Getting started with geolocation
By Lilian MahoukouAs the resident French ‘Head, I’ve been busy travelling across Paris over the past few days with the opportunity to attend two interesting meetups on geolocation services - a growth area causing a lot of buzz over here.
The first event was organized by PME Multimedia with quick presentations of DisMoiou.fr (TellMeWhere), OpenPlayce, Yuback, Foursquare and Status.net; the second gathering (Yulbiz Paris) was more about how businesses could really use these new channels to grow.
Among all these conversations, Foursquare seems to be the most talked about; but there was a definite sense of ‘how the heck can we take advantage of this?’
Over at AdAge, Dave Curry has written an insightful piece about the dangers of brands piling on geo-location apps indiscriminately, and how they could approach them in a more inspiring way.
At the moment, the most common use appears to be local businesses offering coupons to users checking into their venues - but this is a pretty basic transactional use of the opportunities. Some organisations such as Harvard are getting more experiential and imaginative, but this may be a step too far for smaller companies. So I’d suggest that brands ask themselves two basic questions integral to these apps:
How cool is our venue? and
How do our employees interact with people ?
These questions gets us focused on the priority of remarkable service and experience first.
Moving beyond the basics, geolocation services are great when used to identify brand ambassadors and to engage them; to nurture deep relationships; and to inspire positive word-of-mouth and attract new customers. But businesses should start by making the basic in-app experience around their venue as human, helpful and rich as possible.
How do (would) you use these new channels ?
