing with it since they opened it up to the world a couple of months ago (I’m the mayor of about ten places in town) and have become addicted. One of the things that the company is looking for is ideas for badges. They offer badges for reaching certain clip levels – check in at 1, 10, 25, 50 places and you get a badge for each level attained. They have a super mayor badge (mayor of ten or more spots). They don’t always tell you what you have to do to earn some of the badges, so, sometimes when you get one, you’re a little surprised – check into bars four nights in a row and you get the Bender Badge, check into four bars in one night and you earn the Cronked Badge, check into a place with three members of the opposite sex and you get a Player Badge, check into ten places with another person and you get a BFF Badge. You get the idea (the best badge might be the North Pole badge which you get by checking in at the North Pole – there were two guys who were actually racing to be the first to do it last week – the one who won was a 16 year old kid).

For some reason, I got this idea (and it actually happened in the shower one night) for a badge. Four seemed to be a magic number that some of the badges seemed to revolve around (not surprising for a company with four in their name). My though for a badge: a minimum of four friends, four bars, in four hours equals a FourCrawl Badge (short for a Foursquare bar craw). I rushed out of the shower dripping wet and registered the domain name. I then spent the rest of the afternoon setting up a website, grabbing the Twitter name, creating a Facebook page, starting a Facebook event, contacting Foursquare to sell them on the badge idea, and recruiting some of my friends to do one the following weekend (target date was to be April 3rd).

I was pretty proud of what I had accomplished in just a few hours.

But my accomplishments paled in comparison to what this optometrist in Tampa was pulling off.

The day after I set all this up, and fortunately before I had promoted it too much. I see a blog post from a guy in Tampa who’s trying to sell people on the idea for a Foursquare Day to be held on April 16th (4/16 naturally). Holy Mackeral – what a great idea and I’m pissed I didn’t think of it. I immediately change the date of the Fourcrawl to 4/16 and sign up for his Foursquare Day idea.

Within days, his idea EXPLODES. It is unbelievable how quickly people embraced this idea. Within less than a week, the Foresquare people are officially on board. With in two weeks, people are organizing things all over the world – there are well over 100 cities worldwide signed up for this thing. It’s now being called the world’s first global social media holiday. Here’s a story that the local Tampa paper did on the guy ten days ago. A couple of days ago, the mayor of Tampa proclaim Friday officially Foursquare Day in Tampa (I saw a blurb that the mayor of Manchester NH did the same today – Shannon – are you in, Manchester can’t be too far from you?).

Here’s the complete official list of locations doing something. At least my State College Fourcrawl was one of the early ones.

Next year I’m going to follow the lead of the guy in Tampa and aim a little higher with my Fourcrawl (although given how freaked out this town gets over people drinking, the mayor is never going to sign off on it).