I’m hearing a lot of rumbling about Foursqaure being just another social media thing that no one has time for. Everyone wants to know why they should care where people are, or who just became the Mayor of Subway in Hillcrest… Well if you are running a business, or you are in charge of the marketing for a business, it’s my opinion that you should care, and here’s why.

First off, what is Foursquare?

Well, it’s a location-based, social networking game. In the most basic sense, it allows you to use your phone to alert your friends, in real-time, of your exact whereabouts. You can build a friend network on Foursquare and simply elect to alert those people, or you can connect your Foursquare account to your Facebook and Twitter, in order to update your already existing friends of your whereabouts.

When you check-in places you are given the opportunity to leave a little tip about the venue (eg Try the portobello mushroom sandwich, it’s fantastic). Those tips are then shown to anyone when they check-in to a nearby location. If they like your tip, they can then save it as a “to-do” for themselves. Foursquare also lets you tag a location with descriptive words to let other users know what to expect.

As you begin to use Foursquare you can earn yourself badges (remember this is a game) which tell fellow Foursquarers exactly what kind of Foursquare user you are. Then if you go to a venue enough times, you become the Mayor of that venue. This is a very prestigious honor (ok not so much) but it is super fun to say you are the Mayor of places. Just ask Jason, the current Mayor of Bailey Gardiner…

You’ll earn points every time you check-in somewhere, and you get more points for being adventuresome and checking into different parts of the city, or for going more than once place in a night. You also get points when someone else takes one of your tips or when you complete one of your To-Do’s. The best part of the game is that the stats get reset to zero every Sunday, which gives everyone a fair chance at playing the game – no matter how long you’ve been a Foursquare player.

So why should you care about Foursquare?

If you own a business, work at a marketing agency or are a marketing director for a company, there are five main reasons you should care about Foursquare.

1. Monitoring – As more and more people begin using Foursquare, it’s imperative that your business knows what is being said about you on the platform. Between tips and tags, people have a lot of opportunity to talk about you, and like any social media platform, we recommend you are monitoring what they are saying.

2. Rewards programs – Many companies have already started integrating Foursquare into their customer loyalty/rewards programs. Take Tasti D-lite in NY. They’ve created a comprehensive social media rewards program that utilizes Foursqaure (and therefore Facebook and Twitter) to reward their regular customers for their social media involvement. On a smaller scale, some companies simply put a sign out in front of their venue, offering a free drink, sandwich, whatever, to the Mayor of their place. This inspires people to check in regularly to compete for Mayorship, while rewarding the venue’s most loyal patron.

3. Events - Word on the street (and by street I mean Mashable) is that there is possibly an events layer coming soon that will reward Foursqaure users for attending events. As a public relations professional, I can only imagine how helpful this might be when trying to throw a big event for a client, to have yet another way to give people an incentive to attend.

4. This is just the beginning – Foursquare has some smart developers, who are on their A-game, to say the least. They’ve got some big plans and are in no way done creating Foursquare. Think how much Facebook has evolved since it began (anyone out there remember when it was just your profile picture and some information about your interests?) Foursquare is growing fast. Hop on now so you can be along for the ride.

5. And finally, Foursquare is the next big thing – not to sound trite, but this is getting a LOT of buzz from the higher ups in the social media world. These people know a good thing when they see it, and with so many companies already beginning to adopt Foursquare, I think they may be right. These are the same people that were telling you to pay attention to Twitter back in 2007, when most of us were going “Tweet what?” or “That sounds ridiculously lame.”

In addition to getting involved as a business or as a marketing/PR representative, there are some benefits to using Foursquare as a user:

1. Foursquare answers the question, “I’m here, so now what?” – Foursquare can do everything from help you choose what to order, to seeing what other great places are nearby, to learning about drink specials and deals. The developers told Mashable in an interview that they want to be more than any other location based service by focusing on the “So what”.

2. It will help you connect offline - You spend all this time making connections with people on Twitter that you have never met, which, to me, is kind of a bummer. In fact, it was one of the reasons I so enjoyed going to Blog World this year, because it was fascinating to sit next to some of the people I’ve been communicating with for the past two years. Foursquare helps make this process even easier because you are able to see where you Twitter friends are even if you aren’t all at a conference.

3. It’s fun - There’s a reason people like games. Everyone loves a good competition and what’s better than being rewarded for places you are already going and things you are already doing.

So, what do you think? Are you convinced? Want to be my friend on Foursquare? And if you are looking for some more updates information on Foursquare, check out our latest post on Foursquare and marketing.