A few weeks ago I wrote about FourSquare adding a business dashboard that will let owners of venues know when someone checks in at your venue using FourSquare. At the time I wrote, the business dashboard feature was in beta and not generally assessable – now … it is.  As reported today in Mashable – Foursquare Makes it Easy for Businesses to Sign Up

Foursquare is making it easier than ever for businesses to offer venue promotions and get insight on their Foursquare traction. The location-oriented social network has launched a do-it-yourself tool for business to claim their venue and reap the rewards of the business dashboard.

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.

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.

When you add Google Places and yesterday’s announcement at F8 - Social Media ROI will become easier and easier to demonstrate and by end of this year – I predicted, would start becoming fairly routine to show.