The FourSquare Fiasco
July 31, 2014 - David Hall
Category: Social Media Marketing
Or how to totally ignore your customers when restructuring your business…
Restructuring a company is tough, especially when you provide a very popular “household name” service to the public. Up until recently, Foursquare was the go-to check-in app, providing useful incentives and discounts for customers who checked in to local businesses on their phone. It was so popular we even used to offer Foursquare marketing management as part of our Advanced Social Media package.
For those of you unfamiliar with the service, Foursquare was a useful tool that let local businesses provide incentives to their customers when they checked in with the app on their smartphones. You could offer an discount or freebie when a person checked in for the first time, when they checked in with a group of friends, etc. You could even offer “Mayorship” to a customer who checked in X number of times.
Sometimes earning the “Mayor” title turned into a friendly competition. Users would share their location in real-time with their friends and would be awarded different badges based on their account activity. Users could also look up others who frequented their favorite spots around town and use it as a starting point for some friendly conversation.
For users, it was a fun, game-like way to let your friends know what you were up to and win free stuff from your favorite businesses. For businesses, it was an easy way to advertise and get people coming through the door who might not have otherwise.
Although Foursquare’s growth had curtailed over the past few years, it was still a major player in the social media game. However, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley saw the lack of growth and profitability as a huge problem, and it was, but the way he sought to fix it left much to be desired.
Foursquare’s stakeholder’s had the “ingenious” idea to make themselves the next Yelp. They took away the key ingredient that made Foursquare what it was; the check-in, and moved it to a new app called Swarm.
Foursquare is now re-branded as a way to see and rate the venues around you, almost exactly like the much more popular Yelp. Swarm rolled out to replace the user experience of Foursquare but, starting last Thursday, both apps only work if you use them simultaneously with Foursquare not registering check-ins at all. In essence, the company took one well performing app and made it into two poor-performing apps which do almost the same exact thing.
As part of this mass re-branding effort, they even changed their company logo. The new logo isn’t bad, but the old one was better in my opinion. Considering how much people hate change, rolling all of this out at once seems like a particularly dumb move.
vs.
Not believing that such a prominent social media company could be so stupid, I took the liberty of visiting their blog and Facebook page to see how people were reacting to these modifications. The feedback is decidedly negative.
Both Swarm and the new Foursquare have terrible reviews on both the Apple store and Google play, something many users were quick to point out.
Users complain that the apps are glitchy, use a ton of battery, while pointing out the stupidity of having to download two different apps where they used to just have the one.
Many people just straight up deleted Foursquare when they realized check-ins were no longer available. The hashtag #failsquare was trending on Facebook and Twitter all afternoon.
One user got creative with FourSquare’s new logo.
You would think with all this negative feedback (there were about 2 positive comments on their entire page), the company would make a statement or apology of some sort. Instead, the comments went completely ignored causing even more anger and frustration from their fans.
Conclusion
I’m glad I’m able to watch and learn from afar from FourSquare and other large company’s mistakes. In the social media age, there’s really no excuse for a gaffe of this proportion. You have a captive audience of customers having conversations about your product and constantly giving you their feedback and opinions. Listen to them! If FourSquare had been listening, they would have realized that the response from Swarm was overwhelmingly negative and a mistake to force onto their users. They could have re-invented FourSquare with features that their users suggested or even asked their followers what features they would love the app to have.
My takeaways from this include the following:
- Listen to your customers.
- If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
- People hate change.
What are your opinions on FourSquare’s recent actions? Will these changes affect their bottom line or do people just like to complain? I guess time will tell.