The geo-social media wars have nothing to do with location

What used to be true in business is now becoming true on the social webs if you believe the recent digital hype around geo-based social media platforms such as foursquare and Gowalla.

It’s about location, location, location (not) !

I’ve been an active participant / early adopter on foursquare and Gowalla for the last several months and what is really obvious is that Geo-based social media is the first digital channel that could effectively redefine loyalty programs and truly tie retail, trade and both ATL & BTL initiatives together. It’s practically a digital marketer’s wet dream.

It’s also become obvious to me that location (through GPS or otherwise) is actually not the reason for the hype and early success of these platforms, nor will it be the reason it doesn’t fizzle out in 3 months.

If it was only about location to create social interactions, Latitude from Google would have taken off two years ago and not become known as the stalker app.

From my perspective, having people “check in” or let their location become visible to others through these platforms is merely the mechanism or enabler to the gaming part of these platforms.

At the end of the day, the foursquare platform is a more fun and intuitive game to play than the Gowalla game of stamping passports and picking up & dropping off weird items around town. This is also why having twitter report on location will have zero impact on these platforms as twitter is a live search engine – not a social network or a game.

Foursquare is seeing 50% monthly growth right now because the game is fun and unlike other silly games that have taken over the social media world (i.e. farmville or mafia wars on facebook) it has some real life context and rewards – like free food and drink for being the “mayor” of a location or checking into a location a set number of times. Gowalla’s success can also be tied back to real rewards and context.

Of course these new platforms are also mobile based and we all know by now that mobile web is being used primarily by consumers for social media. Did you know that traffic to facebook mobile in Canada is now about the same as online access?  Knowing that, it’s hard to believe that facebook hasn’t enabled their Apps to work on mobile yet – although for those of us already sick of the farmville and mafia wars fbook spam on our walls, this is still a good thing.

Just as gaming apps are the most popular downloads on smartphones, the geo-social media wars are really about who has the best game and who can keep it going the longest before being picked up by  Google, Yahoo, facebook, or Microsoft.