What facebook’s Places means to marketers

The digital media landscape just got a bit blurrier.

The long anticipated roll out of facebook’s geo-location based feature called “Places” has been heralded as the end of foursquare, gowalla, yelp and other geo-based social media platforms.

Geo-based social media is not about location

This is a lesson that Google learned a few years ago when they rolled out Lattitude – one of the first geo-based services. It became know as the stalker app because all it really did was show you exactly where your friends were at all times.  That was a bit creepy for most to handle and the service never took off.

Location is merely the enabler to an engaging user experience

The reason foursquare and Gowalla have had great success is that they are essentially social gaming platforms that are enabled through location based check-ins. The experience is fun, easy and engaging. Add rewards for check-ins or earning badges and suddenly marketers were salivating at all the opportunities to build loyalty and word of mouth for their brands.

Facebook Places can do for mobile web and applications – as American Idol did for SMS

Much like voting for your favorite soon to be pop star on American Idol via text message really ushered in the era of mass SMS adoption, Facebook Places has the potential to bring mobile web and mobile applications to the masses as you can’t carry around your desktop to “check-in” to your favorite restaurant in the Toronto Entertainment District.

You also can’t carry around the old flip phone or first generation smartphone, so bringing geo-based social media to a mass scale could accelerate the adoption of new generation smartphones that are location aware through GPS and have great mobile web browsers or a platform that supports enriched mobile Applications.

Should Marketers abandon services like Foursquare now that facebook Places has arrived?

Although it’s true that facebook has 500 million users (150 on mobile) while services like foursqure only have a few million, let’s keep in mind the following things:

1. Places is only available in the U.S. currently – although I’d expect it to come to Canada and other countries by the holiday season.
2. Facebook became the king of location overnight but just because the media is declaring this to be true, it’s the consumer who has the ultimate say.  Remember Google Buzz? It too was heralded as a new giant in the social media space.  The problem was that consumers didn’t really want their Google services to be linked and used in a different context from which they subscribed to.  There is a good chance that many facebook users will feel the same way about their profile and will instead start limiting their time on facebook or abandon it entirely.
3. Facebook is making their location based API available to developers – so marketers can create digital experiences that leverage facebook Places – much like how facebook connect for commenting, liking and sharing has been incorporated into many sites today. For example, this means you can roll out a foursquare program that leverages a proven social gaming platform and then extend reach and frequency by incorporating the new facebook Places extensions.

Regardless if you or the brands you are working for think existing geo-based social media gaming platforms or the new facebook Places is the future, the only bad choice to make right now is to ignore geo-based social media and the impact that smartphones will have on shopper marketing and all consumer communications.