Adding Location based Services | Advantage Brands

I am on Foursquare.com, there is gowalla.com and I am not mayor of Times Square. Well, if you are still sitting in a big chair in a Fortune 200 company’s marketing office spending $800m and printing your own in-house magazine, secure in the knowledge that Location based services are the map providers on your car GPS and Navstar systems, this wake up call is for you.

You are happy that your ad agency has worked to the letter on your last 3 briefs..read on. You are the boss of department untouched by the latest storm to hit Facebook and Twitter, because you have a friendly social media strategy where the web is abuzz about the best that you offer and the not so good has been taken care of. Well, your and my world is about to change. The last privacy brouhaha was when location being made available to all my readers and any other publisher’s post meant that tweeting was risky. There had been reports of burglary’s because the robbers knew you were away..Not that any of them have been sorted out, they never are. In October 2009, foursquare.com was launched and to cut a long story short, millions were anointed mayors of their favorite cafe, mall and even schools. A lot of global travelers can now access tips of travel, stay and food at a diner, or in a new town and much more. That till last week was as far as it got. Now with a couple of 2010 conferences and well-timed roll outs this is going to be a long distant past in the history of the social revolution, the social web.

Facebook is adding inline location information with each status update

Now location-based services mean Four Square and more. Twitter’s location moves on from coordinates and nonsensical rhymes to geographically verified locations. Four square is also getting special treatment for iPhone apps and integration with Facebook. All this in the coming few weeks. Location based services have seemingly overpowered significant privacy concerns and make the web capable of communicating meaningfully and locating your own social circle in the ‘real’ world. It still can’t tell whether a NFL athlete is on or off the field when tweeting so it’s not that easy for users. Apps based on Foursquare have thus also made an entry, making beautiful GUI on the iPhone, (or Blackberry or Android) these apps let you check in to Foursquare and locate yourself for the handy tips and points, while if you are looking for tips, the same are available. Mapquest and the other geo coding apps of course remain at the base of the revolution, so the apps on top will have the same level of accuracy and can easily add features like driving directions etc on to it.

How do brands come into it? They will have to find a way. At least in the consumer / retail – lifestyle space, the users are not going to wait for their offline Macy’s, Starbucks or even the Coke or Pizza they want. The brand’s social strategy has to move from a Facebook page and find innovative ways to touch the customers with electronic coupons and in fact their own social games rather than ‘advertising’ on or around social games and animation. There is less reason today for not knowing your consumer personally and to keep in touch with customised preferences of all individuals from the billions that consume your drink or wear your shoes is now possible. If you don’t make it, someone else will. For the socially aware world ( 20% of the world is on Facebook right now!) not knowing their each and every quirk could soon become unforgivable. Banking and Healthcare should start using it now to earn their badges back. Maybe some brands can help them do that. Also I think Yahoo and Google could really start a counter trend by sponsoring such free Wi Fi services all over! It has to be a real brand to get mileage from Wi Fi on almost all domestic flights and major airports..