Location Based Services: Where’s the beef?

My buddy Mark Schaefer wrote a post yesterday detailing The World’s Greatest Foursquare Experiment. It had me nodding my head in agreement at times, chuckling at other times and thinking back to the early days of PCs, the Internet and Social Media after I’d finished reading it.

Mark said that he thought that he “gets” Foursquare. And I suspect that he does. He’s a very savvy marketing and social media leader. He teaches at the university level and to his credit, when his students wonder about a technology/marketing/social media trend, he’s not afraid to go out there and get his hands dirty. I rather suspect he’s one of the few professors around talking about Foursquare with his marketing students in a classroom setting.

He went on to say that he understood the potential significant business benefits and he linked to an article by Social Fresh’s Jason Keith from last week that listed some Foursquare business case studies. The same afternoon that Jason wrote that he hosted a social media Twitter chat where some of the same issues that Mark talks about were discussed as well.

Lastly, he wondered if if Foursquare can reach critical mass to be a widespread consumer social media platform. And thus began his “Foursquare Experiment.”

Let’s look at what he discovered and see if we can offer any thoughts that might suggest where and why services like Foursquare might reach that critical mass.

It can be a pain in the ass to checkin.

He didn’t quite say it that way but he’s a ‘southern gentleman’ and has likely been raised better. The checkin process needs to improve. No doubt about it. And it will. My suspicion is that soon businesses and venues will use barcodes or something very similar to facilitate the process. Then, instead of relying on data tables pulling businesses from cell tower coordinates, we’ll be able to just scan the barcode with our smart phone or device as we pass by or upon entering the business.

Where everybody knows your name.

Mark started to get, and accept, friend requests from people in Foursquare. The only problem I see here is his accepting requests from complete strangers. It’s a social service. Part of what will likely drive the explosive growth is this same social-ness. It’s really not so much different than Twitter in some regards here. I know he probably doesn’t accept every Twitter follow request. Speaking of Twitter, they too have enabled location based services. How long until all of us opt in to that and tell the world where it is we’re tweeting from at the moment?

Trust me, I’m a Mayor.

This is just good fun (even for old guys like me) and it’s part of what has drawn the early adopters. Is there any value in it? Bragging rights for now but as the services mature there will be value that will be delivered through things like loyalty programs that don’t require you to keep up with some silly punch card or whatever. You’ll checkin to your favorite places and get your loyalty rewards and wonder how you ever got along without location based services before. As those businesses that Mark referenced earlier get savvier about how to market using location based services, value to us as consumers will continue to grow as new and innovative ways of interacting are introduced.

Vanna, is there an “M”?

Mark mentions that the system as it exists now can be gamed. Bernie Madoff anyone? Yes, right now you can just pass by a place and checkin. Hell, you don’t even have to ‘pass by’. Again, as the systems mature and things like barcodes supplement the checkin process this will become difficult to ‘game’.

True Value (unless you’re an Ace/John Madden fan), Cost vs. Reward and keeping the bad guys at bay.

Mark mentions instant coupons, menu recommendations and connecting with friends who happen to be at the same location. While he didn’t happen to get any coupons during his experiment, they’re out there being offered by forward thinking businesses. Some offer them the first time you checkin. TriOutNC, a location based service I work with in the Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill area, offers businesses the opportunity to do just this for every customer who checks in. Going forward, and if you opt in, I think you’ll get coupons and special offers as you enter areas that are coming to be called geo fences. In essence, you’ll enter an area and if you’ve opted in, you’ll get coupons, special offers, etc. pushed to your smartphone or device.

The real value of course, outside of the tangible benefits of coupons, loyalty programs, gifts and savings, is on the social side of things and the convenience side. Imagine you’ve just finished dinner and you want to get a drink or a cup of coffee someplace else. Again, using TriOut as an example, you’d simply go to the app, or the mobile site in a browser if you prefer, and you’d see a list of those places close by. A quick tap and you’d see what your friends think of the places, see photos of the venue, available menu items, etc. That’s convenience.

From the social side of things, being able to connect with friends close by, sharing recommendations and experiences, and being able to share coupons and other value based offers via the location based apps themselves and through other social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, will deliver value and make checking in an almost automatic response. And as far as the bad guys looking to break into your house or business by checking on your whereabouts, I’ll offer this to consider. Our neighborhood is in the midst of break-ins that have had the police and our ever vigilant neighborhood watch captains baffled for months. And we’re not talking just two or three here. In not one of those instances did the victims broadcast over ‘social channels’ that they’d be away, at work, at the store, at dinner, whatever. The bad guys seem to be doing quite well without monitoring Foursquare, TriOut, Twitter or Facebook, thank you very much.

It will take a while for all of this to come together of course. I remember people looking at me funny in the early 80′s when I suggested that it was just a matter of time before we would wonder how we ever got along without PC’s. We were saying the same things in the early and mid 90′s about the Internet. And can’t the same be said of those who were touting MySpace and then Facebook and then Twitter and what went on to become Social Media? With the explosive growth of the mobile platforms and smart phones, coupled with social media and behaviors, I think we’ll someday wonder how we ever got along without services like Foursquare and TriOut. It seems to me that there is tremendous value in location based services just waiting for both businesses and consumers to discover it and take advantage of it by connecting in ways never before possible. Can I get a Frosty with that please?