The Foursquare Challenge: Employee Incentive vs. Customer Rewards?

Next time you’re wondering why you can’t steal the Foursquare title of Mayor from whoever currently holds the crown at your favorite venue, take a look behind the counter. There’s a good chance that the Mayor’s an employee putting in an unbeatable 40 check-ins a week on the throne.

Stories have begun to surface around the web about Starbucks customers unable to take advantage of the Foursquare rewards that their steady patronage has earned them because the person behind the counter serving the coffee is also the Mayor of the venue. Starbucks has replied, but their response (“Foursquare is open to any one that can access it and it happens that the Mayor of this location is the Barista again I do apologize for any type of inconvenience that this may have caused.”) hints at a looming showdown between Foursquare, employers and their employees.

In order for Foursquare’s potential as the ultimate marketing tool to be realized, there’s got to be a way for venues to stop employees from interfering with valuable customer interaction. In the brick and mortar business world employees are usually not eligible to participate in contests held at their venues, and sometimes not even their relatives. Imagine if your favorite local radio DJ or their significant other was always the 97th caller to receive tickets to the Summer Jam?

But these are usually scenarios where the employer/contest provider controls the process from end to end, screening participants, logging entries, etc (though a third party maybe included to ensure ultimate security). With Foursquare, they are simply taking advantage of a marketing opportunity created by the existence of the platform. It’s not their platform, so they seem to think that it’s not their responsibility to make an effort to maintain the integrity of the “special” their promoting on it. In taking what appears to be the easy way out, they’ve exposed the greater complexity of the entire issue.

If Starbucks has no qualms about their Baristas being mayors, why should customers believe there is any value in the specials? Or that Starbucks isn’t encouraging this behavior to prevent from having to pay up? It may be true that “Foursquare is open to anyone that can access it,” but only the Baristas are paid to check in, while customers are usually there to make a purchase. Even if Starbucks asked employees not to check in during working hours, they would still check in when they arrived (before they clocked in), during a lunch break and when they left – making it impossible for anyone but the ultimate caffeine fiend to take the title of Mayor from them and get a dollar off their next fix. And with free wi-fi, could Starbucks even attempt to enforce a smartphone ban on employees during working hours? That’s highly unlikely.

Geo-location service-based games are a luxury to businesses, and will be until significant ROI is proven. If the backlash from folks unable to secure rewards associated with them is too much, the plug can be pulled without much damage to the core business. Because of this it’s up to Foursquare to enhance its current business dashboard. While the current iteration offers specific metrics, it will have to go a step further and give employers participating in specials a level of control. It could be as simple as giving the employer the ability to collect the Foursquare identity of employees, assigning it to a specific location, and preventing the system from checking them in or granting them Mayor status. Not groundbreaking, at all, but pioneering in the way it would continue to link people’s identity in the real and virtual worlds.

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