Venue pages now include the message, "Are you the manger of this business?" and a link to begin the process. Any business owner can claim their Foursquare venue and manage their account in three simple steps.
The feature set officially went live yesterday and the company already has plans to fine tune the process, as well as build out functionality to better serve businesses.
For interested businesses, the first step is to confirm business ownership, which Foursquare will manually verify. In step two, owners can create their first special. Dodgeball veteran and Foursquare's new Head of Product, Alex Rainert, describes this process as a "mad-libs style special creator." Business owners can add one special at a time. The first special is automatically added to the queue once ownership is verified.
The final step is simply verification. Once approved, businesses will gain access to the business dashboard where they can manage specials on an on-going basis and eventually control staff privileges. The dashboard is the same as the one select businesses were given early access to, so it includes the same stats on visitor data -- recent visitors, most frequent visitors, total uniques -- and a histogram of checkins per day.
Another kicker is that Foursquare business owners can even request official Foursquare window clings and stickers -- i.e. window decals to advertise that a business is Foursquare-friendly.
There are currently no costs associated with claiming your business and using the business dashboard for analytics and promoting specials. Rainert also confirms that there is "no immediate plan" for pricing, and that right now the priority is to make the business dashboard as rich as possible.
In many ways the effort is directly competitive with the recently enhanced Google Places, but the key here is the real-time checkin data that could really help business owners further develop their relationships with customers and better manage and track their promotions. Of course, given the checkin capabilities of Google Buzz for Mobile, there's potential for Google to extend similar privileges to those who claim their businesses with their service.
