Checking in to the Wolfstar HQ this morning I spotted a location I hadn’t seen before – the Farnell trade counter, which is about a kilometre away.
What made it stand out was that there was a little orange special logo. Farnell’s offer is that if you do ten check-ins at its Maybrook trade counter then you get a £25 discount on your next order. This is the first specifically B2B use of Foursquare that I’ve seen.
And it isn’t Farnell’s first foray into the social web as it also runs the excellent element14 community where customers can talk to each other and to Farnell experts about the hundreds of thousands of components and accessories that it sells.
Has anyone else got some good examples of business-to-business use of Foursquare?
One reason that I was so impressed is that Premier Farnell plc is an ex-client. In the early 90s I worked at the consultancy that handled all of the then Farnell Electronics plc’s global corporate communications. In fact I helped it to rebrand into Premier Farnell and we did lots of press interviews with electronics magazines across Europe and North America, as well as also using full page display adverts as part of our corporate communications campaign. I also did B2B public relations for a number of Premier Farnell’s subsidiaries including Farnell Components.
The other wave of nostalgia is that I did the public relations for the opening of the Maybrook distribution centre, which at the time was the largest in Europe (might still be for all I know!). From memory the official opening was done the then foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, in recognition that Farnell was one of Yorkshire’s biggest exporters.
