Startup to Turn Free Wi-Fi Into Marketing Gold

Free Wi-Fi is often the reason you visit the local café in your neighborhood and spend maybe hours of your weekend sipping slowly a cup of coffee. This is not the case in small businesses only; just think of how many people are going to Starbucks-let’s be honest-not for their great coffee but for the free Wi-Fi.

What’s more, when we finally do leave, the owner — unlike the proprietor of any online business — has no record we were ever there in the first place. Brick-and-mortar merchants collect little, if any, information on the customers visiting their stores daily. Unlike online commerce, physical store merchants are still living in a largely analog world without collecting in-person data for their record. Imagine if there was a way to turn free Wi-Fi into valuable customer data. Well, Mike Perrone (co-founder of SocialFlow) has thought about it. According to Wired’s article, his latest startup, which he co-founded with Jeff Lanza, is called SocialSign.in, and the concept is brilliantly simple. To access the Wi-Fi in a SocialSign.in-enabled space, customers have to log in with their Facebook, LinkedIn, or email credentials. Once the account is activated, the customer will be prompted to “like” the business’s page on Facebook, subscribe to a mailing list, or opt in some other way to connect with that retailer. Even when customers don’t bother with that optional step, businesses can still glean meaningful insights about their customers through their social sign-ins alone. It’s a compromise that could get merchants to the data they want without angering their customers, since they know they’re getting something in return.

“It’s really important for us to maintain the balance between what the location wants and what the end user wants,” Perrone says. There are companies like Retailnext are tracking store customers with Wi-Fi, video, that customers don’t realize that are being tracked, which is a huge privacy and debatable issue. So would you trade data collection for merchants and analysts for consumer privacy?

Read the entire article here.