Four Days, Foursquare & Hitting The Ground Running

George Guildford

Just over halfway through my first week at Punch now and already feeling right at home. As with any new job, you never really know what it’s going to be like until you properly get started. With all the amazing work that Punch are doing with PR, search, and social media, and the sheer pace at which everything is moving in these areas at the minute, I had a feeling that the first week was going to be, well, a little crazy – but the kind of crazy that I can totally get on board with. There’s even a team in the office called Team Geek. Perfect.

As I write this post from the comfort of my shiny new smartphone, I’m currently sat on the train down to London to meet the lovely folks at the Punch London office and to pitch to a fantastic new charity working in Haiti. I always find trains to be the perfect place to get some good old-fashioned thinking and writing done, and a trip down to London will also give me the perfect opportunity to test out my new Foursquare app. Living in a village and working out in the countryside, once you’ve “checked in” to the local bakery and gift shop, you’ve pretty much got the area covered.

With more and more people starting to talk about location-based services and the ways in which companies can utilise these alongside both their brand-focused apps and their in-store experiences, it surely can’t be long before we start to see more and more retailers using location-based social media to entice us into their stores through a whole host of loyalty programmes, competitions and discount promotions. With that in mind, Oxford Street certainly seems like the perfect place to start some research and finally get to grips with the Facebook Places vs Foursquare app rivalry. That said, who’d have thought I’d be heading down to London for the first time this year and one of the first things I’d be looking forward to doing is “checking in” to St. Pancras and tweeting about it? Team Geek here I come.

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