Bill Hanifin
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Fresh from South by Southwest, I read a fascinating profile of self-proclaimed Cyborg Anthropologist Amber Case where she outlined a compelling vision for the future of location based marketing.
Case is the founder of Geoloqi, a company positioned to use geo-fencing to “redefine the possibilities of location-based intelligence”. In a recent TED talk, Case shared some of this philosophy, saying that “We (people) are co-creating each other all the time” through our digital interactions.
If I were to grossly oversimplify her message, it is that Geoloqi plans to develop Smartphone apps that will reverse the information flow for users to vastly increase the utility and importance of location based applications for users.
Reversing the information flow means that the mobile app serves up useful information to the user based on configured preferences as well as accumulated historical data. The trouble with location based marketing today is that the user has to initiate the interaction and invest valuable time, all without promise of anything in return. News from Foursquare shared at SXSW as well as the imminent closing of Gowalla and Loopt underscore the changes afoot among LBM leaders.
James Tenser said it best in a Brain Trust discussion on Retail Wire this week responding to Walgreen’s location based experiment with Foursquare “Time-consuming silly apps won’t win me over, neither will improbable lottery prizes, or irrelevant coupon incentives. I don’t have to make this easy for you either. Your job is to make it easy for me.”
Another Brain Trust contributor, Ed Rosenbaum, challenged the current user-initiated LBM model in this way “Tongue in cheek I ask, does anyone (besides me) work any more, or do we just tweet where the bargains are?”
Have a quick look at the TED talk here and give some thought how you could adapt your loyalty marketing communications to fit comfortably with this new view of the mobile world. I think you’ll find that, once again, it’s not about the technology, it’s about making the technology relevant and useful to the user.
