Lately, I have been really digging Foursquare. I'm pumped that they made it available in any city now. If you're not sure what it is, then you should check out what @TheRealClint posted up about Foursquare on his blog. It covers the introduction bases well and even goes on to talk about why it's important for businesses to take advantage of it. I highly recommend reading it. My favorite point he makes is that if you become "Mayor" of a place and they give you a free coffee/beer/treat, you'll be inclined to come back. And then others will be visiting more often to see if they can take the Mayor spot from you. This, obviously, results in an increase of customers coming by. The point I want to make is that when you check-in to a place via Foursquare you have the option to push it out as a Facebook and/or Twitter status update to let your friends know that you're at the place in hopes that they stop by if they're in the area. Basically this boils down to wonderful word of mouth free advertising from a trusted source to your network of friends for the business. The average person who's decently into Social Networking has at least 300-500 friends on there combined Facebook/Twitter friend list, if not significantly more. Being able to get out to that many people, through a trusted source, for the price of a free cup of coffee, is an amazing deal to businesses. People are SICK of traditional advertising. They've built up a resistance to it. Friends telling them where the great place to go is, what there favorite product is, and what meaningful, relevant news they should pay attention to, is quickly replacing traditional advertising. If businesses can't excite their customer base to the point that they get excited enough to share it with their friends, then they've lost on a big opportunity. Social Media fans have long known this, but the new element that Foursquare is bringing to the table is they are tying status updates to a location. Tying the digital update to a real physical location is key for this to work. It's a new push into Geosocial Networking. More information about Foursquare can be found on there site, their Wikipedia page, their blog, or on Twitter: @Foursquare.