It’s that time of year again! In short, thousands of panel ideas were submitted to South by Southwest and now they take the public’s votes into consideration as they determine the programming for the 2011 event! (More info on how that works…)
Walter Elly of MicroArts thought a SXSW panel about Foursquare Day and the foursquare community would be really interesting and Dr. Nate and I agreed! We’d love your help getting there!
Foursquare Day: Realizing the Location-Based Services Revolution
Location-based services are here and are revolutionizing the way people experience the world. Events like Foursquare Day 2010 fueled the growth of this revolution, but we haven’t fully realized the future of what location-based services have to offer. See what the future holds for location-based services. Examine how Foursquare Day went from idea to grassroots international movement in 1 month and what its effects were on the growth of location-based services. Learn how to supercharge the growth of location-based services and realize their future by bringing Foursquare Day to your town or city on 4/16/11, Foursquare Day 2011.
In about three weeks, the core team from Tampa Bay started the first Social Media holiday and it was a hit! On 4/16 there were 550,000 checkins (9 checkins/sec at peak) and 20,000 new user signups. 14,330 Foursquare Day badges and 5, 566 Foursquare Swarm badges were awarded on 4/16 at over 45 different venues. By our count, about 290 cities in 35 different countries celebrated the holiday!
Some things that interest me about the topic that I think we can share:
- For the Tampa team, Foursquare Day wasn’t really about foursquare, it was about community! Why is this important? Why did people love the idea so much?
- Uniquely bridges the gap between the internet and real life connections… Besides tweet-ups, this is the only tool/day, etc (I can think of) that does this. Even came about before meetup.com/everywhere.
- It wasn’t just about getting together. We can talk about specials businesses offered, too. What unique ways did other communities celebrate? We did the Puzzle Hunt, etc. These are things communities could be doing all the time, for any reason. Think of the possibilities a Chamber of Commerce could come up with? Or a Neighborhood Association?
- The story of how we in Tampa created the event, and how others built up the event in their local community… what we learned… what went wrong and what went right…
- Creating an event for free from scratch in 3 weeks. Building a viral event in general.
- Social networking tools and the intersection of business and personal lives.
