Location, Location, Location

It’s a frightening thought that sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would love us to live in a world where you sit on the internet all day and never meet anyone face to face or go outside in the real world. The longer you sit online the more time you can be bombarded and subtly displayed adverts and so the more money they earn. Thankfully, we have not been fully immersed into the internet yet and a great reason for this is being able to search the web on your mobile phone. This points towards the main thing that frees us from being enslaved to the internet – physical location. The reason why we don’t all go for a pint with our friends on Facebook chat, whilst tweeting about how you’re having a wild night is because we all have a basic need to be in the physical company of others. This is why location is important.

New services are hatching as pioneers come up with new ideas such as Gowalla and Google Latitude where you can post your exact location online and play location based travel games. But if sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google start adding location-based services (LBS) with millions of members it will have a dramatic effect. Twitter is currently working on a geolocation service where you can attach your location on to tweets. Imagine reading that an old friend you haven’t seen for years is in a pub round the corner. You could avoid your ex in ways you’ve never been able to do before. It also opens up a new meaning to the term ‘Facebook stalking.’ On a larger scale services will also be able to provide information such as which nightclub everyone is flocking to one night.

What does this mean for marketers?
Well if you haven’t already guessed pioneers have more than likely struck gold. Being able to access the context of the consumer opens up a new world of marketing tactics. With more power comes more responsibility as the old saying goes so one of the main challenges will be protecting consumers privacy. Like all marketing it will be essential that privacy is transparent to gain consumer trust before they buy into these new services. Researchers have already been commenting that location isn’t everything. You will also have to know about people’s tastes and interests and exercise discretion instead of bombarding people with ads that will more likely make them switch off the app than interact with it. However if successful it could open up a whole new world of marketing techniques accessing what the consumers interests right here right now, where ever that may be.

Images by Moriza

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