Foursquare allows users to earn points by “checking in” at various locations around town. Users can connect with their friends from Facebook and Twitter, and the user who checks in at a location the most over a 60-day period can become the “Mayor” of that location. (Here’s how Foursquare describes some of their opportunities for businesses.)

But what if you’re not a restaurant or coffee shop or bar or other venue ideally suited for a service like this? Are there still ways you can use a location app like Foursquare for your business? Absolutely. Let’s take a look at how an apartment company could use Foursquare:

• List your business location so it shows up in results when users are nearby.
• Add unique tips and to-dos for local restaurants, retailers and other venues.
• Track Mayor deals and check-in coupons for other businesses in the area, and post them on your website.
• Get out in the neighborhood and help more businesses create their own Foursquare deals.
• Create a referral special for Foursquare users, or offer a freebie for stopping by your leasing office.
• Link your Foursquare account to Twitter, then check in around town to share local hidden gems with your network.
• Encourage as many people in your community as possible to join Foursquare, then share their best tips and to-dos on your blog.
• Offer a reserved parking spot to the “Mayor” of your community.
• Use the “Shout” feature to let locals know about upcoming parties or other open events at your community.
• Partner with a local coffee shop or bar to offer a special discount to their customers “brought to you by XYZ Apartments.”

What else would you add to the list? Are you using Foursquare? Have you tried it for your business?

Connect with Mike on Foursquare.

I’m going to cheat a bit on this first one, because I’ve selected an app that I had a small hand in creating, called TurnSocial. TurnSocial is a social layer that you can add to any website — in fact, you can see it in action at the bottom of this page.

To understand the tool, I think it’s important to know what problem we’re trying to solve. We saw that lots of people and businesses were creating profiles and connecting with people on multiple social networks. These sites make great ‘outposts’ where brands can connect with their audiences. But once you get a lot of these outposts going, it can be a major task just to let people know where and how they can connect with you. So we saw sites like Friendfeed, Chi.mp and a number of others, that helped us aggregate this content on their sites. One more site, one more profile to manage. Ugh, right?

But let’s say you’re doing a nice job of driving traffic to your website. Maybe it’s your blog, maybe it’s PPC ads, maybe it was that great deal in your last e-newsletter. How do you let people know about all that time you’ve spent making connections and building relationships across all of those social media sites? You could use an online profile widget like Retaggr, or you could add rows and rows of social media icons in the sidebar. How many times have you seen this before?

Except every one of those icons takes the visitor away from your site. It takes a lot to keep someone engaged on your website … you shouldn’t lose them just because they want to click on some icon they’ve never seen before! Twitter badges and a Facebook fan box provide more information, but each only pulls content from one site, and it’s not long before you have a sidebar full of widgets that may or may not be relevant to your audience.

THIS is why we created TurnSocial — it’s intended to keep your socially engaged visitors on your site. You’re already creating content on your website, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Flickr, on YouTube, in lots of places across the web. You don’t need another site to manage. You need a better way to show a more complete snapshot of your online presence to your reader. Provide context. Show some personality.

TurnSocial brings all that social content back to your site. And if you’re in real estate or if you’re interested in highlighting local content on your site, we threw in some bonus features for you. Add your location, and TurnSocial can pull local content from Yelp, WalkScore and RentWiki, as well as posts from local bloggers on Outside.in. There’s are a bunch of other cool features for brand marketers that we hope to announce soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, play around with the bar on this page and let me know what you think.

You can sign up for your free TurnSocial bar here. Would you use this on your site? What other apps would you want to see included in the bar? What are some other ways you are featuring your social content on your website? What other social media tools would you like to learn more about?

Think about some of this data:

• By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers — 96% of them have joined a social network.
• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences!
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
• 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.
• Only 14% trust advertisements.

Of course, this doesn’t mean stop everything else. If your offline efforts are working, keep at it!

What do you think … is social media permanently changing how we communicate? What do these numbers mean for business owners?

So how can apartment communities use Twitter as a communication tool? Well, you can start by listening. You can use it to announce events, communicate maintenance updates, or provide another touch point for customer service. You can even broadcast leasing specials to prospects.

Want some examples of other apartment companies on Twitter? Check out Urbane Apartments or J.C. Hart. For even more examples, check out what companies like Zappos, Comcast, Southwest Airlines and others are doing.

Regardless of what you do with it, your business needs to be aware of Twitter and how people are using it. As you can see, it doesn’t appear to be a fad that is going away anytime soon.

Do you have other examples of creative ways that apartment companies can use Twitter as a business tool?

Related Post:
Listening to Twitter

Try chatting with them with web-based chat tools.

One very easy chat application that can be embedded on any website is MeeboMe by Meebo. Anytime a user visits your site, a small window (called a “widget”) will let the user know if you’re online — they then can start chatting with you at anytime as long as they’re on the site. I use this application every day on another site, and it works remarkably well. For examples of Meebo in action, check out Multifamily Technology or DocStoc.

If you have a Facebook Page for your community (you should…), then you can always use the popular Facebook Chat function on that site. This may be the easiest way to connect with users on a site that they already know. Here’s what Facebook chat looks like if you haven’t seen it yet:

Taking it even further, If you like the Facebook chat client and want this same functionality on other sites, you can combine tools from Userplane and ConVerdge. (Userplane provides communications software for online communities, and ConVerdge offers a white-label social network platform.) This ends up looking very similar to the design of the Facebook instant message client, and it actually offers more features, including video chat, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calling, and games. (Although it’s probably not a good idea for staffers to be playing chat games with the residents on the clock!)

While the chat function for websites is not really a new thing, these newer implementations of chat applications lood good and are easy to use. I’m guessing that we’ll see more of this type of chat interface in the near future.

Have you found chats that are integrated into other websites to be of use? Would it be useful for apartment communities to integrate chat into their marketing websites or resident portals? Let me know what you think.

Tools mentioned in this post:
Meebo
Facebook Pages
Facebook Chat
Userplane
ConVerdge

Summize Conversational Search is one of the fastest and best-formatted Twitter search engines around. You can easily find tweets about your brand, and it even has possibilities as a prospecting tool, as well. In a quick search for “Orlando apartment,” the second and fourth tweets are both from users looking for apartments.

If you’re surfing mobile on an iPhone, try Hahlo. Hahlo is a great site that combines features from Twitter and Summize. In addition to the search features of Summize, you can update your Twitter directly from this site. (It works on any browser, but it’s optimized for the iPhone.) A new feature even allows you to follow tweets that are closest to your location (similar to TwitterLocal).

Don’t have time to monitor Twitter all day? (Yeah, me either…) Put your Twitter listening on auto-pilot: try setting alerts with a site like TweetBeep. I really can’t describe it any easier than the website: “Like Google Alerts for Twitter!” It’s a very effective tool for picking up all kinds of tweets — enter your brand name and a few competitors, and watch how the conversations develop. (And more importantly, find those that you should be engaging in conversations.)

Twitter is a very open site, which makes it easy for other web developers to create unique tools like these. If you’re looking for more ways to interact with the microblogging tool, check out this article over at the Online Marketing Blog and this one over at Mashable.

What are your favorite ways to listen to Twitter?

(You can find me on Twitter as @30lines.)

UPDATE: Summize has officially been acquired by Twitter. You can now access the search function at search.twitter.com.

As the buzz builds around Facebook, Twitter and any other sites du jour, I’ve watched countless companies spout off at conferences about how they’re embracing social networking sites and other “social media.” Sorry folks, banner ads don’t qualify in my book. And increasingly, they don’t work very well, either.

The question is, are you listening to what your customers are saying? Do you bother to respond? Do you let folks know when something goes wrong? Do you then tell them what you’re doing to fix it?

Doesn’t seem that hard, does it? Didn’t think so.

Your customers are talking about you whether you like it or not. Are you part of the conversation?