We have a great Social Media community here in Little Rock and it is great to trade ideas. Everyone talks about how great it is, and even I travel and preach the gospel of Social Media, but I want more. I had a little Twitter discussion with @Tsudo from Knowthenetwork.com about geo location services like Gowalla and 4square and their “value”.@Tsudo wrote a great blog post on the topic:
Last Friday night I was at the local ballpark when I received a twitter mention that an acquaintance had checked in to the same venue via Foursquare. I discovered he was with another friend and I decided to walk across to say Hi.
Although I’d never met either of them in real life (IRL) we were familiar to one another because of our online intersections.
What happened? Familiarity turned into friendship…(full article here)
So I argued about “value”, @Tsudo sees value for him in meeting new people, great so do I, but if these services are to survive they need to make money and enter the “main stream”.(Moving beyond early adopters) All of these services are either selling ads, collecting data, or both. They use game play to get us to give them that data for free. That data is then sold or used by marketers. Real money is exchanging hands and you make nothing. Sure I don’t mind playing the game but I need more than a badge, “Show me the money”, or at least a free beer or 20% off for giving you my time and effort for checking in. Now as a business owner give me access to that data, make it easy and I will pay you real money.
Foursquare is starting to do this
In my perfect world of geo location the ball park would have known @Tsudo was at the game and noticed so were his Twitter friends. The app then would have offered him and his friends a coupon and suggest they get together and meet for a beer. The ball park could then look at the stats the next day and see they all used their coupons and send them a thank you emails, reminder of the next game and offered another coupon. The ball park could also go in and look at the data and ask who has not been to the park in the last 15 days and offer them a reminder coupon to come back again. All of this with out @Tsudo ever “checking in”. So like in said in my Twitter post “@Tsudo there is no real value yet in social location, it is the first step towards something bigger but not there yet”. The future is geo location combined with social that I agree. I just want more.
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I think we are combining two different arguments.
1) The monetization of the application.
2) Reward and incentive for user participation.
Concerning, monetization – I think it is clear how these applications intend to turn a profit. We’ve already seen major Foursquare partnerships (Bravo,History,Zagat, etc..) and knowing you can’t even talk to 4sq without $10,000 ready to spend it is safe to assume that this is their viability strategy. I think Gowalla will soon follow suit as evidenced by the recent NJ Nets experiment.
2) Concerning user rewards – Wouldn’t you agree that venue specials and incentives offered through 4sq already accomplish this goal? If the ballpark was active in LBS then they could have definitely responded with discount or reward. As more businesses understand the platform then the procedure already exists.
I find in being able value able to discover people and places and when you add discounts/specials to that equation what more should I expect?
Thanks for linking to my post. Always enjoy the discussion.