Location based Social Media Services, whauu! – Who cares?

Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places. These are Social Media location based services for your mobile phone. Tell your friends where you are, check in to places and get rewarded with a badge that you can use for discounts, read and write tips to other users. Examples of what these service can provide for their users. These services have opened up for location-aware marketing because they trick users into sharing their real-time location with advertisers.
It´s hot and hip and according to experts it’s huge and it’s increasing. And the Advertisers are jumping in. Foursquare introduces a new A-list corporate partner like MTV and Starbucks almost every week.

Hype? To work well, these services must go mainstream. 3 million worldwide users (Foursquare) translates to a very, very small share of any local market. And in addition to that the users must be active – Dirk Singer suggest that less than 50% of the Foursquare users are active

There are two main problems. People are not familiar with these services and the ones who are using them are not active enough. That´s my conclusion based on these results from a study by Forrester Research (“To what extent are you (US online adults) familiar with gelocation applications like Foursquare and Gowalla that you can access on a mobile phone?): 84% of the respondents said “I am not familiar with such applications.” Only 1% of respondents claimed to use them more than once a week, and only a total of 4% said that they used the applications at all, ever. The remaining 12% have heard of the applications, but do not use them.

But as suggested by Chris Treadaway in this post we need to get the numbers that matters from the services themselves to be able to see proof of true success. Total number of users and total numbers of checkins are not enough. We need to see numbers that tells us something about the users engagement in these services.

Todays proof of success are the good examples. Starbucks is offcourse 🙂 one of them.

Do you know any good examples?

For me it seems like location based services can be effective in specialized situations. But in a broader perspective most local businesses can’t consider access to a small, occasionally interested local audience (mostly young guys) to do any difference for their business. And that is the situation right now. Maybe that will change?

For more cases see this presentation:

And this ….