Are You The Manager of Your Social Media Future?

So I ran across this today when I logged into my Foursquare account. Go ahead and look... I am talking about the highlighted area that asks if you are the manager of the business. What is that you ask? Well I had to check it out for myself.

After clicking on the hyperlink it takes you to a page that explains what the business manager gets in return for claiming the venue:

In order to give you the power to create specials for your venue, we need to confirm that you're the person in charge of managing that venue.


In addition to being able to create specials for you location, Foursquare gives you access to its research:


By claiming your venue, you'll also get exclusive access to the stats we collect for your venue — how many people check in on what days and times, and lots of other goodies.


What I like about this "new" option (I haven't seen it before today) is that it is finally an option to track visits to your location. Foursquare will actually keep track of the visits for your specials. You are only allowed one active special at a time but can activate a new special at anytime.


Why is this significant you ask? Well this removes a barrier many small businesses have been facing to entering the Foursquare game. Before this it was a little more difficult to keep track of the specials and required more work on the part of the business owner. I applaud Foursquare's decision to make it easier to control the specials and look forward to what this is going to do for small business and the mainstream adoption of Foursquare's service. 


Gowalla has had a little buzz as of late (no social media pun intended) that would also be great as a blog post... maybe another post is in order?


What is your take on the new "fad" of geolocation apps? Will the fad fade or is this the next big thing? Do we even need geolocation? Let me know!