Category — geo social media

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.

A while back I earned my Starbucks badge on foursquare for checking into 5 different locations.

Excited about the badge I was then quickly disappointed that it actually meant nothing and there was no reward for my loyalty.

With a recent update to the App installed, I noticed that there was now a “special offer” button under Starbucks this morning when I went to check-in.  In order to unlock the special, you need to be the mayor. Despite fierce competition from other BSTREET-ers, I’ve been able to defend this mayorship and redeemed my special today – even though the Barrista had no idea what foursquare was or whether or not my coupon was even real as there was no promotional code on it.

The timing for this real reward for my loyalty to Starbucks is timely considering McDonalds is about to roll out their own location based service using the new facebook location API.

Although I applaud Starbucks for adding a real incentive, I think it’s still a miss not to offer those with the badge something too.

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.