We Will Pay You To Do Exactly What You Already Do

The rapid growth of location based social networks such as foursquare and Gowalla are creating many new and exciting opportunities for marketers and brands to engage  consumers like never before.

These sites are pioneering a new frontier of brand champions. Similar to how sites like Twitter and Facebook helped ushered in the dawn of citizen journalism and almost overnight transformed the consumer into a media producer, sites like foursquare are empowering mobile users to easily broadcast where they are and how they are spending their money. This is fundamentally different than Twitter where the conversation and content users provide has a tendency to veer off into many different areas ie tweets about how I’m feeling, what I’m reading, what’s funny, what upsets me etc.

Things get even more interesting when sites like WeReward get involved. This innovative digital start up leverages the popularity of location based social networks and rewards users for their patronage. How does it work? Every time a user checks in to a specific location (Note: location venue most already be working with WeReward) they get points that can eventually (need 1000+ points first) be cashed out for real money. WeReward also rewards users for broadcasting their actions via Twitter, Facebook and foursquare. (smart move)

My concern is if location based social networks are transforming consumers into food and travel critics, wouldn’t it be a conflict of interest to pay them to review products and locations? It would be a different story if the point system that sites like WeReward used where a flat rate which stayed the same for all locations, but from the looks of the intro video above they have opted for a more free market driven model which somewhat resembles Google’s pay-per-click system. 

Paying critics extra money to come and review your business seems like a very slippery slop, but maybe I am just being a social media communist. ;)