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Foursquare Day - Pune 2010

The legend about Social Media being for those stricken with boredom were grounded firmly on Friday 16th April.. the Unofficial Global Social Media Holiday as initiated by Supermayor Dr. Nate Bonilla-Warford from Tampa, Florida. Within days, people from around the world picked up on the idea which went on to become a global phenomenon. 

Now while Foursquare is big in US and Europe with certain parts of East-Asia… there is a niche community of Twitterers from Pune which have been actively holding the most random tweetups.. the Twitter shout for a meetup. I became a part of this community sometime around Jan 2010 only and found it extremely interesting way to connect with people around. This lead to the launch of SocialSenseTV.. which I use primarily for commenting on Social media et. all.

On 11th April.. we had another tweetup planned at Doolally which is a favorite with all since its Pune’s first micro brewery.. I was picked up by Sahil & Tarun and while we drove  to Doolally we started to talk about how we could plan a Foursquare Day party in Pune. A day earlier I had already created the twitter account @4sqPUNE out of sheer excitement. 

Soon we found out we were the ‘only ones’ in India even doing something on the Foursquare day.. meeting Nikhil at the Tweetup we took the discussion further and figured out that the odds were highly against us.. like I summarize below:

1. The foursquare users community is small and not organized.. 
2. Pune demographics means its a small city spread over a large area and bad public transportation. 
3. Lack of broadband internet speeds with a majority and also number of GPRS/EDGE enabled smart phones. 

After thinking about possible venues, I decided to call Ashwin who is the co-owner of 1 - The Lounge in Koregaon Park. The area is known for its restaurants, cosmopolitan lifestyle and buzzing nightlife scene. Fortunately a few weeks earlier I had checked-in from his lounge and showed it to him. Ashwin immediately jumped on the idea and we got cracking… with renewed zest! 

Immediately a Facebook event page was created and the invites sent. Tarun came up with an excellent idea to create a web-page to explain what Foursquare, 4SQday and the event was all about. In this time, Dr. Nate suggested we throw a swarm challenge to any other competing city in the world.. I did tell him that personally getting a Swarm badge itself was a huge challenge for us… but nonetheless and for the fun factor we challenged Bellefontaine, Ohio which was having its swarm party at Chattan Loch. 

Tuesday night the team met at 1 - The Lounge and discussed the deals we would be throwing to the foursquare users who checkin at the Swarm party and also the challenges. We decided to set up laptops using the in-house broadband and a datacard to make it easy for users to checkin when they arrive. The announcement of a complimentary Foursquare Shot was made and Pune was the only second venue after Atlanta to offer a special drink especially for the 4sqday party! 

Now the process of tweeting, retweeting, introducing foursquare and run in between meetings started… time was ticking for us and we had our sight on Mumbai which has its own Social Media Club. Sadly our hopes of getting some foursquare users to come down to Pune were smashed when Mumbai users announced their own 4sqday event.. Not a swarm. This made the task of getting more users even more complicated as now we had to focus simply on Pune tweeps. 

Meanwhile I announced a special offer for first 10 checkins to get a free Pune 4sqday Badge sponsored from my social media start-up the SocialSenseTV. 

The team managed to create a good buzz and finally Friday dawned upon us with 46 RSVP’s in place on the facebook page and good inquiries on the webpage developed by Teemac team of Tarun and Ashwin.

As I got ready to leave for the party… Pune had an overcast and Sahil called to tell me that it had started raining. Tarun also confirmed the same… it was a nervous moment as the entire Swarm party now seemed to hang in the balance of nothingness. To make matters worst, Pune had its electricity cut off… creating traffic snarls and confusion. Biting my fingers *literally* .. Tarun sent out a tweet saying that Party was still ON and that we should thank the Rain Gods for cooling Pune down. 

By the time I could reach the venue with Sahil, Tarun had already started setting up the laptops and people started coming in… this was a positive sign. A grueling session of checkins, collecting money, handing coupons, badges and calls later… Sahil excitedly  announced “WE GOT THE SWARM BADGE”… at 9:56 pm… just under 2 hours we had our 50th checkin. Excited and crazed.. we decided to finally go inside and party with the swarm, it was well worth the effort.

On 16th April 2010, the team of Pune Foursquare Day - MrShri, TarunMarkose, SahilK, iNKV and help from AnandNav with Mehr… made History! India’s first Swarm Badge won against all odds… and what a week it was. Tampa got 3 weeks to plan their swarm, we got a mere 4 days and we did it. 

Cheers to Foursquare, Dr. Nate and Team Foursquare Day for giving us this exciting opportunity. As for Bellefontaine Ohio, they lost the challenge with us… but we are now connected forever! 

Written by:

MrShri