Sean D. Francis

Knowing Where You Are and What You Want

Posted on 12 January 2010

There are some things you just feel in your gut.  Recently I was speaking to a friend about Foursquare and GoWalla.  Both are services that let you ‘check in’ at different locations via your mobile communication device.  We were chatting about the importance of ‘going local’ in the future of marketing and social media.  To both of us, going local just seemed obvious.  You need to reach people right at the point where they are making their transaction decisions.

If a business can learn that a potential consumer is near them, it can then offer enticements to that potential consumer and turn her into an actual consumer.   I hate thinking in gross monetization terms, but I really am just talking about transactions and transactions don’t always have to be consumer behavior.  Practically though, it is consumer behavior that concerns us all because that is how we make money.

Part of the discussion was about which service, Foursquare or GoWalla was going to become the standard.  I can easily see an argument for either, based upon the gimmick that is appealing to me at the time.  Right now, GoWalla only seems to work on iPhones and seeing that smart phones make up 16% of the cell phone market, it really can’t reach a massive audience.  Foursquare can work on any cellphone but the texts I send on my cellphone to the service to check in often fail to get registered.  I have to know exactly how Foursquare has a business entered in its system in order for it to register the text.  This is annoying and frustrating.

The winner between the two will be the first to offer benefits beyond abstract points and badges.  Foursquare does have the “Mayor of …” element where if you visit a location often enough you become the mayor of it and that location can honor that title in some way.  That seems clunky to me.  The real benefits will come from partnering with yelp.com and groupon.com.  After a few months of using Foursquare, it will have a good idea of the places I go to most often, the types of places I generally go to, and will be able to suggest other places I might enjoy and if there is a groupon.com coupon for one of these places, it will be able to highlight it for me.  If one of these services could also tie in with Facebook and know more about my personal demographics, it will be able to more effectively market specific locations to me.

In general I hate being marketed to, but that is generally because I hate clumsy marketing.  I hate shotgun attempts to lump me in with others of my general ilk and make assumptions about me based on that grouping.  Often times when the marketing is done well, I don’t see it has marketing but as helpful suggestions.  Netflix does this as does Amazon.  I’m rarely annoyed at their marketing attempts because they are suggestions based mainly on what I’ve watched/purchased in the past and then paired with the information of what others who have similar tastes as me have watched/purchased in the past.

The other aspect of going local is it can’t be spammy.  It has to be related to my intention.  Just because every morning I go and get coffee from my favorite cafe does not mean that when I check in at that cafe that I should be bombarded with ads for nearby businesses.  My intent is to get coffee, not a haircut.  That will be a hurdle marketers will have to address carefully.  Knowing where I am located is only half the story, knowing what I want while there is the other half.  Having access to my favorite places and the types of activities at my favorite places will build a useful database of my general intentions.

Intention can further be defined if the service also let me score a location in some way.  If I really liked a certain bar that is tagged with specific traits, then the service can locate other bars with those traits and suggest that to me or even better, help me avoid places I am going to dislike.  I’d love to be able to ‘pre-check in’ to a location and get a little summary along the lines of “based upon your ratings of Place X and Place Y, Place Z will probably rate n stars for you.”

The immediate future is going to be dominated by being able to reach people at the point of they are making decisions about their transactions.  The future is real-time location based information management.