A few weeks ago, Joe Sorge showed us how he used Foursquare to get a flash mob of 150+ people into his restaurant, AJ Bombers. This Friday, with a little help from Milwaukee’s online community, he pulled together the most successful Foursquare-based event run by a restaurant to date in a 24 hour period, and proved that his Foursquare formula truly works for restaurants, and that it’s repeatable. By the end of the day on Friday, 231 people had checked in at AJ Bombers’s “I’m On A Boat!” badge party, and Joe had done more business at lunch in one day than he ever had. In this post, we’ll share some media and stats from the gathering, discuss exactly what it takes to pull off one of these events, and Joe will share some lessons learned and tips for using Foursquare to drive business.

Before we dive into my interview with Joe where he discusses how he did it, here’s some video, media and stats from the event so you can get a flavor of what it was like:

Video From AJ Bombers’ “I’m On A Boat!” Foursquare Badge Party:

Foursquare Check-in and Share Stats to AJ Bombers for 4/16:

Photos From The Event On Flickr

My Interview With Joe Sorge

Q. Joe, back in March you put together what turned out to be a hugely successful event for your restaurant using Foursquare. Over 160 people showed up for that event and earned the Foursquare swarm badge. When we broke the news and documented how you did it on this blog, even though we had pictures and video of the event, some people thought that it was a fluke. But here we are. Your second event’s done, and was even more successful than the first. What would you say now to the people who said it couldn’t be done again?

JS: I hope the skeptics can now see that not only is it possible to use foursquare to drive sales at your business, but that it becomes slightly easier with each event like this that you pull together. As your customers look to you to provide this type of event as a part of their entertainment schedule, even going so far as to share their suggestions with you for the next event.

JS: Actually we were very careful to duplicate the steps exactly as we had during the Swarm badge event. I wanted to be sure that we were going to prove that there could in fact be a systematic way to create this style of promotion.

JS: On March 22nd an uber Foursquare fan from Tampa, Nate Bonilla-Warford came up with the brilliant idea to declare April 16th Foursquare Day (4 squared = 16. 4/16. Get it?). It started with a blog post, and the idea caught on and spread over the next few weeks – by last week there were small events being organized in cities all over the country to celebrate the day thanks to all the chatter about it on the web. People were getting into it. So I looked at the badges that were available to the average foursquare user to base our own event around and we chose one that was hard to acquire, but also would be fun to acquire with a group of friends. Did we have a boat? No. But with a little creative thinking, we partnered with another local business, got a kayak and went for it anyway.

JS: In contacting foursquare about earning the badge, I asked the question about what was required to earn the badge.  My question was, “are there two things needed to acquire the boat badge, a) a boat and b) a boat “tagged” venue page?  They confirmed that was in fact the case, but there was also a third way to earn the badge.  That’s the route we chose, to have our customers check-in in the boat itself and add a “shout” to their check-in: “I’m on a boat @AJBombers”.

Q. You chose Foursquare day to hold the event. How much did people’s enthusiasm for the that affect your success.

JS: It certainly helped to keep awareness high in the days immediately leading up to the event, ironically it was our customers who continued to tweet with us about how excited they were to be celebrating foursquare day by earning a new badge together @AJBombers.  We even had a little fun with adding: Happy @foursquare Day to the front of the “I’m on a Boat” badge shout, which earned this players the additional Four Square Day Badge, a fun bonus for all involved.

JS: Again, we followed the exactly same method as the one that we used to promote the Swarm Badge event, just in a shorter overall timeframe.  That is, we chose the badge to acquire, contacted foursquare about the process of acquiring the badge, built the twtvite.com invitation and began to promote it via twitter and facebook during the 1 day leading up to the event.  With the date also being foursquare day, we researched the badge that might be awarded for that day and changed our twitter avatar to that badge for the two days leading up to the event.  The entire process of putting the pieces in place took less than two hours to pull together and we tweeted with approximately 50 users to get the ball rolling in the last 24 hours before the night of the event.

JS: I was a little afraid that another business may try to duplicate the idea quickly if I released the idea too soon, so yes I did keep it a bit of a secret. I Only privately DM’ed our customers that I knew would think it was fun and who could keep a secret!

JS: I don’t think that you could be anywhere near as successful without employing partners in these events.  Without our neighbor, outdoor outfitter Laacke & Joys, we wouldn’t even have had the boat!

JS: I hope that the fact that we were able to achieve our best sales day so far with such a short duration of well planned promotion via social media tools lends some credibility to the opportunity for measurable ROI that so many of those skeptics of our Swarm Badge event were previously critical.

That’s a wrap. If any of you out there have additional questions for Joe on this, I’m sure he’d be happy to discuss them with you in the comments. Also, if you have your own ideas or case studies you’d like to share, please do. It’s discussion time….