Check in With Tulane on Foursquare

“Couches on the 3rd floor are the most comfortable ever,” wrote a tipster about Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. “On weekends, Bruff serves breakfast until 2 p.m.,” another offered about Bruff Commons, a dining hall on the uptown campus. These helpful tips and others about Tulane venues are found on Foursquare.

A location-based social networking site, Foursquare allows users to check in, share information, find activities and play games with others using GPS-enabled mobile devices. Tulane recently expanded its social media presence by joining the online community through its Foursquare for Universities program.

“Foursquare launched its university program this past fall,” says Ashley Keller Nelson, a professor of practice in management communications at the A. B. Freeman School of Business who received her business degree from Tulane in 1998. “The program is designed to help university members and visitors share insights about campus.”

Nelson is teaching a course that examines the impact of social media on business communication. As part of their coursework, Nelson's students are working with the University Communications and Marketing Office and the Innovative Learning Center to populate Tulane's Foursquare venues with descriptions and tips.

While many popular spots on and around Tulane's campuses had been geo-tagged by the Foursquare community beforehand, the locations are now “owned” by Tulane, enabling the university to use the service to coordinate activities such as virtual tours and scavenger hunts.

Nelson is excited about the success of the Foursquare project so far, and says the course has been popular with students. “We look at new channels of communication that make up social media and the Web and explore how these tools fit into a company's traditional integrated communication strategy,” explains Nelson. “Foursquare is just one example of how business leaders need to embrace social media in order to understand content sharing to communicate.”