Location, Location, Location
The last chapter of our textbook talks about the future of the groundswell. My point of view, social technologies are exploding, and they are embedded within every activity, not just on computers, but also on mobile devices and in the real world. This is the ubiquitous groundswell. The word “ubiquity” means everywhere referring to locations in the physical world. Location-based services is not a new word now, and it is quite self-explanatory. It can do more than creating your visual dairy or keeping track of footprint.
Many startups have emerged with powerful and useful geolocation capabilities central to their business model. According to flavors of location, there are several categories of startups.
Many startups have emerged with powerful and useful geolocation capabilities central to their business model. According to flavors of location, there are several categories of startups.
1.Place annotations & discoveries
Description: With these apps, it’s all about places. Document and tag your city, discover what’s interesting around you, share what you discover with the world or your network. This is an amazing category.
Apps & sites: Now (a just-launched “find fun nearby!” app around real-time events), Sidewalk (“find what you love about your city”), Banjo (social discovery app that lets the user look at what is happening around the world in real time), Urbantag(bought by Tagged, it will shut down March 31), Everplaces(save and share places you love, though the app seems to be chiefly for people to keep track of places privately), EyeEm (a photo-sharing app centered on places), Kullect (share your world), Field Trip (an app that runs in the background and serves up information based on your location), Tagwhat (a feed of hyperlocal content), goGlyph (annotations attached to a location), Trover (find and share hidden gems) and others.
2.Geo-social
Description: With these apps, the focus is generally more on the social than the geo. Share geotagged content with friends and share place-based information.
Apps & sites: Instagram, of course, is the photo-sharing app that lets you see what your friends are doing, with the geolocation element an afterthought. Bonfyre lets you capture and share experiences only with your friends. Findery is a location-based note sharing Web app — no mobile app released yet. Highlight, Sonar and Glympse all alert friends that you’re nearby. Facebook Places (social check-ins) and Place+ (buggy app lets you check in to places, share your location with friends) round out the field.
3.Geo & social travel apps
Description: An obvious killer use case for geolocation apps is helping travelers and tourists during their travels. Seems like a new travel startup pops up every day.
Apps & sites: TripAdvisor and TripAdvisor City Guides (spun off from Expedia, TripAdvisor is the big kahuna but only has limited social capabilities), Gogobot (travel recommendations from friends and people who travel like you), BagsUp (Australia-based startup offers trusted travel tips from your friends), Like a Local Guide (travel tips from locals, from a startup in Estonia), Afar (collaborative travel guide), TouristEye (Web and mobile travel guide with personalized recommendations), Airbnb (cool mobile app but just offers geo-tagged listings with no info about surroundings) and a gaggle of other incumbents that use geo to some extent: Travelocity, Expedia, Kayak and LonelyPlanet
4.Recommendation apps
Description: One of the hottest startup sectors — everyone wants to be the next Yelp, given the lack of personal social networking in Yelp’s offering.
Apps & sites: Yelp (reviews and recommendations), Foursquare(moving past check-ins into recommendations and deals), Zagat(venerable restaurant reviews site bought by Google), Raved(leave raves, share recommendations with friends), Snoox(friends’ recommendations on everything), LiveStar(recommendations from your social network), Citysearch (local city guides), Cityseries (iPad app for restaurants and entertainment), Google Local (reviews from people in your circles), Ditto (now founder-less startup lets you make recommendations to friends), I loves it! (share what you love) and, of course, the spate of both city guide apps and online city guides around the world such as TimeOut or Thrillist (which generally just have online maps). The newest player at the table? Facebook Nearby.
5.Shared experiences & social streams
Description: Seems every new startup wants to be the Instagram of video. The vast majority of these are primarily social, with location as an afterthought. We’ll likely see a dozen or more new entrants in the next year.
Apps & sites: Zkatter (social street view — real-time videos of what your friends are doing and where, although it’s marketing itself as a way to preserve memories), Flock (capture and share experiences with friends), LooxcieMoments (capture moments and stream video in real time), Koozoo (see and share live views of places you care about). Old-timers Justin TV (life streaming), Flixwagon Geo(combine mobile video sharing and GPS navigation), Qik and other live-streaming services aren’t really optimized for what I want from social geo. Next2Friends Live has already bit the dust. Other mobile and Web video-sharing apps such as Vine (6-second videos from Twitter), SocialCam (bought by AutoDesk), Viddy, Klip, Telly, Glmps (capture and shae short videos with friends to “relive the moment”) and Recood don’t really have location elements at their core. YouTube Capture may help shake up the game.
6.Storytelling apps
Description: Storytelling and citizen journalism is increasingly being done on mobile devices.
Apps & sites: Blurb Mobile (create and share short media stories using your mobile), Mobli(capture and share the the perfect photo or video), Qwiki (turn memories into mini-movies, best seen on iPad), Meograph (create multimedia stories on Web), Rememble (storytelling Web app doubles as a memory aid)
7.Geo-fencing & keeping track of your kids
Description: A long-crowded field, a variety of geo apps enable parents to keep track of their children and other family members. Features often include messaging systems, geo-fencing capabilities that send out alerts, built-in sirens and more.
Apps & sites: Footprints, Family Tracker, SecuraFone,NearParent, Lookout, Trick or Tracker and others all help parents keep track of their children.
8.Health & fitness apps
Description: The health and fitness sector has put GPS apps to good use for years. You probably have a couple on your phone.
Apps & sites: RunKeeper, Runtastic, Map My Run, Map My Ride, Cycle Tracker Pro, Cycle Watch, AccuTerra and literally hundreds of others
9.Local experts & real-time knowledge
Description: Who knows the local landscape better than a local? Some startups are betting that people will want to be connected with local experts.
Apps & sites: Localmind (real-time Q&A with locals and friends about what’s happening now), LocalUncle(Switzerland-based Q&A-based city advice and tips from locals)
10.Time-based apps & memory aids
Description: One great capability of GPS is to retrace past events. These sites let you do that for your own travels or to see the virtual footsteps of others who have been in the same place before.
Apps & sites: Path is positioning itself as less a private social network and more of a way to “remember life,” which is why I placed it here. There’s also TimeHop (a virtual time capsule that lets you see your photos and updates from this date in the past), Historypin (not-for-profit effort to chronicle our past), Historvius (mapping history), Rewind.Me (capture your experiences), Breadcrumbs(get a timeline of your day and set goals), Do You Remember (will let you post your memories on the Web; geo component uncertain), Placeme (remember where you’ve been)
11.Neighborhood connections & actions
Description: No one has yet cracked the local neighborhoods challenge, but geo apps are helping bring people together in local communities for political activities, social activities and more.
Apps & sites: Nextdoor (neighbors can build private websites where they can swap questions and advice and sell used items in these Web-only communities), RedRover (helps parents make play dates and make plans on the fly), NeighborGoods (share your stuff with neighbors) and dozens of similar sites, SeeClickFix (report neighborhood issues and get them fixed)
12.Augmented Reality & games
Description: Augmented reality (AR) hasn’t yet come into its own, though the release of Google Glass later this year may help spotlight this category.
Apps & sites: Wikitude and Junaio (AR apps), Wallit (location-based virtual walls that let you start a conversation with locals), Placespotting (an online map game), scvngr (game about doing challenges at places), many others
13.Local social & mobile commerce
Description: The holy grail for geolocation apps is local commerce, and we’re not there yet. Here are some early players.
Apps & sites: ScoutMob (local offers, mobile deals), Shopkick (get rewards by walking into a store), the new Craigslist app by Mokriya (neighborhood marketplace), Zaarly (buy from local service providers), Savvi (local discounts),Groupon Mobile and Living Social (offers from local merchants), Zavers by Google (real-time coupons). Other apps, like Foursquare, also offer local deals.
Other geolocation apps
Other apps and sites incorporate location, of course, in dozens of different ways — and we’ll certainly see an exponential growth in these apps in the coming years. Here are a few:
• Foodspotting and other food apps
• Skout (meet new people, hook up) and other location-specific dating apps
• Education, medical, workplace, sports and entertainment apps (I haven’t looked into these sectors)
• Zillow and Trulia and other services to help you find homes for sale, neighborhood information, etc.
• Bundle (how people are spending their money to show you your city in a new way)
• Virtual ownership: MyInchoftheEarth, The Ocean Registry, The International Star Registry
• Skout (meet new people, hook up) and other location-specific dating apps
• Education, medical, workplace, sports and entertainment apps (I haven’t looked into these sectors)
• Zillow and Trulia and other services to help you find homes for sale, neighborhood information, etc.
• Bundle (how people are spending their money to show you your city in a new way)
• Virtual ownership: MyInchoftheEarth, The Ocean Registry, The International Star Registry
Combining mobile and location-based services, social tools such as Foursquare and Yelp have been changing the way customers interact with the physical location of a business. These services offer more information for consumers, helping them make more informed decisions on where to eat, sleep, shop and relax.
But a new crop of location-based social startups has emerged, going beyond the initial wave of innovations to build upon the experience of a customer who is about to visit or is currently visiting a business.
From a company that provides indoor GPS services to another that curates social information about specific neighborhoods, here are three new trends and the startups that are changing the way brick-and-mortar companies do business:
1. Indoor location based services.
GPS is most commonly known for being used outdoors, but Boston startup ByteLight has taken that idea and applied it to analyzing the movements of customers indoors. ByteLight integrates with the LED lighting already present in a building to track the movements of customers in your business based on their mobile device. A customer then uses one of the apps developed by ByteLight to navigate and engage with a business by either receiving relevant coupons, ads or more based upon their location.
GPS is most commonly known for being used outdoors, but Boston startup ByteLight has taken that idea and applied it to analyzing the movements of customers indoors. ByteLight integrates with the LED lighting already present in a building to track the movements of customers in your business based on their mobile device. A customer then uses one of the apps developed by ByteLight to navigate and engage with a business by either receiving relevant coupons, ads or more based upon their location.
ByteLight's take on location-based marketing aims to bring together online and offline content like delivering deals or coupons once a customer reaches a certain location in-store, as well as analyzing the patterns in the movements of customers so owners can create new ways to interact with them. ByteLight licenses its product to LED manufacturers, so the cost of their services varies based on the size and scope of the installation.
2. Socially curating neighborhood demographics.
A research project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh called Livehoods aims to track information from 18 million public tweets and check-ins to collect geographic and demographic data about a location and the person visiting that location, essentially to tell the story of neighborhoods of a city. These snapshots of the various areas could potentially give businesses a way of targeting their product and advertising to the right customer based on the demographics of a region.
A research project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh called Livehoods aims to track information from 18 million public tweets and check-ins to collect geographic and demographic data about a location and the person visiting that location, essentially to tell the story of neighborhoods of a city. These snapshots of the various areas could potentially give businesses a way of targeting their product and advertising to the right customer based on the demographics of a region.
So far, Livehoods has mapped neighborhoods in seven cities in the U.S. and Canada [http://livehoods.org/maps]. Businesses can use these maps for free to bolster the targeting of their advertising and learn more about the regions that mean the most to their customer base. The project is still in its beginnings, but potential is there to someday provide businesses with demographics, economic development, resources and other valuable data about a local area.
3. From real wallet to mobile wallet. With new platforms like Gyft, Passbook and Google Wallet offering consumers the ability to hold all of their gift cards, gift certificates, tickets, coupons and more in their phones, businesses have an opportunity to interact with their customers in a new arena with little competition. Engage customers with special offers and discounts only accessible from their mobile wallet and only redeemable in stores.
By marketing to customers through their mobile wallets, there's the opportunity to provide hyper local content that leads to more relevant advertising and, ideally, more business for your company.
Companies are using location-based marketing in a number of ways to connect with customers. Some tend to stick with only one tool to keep things simple. Others use all of the tools to stay connected with their customers on a variety of fronts.
First, we should explain what location-based marketing is. It refers to the ability to customize marketing messages based on a prospect's location and preferences. To do this, marketers can use the following:
- Location-based services (LBS): mobile apps such as foursquare and SCVNGER that provide information or entertainment to users based on their location.
- Near-field communications (NFC): technology that allows two devices that are in close proximity -- between two and 20 centimeters -- to exchange information.
- Bluetooth marketing: like NFC, this allows data transfer over short distances. If you've used a wireless phone headset, it probably was Bluetooth.
- Location-based advertising (LBA): uses tools such as GPS and geo-fencing to locate potential prospects and send them messages.
Here are several examples of how companies have successfully used location-based marketing and how you can, too:
Improve customer loyalty: In the U.K., the restaurant chain Subway launched a location-based marketing campaign called "You Are Here." The campaign used LBA and multimedia messaging (MMS) to reach targeted users within close proximity to a Subway.
Users had to opt in first -- always an important consideration for a location-based marketing campaign. Once they had done so, they received MMS messages alerting them to special discounts as they were walking by a Subway location.
In a sense, Subway said, "Hey, next time you're near one of our restaurants, do you want us to send you a text with a special discount on it?" By confirming they were interested in receiving the messages, customers were giving Subway permission to text them.
Improve the customer experience and secure brand loyalty: Zuma Fashions rolled out an NFC campaign that embedded chips in point-of-sale posters. Consumers were encouraged to download the Zuma Fashions app from iTunes or the Google Play marketplace. Once the apps were loaded, customers swiped their handsets over the NFC chip and were encouraged to fill out a short survey. After completing the survey, they received a digital discount they could use right away. The campaign proved so successful that Zuma extended it.
Customers also could swipe NFC tags attached to blouses and get details on the price of the garment and the materials used to make it, as well as watch a short video of it being modeled. The app enabled Zuma to create a loyalty program for people who frequented stores.
Improve customer loyalty and drive repeat sales: Pizza chain Domino's created its own location-based services app to drive sales for specific locations. What's impressive is that the app can handle all of the company's different pizza combinations. With four pizza sizes, four types of sauces, 22 toppings and numerous other add-ons, we calculated that there are 522 billion possible combinations. (Seriously. It took us all night to count them.)
Despite the complexity of making the app, Domino managed to do it and effectively streamlined the ordering process. Once customers take time to download the app, input their information and order a pizza, what's the likelihood they're going to start all over with a competitor's app? Probably very low.
Another example is outdoor clothing and gear supplier REI. It used ShopAlerts LBA to engage consumers with time and location-targeted messages. When consumers who had previously opted in to receive messages were near an REI location, they received SMS messages with special discounts.
A survey of customers found that 69 percent said ShopAlerts would increase their likelihood to visit a store. What's more, 65 percent said they made a purchase because of ShopAlerts, and 73 percent said they would definitely or probably use the service in the future.
Generate buzz and brand loyalty: To promote the launch of a new pocket-sized spray, the advertising agency for U.K.-based body spray maker Lynx installed highly visible vinyl floor tiles in high-traffic areas of various colleges and universities. Students who stood on or near the Lynx floor vinyls were encouraged to wirelessly download a simple branded dating application via Bluetooth.
The campaign was a success not only because of the public relations buzz it generated, but also because more than 500 students a day downloaded the app.
Once consumers get comfortable with LBS, NFC, Bluetooth and LBA, the floodgates will open. The day is not far off when it will be commonplace for discount offers to pop up on mobile devices when customers return to a favorite business. For marketers, that prospect should be exciting.
Concerns: users' privacy
These apps collect data about our daily routines and the routines of those closest to us. They track personal tastes in food, fashion, and music so we can receive alerts and location-based notifications. The device maintains a record of our daily routines, and it's constantly looking for people we know who may be nearby. What happens to the data that are being collected about our whereabouts? Who or what controls it? We need to be the owners and keepers of our information
Executives at Brightkite take security concerns seriously and give users the option not to broadcast their whereabouts. "A real sense of privacy is important, and we spend a lot of time thinking about it," says Brightkite CEO and co-founder Jonathon Linner. "Privacy has to be transparent—in the setting menu and the post screen. It has to be very explicit." Twitter plans to make its location services opt-in, also letting users choose whether to tell others where they are.
There are many ways to do this from a user standpoint. Users can create their own groups and set their security settings and circles of trust, and how we do this is critical." The majority of [existing] apps are very centralized—they remain Internet-based, and the controls are with the company.
References:
http://bdnooz.com/lbsn-location-based-social-networking-links/#axzz2Qd4NqFoV
http://socialmedia.biz/2013/02/26/location-based-services-grow-up/
http://socialmedia.biz/2012/03/12/oreilly-where-the-art-and-business-of-location/
http://socialmedia.biz/2013/01/28/geolocation-place-graph/
http://socialmedia.biz/2013/03/04/strategies-to-make-your-corporate-website-sticky/
http://mashable.com/2010/03/19/location-based-strategy/
http://mashable.com/2010/03/15/location-based-marketing/
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21565006-internet-going-local-your-friendly-neighbourhood-app
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21564999-mapmakers-are-competing-your-smartphone-world-your-pocket
http://whereconf.com/where2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZl9xYRnUtI&list=PL0897F13AAB22EA59&index=19
http://livehoods.org/
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21565007-geography-matters-much-ever-despite-digital-revolution-says-patrick-lane
