CHAPTER 9
Knock Out the Competition

You go to where your customers are, and they are on places like foursquare.

—EDWARD GILLIGAN, Vice Chairman, American Express

In early 2011 a patron at AJ Bombers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was rewarded with 8,000 minutes of free food. That’s a lot of fries, burgers, and beers. The customer won the free food for being the restaurant’s 8,000th check-in on foursquare. AJ Bombers has become a poster child for the power of social media, and as you’ll learn, location-based apps like foursquare have played a big role in its success (see Figure 9.1).

FIGURE 9.1   AJ Bombers is a poster child for the power of social media.

Although the restaurant is booming today, the outlook looked bleak in 2008 when Joe Sorge and his wife, Angie, were struggling small business owners. They owned four restaurants and a fifth, AJ Bombers, had just been returned to their possession because it wasn’t doing well. Sorge credits social media tools such as Twitter and foursquare for helping them dig out of their hole and create a thriving group of restaurants with AJ Bombers as its flagship. “I had to find a way to gain exposure without spending money,”¹ Sorge told me.