Location location location!

22/03/10 posted by Annie

From Foursquare to Google Maps, location-based marketing is really beginning to take off.  As our post from last week tells, the “lo-so” phenomenon is something that tech-savvy businesses should certainly get up on - if they haven’t already.

Recently celebrating it's first birthday, Foursquare already boasts in excess of 500,000 worldwide users, and over 15.5 million checkins so far, at more than 1.4 million venues. The idea turns life into a game, with real life players competing for mayordoms by 'checking in' to venues more than anyone else. As more players compete, Foursquare becomes a real-time measure of the popularity of a given location or event. It's competitive and fun, while passively getting your brand thrown around - a great marketing tool for local businesses. For you to get the most out of your marketing dollars, think about your audience and who you're trying to reach. Foursquare is great for building traction for small businesses within local communities, but might be less helpful if you're looking to grab international clients.

In a similar vein, Google Maps in Australia is testing out location-based marketing through sponsored icons. Now when you visit Google Maps in Australia, you can zoom in and spot a business by its special logo. Sponsored icons will help the millions of Google Maps users pick you out of the crowd of generic icons, and turn the online world into a better depiction of the offline world. With Google Maps being the first place most people look for online directions, Google's step into the lo-so is a perfectly organic one which should promise an effortless transition for most users and online marketers.

However there may be a couple of teething issues to confront before these sponsored icons are wholly embraced. Firstly, sprinkling your all-important logo over millions of map-searches comes at a price. What about places like shopping-centres, where hundreds of icons will compete for the same spot on the map? Google says, "The placement of the icons, both the generic non-paid ones, and the new paid ones with the logo, are determined algorithmically. In the case that two are in very close proximity, we’ll determine algorithmically which one is relevant to show. Advertisers will only pay when their logo is shown." But might this mean that sponsored logos could trump the generic ones we're after in a search? Will businesses not willing to pay the fee, end up losing out?

Online marketing is no less dog-eat-dog than traditional competition always has been. Thankfully, new stats spell out who we should market to. In a comprehensive analysis of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Digg, online advertising network Chitika have found that each social site has a distinct makeup of users with unique tastes and wants. Twitterers love their news, Facebookers are into news and community interests, while MySpacers are thinking video games, celebrities and entertainment, with no interest in news whatsoever. And with the Diggers, pretty much anything goes.

It's definitely handy to know who and what's at your fingertips, and consequently what to spend time and money on. While lo-so marketing might be a little less popular on our own turf than social networking sites like Facebook, all that might be set to change in the near future.