The idea “location, location, location”… really hit my mind after yesterday’s announcement of Cloudvox’s new web app to find the location of any phone number. I started thinking about how new technologies and marketing plans are going back to the basic realization that people’s lives still revolve around the location in which they live. The trend towards location in advertising, marketing and sales could signify good news for SMBs (especially located based businesses), in their constant struggle to compete with larger national and international corporates. Let’s take a look at some of the trends towards location on Facebook, Twitter and others to see how small businesses, advertisers and developers can leverage these opportunities.
Here’s Gigaom’s post on today’s anticipated news at Facebook’s f8 developer’s conference, for example:
Finally, it is widely expected that Facebook is going to announce some kind of location capability at f8. By adding place tagging, in one fell swoop, they could gain the largest single userbase for updates tagged with location. The check-in behavior popularized by the likes of FourSquare would become more easily usable for its more mainstream audience. This was the approach Twitter announced at its own developer conference last week.
But as users start adding location context to Facebook data, there will be more opportunities to make use of social actions married to geo-location. Aggregating people around location will make it much easier for people to socialize and interact offline. It also opens up the opportunity to go after the lucrative local market, another place to compete directly with Google. Facebook could soon have pages for every local restaurant and hair salon, accompanied by user likes, shares and comments and enabling offline businesses to have closer ties with their users. That would give Yelp a run for their money, too.
SocialBeat adds some more insight to the upcoming Facebook location features, in the form of risks and opportunities:
Opportunities: Smart location features open the door to socially-intelligent local ads and lead generation – a multibillion dollar opportunity. No company, Google and Yelp included, has solved this. Facebook has positioned itself as a brand advertising solution, in contrast to Google with its comparative strength in search ads near the point of purchase. The problem is brand advertising doesn’t yet have the analytics behind it to quantify effectiveness. Mobile advertising and analytics represent one powerful and accountable solution to this. Location-sharing could be used to track follow-through and whether users actually visited a restaurant or store after seeing a campaign.
Risks: Again, a privacy backlash. Just because a user has 1,000 friends doesn’t mean they want to blast their location out to them.
Which brings us back to Gigaom’s post about Twitter’s launch of Places:
Twitter’s new location feature, Places, will give developers a structured and curated database of places from around the world. That will allow tweets to be associated with the actual location they originated from, in a way that’s more decipherable and interesting than lat-long coordinates.
With all of this speculative info in mind, the question is: how can SMBs, and location-based businesses use the trend towards location, targeted mobile advertising, and local ads to their advantage? Gigaom anticipates that Facebook will figure out how to use the concept of location to monetize their large customer base, Twitter is doing the same, Foursquare is becoming a big location based player, and we recently wrote about how Apple is targeting location based mobile ads. Advertisers will begin finding ways to more directly target their specific market. Implementing Cloudvox’s new web app to direct callers to the right branch or retail chain, based on location is one idea, which we discussed yesterday. What other ideas would you suggest?
Related posts:
- Why Location Matters Again
- New York Times Plays the Location Game
- Find the Location of Any Phone Number with Cloudvox
- Subway Drops the Ball on Ryan Howard Contract Extension News
- Facebook’s Game to Lose
