I really enjoyed the sage per­spec­tive in this arti­cle from Dave Curry (AdAge) about geolo­ca­tion, and the pos­si­ble per­sonal and indus­try pit­falls it could bring on. We’ve def­i­nitely turned a cor­ner, and mar­ket­ing will never be the same now that the tech­nol­ogy has finally caught up to advertiser’s need for mobile mar­ket­ing. If you’re think­ing about get­ting started in location-​​based mobile mar­ket­ing, this is a great read to con­sider first:

Unless you’ve been liv­ing under a rock, you know that every­one is buzzing, blog­ging, tweet­ing, and talk­ing about geolo­ca­tion. Research firm Bor­rel fore­casts that location-​​based mobile spend­ing will hit $4 bil­lion in 2015, an increase of nearly 12,000% from the $34 mil­lion spent in 2009. With highly antic­i­pated location-​​centric announce­ments loom­ing from both Face­book and Apple, the buzz over geolo­ca­tion is not expected to dimin­ish any time soon. Lever­ag­ing loca­tion will drive the next wave of con­sumer mar­ket­ing, but based on the cur­rent pace of ser­vices and apps going to mar­ket, we’re set­ting our­selves up for geolo­ca­tion apocalypse.

Lever­ag­ing loca­tion will drive the next wave of con­sumer mar­ket­ing, but based on the cur­rent pace of ser­vices and apps going to mar­ket, we’re set­ting our­selves up for geolo­ca­tion apoc­a­lypse. In this sce­nario con­sumers gorge them­selves on a plethora of location-​​based ser­vices and spam, gut-​​busting data pro­fu­sion and pro­mo­tional push acid-​​reflux. If we’re not care­ful, the com­ing cat­a­clysm could con­sume us with:

  • Swarms of Geolo­ca­tion Ser­vices. Already in full swing, new ser­vices are appear­ing with an alarm­ing fre­quency. Rang­ing from the more popular/​mainstream (Foursquare, Gowalla, Twit­ter, Yelp, MyTown, Whrrl and Loopt) to the more obscure (Pla­ce­Pop, BlockChalk, Bump, FoodSpot­ting and Graf­fiti), ser­vices are being piled high. Gaug­ing by the more than 25 com­pa­nies that made location-​​based announce­ments at SXSW, con­sumers will soon be chok­ing on an over­abun­dance of geolo­ca­tion services.
  • Armies of Aim­less Apps. Each ser­vice wants you to use their app, so can the mar­ket­place sus­tain a mas­sive rush of apps? Of course not. When I sit down for din­ner at my favorite tapas place, how many apps can I “check-​​in” with before every­one else at the table starts throw­ing flat­ware at me? Most likely one, pos­si­bly two, if I snap a photo for upload when the entrees arrive. Check.in, by the team at Brightkite, is address­ing this prob­lem with their upcom­ing app (one checkin to rule them all). But how many apps (and fea­tures within each ser­vice) will they need to sup­port to effec­tively ful­fill con­sumer needs?
  • Drown­ing in a Del­uge of Data. If you’ve seen SimpleGeo’s Vicarious.ly, or the visu­al­iza­tion video of geolo­cated data they col­lected dur­ing SXSW, you can see the poten­tial for mas­sive floods of per­sonal geolo­cated infor­ma­tion that may or may not be rel­e­vant to your con­sumers. Bing recently added Foursquare data results to their maps. Now imag­ine them adding results from a dozen other ser­vices, or maybe four dozen other ser­vices. As a user, I just wanted direc­tions to the post office, now obscured by thou­sands of user notes, to pick up my bacon-​​of-​​the-​​month. Does it help to know that 600 of my clos­est friends also hate going to the post office?

Read the rest of the arti­cle at AdAge here –>

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