Local Business
Pew: The Internet is the source that people most rely on for material about local businesses; http://eicker.at/LocalBusiness
Tagged: Location Marketing Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Places: Where We Go
Facebook adds time to location sharing: Where we are, where we go, and where we’ve been; http://eicker.at/WhereWeGo
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Add where you are to anything you share – In the past, you needed a smart phone to easily share your location. Now you can share your location from your computer, too, and say: Where you’ve been. Remember where you were in your favourite photos. Where you are now. If friends are nearby, they might just meet you there. Where you’re going. Friends who have been there can give you tips or even join in the plan.”
TC: “It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. … Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places. – To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the ‘check-in’ services have been playing. And a result of that is Places being killed off and being replaced by new ‘Nearby’ area… This is smart, as it’s something none of the other location services have really nailed yet. And now that location is being emphasized on every Facebook action (though it can easily be turned off) – and not just on mobile…”
IF: “Facebook will remove the Places check-in feed from its mobile apps and interface, a company spokesperson confirms with us. Rather than check-in, users will be able to add their city-level location or tag a specific Place in any post. … When users post content from the web, mobile site, or smartphone apps, they’ll have the option to tag a Place, whether they’re there currently or just want to mention it. As TechCrunch illustrates, Facebook’s foot-traffic incentivizing Check-in Deals will still be available, with users seeing the option to redeem them appended to the news feed story of their mention of a location.”
Gerrit Eicker
Adoption of Online Marketing Services
Local businesses: the adoption of online marketing services; http://eicker.at/2d Chart: http://eicker.at/2e (via @SocialTimes)
Gerrit Eicker
Google Hotpot
Google adds Hotpot to Google Places: a local recommendation engine personalising local search; http://eicker.at/GoogleHotpot
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Places: Marketing Opportunities
Facebook Places offers a bunch of marketing opportunities: Claim your place, next to your page; http://j.mp/9YwmZX
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “One incentive that Facebook is using to encourage businesses to create a Places page is advertising. Facebook says that ‘Once you claim your Place, you’ll be able to advertise it just as you advertise your Facebook Page. To advertise your Place, click ‘I want to advertise something I have on Facebook’ in the ad creation flow and choose your Place from the drop-down menu.’ Advertising is completely self serve and seems fairly simple. Currently, you cannot target people who check-in to your Place, but a business can target people who ‘Like’ your Place page if you have performed a Page to Place merge.”
SEL: “One of the questions that came up after the formal launch of Facebook Places last night was: how will this affect Google Places (among others)? As an aside, I have to say it’s really strange that these products have nearly the identical name. It’s almost like Honda offering a car with a particular name and then Toyota coming out with a car with the same model name. … However from a local business standpoint the two Places are conceptually if not practically quite similar. Local businesses can claim their Places pages on both sites and use them as promotional tools in several ways. I’m not going to enumerate the relative merits or practical aspects of this comparison here; I’ll leave that for another article or articles plural. … In fact, Facebook Places may actually help Google Places rather than harm it. By raising awareness of the need to ‘claim’ your listing generally Google Places may see an increase in local business activity on its pages. Claiming your listings at both Places will be on the list of must-do local online promotions for small businesses going forward.”
FC: “With Places, not only does Facebook get to add a potentially money-spinning stream of data to all Places players (namely, your location and location habits, which is data ripe for mining for marketing), but it also gets a new network – the location database of local businesses. Facebook had data in businesses before, but the fact that it’ll now be able to geolocate them means Facebook will likely build up plans for location-sensitive advertising, tied to which particular shop you’re in (imaging a competitors ad popping up when youre checked in, offering lower prices or a promotional discount). It lets Facebook potentially build up a powerful ‘points of interest’ database, should it every feel like leaping into the personal navigation or augmented reality games. It lets Facebook’s app developers come up with creative uses for the data that we haven’t even thought about yet.”
eMarketer: “Location will give Facebook a new way to target and sell advertising. Mobile hasn’t been a part of Facebook’s ad offerings until now, but that will change. By offering ways for marketers to target Facebook users not only on the online service but also when they are on the go and using Facebook on their mobile phones, it opens up all-new avenues for interaction. In particular, Places gives local businesses a great reason to advertise on Facebook. Many of them already have a Facebook Page; by creating a new Facebook Place (essentially a page where people can check in and see who else they know who has checked in), businesses can give customers ‘the power to tell their friends about your business,’ as the Places advertising FAQ says.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Places: Where We Are
Facebook Places introduces the masses to location-based sharing: Who, What, When, and Now… Where; http://j.mp/c32fU0
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Starting today, you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot with Facebook Places. You can share where you are and the friends you’re with in real time from your mobile device. … To get started, you’ll need the most recent version of the Facebook application for iPhone. You also can access Places from touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and geolocation. … With Places, you are in control of what you share and the people you share with. You choose whether or not to share your location when you check in at a place. When you check in, you can tag friends who are with you but only if their settings allow it. When you are tagged, you are always notified.”
TC: “‘There was so much to do before we launched this,’ Zuckerberg said with a smile on his face. He said that what they’re focusing on at launch is a solid core. The three main things they’re focusing on is helping people share where they are, helping people see who is around them, and helping people seeing what’s going on. The basics. – When asked about checking-in to watching television shows or the like, Zuckerberg joked, ‘there’s a lot of stuff we’re not doing.'”
RWW: “Facebook may be moving fast, but Zuckerberg and co. are being careful to ease their 500 million users in – making nice with location pioneers Gowalla and Foursquare; emphasizing user benefits, not marketing possibilities; and sharing gooey anecdotes about how Facebook Places creates a living history of the world. … The new Facebook Places is ‘opt-in,’ which in this case means Facebook assumes you want to be part of Places and share your location information with your friends, but not necessarily the whole Internet (we’re working on a ‘How to disable Facebook Places’ post now for those who aren’t ready for the location revolution). … Facebook has introduced this feature in a compelling way to mainstream users who are learning and loving the social web, and it seems destined to be a raging hit. A lot of attractive possibilities open up when users share location data.”
O’Reilly: “Martin May, a founder of location check-in service Brightkite, summed it up with a tweet, ‘So far, FB Places is pretty much ‘been there, done that’…of course at FB size‘. The key feature of Facebook Places is the number of users that are suddenly impacted. Tens of millions of people across the US will now be able to share their location with their friends for the time ever (of course they could have always joined one of the existing services, but they didn’t). Facebook Places in many ways just validated the location check-in space while at the same time they owned it. As Dennis Crowley, the Foursquare founder, has said (and many others) check-in data is a commodity. The value will come in the reviews, ratings and other data that they are able to glean from their users’ behaviors.”
Guardian: “Facebook knows that, and the only thing that matters about adding location data to Facebook profiles is how secure and uncomplicated the privacy settings are. One person’s ‘granularity’ is another person’s ‘complicated’, and Facebook had better hope users can turn privacy up to 11. – I’d argue that of all the features Facebook has launched, and every momentary backlash, this is by far the biggest opportunity for a serious balls up. That’s down to Facebook’s scale of half a billion people, the public’s discomfort with the commercial uses of their data (at least for those who care to think about it) and the uniquely risky implications of location services that go wrong. – If they get it right, on the other hand, it could finally deliver the promise of location-based-services to the mainstream. In technology at least, that’s big news.“
Gerrit Eicker
Foursquare: Brands Push Tips
Foursquare lets established brands push information, moving from a mere game to a location platform; http://j.mp/cjpinv
Gerrit Eicker
Location Marketing
The new (old) point-of-purchase (POP) is location marketing: with a projected outlay of $4B by 2015; http://j.mp/bOj4hX
Gerrit Eicker 11:29 on 17. December 2011 Permalink |
Pew: “Where people get information about restaurants and other local businesses – The internet is the source that people most rely on for material about the local business scene and search engines are particularly valued. Newspapers and word of mouth also rank high as sources. … The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from January 12 to 25, 2011, among a sample of 2,251 adults, age 18 and older.”
Pew: “People looking for information about local restaurants and other businesses say they rely on the internet, especially search engines, ahead of any other source. – Newspapers, both printed copies and the websites of newspaper companies, run second behind the internet as the source that people rely on for news and information about local businesses, including restaurants and bars. – And word of mouth, particularly among non-internet users, is also an important source of information about local businesses. … 51% turn to the internet, including: search engines (38% rely on them), specialty websites (17% rely on them), social media (3% rely on social networking sites or Twitter) … People who seek out information and news about local businesses and restaurants are a diverse and somewhat upscale group. As distinct populations, they are more likely to live in relatively well-off households – those earning $75,000 or more – and have college educations. – In addition, the 55% of adults who get information about restaurants, bars, and clubs are more likely to be women, young adults, urban, and technology adopters. – The 60% of adults who get information about other local businesses are also more likely to be tech users.”
Pew: “The 55% of all adults who get information about restaurants, bars, and clubs are disproportionately young, female, tech adaptive and upscale in educational attainment, urban. … Those who get news and information about local restaurants, bars, and clubs are also likely to be avid local news consumers who enjoy following the local scene, pay for local news in some form, and use multiple platforms to get the local information. … Those who are heavy local news junkies are considerably more likely than others to get material about local restaurants. We asked people about their use of 14 different kinds of sources to get local news and their frequency of using those platforms. When it comes to restaurant information, 71% of those who used at least six platforms monthly got news and information about local restaurants, compared with 34% of those who relied on just one or two sources.”
Pew: “Those who get information about local businesses that are not tied to eating or socializing are a diverse and somewhat upscale group. Those who get this information are more likely to have college or advanced degrees, live in relatively high-earning households, use the internet and own cell phones. They are not distinct by gender or race and ethnicity. … They are also likely to be local news and information junkies. Those who get news and information from at least six different local news platforms monthly are considerably more likely than others to get material about local businesses. … Those mobile consumers were also more likely than others to get material about local businesses: 65% of mobile local news consumers got information about local businesses, compared with 55% of others.”