4sq Hinted at EO/Patel Merger a Month Early

The notion that there aren’t any secrets on foursquare isn’t exactly new. The whole point is to announce where you are, of course, with the hope of scoring frequency-based bragging rights. Derived from this, we’ve seen applications that signal homes at risk of burglary and developed dreams of location-based marketing, a decade-old objective that finally has a shot at coming to fruition. Sneak past the obvious, however, and you can see that foursquare is a great tool for gathering cigar market intelligence, particularly about mergers and acquisitions.

To see this concept in action, skip the Fortune 500 and scramble down to Florida, the heart of the cigar industry in the United States. It’s a relatively small business, with total annual retail sales in this country, I’m told, amounting to only around $800 million. This small marketplace is what makes it easy to use foursquare to see what’s happening in the market. In fact, the hints popping up in April should have made clear that something was up.

It seems small – well, it did at the time – but Eddie Ortega, of Espinosa y Ortega Brands became “mayor of rocky patel,” a competitor in the cigar business, as evidenced by an April 12, 2010 tweet. I thought it was funny that one manufacturer would become mayor of another on foursquare, as I mentioned to Ortega on Twitter, but didn’t think much of it.

Two weeks later, Cigar Insider revealed that Eddie Ortega and Rocky Patel were talking about a merger, and Ortega confirmed the completion of the transaction for me on May 5, 2010.

Of course, ther isn’t a whole lot of action at Rocky Patel on foursquare — Ortega’s pretty much the mayor and the constituency. But, the lesson is clear. Watch foursquare carefully, and you could spot the next big move in the cigar business before it happens.

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3. The Future of Cigar Companies, Big and Small
4. Get Your Big Smoke Tickets
5. Orange County Policy Limits Public Workers to Four Cigars a Year

Tags: 4sq, cigar business, cigars, Eddie Ortega, Florida, foursquare, Rocky Patel, social media, Twitter