Publishers Eye Foursquare for Localized Content Distribution
Maybe it’s out of desperation, or maybe it’s shrewd marketing – but the latest word is that content publishers are looking at Foursquare as a potential content distribution channel.
Mike Shields, writing in Mediaweek, says Foursquare has recently picked up AskMen.com, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Out New York as partners. Now remember, Foursquare isn’t officially in the content distribution business. Its reason for being is to connect friends to friends in a local place like a city through their mobile devices. Users “earn points and unlock badges for discovering new things.”
So why, exactly, would the likes of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal be interested in Foursquare? Well, both newspapers are pushing out New York City-related content. The Journal is averaging five New York posts each day… clearly in support of the New York City edition it recently started publishing to compete with The Times. In fact, The Journal already has 5,000 Foursquare followers – pretty impressive for a buttoned up financial publication.
For publishers of content about local hotels, restaurants, bars, and hot spots, Foursquare makes perfect sense, and that’s why Michael Martin, a senior editor at Time Out New York, likes Foursquare. He tells Mediaweek, “It’s so applicable to everything we do. I think this will be a major place where people will consume actionable content.”
The story behind the story, however, is the on-going turbulence in the traditional content publishing business. As we’ve discussed numerous times in ReveNews, newspapers and magazines are scrambling to keep readers engaged. Most of them are losing subscribers by the thousands as widely available online content drives readers away from traditional channels.
It’s no surprise that these content publishers are looking at anything and everything to cast a wider net. If that means publishing a special edition on iPad, so be it. If that means using every social media network available, go for it. And if that means exploring an emerging social tool like Foursquare for mobile content distribution, well what the heck, they’ll try anything.
Ironically, though, it’s not the wider net that these publishers are really after. The golden ring is localizing their content down to a micro-level.
Foursquare has grown to some one million users on the basis of micro-localization. A publisher who can successfully serve up fresh unique material at a localized level may find a lot of people choosing that content over a competitor’s.
In previous posts, I discussed the move towards localization by magazines, the growing use of QR codes to drive customers to local businesses, and, more recently, Google’s renewed emphasis on local markets.
With some major content publishers now jumping on board, it’s probably time to define localization as one of the key emerging trends of 2010. The timing couldn’t be better for Foursquare.
