As the technology space evolves, so does the terminology

In 2009, we added the term “geolocation” to this blog as one of its primary topics. We marked this with a post stating that geolocation would be a major trend in 2010. This echoed much of what other blogs were writing at the time. Geolocation was the buzz term.

We followed up several months later with one one of our distributed blog posts entitled “10 Ways Geolocation is Changing the World.” It’s about this time, however, that the terminology shifted and we began to refer to this as location-based services or LBS for short.

We’ve published several posts on the topic, but this one from November of 2010 is particularly relevant and timely: Four Reasons to Invest in Location-Based Services. We were essentially making the case for checking-in. Today, Foursquare launched Explore for the Web at Foursquare.com/Explore. Earlier today we tweeted that it’s the first social search engine for the real world, as it uses your check-in history, social graph, and location to make intelligent recommendations of places you’d like to go. In that November post, some 14 months ago, we wrote,

“The promise of intelligent recommendations is the feature that gets me most excited. Based on the data I volunteer through checking-in everywhere I go, whether it’s a public or private checkin, location-based services can use their aggregate data to accurately recommend other places I’ll like. Mind you, this is no small task.

By checking-in everywhere I go at home and when I’m traveling, no matter how mundane or insignificant, these apps can learn a lot about what I like and don’t like. With enough data, they can learn more about my preferences than I probably even realize. Again, let’t think in terms of many years’ worth of data that may also include sentiment value one way or another. Then consider a data set that includes hundreds of millions of users all over the world.

This type of predictive intelligence for location is only possible if we provide the raw data i.e. a complete history of check-in behavior. That’s the trade-off. That’s the value exchange. And that’s ultimately how LBS improves my life.”

This is a game-changer for Foursquare and will likely provide a monetization engine not unlike Google Search. You can be sure that Facebook is working on something similar, given its push toward Yelp-like recommendations on Places, and there’s little doubt that Google will provide a similar service with a combination of Search, Plus, and Places.

Throughout 2011, we collectively referred to this as the Location-Based Services (LBS) space. It wasn’t ideal, and it lead to a lot of confusion about what did or did not constitute LBS. The term was both too broad and too narrow. With 2012, the terminology has evolved once again. Geolocation and Location-Based Services are now collectively referred to as SoLoMo – shorthand for the convergence of social, local, and mobile.

The SoLoMo Manifesto: Just About Everything Marketers Need to Know about the Convergence of Social, Local, and Mobile

We invite you to download the most recent whitepaper from MomentFeed: The SoLoMo Manifesto 

The SoLoMo Manifesto explores the mega-markets of social, local, and mobile as a cohesive ecosystem of marketing technologies. Driven by the rapid adoption of smartphones and the global network of connected consumers, the SoLoMo space can be uniquely understood through MomentFeed’s “Location-Based Engagement Stack.” This is the central premise to the paper and represents the core vision for the MomentFeed location-based marketing platform.

You can download this free whitepaper by clicking HERE

Guest post by Lorna Li, founder of a green marketing blog for green entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs. Visit Green Marketing 2.0 for more great tips on how to use social media for green business.

A new tool allows green business owners to take their marketing to the next level – geolocation. This inexpensive marketing medium allows green business owners to not only attract more customers, but also to learn more about current customers.

What is Geolocation?

Geolocation software has a variety of applications for small business owners. The most popular geolocation software is available in the form of games for customers to play. Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Loopt all give customers the opportunity to “check in” to certain locations and earn points. Each game has its own rules, however, all utilize global positioning software (GPS) on a player’s smartphone to identify where the player is located.

• Foursquare: These users access the Foursquare app on their phones and “check in” at certain locations. Players can earn different badges after a certain number of check ins, or can become the “mayor” of a location if that player checks in at the location more than any other player.
• Gowalla: Users check in on Gowalla to earn stamps on their “passport”. Users may share their locations on Twitter and Facebook. They may also take part in trips created by organizations such as National Geographic, USAToday and CNN.
• Loopt: When Loopt users check in at certain locations, they are able to see which of their friends are nearby. They can even use Loopt to “ping” their friends and share their own location. Loopt allows players to set up alerts when certain friends are nearby or for local hot spots.
• Yelp: This geolocation software lets users check in and review local restaurants, bars, clubs, shops and more. It also allows users to find and read reviews written by other Yelp members.

How can My Business Use Geolocation?

The most basic business application for geolocation software is information about a green business’s customers who use geolocation programs. Before you can access this information, you must claim your green business’s location. Usually this means visiting the program’s website to add your location and claim that you are a manager or owner. After verification, you will be given access to analytics information about who is checking in there. The analytics are usually free and can be sorted in a variety of ways, such as by gender or frequency of check ins.

Once you have claimed your location and begun searching through the analytics, decide what you want to gain from geolocation programs. Do you want to attract new customers or keep current ones? When you decide how you would like to benefit from the programs, you can begin to reward your customers. You may create specials based on the number of check ins a person has or if a player becomes “mayor” of your location. These specials will not only encourage people to visit you, but also to use the geolocation program which will ultimately provide you will better demographic information.

Location Aware Content – Taking Geolocation to the Next Level

Using geolocation programs is only the beginning for your company. You can take your green marketing efforts to the next level by using geotargeting for your blog or website. Geolocation publishing software works best for content management system (CMS), as many publishing platforms have apps or plug-ins that take care of coding your website.

If you do not have an online presence, begin building one with free small business themes and marketing plug-ins. Many small business themes, such as the Business Turnkey WordPress theme, allow you to build a blog and a website. Learn more about how a Marin landscape design company used the theme to quickly and easily create a new website.

When your website is created, you can use geolocation software to tailor your message to people in different locations. The Geoposty GeoLocation Widgets, Posts and Redirects plugin lets you create content that is automatically localized for each visitor. Geoposty shows each of your readers information that is unique to their location and contextually relevant to your site. First, they combine your user’s IP address with the world’s most accurate database of geolocation IP information. Next, they use your custom search term/text/point of interest and combine it with reliable APIs from Google and others. Mix it all together and you get the most relevant, personalized, location-specific content that ever made a WordPress user happy. You can use it to serve up a location based welcome message, local weather, or display local promotions like prix fixe specials at organic restaurants in the area. Fascinating, huh?

Geolocation is another great WordPress plug-in that is perfect for green travel bloggers or green photobloggers. You can use it to share the location, photos and information about eco-friendly businesses you encounter.

Geolocation services create a strong bond between green business owners and their customers. You can learn more about who is walking through your door while rewarding them for visiting you. You can better connect with them online by creating content that is relevant to their location. Combining geolocation and social media may be the answer to a green business owner’s prayers!

If your company or client has multiple locations, such as a restaurant or retail chain, then you need a location-based monitoring and analytics solution. An interview with MomentFeed founder Rob Reed.

First, we wrote that geolocation would be the trend for 2010. Next, we added geolocation as a fundamental topic, alongside social media and green living. Most recently, we cross-posted 10 Ways Geolocation is Changing the World on more than 100 blogs (Guy Kawasaki re-posted it just yesterday). All of which is culminating with the launch of MomentFeed, a first-of-its-kind analytics solution designed to monitor geosocial engagement across hundreds or thousands of physical locations. Indeed, it’s like Google Analytics for the real world.

MomentFeed was founded by Rob Reed and ”a group of marketing and technology executives who believe the nexus of mobile, social, and location amounts to the Holy Grail of marketing,” according to the company website. Rob is also the founder of Max Gladwell. The company recently launched its first product—known as Location Engagement Analytics (LEA)—in beta. To learn more about it, we conducted our third one-on-one interview with Rob in as many years.

Max Gladwell (MG): Tell us a little more about MomentFeed. What does the company do?

Rob Reed (RR): MomentFeed solves a big problem for companies that have any more than 10 or 20 locations. With the rapid adoption of location-based services (LBS), consumers are engaging or “checking-in” to millions of places on a daily basis, and there are no fewer than 20 different applications worth noting so far, not the least of which are Facebook and Twitter. On the Web, companies like Subway and Starbucks have one website and one brand to manage. In the real world, they have tens of thousands of brick-and-mortar locations, each of which is now behaving like a website thanks to smarthphones. Our LEA solution provides a single, dedicated interface to monitor, measure, and manage all of this activity.

MG: So it’s like a Web-style analytics dashboard for LBS? How does it work?

RR: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. We store client locations in our database and match those to the venues on Facebook Places, Foursquare, Twitter Places, and Gowalla (with Whrrl and others to follow). This is actually one of the biggest challenges because each service has it’s own place database, many of which are user generated. Plus, retrieving the right place typically relies on some human intervention. In other words, a location query gives you multiple results, and you have to manually choose the right one. In order to scale our solution, we had to develop a place-matching algorithm that’s accurate without human intervention. It’s a big part of our IP.

MG: What type of location analytics does LEA provide?

RR: First, you can see how many people have engaged (checked-in) with your locations—this is your location traffic—on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The interface is a lot like Google Analytics, but you’re potentially monitoring thousands of places at once. So you can view this activity in the aggregate for all locations or filter down by state, individual location, or a custom group of locations. We’ve also developed a qualitative metric known as an Engagement Score. This measures how deeply people engaged beyond the checkin by leaving comments, writing reviews, or taking photos. The score is represented on a 100-point scale, and it’s independent of traffic volume.

MG: Sounds like some good information, but what does one do with it?

RR: That’s a good question, and the answer can vary from company to company. First and foremost, LEA is a listening and measurement device for LBS. If big brands are going to effectively utilize this new channel, they first have to monitor what’s happening and understand the dynamics of LBS. Most campaigns so far have been about testing or generating quick PR. No one is really moving the needle. Not yet. This is partly a function of scale, but execution has a lot to do with it. With our solution, companies can measure and optimize campaigns across multiple services at the local, regional, and national level. LEA is designed for performance and ROI. As cliche as it may sound, we’re positioned to take LBS marketing to the next level.

MG: Are there MomentFeed competitors or is this a wide-open space?

RR: There are a handful of startups with similar products, which definitely validates the model. But we’re uniquely positioned in terms of (a) the market we’re after, (b) how we integrate with the larger LBS ecosystem, and (c) the value we provide. Our vision is clear and focused. From previous experience, we know exactly what we have to do to execute, but it won’t be easy. In addition to the technical challenges, there is a lot of sales and business development. Incidentally, our timing has been fantastic. We started the first development cycle two weeks before Facebook announced Places in August, and we finished a week after the Places API went public.

MG: Are you planning to add more data sources…other LBS providers? What does your roadmap look like?

RR: Our roadmap has two paths. First, we will be adding new data sources like Whrrl, which already has a public API, as well as SCVNGR, Yelp, Loopt, and Google Places which don’t yet. Next, we’ll add new data types from the current data sources such as demographic, loyalty, and sentiment information.

MG: In terms of the proliferation of different LBS applications, do you see a limit? Will the space consolidate into one or two big winners?

RR: I have no doubt that there will be big winners, but it’s far from winner-take-all. I look at the LBS space more like media, where you’ll certainly have the NewsCorp, NBC Universal, and New York Times of LBS. But you’ll also have hundreds of mid-sized players and thousands of small players consisting of local, regional, and niche-interest apps, each of which share a “location-based engagement” feature. We’re already seeing this with apps like Foodspotting and Instagram. Each has a significant and growing user base, and both would qualify as a data or traffic source for MomentFeed.

MG: How do companies sign up for your beta?

RR: They contact us directly. It starts with providing a csv file of their addresses followed by a product demo. Then they’re up and running with our trial version. This provides traffic and engagement monitoring for all of their locations at no cost. The full-featured version, which is fee based, adds deeper analytics and the ability to monitor competitor locations.

MG: Is your solution open to any company?

RR: Actually, no. LEA isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. In any business, it’s important to know who your customers are but also who they aren’t. This is part of our focus. The value curve for LEA starts to ramp up at about 20 locations. Which isn’t to say there’s no value for fewer locations, especially when you add competitors, but our sweet spot is when you get into the hundreds. That said, we’re looking at some channel partnerships to service the sub-20-location market.

MG: How about running campaigns? The analytics are cool, but LBS is so new that most companies are probably still at a loss.

RR: This would fall under our value-added services. We’ll work with clients to develop a comprehensive LBS marketing strategy. There are a lot of moving parts given multiple services, multiple locations and regions, different promotional mechanisms, and a variety of objectives. But this is also what the LEA solution is designed to track and measure.

MG: So who are your clients?

RR: I’m not at liberty to discuss our beta clients, though I can say they total more than 10,000 locations. In general, though, we work with two types: marketing agencies and large brands. We consider agencies our partners and offer unique programs including a co-branded LEA solution. To be clear, though, we’re not in the business of executing on campaigns or doing any type creative or media buying. We can provide the strategy, intelligence, and relationships to enable an LBS marketing campaign, but execution is handled by an agency or internal team.

MG: What if LBS doesn’t take off like you think it will? Is there a backup plan?

RR: I have little doubt that LBS will become one of the biggest advertising segments since direct mail and television. I say this with confidence because marketers have a huge interest in making this happen. They have every reason in the world to migrate their customers to this channel through various incentives. Think about it. Customers are both present and engaged—they’re in the moment, in your stores with wallet in hand and the ability to share the experience with their social graph. The promotions marketers serve can then be more relevant, personal, and valuable. It’s the Holy Grail for these types of marketers. That said, our business model is not dependent on LBS. We have two more products in development that are location-agnostic.

MG: So this is our third “one-on-one interview,” which is code for interviewing yourself. How do you think it went?

RR: Admittedly, there were a lot of softball questions, but that’s one of its advantages. It really comes back to the obligation—the imperative—to tell your story the way you want it told before anyone else has a chance to do it for you. You certainly can’t count on the press to get it right. And once people do start writing about you, it can take a life of its own. It’s important to have a foundation to your story, and this is ours.

On the question of why to check-in, most are still at a loss. We try to clear it up with four good reasons.

When I talk to non-LBS folks about services like Foursquare, Whrrl, and Gowalla, the typical response is, “Why the hell would I do that?” In other words, why invest the time to check-in? Why bother? What do I have to gain from sharing my location and volunteering this personal information? What’s the pay-off?

The most basic reason for checking in—letting your friends know where you are—is pretty obvious, yet most people don’t see this as having a lot of value. They don’t see it as a sufficient exchange of time and personal information for utility and/or tangible rewards. And that’s what it boils down to for any type of online or mobile service. What’s the consumer value proposition? Or more generally, how does it improve my life?

I’ve often said that LBS trails social media by about two years in terms of its adoption and growth trajectory. Throughout 2010, it has felt like we were re-living 2008 from a marketing and technology perspective. Only instead of exploring, celebrating and/or misunderstanding social media we’ve been doing the same for LBS. A recent study by Pew aligns with this thinking.

According to Business Insider,

“Pew reports that a two years after Twitter launched it only had 6% of the population using it. This suggests Foursquare (and Gowalla, to a lesser extent) are growing just as fast as Twitter did in its early going.”

Not coincidentally, in 2008, I got the very same response when I advocated using Twitter, both from colleagues and brands: “Why the hell would I do that?” In other words, why would I broadcast what I was doing? What’s the utility in that? And who cares what a bunch of strangers are doing?

Answering these questions with any level of satisfaction was nearly impossible. Twitter was so new that you really had to experience it for yourself to understand what it was about and why the hell you’d want to tweet. Indeed, even after 150 million users, the question is still asked, and the answer is far from uniform. There are many reasons to use and gain value from Twitter. The same will ultimately be said for LBS.

In preparation for the next two years, we explore four reasons to check-in and how LBS can improve our lives.

1. To get deals, coupons, discounts, and other rewards

This is the most easy and obvious use of LBS for consumers and businesses, so it’s no coincidence that deals is playing such a huge role in Facebook Places. All of a sudden, 200 million mobile Facebook users have a reason to check-in, and countless businesses have a reason to encourage this behavior. Before this, it really wasn’t obvious to the average Facebook user. It was just a niche form of status update with some added context. Now you can get a discount or make a $1 donation to charity. Of course, Foursquare has its own self-serve coupon and “Specials” features. With SCVNGR, you can attach discounts to game-like challenges, and Gowalla recently unveiled a suite of business features, complete with incentives to check-in. Getting a deal or discount is a universal good and, therefore, has universal appeal. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that relatively few businesses will offer discounts or deals in the short term. And if this is your primary motivation, the absence of a deal means there is no reason to check-in. There clearly has to be more to it.

2. To capture and record all of your travels

A digital travel diary may not be so obvious now. But with the benefit of hindsight, it may be of tremendous value.

I look back to the year 2000. I was a freelance writer for adventure travel magazines, covering snowboarding and mountain biking. Suffice it to say, I visited beautiful places and had some phenomenal experiences. I can easily recall the highlights, and I have thousands of slides from these adventures. But if LBS had been available, I’d have a complete digital diary of the airports, hotels, camp grounds, national parks, ski resorts, bars, and restaurants I’d visited.

This exact value proposition was the key motivation behind Gowalla, where you have a digital passport and earn unique stamps based on the places you check-in. If I recall correctly, Gowalla founder Josh Williams was in Tahoe when he first had the idea (Tahoe is a great place to ski…almost as good as Mammoth.) With a decade worth of content, this can get pretty interesting, especially as features emerge to visualize and re-live those experiences. Today, the most one could have is a couple years, and those memories are probably still somewhat fresh.

Finding value here obviously requires some long-term thinking on the part of consumers. It’s a far cry from the instant gratification of a discount. It’s also not a reason to check-in everywhere all the time. You may feel supermarkets and gas stations don’t qualify for a digital travel journal.

3. Intelligent recommendations

The promise of intelligent recommendations is the feature that gets me most excited. Based on the data I volunteer through checking-in everywhere I go, whether it’s a public or private checkin, location-based services can use their aggregate data to accurately recommend other places I’ll like. Mind you, this is no small task.

Think about the types of breakfast spots, sushi restaurants, cafes, bars, tourist attractions, and hotels you like. The reasons you like them are incredibly nuanced. In many cases, you probably don’t know exactly why you like one or another. Plus, your tastes change over time. So much of this registers at a subconscious level that we’re not even aware of our tastes or that they’ve changed. As such, making an intelligent recommendation about what other places you’ll like is a huge technical challenge. But it also has corresponding value.

Let’s consider a use case. You live in Los Angeles, and you’re traveling to a city (New Orleans, Montreal, Paris) where you’ve never been. You could use a basic place-finder app like Poynt or Geodelic to search for a nearby restaurant or coffee shop. If you want more information, you could use Yelp, which provides user reviews and ratings to further inform your decision. These services provide broad value for everyone. You don’t have to contribute anything. Just open the app and access the information. But the value here isn’t that deep because it’s entirely non-personal. With a Yelp review, you have no clue about whether you’d agree with the people who rated a restaurant with one or five stars. You could invest a lot of time reading all of the reviews to come to some type of conclusion, but who has time for that? It defeats the purpose. With checkin-based LBS apps, there’s a better way. (Note: Yelp also has a check-in feature.)

By checking-in everywhere I go at home and when I’m traveling, no matter how mundane or insignificant, these apps can learn a lot about what I like and don’t like. With enough data, they can learn more about my preferences than I probably even realize. Again, let’t think in terms of many years’ worth of data that may also include sentiment value one way or another. Then consider a data set that includes hundreds of millions of users all over the world.

When I land in New Orleans, Montreal, or Paris, I don’t want to look for a sushi restaurant or sports bar that I might like. I want an app to intelligently recommend a sushi restaurant or sports bar, based on a massive set of data including my own, that I’m all-but guaranteed to like. This type of predictive intelligence for location is only possible if we provide the raw data i.e. a complete history of check-in behavior. That’s the trade-off. That’s the value exchange. And that’s ultimately how LBS improves my life.

Whrrl has been a pioneer in the recommendations space, and Foursquare is rumored to be working hard to add this functionality. Gowalla recently added a Highlights feature, whereby you select your favorite spots in specific categories such as sushi, coffee shops, or museums. Which is precisely the type of data Gowalla needs to make intelligent recommendations about other spots you’ll like at home or when traveling.

4. It’s a fun game to play

Several of the services offer gaming or gaming mechanics, which can add a fun factor to checking-in. Foursquare has its badges and mayorships; Whrrl has Societies and corresponding levels, and SCVNGR is designed around post-checkin challenges that anyone, including marketers, can create. SCVNGR is explicitly positioned as “a game layer on top of the world,” which adds an element of deeper engagement for marketers by associating these challenges with deals, coupons, and discounts (see #1). MyTown, of course, is a pure location-based game, complete with product checkins.

The most compelling aspect of gaming mechanics is that they provide independent value from numbers one, two, and three above. Playing or winning the game is the objective, which can have plenty of entertainment value. In this case, however, the answer to the question of why the hell you’d check-in would have to be, “Because it’s fun.” This clearly appeals to early adopters. It remains to be seen whether this is a sustainable value proposition that improves the lives of mainstream consumers.

Originally published on the MomentFeed Location Blog.

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Facebook expands its Places product by opening its API and adding a Deals feature. What does this mean for LBS?

Originally posted on the MomentFeed Location Blog.

Facebook debuted Places back in August. This added the social gesture of “checking in” to its iPhone and mobile Web apps. It was huge news for LBS, but it was mere foreshadowing to last week’s announcement. What started as a product feature has now become the Facebook Places platform. By extension, Facebook is now the de facto platform for LBS.

The impact of this on the nacent LBS space cannot be overstated. The question is whether it will be positive or negative and for whom. In the following, we highlight the three major announcements—Single sign-on, Open API, and Deals—and what they mean for the LBS ecosystem.

1. Facebook announced a single sign-on for mobile apps. Much like its Web counterpart, being logged-in to the Facebook iPhone app means you can be logged in on any app that uses this new authentication standard. This is huge for mobile in general and for LBS in particular. Consumers can now take their Facebook social graph into any LBS application. Which means that if you’re logged-in to Facebook and open Loopt, MyTown, Gowalla, SCVNGR, Whrrl, Foursquare, and others, you’d already be logged-in on those (assuming each enables it). This lowers the barrier for trying these apps and, therefore, opens them to many more users.

Key takeaway: This creates tremendous opportunities to develop a broad range of applications with a geo-social element.

2. Facebook announced that its Places API (read, write, and search) was being opened to all developers. MomentFeed has been in discussions with Facebook on this for a while, as it enables the company to integrate Facebook Places data into its LEA solution. It also enables any app to push checkins to Facebook and to pull one’s checkin information from Facebook. Now that Facebook is the LBS platform, developers can focus on adding value on top of that using the API.

Key takeaway: Facebook may be the largest LBS platform, but it won’t be the only one (especially if Google and Twitter have their say). Other companies should model their APIs accordingly and compete on features.

3. Facebook dropped the Deals bomb, complete with brand partners including Gap, REI, The North Face, H&M, JCPenny, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and 24 Hour Fitness. This self-service feature enables businesses to offer a range of incentives for checking in. All of a sudden, marketers have a clear reason to use Facebook Places and consumers have a reason to check-in. What’s more, it is free for businesses, so they have nothing to lose in trying it. This will have the greatest impact on the LBS space in general. As MomentFeed detailed in its whitepaper, LBS adoption is equal parts hardware, software, and behavior. Deals is all about the latter. All of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of businesses and hundreds of millions of consumers have a reason to care about LBS.

Key takeaway: While Deals can serve the basic needs of marketers, the LBS space is so vast that there is plenty of room to innovate, differentiate, and add value. Facebook will introduce consumers and marketers to LBS in large numbers, but that’s pretty much where it ends. Established LBS companies have a significant head start in developing beyond-the-checkin products and experiences. At the same time, Facebook has leveled the playing field for new entrants. It’s now quite simple to launch a location-aware application with a checkin feature. And there is no shortage of niche markets in LBS. All of which means that Facebook will further fragment an already fragmented marketplace.

Final note: The one feature Facebook Places does not currently offer is the “Solo Checkin,” whereby you can checkin without broadcasting it to your friends in any way. This would pave the way for mainstream adoption, as many are still wary of the privacy issues. It’s unclear whether Facebook would deem this anti-social and, therefore, anathema to using Facebook. It could also undermine the value for marketers, as the word-of-mouth advertising via one’s social graph is a primary motivator for offering deals. Still, several of the LBS leaders offer some version of this feature, which could be a small way to differentiate.

The one simple feature all location-based services should have in common: a business thank-you message

The location-based services (LBS) space is remarkably fragmented, and the forces at work here are many.

The geographic nature of these services creates hot spots, most notably in urban areas but also in the regions where the companies were founded. Foursquare is hottest in New York, while it should come as no surprise that Gowalla, Whrrl, and SCVNGR are favorites in Austin, Seattle, and Boston respectively. Next, you have niche applications like Foodspotting and JustSpotted, which are both location- and subject-specific. There are vertical-interest checkin applications like those from ESPN, the NBA, and Apple. There are location-based gaming applications like MyTown. And finally there are the catch-all LBS applications from Facebook and Twitter.

Regardless of fragmentation for any reason, each app shares the checkin feature (or some variation) in common. We’d like to suggest another universal feature: “Thank you for checking in.”

As LBS companies struggle with the notion of “checkin fatigue” and how to provide long-term value for consumers, this is an easy first step. Enable businesses to automate a thank-you message. No coupon. No special offer. No reward for becoming the mayor or completing a series of challenges. Just a simple and sincere gesture of gratitude.

In other words, “I appreciate that you chose to engage with my business by checking in and potentially sharing this experience with your friends. I hope our product or service exceeds your expectations and that you enjoy your experience enough to return. Just know that we’re listening, we’re aware of your checkin, and we’re thankful to have you.”

If we’ve learned one thing from social media, it’s that consumer engagement and acknowledgement matter. Just ask any community manager. The problem with LBS apps is that the mechanisms for reciprocating these engagements are not as straightforward or accessible as, say, Twitter or a blog post. For the most part, checkins are met with crickets chirping (or deafening silence, choose the metaphor that best suits you). A few of the apps award points and offer other rewards, but consumers aren’t checking into the apps. The app is the medium. They’re checking into and engaging with a place. If that place is a business, then they’re probably looking for some type of acknowledgement for their effort. This starts with a “Thank you” on behalf of the business itself.

Implementation of this feature can vary. It may be that a thank-you message can only be triggered on a customer’s second or third checkin and then every five checkins after that so as not to be spammy. We’d suggest the ability to upload a logo to properly brand the message, and businesses ought to properly register with each LBS to activate this feature. Gowalla recently launched a set of business features that enable one to claim their spot and “welcome fans with a check-in message or special promotion.” We assume this can be as simple as thanking you for checking in. Several companies offer variations on this. Our point is that a thank-you message ought to be a universal feature that is uniform in its simplicity and intent. The space may be fragmented, but we can all agree that saying “Thank you” is good manners.

This isn’t to suggest that an automated thank-you message is enough to keep people checking in long-term. It’s meant as a first step to enable businesses to reciprocate these engagements and explore the nature of LBS without going right to discounts, sweepstakes, or some other elaborate scheme. Ultimately, a business will want to reward customer loyalty with coupons and exclusive offers. In the beginning—and we are clearly at the beginning—a simple thank you will suffice.

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A cautionary note to advertisers about text messaging as a marketing channel

Have you ever registered a phone number with the national Do Not Call list? If so, then you’re more likely to agree that SMS is not a preferred channel for marketing messages.

I use SMS as a communications channel between friends, family, and people I know. I use it the same way I previously used a home telephone. When my mobile phone alerts me to a text message, I expect to look down and find a message from someone I know, just as I had always expected to pick up the phone and actually know the person who was calling.

Except when a telemarketer got ahold of my number and interrupted whatever I was doing to sell me something that I wouldn’t buy precisely because of how it was being sold. Interrupting me with a sales pitch through what I consider an exclusive communications channel will always result in failure and negative sentiment toward whatever brand is being represented.

Does this mean SMS marketing is not effective? Hardly. In fact, it’s every bit as “effective” as telemarketing. It’s a numbers game. As long as the direct ROI is sufficient, it doesn’t matter how many people you offend in the process. Right? If you agree, then we can agree to disagree. Because this approach isn’t sustainable. Not in a hyper-connected world and not if you value brand equity.

But what if someone has opted in to receive SMS advertising? In this case, you have to consider the consumer experience. Do you want to be an interruption? Do you want your brand associated with that feeling? I’m sure telemarketers use this same justification. After all, your phone number is publicly listed in the phone book, right? And as a Bank of America customer, you volunteered your phone number. You already use several of the company’s services. Why wouldn’t you want more? So BofA calls and calls and calls again. If you didn’t want telemarketing calls, well, you shouldn’t have become a BofA customer in the first place. You opted in.

So what is the alternative? It really comes down to push versus pull. Mobile advertising is no different than what’s come before. It just happens to be more immediate, more relevant, and more personalized. So if SMS is like push-style telemarketing, then mobile applications are like pull-style glossy magazines.

When you open Vogue, Men’s Journal, or Car & Driver, you expect to see advertising. In fact, that advertising is part of the experience because it’s relevant to why you opened the magazine in the first place. It complements the editorial content. In many cases, the advertising has independent value of its own. This type of advertising has pulled (lured) you in based on the value of the overall experience…as opposed to being pushed (shoved) at you with little or no exchange of value. Mobile applications don’t interrupt the flow of what you’re doing because it’s precisely what you are doing. The environment is ad-friendly. And that’s how LBS advertising works through mobile apps.

Location-based applications promise a valuable pull experience. Consumers open these apps precisely to engage with a place or product, often in a social context. Receiving relevant advertising is not only permissible but expected. If I engage with Best Buy or 7-Eleven enough times, I expect some form of reciprocation. It could be as simple as, “Thank you for checking in to 7-Eleven!” Over time I’ll expect more, such as a coupon or exclusive reward, but this is a good first step. The app experience is much more like that of an enthusiast magazine than a telemarketing call.

SMS advertising is tempting because of its ubiquity and scale. And it may have a place with less sophisticated audiences. Otherwise, I don’t see it as an appropriate or sustainable marketing channel for brands that value advertising as an experience.

Originally published on the MomentFeed Location Blog.

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Today’s social media and digital natives are in their 20s. The next generation will be location and smartphone native, and the impact will be even more profound.

The disruptive effect of smartphones on media, communications, and commerce cannot be overstated. It is truly a revolution that will be felt in every corner of society.

Smartphones represent the greatest technological and social disruption since the Internet itself. And just as we referred to those who grew up with the Internet—who don’t know a world without it—as digital natives, we need to consider what it will mean to never have been without a smartphone. To be a smartphone native.

First, a bit of semantic clarification. The term “smartphone” refers to a mobile, handheld computer such as the iPhone. The term is more convenient than accurate. It’s practically an anachronism because the phone feature (voice calling) represents a small percentage of how we actually use them. They have broadband connections, web browsers, e-book readers, maps of the world, motion sensors, and HD video cameras. Indeed, our children will have a radically different idea of what a phone is than we do. Which brings me to a couple anecdotes.

My oldest daughter is three-and-a-half (I also have a nine-month-old). Over the years, she’s had a number of toy cell phones to play with. For most of this time, I’ve had an iPhone. My photo library is essentially her life story. Which is to say I take a lot of pictures of her with my “phone” and have done this for her entire life. So it should come as no surprise that she assumes each of her toy cell phones has a camera. In fact, she does much more picture taking than talking on these toy cell phones. Not coincidentally, this reflects how I use my iPhone.

The next example originated from her love of dance, especially with her cousins. Our extended family was together recently to watch a college football game. My daughter asked if we could play some music, but the game was being played through the stereo. Without thinking twice, she pointed to my iPhone and reminded me it could also play music. So in addition to having a camera, she takes for granted that “phones” store and play music.

In terms of the iPhone itself, my daughter is quite adept at using the actual device. The user interface is so intuitive that she’s been swiping through photos and playing videos for years—yes, years—as well as playing games on the iPad for as long as it’s been available. In addition to taking for granted a camera, photo/video viewing, music playback, and mobile gaming, she’s become familiar with a touch interface long before the keyboard/mouse. As such, I’ve noticed she assumes all screens are interactive (as they should be) and attempts to manipulate them accordingly.

It’s safe to assume, then, that anyone younger than 12 or 13 today is a smartphone native. They won’t know anything different. On the other hand, those of us who (a) grew up without mobile phones and/or (b) used a basic feature phone prior to 2007 are smartphone immigrants. We take none of this for granted. Because we can’t. We’re incapable. And it’s not that we appreciate these technologies too much to take them for granted. It’s that they will always be foreign and new relative to what we’ve always known. So we end up in a constant state of adaptation just as we did with the Internet and World Wide Web. We can become proficient and even fluent. We can learn the language and assimilate to the culture. As immigrants, though, we can never know what it’s like to be a smartphone native. We can only imagine what it’s like to see the world through their eyes.

Smartphone natives won’t think of the features as much as what they enable and how they’re beneficial. Just as all phones have cameras, play music, and use a touch interface, all of them will be location aware right down to the meter and elevation. In the dawn of location-based services (LBS), we’re transfixed on this as a feature and what that feature represents. Smartphone natives won’t care. It’s a bit like trying to explain to a 20-year-old digital native that we once had to dial up to connect to the Internet. They take for granted that the Internet is always on when they open their laptop, which means they can immediately realize the benefits.

Likewise, when a smartphone native opens their device (in a few years), its location will be known and precise. Today we have the dialup counterpart, which is to wait for a fix on our location (insert dial-up modem noise) and then manually choose from a list of possible places. These steps will soon be unnecessary. Which means the feature fades into the background so the benefits can be immediately realized.

Engaging with a place via the checkin or some other mechanism will be central to realizing a range of benefits. These include sharing one’s whereabouts with friends, participating in loyalty programs, receiving personalized offers, playing games, triggering relevant content, and making purchases. By and large, this will still be interactive. In other words, these applications won’t automatically check us in i.e. the “passive checkin.” As consumers and individuals, we will still want to choose to engage on a case-by-case basis. It will just be a helluva lot easier and more intuitive to do so. We might get a push alert, based on our preferences, asking whether we want to check-in. It will be accurate, and a simple “OK” will do it. This isn’t to say passive checkins won’t be possible. They are and will continue to be. They just won’t be as popular as some might assert.

(Side note: Automatic checkins are a lot like automatic Twitter DMs. They’re the weakest of weak engagement and seldom warrant a response, though there are exceptions where it’s integral to the service. Passive checkins are what smartphone immigrants think we need precisely because they’re immigrants and think in terms of changing existing behavior as opposed to native behaviors.)

If you’re skeptical about checkins (location-based engagements) as a new consumer behavior, try to think like a smartphone native. This device is central to pretty much everything you do…work, school, travel, social life, shopping, and entertainment. It’s a primary conduit for experiencing and processing the world. You don’t know what it’s like not to have one, verging on a sixth sense. Most of your behavior is shaped in one way or another by having one at all times. So why wouldn’t it be central to your everyday interactions with people, services, places, and products? Especially if it enhances these experiences and adds value. To put it another way, learning a new language represents a change in behavior; learning a native tongue is just what you do.

Today, we are learning from the smartphone immigrants because the natives are still too young. We’re focused on the early adopters and pioneering companies of LBS. For a forward-thinking brand, however, it’s not too soon to think about how natives will shape the future of commerce and what they’ll expect in terms of service and reciprocal engagement via their smartphone devices. The opportunity this represents to establish long-term brand loyalty at an early stage is the greatest of this generation.

The best thing a brand can do right now is to start monitoring, measuring, and learning. By making sense of the data being generated by early adopters, we can better prepare for the revolution in consumer engagement that’s just around the corner…the revolution smartphone natives will no doubt take for granted.

Originally published on the MomentFeed Location Blog.

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Embracing location-based services (LBS) could be the last best hope for local and regional publishers

It goes without saying that newspaper publishers are suffering. The steady decline in relevance and revenue began in the ’90s with the rise of the Web. This accelerated with Web 2.0 and the Great Recession. The final nail in the coffin could be the rise of mobile and LBS. Alternatively, it could be their savior.

Back in August, Dave Morgan asserted that Location-Based Web Services Will Devastate the Local Media Scene:

“If local newspaper, yellow pages, radio or local TV companies thought that Google, Yahoo, eBay and craigslist were disruptive, they are now going to face down a competitor that will have an even bigger impact on their businesses than any one of those companies did.

I believe that location-based Web services will take 20% to 25% of the annual revenue out of local media’s current advertising base within four years. Yes, 20% to-25% of their revenue base will be lost by 2014. That spend will be displaced by promotion and marketing fees paid to these new location-based services or applications that run on top of them. To the incumbent companies, these new services will be like craigslist on steroids.”

More recently, TheNextWeb stated bluntly that Local Newspapers Are Dead Men Walking:

“The recessions is over and many forms of media are seeing a rebirth of their advertising demand. Things are on the mend for national newspapers, network television, and even radio here in the US.

While those mediums are seeing large gains, inducing cries of joy it must be assumed, local papers are notrecovering. Year over year (YOY) advertising growth for the first 6 months of 2010 versus the first six months of 2009 was a paltry 0.2% for local newspapers, leaving them nearly unchanged after exiting a recession.”

We’ve written several times about the New Media Landscape and the importance of a Fourth Estate to our democracy. Because while the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, there is no guarantee that a press will actually exist. In the U.S., it is wholly dependent on market forces i.e. the ability for a media company to sustain itself in the business of generating news and selling ads. The economics of the Web have seriously undermined this ability. On balance, this is a good thing because it democratizes and decentralizes news production. But local publications can’t make up for lost subscription and print-ad revenue by taking the business online.

Our suggestion is that these companies may have a final shot to survive and, indeed, prosper if they get ahead of the curve and embrace mobile, location-based services aka LBS.

First, let’s look at the current LBS landscape. You have Internet powerhouses like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, AT&T Interactive and several others that want a piece of the very large local advertising pie. Google, Facebook, and Twitter each have a “Places” platform for local businesses. AT&T Interactive has YellowPages.com, and Yelp is, well, Yelp.

Next, you have hundreds of startups that are gaining various levels of traction. These include Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Loopt, PlacePop, Brightkite, SCVNGR, WeReward, ShopKick, DeHood, and Poynt to name a few.

The big companies have the advantage of scale and brand recognition. The startups are nimble, well-funded (in many cases), and far ahead of the curve in terms of features and the cool factor. Unlike local and regional publishers, though, none of them has local presence. And we don’t just mean sales reps, though few even have those. Local papers are part of the community fabric. There is a unique relationship with the audiences and businesses they serve, as well as a staff to serve them. The advertising that local papers sell supports something of value to that community: professionally produced, locally relevant content. These are the unique assets local media can leverage to implement an LBS strategy that can save their businesses.

What does this look like? It will vary from case to case, often involving a combination of branded apps and strategic partnerships. The key point is the ability to monetize LBS. This is precisely why there are so many players of all sizes vying for their share of LBS revenue. The combination of mobility, presence, engagement, context, relevance, and personalization will yield tremendous returns. For traditional publishers, it has the potential to replicate print advertising revenue in ways that online advertising never could and never will.

But the window of opportunity won’t be open for long. Publishers hesitated with the Web, and it quickly ate half their lunch. If they hesitate again, LBS will certainly eat the other half.

If you’re a local or regional publisher looking to explore an LBS business strategy, you can contact MomentFeed to engage their services and leverage their proprietary location technologies.

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