birddog

Location, Location, Location

Location-based social media is all the rage in 2010, but has its potential for businesses been dashed before they’ve even moved in?

A lot of new media buzz is generated when a new ‘breakout’ company arrives on the scene. Twitter was 2009’s indisputable success story, and for a long time, it looked like Foursquare might check-in at number one for 2010. It’s trendy, fun, and it comes readymade with a simple business model that companies and brands could quickly benefit from.

But its rocketing popularity has been stymied during a period of increasing focus on privacy online.

Foursquare, for those unacquainted, is the feted darling of location-based social media tools. As opposed to being asked ‘What’s happening?’ by Twitter, Foursquare in essence asks its users – around 3 million, up from 500,000 in March this year – the question ‘Where are you?’

To answer, Foursquare users ‘check-in’ to their favourite places, racking up visitor points and unlocking badges when visiting new places and their top locations. The user who checks-in to a location most often becomes its ‘Mayor’ (the service works using GPS-tracking to confirm a person’s whereabouts, so there’s no cheating).

Harmless enough, and given the pervasiveness of smartphones, laptops, netbooks et al, it’s pretty useful. And the epitome of social, too: using your techno gadgets to tell people exactly where to find you in real-time can only encourage and accelerate face-to-face communication.

But there’s a very stark privacy issue. Like Twitter, the chances are most of your Foursquare followers are people you’ve never met, and don’t really know anything about. And yet the service provides complete strangers with your precise location.

The Guardian highlighted this best with this article (check out the sinister opening line, “Louise has straight, auburn hair…” http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/23/foursquare) but such concerns have been bubbling under since Foursquare launched. Worries vary from the naïve, where users detail the location of their homes (and then detail when they’re out), to the conspiratorial: fears that governments or security agencies can monitor an individual’s whereabouts through their social network activity.

The truth is, despite its relative success in the US, adoption in the UK has been slow. For the right brand, the benefits are clear enough: using Foursquare to engage with audiences and reward consumer loyalty adds a competitive edge to customers’ interactions with a brand, and incentivises ‘another’ visit to a favourite coffee shop, bar, cinema, park, tourist attraction, etc.

Now, fresh from its own privacy problems earlier this year, Facebook has entered the ‘geosocial’ space with their launch of Facebook Places. While it’s put location-based social networks on the map (sorry), those privacy concerns have suddenly become a mainstream hot topic, thanks to the small matter of its half-a-billion strong user base.

As a result, much of the wider audience will so far only have been exposed to Foursquare and the ‘geosocial’ buzz through its negative publicity.

Social media in 2010 is undoubtedly all about location, but its full impact may have already been damaged, at least short-term, by concerns over privacy. And until these are fully understood, brands thinking about location-based social networking might be served best by waiting to see whether ‘geosocial’ literally does go global – or disappears off the face of the Earth.

Tim Miller

Content Editor

Mobile – It’s the new black

I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about my new iPhone. It is a thing of beauty that I, quite literally, take to bed with me and, more than once, have found myself licking with affection. When I finally converted from my totally unusable Sony Ericsson, I was accused of simply being a sheep and following the herd, but I care not a jot, I’m in love. The best part of course, is that I don’t have the slightest inkling how to use the damn thing and am only just starting to discover the possibilities. Which are endless.

My wife has already banned me from holding it when I’m talking to her because, apparently, I’m more interested in the content on my phone. She actually hides it when we have visitors to the house because, “Sitting on the sofa with your phone and grunting occasionally does not count as joining the conversation…” Of course, I am actually fully engaged in the conversation, just not hers.

So, whilst clearly not first to the bar at the SmartPhone party, I find myself fully committed to the future of mobile internet delivery. It’s an area of the marketing mix that has been woefully underexploited in the business community, but it’s OK, you can relax, I’m going to fix that.

Having started to explore the opportunity, it came as no real surprise that users’ appetite for mobile content is far more advanced than brands’ understanding of the technology and capabilities, or limitations. Despite the Credit Crunch, over 40 million G3 Smartphone devices had been sold worldwide at the end of 2008 with some of the top manufacturers still posting sales growth of over 80% pa. Whilst the recession may be hurting large parts of the global economy, the mobile market is growing – at speed.

And yet businesses have failed to capitalise on the ability to deliver their digital content to this rapidly growing mobile audience in anything like a compelling way. If I want to access a website from my phone (and I do, all the time…) I can do it, but the experience sucks. On a 3×2” screen, I really don’t care about your flash animations and your searchable, keyword heavy content that appears in 0.05 point type with fifteen dropdown navigation tabs that I can’t read. I couldn’t be arsed to pinch and slide and zoom and scroll – I want and need better delivery of your content on my mobile device if I’m going to engage with your brand. And I’m not the only one. There are 39.99m others who would like a better experience too.

In the next couple of years, I predict an explosion in the development of website content for mobiles. It started with, “There’s an app for that…” where iPhone users could enjoy bespoke applications, easily accessed, with simple, intuitive functionality, but fell short when links from the app led straight back to standard web page content on the main brand website. That needs to change. We need to differentiate between static delivery of web content (large format screens), and mobile devices (SmartPhones, NetBooks, PDAs). The difference is obviously the size, but also the needs of the audience using the device and the environment in which they are using them. Speed, clarity and simplicity of content will reward the brands who move boldly into this space with the customer attention that they need to secure.

Options at the moment, however, are limited. But that’s the opportunity. Brands can use their own IT department to deliver mobile internet (the BBC has made a good job of it) but it takes time, costs are high and it may not work across all mobile platforms. Or they can tap into the expertise of others – Mobestar is my favourite. Mobestar’s mLite suite is, “…the first packaged product to automate mobile website production.” I liked it so much, I joined the company. Far from being a sheep and following the herd then, I believe I’m actually leading the pack. So flock ewe.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666