3foldComm

In a world where being (four)square is suddenly cool, do you have a location-based outreach plan?

In the past few months, a new frontier in social media geotagging (adding location-specific information to your media and communications) has come of age. Gowalla, foursquare, Yelp, and newbie MyTown are positioned to shake off their “game” label and become the next big thing for the social savvy businesses.

These services started out as addictive pastimes for early adopters, allowing them to alert friends of their whereabouts and compete for virtual mayorships of their favorite bars and restaurants. However, we predict in the coming year, location-based services will evolve into global platforms for individuals and businesses to create social power and capital.

First, though, you have to know and respect the networks. Here’s a breakdown of the (current) location-based platform leaders:

• Gowalla: Like a virtual passport, this location-based travel game that rewards you for visiting places with your iPhone. As you visit places, you earn “stamps” from all the places you visit. In addition to collecting stamps from real-world locations, you can gather virtual souvenirs, or icons, that can be traded with friends or hidden for others to find. Basically, Gowalla encourages users to travel, from extraordinary to ordinary places, exploring neighborhoods and looking at their surroundings as opportunities to experience new things.
• foursquare: It’s like telling people, “Here I am, come join me!” Say you visit Grange for dinner. Use foursquare to “check-in”, telling people your whereabouts. Your foursquare friends (or Twitter followers if you choose to Tweet your check-ins) will know where they can find you and recommend places to go nearby. Check-in at all kind of places – cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, homes, offices. For businesses, foursquare creates an opportunity to reward people by recognizing their exploration as they earn points, win mayorships and unlock badges for trying new places and revisiting favorites.
• Yelp: Already one of the premier user-generated review sites, Yelp has recently turned on check-in capabilities for members. It doesn’t (yet) offer the same level of game-like points and achievements for contributing social life location metadata, but it does offer a deep set of existing data surrounding place information and user ratings and opinions.
• MyTown: If Monopoly married Twitter, it would produce something like MyTown. Basically, this App for the iPhone is a GPS game that involves buying and owning your favorite local shops, restaurants, and hangouts from your phone. Check-in at real-world locations to unlock rewards, then buy and “own” real-life places. During the day, you can collect rent when people check-in to your shops. The more visitors that come to your stores, the more it raises your properties’ total value. While this site has only existed for a little more than a month, it has already signed up 500,000 users.

Now that you have an idea on what geo-location networks exist, here’s how your businesses can get connected with location-based users, and earn some PR respect in the process:

• Crowd-source action, ideas and information: Draw on these involved customer bases to get feed back, encourage suggestions, find ways to mobilize events and spread important, value-driven information to their social networks.
• Rewarding loyalty and customer visits: If they’re coming to you to earn points and status on their service of choice, why not show them your appreciation? Not only will it inspire repeat business and garner loyalty, you’ll also encourage others in the network to get involved.
• Turn check-in points into currency or donations: Think frequent flyer program with a pre-existing infrastructure you don’t have to build yourself. Nonprofits can partner with businesses for points-to-donation participation, restaurants can offer heavy users (who are happily spreading the word about your business) with points-to-dollar discounts.
• Build communities: These communities are by-products of the social networking movement, and, therefore, are already forming loose communities. When location-based services exist to encourage members to explore their neighborhoods and local businesses, there are great opportunities for developing full-fledged, active groups made up of members of your target audiences.