Would you check in on Facebook in exchange for free Wi-Fi at a hotel, restaurant, or retailer? That's the pitch Facebook and Cisco have cooked up to give more people access to free Wi-Fi at merchants big and small.
The companies are jointly announcing Wednesday that they've partnered to bring the social Wi-Fi option to more business after a small but fruitfulpilot of the system in around 1,000 small and medium-sized businesses. For the average restaurant diner, airport goer, or superstore shopper, the arrangement should mean they'll soon find Facebook Wi-Fi at more of the places they visit regularly.
The three-step system, which can be deployed by merchants running a Cisco router setup, lets people connect to a venue's Wi-Fi, launch their browser, and click on the blue check-in button to gain unfettered access to the Internet.
"In a nutshell, this is checking in on Facebook for free Wi-Fi," Erick Tseng, who's heading up the project for the social network, told CNET.
For Facebook, the Wi-Fi-with-check-in initiative is part of a broader plan to attack the local market by encouraging merchants to set up and maintain Pages on the social network. Participating merchants will get additional distribution with each check-in, receiving exposure that could help bring in more customers or inspire more "likes." They'll also benefit from aggregate, anonymous demographic data such as age, gender, and interests on customers who sign-in to Facebook Wi-Fi, and can then use that data for targeting purposes in whatever Facebook advertising campaigns they run.
In essence, Facebook, which is not profiting directly from any revenue share through the partnership, hopes to attract more merchants that go on to buy ads. The idea is also to become a formidable player in local search, an area where everyone from Google and Yahoo to Yelp and Foursquare are competing for attention and advertising dollars.
"Today's announcement with Cisco really, in my mind, expands the scope of where we can deploy this product," Tseng said. "Through them, we now have access to many of the world's biggest brands and businesses."
In a field trial kicked off in October, Facebook noticed that its 25 participating merchants in the Bay Area saw a minimum of three times their average daily check-ins, he said.
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