To some people, telling the world where you are all the time is a bit like blowing your own trumpet (or sousaphone in the below example, from the delightfully weird Black and WTF blog). But geo-location is becoming more and more popular and increasingly used by a number of campaigners and marketers.
The principle of geo-location is to share where you are physically/geographically located through social media. This has led some brands to reward those who ‘check-in’ to a location, for example by offering discounts on products as it effectively promotes the brand through social media.
Audun Utengen over at the Fox ePractice blog has written extensively on how geo-location – specifically Facebook Places – could be used to reward patients who visit medical practices. This would obviously work differently in the UK as healthcare is very different here to the US environment Audun is talking about. But to my knowledge there’s no reason why dentist surgeries shouldn’t be discounting electric toothbrushes and designer dental flosses if people ‘check-in’ when they arrive. Encouraging patients/customers to ‘check-in’ also means they get the benefit or receiving feedback from you about their practice through accessing comments you share about your visit.
Geo-location also offers the potential for public health campaigns to reward people for ‘checking-in’ at their gym, for example. The reward could be financial (eg a discount) but it could also be about status – people will think ‘if everyone else is doing it then I should too’. And everyone else is doing it – there are 500 million users of Facebook places alone (and that stat was taken from July last year!) Even the promise of a ‘badge’ showing other users you have been somewhere so many times is enough to lure quite a few people.
Still not convinced? This alluring video helps explains how geo-location is all about status (and not just getting discounts)…
So what have the coolest brands done using Foursquare so far and what can we learn? There’s a full list on the econsultancy blog, but here are some highlights…
TV network Bravo encouraged people to ‘check-in’ to locations associated with their TV shows, such as restaurants that feature in their cookery shows. There’s no reason why other campaigns – even health awareness campaigns – couldn’t do something similar, for example by using check-ins at locations that suit the theme of the campaign.
And then there’s the charity incentive – you could donate a small amount of money for everyone that checks into a certain location, perhaps around an awareness day or week. Pepsi did something similar by sponsoring the New York Foursquare leaderboard.
Perhaps the most fun of all these examples is Planet Hollywood, which gave the opportunity for people checking-in to have their name in lights in Vegas!
