Mobile platforms and location-based networks could take social marketing to the next level

Google Inc. has warily watched the rise of social-networking site Facebook Inc. Now the Internet companies are bringing their rivalry to a new area: the race for local business-ad dollars.

Google has been scrambling to develop a social-networking-type service to rival Facebook's, people familiar with the matter have said. Now they are both after local-ad dollars. So far, only a fraction of local businesses advertise online. But in an interview Wednesday, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called the local market a "big space."  Overall, small and medium-sized businesses with 100 or fewer employees spent $35 billion to $40 billion in all forms of local advertising in the U.S. in 2009, estimates BIA/Kelsey, a local-media advisory firm. Matthew Booth, a senior vice president at BIA/Kelsey, estimates that about 1.2 million small businesses in the U.S. already pay Google to appear in text ads alongside Internet search results.

Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook and Google "will compete a little bit."

Google struck a polite tone about Facebook Places. "We always welcome additional tools that help put people in touch with information about the world around them," said John Hanke, a Google vice president of product management. Google and Facebook aren't the only ones fixated on places. Twitter Inc., the microblogging service, earlier this year launched Twitter Places, which allows users to broadcast, or "tweet," their location, including at businesses, to followers of their messages. Over time, the company is expected to try to line up local businesses to offer deals to users in connection with the feature. Google last September began creating Place pages for millions of public places, including businesses. Businesses that contact Google can lay claim to a Place page, gaining more control over the content on the page. They also can see the origin of Google users who visit their page and sign up to advertise their services to users of Google's search and maps. Google, which for years has been amassing business listings, says more than four million businesses have a Place page and "thousands" have paid to have their listing highlighted in search queries and maps for about $1 a day, according to Mr. Hanke. He added that about 20% of Google search queries focused on local places. More than 10 billion search queries were executed through Google last month, according to comScore Inc. Now Facebook is asking businesses to create a Place page on its site and is encouraging them to advertise their products to users. In addition, Facebook is letting users "check in" at public places using their mobile phones, which can pinpoint their location through GPS and other means. Checking in allows people to notify friends in their social network that they are at a bar, for example. A host of companies have built mobile-device applications centered around the check-in concept, including Foursquare Labs Inc. and Booyah Inc. For instance, users of Booyah's popular iPhone check-in game, MyTown, are able to check in almost anywhere. The applications sometimes show their users ads from local businesses based on their location.

Google lets app makers such as Booyah tap into its database of 50 million places around the world. Booyah is using that Google data to expand MyTown into foreign countries. At the same time, Google is starting to serve MyTown users with offers from local businesses, said Booyah CEO Keith Lee. Following suit, Facebook aims to amass a database of local businesses and give app developers access to that data. Booyah has already jumped in: When Facebook told Booyah about its forthcoming Places product three weeks ago, the company built a new iPhone check-in game, InCrowd, in time for the launch on Wednesday.

via : wsj.com

The mobile app allows users to alert their friends to their whereabouts

Facebook has launched its much-anticipated answer to location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla .Like those mobile applications, Facebook Places allows users to alert their friends to their whereabouts. Mobile apps have become increasingly popular. They're frequently used by younger, highly wired demographics to "check in" at  localities -- including restaurants, bars, airports and coffee shops -- using smartphones' GPS technology. (See also: "Foursquare Frenzy.")

Facebook Places allows for similar "check ins." The company is billing the tool as a way for members to share favorite places with friends and to help users find friends when they are out and about. According to officials, built-in privacy controls ensure that only users' friends can see where that person is at a given moment. Users can also be selective about which of their friends they include in alerts. "If you're like me, when you find a place you really like, you want to tell your friends you're there," wrote Facebook Places product manager Michael Eyal Sharon. "Maybe it's a new restaurant, a beautiful hiking trail or an amazing live show. [Now], you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot ... You can share where you are and the friends you're with in real time from your mobile device."

That instant-sharing dynamic raises some questions. As Facebook Places rolls out (starting with the iPhone), will fans of check-in services abandon platforms like Foursquare? Or will users prefer to keep their "here's-where-I-am-now" lives separate from their Facebook lives? The latter often include users' family members and professional friends and acquaintances. On the other hand, if it proves popular, Facebook Places also has the potential to unlock a massive local e-commerce platform. Already, many local businesses use similar services to encourage foot traffic and shopping by providing points that can lead to discounts -- or via game-like achievements, such as becoming mayor of a local diner. Facebook's 500 million members will surely entice many merchants to test incentive programs which employ Facebook Places.

One sunny spring day in 2004, Dennis Crowley was running down Waverly Street dressed in yellow, avoiding ghosts. Crowley, then a 27-year-old grad student in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, was participating in a class project called Pac-Manhattan, which used the streets of Greenwich Village for a grueling physical version of the classic arcade game. He was Pac-Man, and—despite a support team that was logging his movements, tracking ghosts, and directing him to power pills—people dressed as Pac-Man spooks eventually cornered him near Fifth Avenue. The New York Times described the experience as “a kind of tableau of digital convergence with the physical world.” Six years later, Crowley and I are sitting in a NoHo cafè pecking at our iPhones. Using Foursquare, an app Crowley cocreated, we are “checking in” to the restaurant. Like many mobile social applications that use GPS, Foursquare lets you broadcast your location to friends and strangers—and, of course, it lets you see where they are, too. Sometimes, when you check into a restaurant, store, or hotel lobby, a previous visitor will have left a tip (“Oatmeal is great here!”)—a digital note tucked under a virtual doormat. But Foursquare is more like a game than a newsfeed. Participants are encouraged to become geographic Boy Scouts, collecting merit badges for the locations they rack up. The most frequent visitor to a given coffee shop, department store, or subway stop gets to be its “mayor,” a designation that’s worth a lot to some. “It’s a hypercompetitive app,” Crowley says. “The badges are good for people who like to collect. And the mayorships are good for people who are territorial.” Power may flow to whoever racks up the most visits to a given Starbucks, but there’s another way in which Foursquare and its kin change how we see ourselves. When we’re holding a GPS-enabled device, our identity isn’t a question of “who, what, where.” It’s a question of “where, what, who.” By putting location first, these apps transform the ethic of the Internet itself, which has traditionally held that it matters not where your fanny is planted. But the neatest thing about Foursquare is what happens when you’re at some location where other users have checked in. Strangers are identified by first name and last initial. If they have allowed the link, you can even peek at their Facebook pages. So you eyeball the crowd in the restaurant, nightclub, or highway rest stop and try to figure out who’s who. Suddenly, real life is like visiting some dungeon in World of Warcraft. Greeting a stranger in WoW, of course, is painless and socially acceptable. A challenge for Foursquare and its competitors is to create a graceful, noncreepy way to break the ice in the scary real world. Otherwise only reckless adventurers or nutcases would opt in. Here’s one idea: a feature that alerts you when it finds simpatico music on the playlist of someone nearby. You could then ping that tasteful person and reveal what mobile tunes you’re loaded with. A match could lead to texting—testing out whether a conversation (or song sharing!) is called for. That would be an even cooler game than Pac-Manhattan.

Location-based services are clearly massively important at the moment and two recent stories demonstrate how seriously the major tech players take them.

First, as TechCrunch reported yesterday, Apple has been using its own location database since April this year for newer iOS devices. Previously Apple used Skyhook and Google for its location data.

Secondly, Google has opened up access to Google Places via an API. This would allow apps driven by check-ins, such as Foursquare, to use Google’s database of places rather than create its own. This would mean, as Read/Write Web explains, that a business could update its information with Google and then be confident that every service using the Places API would have the right info. It’s tempting to view these two stories in terms of the typical ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ narrative that dominates so many discussions about tech these days. However, rather than adopting a moral position each company is in fact taking the line that best fits their business model. Google makes its money from advertising, which requires eyeballs. By spreading their services far and wide they can maximise the number of potential eyeballs for their ads. It’s no surprise that developers wishing to implement the Places API must have a Google Adsense account too. Apple, on the other hand, makes its money from selling devices. Their interest is in providing the best experience for the owners of iPhones, iPads and Macs so it makes sense for them to try to control the whole process. Of course, since they are taking their own steps into the advertising business with iAds, it also makes sense for them not to use shared services, since doing so would probably benefit Apple’s competitors more than it would benefit their customers. The relative strategies seem logical to me. What’s significant is how, regardless of strategy, both Apple and Google are taking location very seriously indeed.

Google is stepping into location-based advertising with the introduction of mobile banner add that show users nearby services.

The unit is an offshoot of AdWords' location extensions. It allows advertisers to attach their phone numbers and business location on an expandable map.The new ad format will run on sites and applications that are part of the Google Display Network. Users of smartphones like iPhone and Android will see a text call to action and small thumbnail graphic. Tapping on the ad expands it to show a Google Map with the business plotted and number displayed.  Google will only charge advertisers when users tap to call the business or visit the advertiser's mobile site. Surojit Chatterjee, senior product manager for mobile ads at Google, said Google would determine the location of users through a variety of means, including nearby WiFi networks and the Internet Protocol address. The process is trickier than location-based search ads since users will not opt-in to provide Google specific location information. "We try to do our best to get the location as good as possible," he said. "We're trying to infer it from indirect means as best we can." The process is complicated by the large role Google rival Apple plays in the mobile market. Its rules forbid application developers, for example, from collecting location data only for advertising purposes. Chatterjee said the radius for location ads would vary. A car dealership listing, for instance, could be miles away, while a coffee shop ad would be within blocks. Google has eyed mobile advertising as potentially a huge driver of future growth. It faces competition in the area from independent ad networks like Millennial Media and Greystripe as well as Apple's new iAd net. Google bought mobile network AdMob for $750 million, and it has rolled out several types of mobile ad products, including click-to-call placements and expandable ads that display video and other content.

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of hot location-based social service Foursquare, addressed a roomful of marketers in June. He asked for a show of hands of how many had tried to work with the company but didn't hear back. A lot of hands went up. The simple message: the still-small company is struggling to further develop its service while responding to the avalanche of requests. Now, with $20 million in new funding, agencies are hopeful the digital world's new belle of the ball will build tools to help them use the service in deeper ways. Adweek spoke with several agencies that report frustrating experiences with Foursquare. Some have found it both hard to contact and unwilling to come up with marketing ideas. One agency representing a major package-goods client said the company put the onus on the brand and agency to find the best way to use the service.
"They're not responsive and extremely hard to work with," said a digital agency exec who asked not to be named. "It's hard to bring campaigns to life. Nobody knows how to create a badge or ask [Foursquare how] to enable behavior. It's black magic." In general, he said, "it's pretty much unworkable."  One sticking point is Foursquare's strategy of initially limiting advertiser participation. Pepsi, for instance, has an exclusive lock on the soft drinks category. Additionally, Foursquare has identified one "charter advertiser" for some major categories, which it then works with to better understand what works before taking on other advertisers. While less formal than exclusive contracts, it nonetheless leaves some competitors out in the cold, if only temporarily.

"There have been a number of things we've been told we can't do because it's already being done in some markets," said Adrian Ho, a partner with Zeus Jones. Working with Foursquare, he noted, is in some ways similar to working with Facebook in its early days.  Foursquare doesn't "have the infrastructure that makes clients comfortable," Ho added. "It's a bit like the Wild West. It's hard to get meetings in person. It's hard to get time on the phone." There is the danger the hiccups will sour relationships. Mark Drapeau, Microsoft's director of innovative social engagement, left a scorching comment on a blog post about Foursquare. He said he tried everything from e-mailing to calling to stopping by Foursquare's office in the hopes of doing a partnership for a Microsoft event that would include a custom badge. He said he eventually gave up.  "They're creating a new marketing opportunity," said Andrea Harrison, social media lead at Razorfish, which has yet to work with Foursquare on a program. "They don't have the packaged media kit ready to go." Many startups, of course, experience growing pains. The company's smaller competitors, for instance, are also still figuring out how to work with businesses. Gowalla, for one, does not yet have self-service tools for businesses. Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla, said it's working to develop them. "There's a lot of hype in the space," he said. "There's promise of great things that will happen, but right now it's really fledgling."

- Brian Morrissey

Mobile marketing is not just for smartphones

This ia a guest post by Justin Davies, founder of NinetyTen, a UK-based consultancy providing mobile community and location aware solutions to companies. Davies also founded the now defunct BuddyPing, an early mobile social networking community based on the realtime location of users.

Not to sound too much like my grandad talking about the War, but when I was doing this, it was all about sending a text message to a person walking past Starbucks with a half price voucher.

Back in my day, we had to pay for location information, none of this “SimpleGeo” or “Google Latitude” malarkey you youngsters have these days.The only phones that had a GPS chip was a prototype N95 I had to beg Nokia for, and some Blackberry phones. Yes dear Location Based enthusiast, these are bright times, and this does finally seem to be the year of location (though, admittedly, this has been the case for the past 3 years). I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but location is big news at the moment. The location players are building solid relationships with big business and tapping into an enthusiastic, engaged and mobile user base. Location is a an exciting, but tough space to thrive in. Location, and realtime location at that, is a rather large privacy issue which, when a service becomes popular, starts making people question just how sensitive their information is. Early Adopters are notoriously OK with sharing information, they get the idea that when you post a photo on Facebook, it will be seen by everyone in your feed by default. Unfortunately, any argument to an end user that they can control that information using Lists aren’t really arguments after all.

The user was not educated by the service provider, and let’s face it, shoving privacy in everyone’s face all the time puts up a barrier to hip kids, because you sounds like their Dad.

(Source: The Next Web)

In the uTest report, one of the most obvious, and at the same time staggering things, is that privacy is so much bigger an issue than whether I am the Mayor of the Starbucks outside work. I don’t want my boss to know I am the person that spends the most time at the coffee shop and not at my desk.

Privacy will always be an issue with large, connected networks of people. Flattening the physical world into our laptops and phones will always cause problems because we forget who we are connected with.Status updates by their very nature are 140 characters or so long, they are not built to have a huge amount of thought put into them, let alone who will eventually see or not see them. If you throw location into the mix, then even the most innocuous location update, or historical patterns (Mayorships) can land you in warm water before you have realised it.

I’ve double booked drinks with a friend, and in my celebratory state after drinking with the preferred option, have managed to inform the world, and more importantly the person I kicked to the side that I was not in a very important, 5 hour meeting that has overrun, but was actually “lovin’ these mojitos right now!” with damning photographic evidence. This is not to say that location services are doomed. Far from it, as more people are considered early adopters, they educate people on the benefits of open communication, and educate them on the merits of privacy as not only a mindset, but as a tool. There will need to be better privacy controls within location based services for them to become truly mainstream. I want to share my location with my family when it is relevant for them to know, but I don’t want to have to think about what lists I should send my location to.

Back in the day, this was one conversation that I took part in over and over again about Location. We knew location was a key piece of information for someone to interact with the world, and it opened up a new way of discovering content that was more relevant. I could finally type Pizza in an LBS system, and it would tell me about things nearby (this was the demo I always used to give for location based search). One thing that was missing from location we found was context. A simple idea of context in location is the “I am at Work”, “I am at Home” problem. If I searched for “Pizza” when in work mode, it’s probably because I want a work lunch with clients. If I did it when I was at home, I’d want to know about delivery pizza.

These different contexts would potentially help with who I would want to share a status update with, something I often think about getting round to figuring out with historical location information, along with times and keyword analysis of a location stream. Is there a way of understanding a user’s context based on information about them? Would this also be a privacy issue? This is where Foursquare, Gowalla and new services like Pappd have changed the dynamic of sharing location, they have Game. Adding Gameplay into location provides a safe mindset to share your location freely to a wider list of people because they are part of the same game.

The same goes for Flickr displaying the location of your photos. Your taking a photo of the location and sharing it with other people goes hand in hand. If I take a photo at a gig and share it, you can tell from the photo where I am. My location guard is down, and I feel comfortable people would know where I was. The fact I am sharing my view of the world right now visually has dampened my concerns about privacy, and the Gameplay Flickr uses is “upload better photos than other people”. Utilising Gameplay does something else that helps the with sharing our location. It importantly helps me learn how other people’s location is shared with me. Understanding how other people’s location is shared with me, helps me understand intrinsically how much information is shared and seen by other people at me.

With every game, there is always a winner. With a very large amount of people playing the game, we have to democratise the winning. Remember, it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts! With the bewildering success of couponing, vouchers and group buying recently, rewarding people for taking part is a logical way to give them something back for engaging with you and other users. Foursquare has done something very interesting with this and managed to reward not only the users of the platform, but also the places they check in to. Providing Starbucks with information about who passes through their stores (anonymised of course!), and allowing them to analyse how often people checkin, view historical data, and also have the potential to reach those people on the move is something that those venues want. Badly.

The checkinee and checkiner both win in this situation, and this builds an ecosystem around the platform. It’s a smart move, because as both sides see more benefit from using Foursquare, they will dedicate more time to interacting with the community. This I would hazard a guess is why rumours of big players courting the founders over the past few weeks have come from. They are solving one of the biggest issues about monetising location and getting the big chains, and the little guys interacting with Foursquare’s userbase on a level playing field.

As a parting shot dear reader, if you are thinking about being the next Gowalla or Foursquare, think outside the box. The world is a very large, and spherical place, mapped by a long/lat address. What about developing countries, where the penetration of mobile data usage far outstrips that of broadband, or even dial up modems? 99% of all location services I have seen are targeted squarely at Early Adopters. If you are looking for the next big thing in location, one that attracts people in the millions, look at the developing markets, because connecting people in disparate locations, and giving those people a way to share information is a great start.