The possibility to target someone with advertising is extremely powerful because companies can fine tune their commercial offers based on their customers’ gender, age, profession, location, etc. And even consumers are happier to be targeted because they can receive better offers. What’s the point in receiving an annoying promotion of a Los Angeles store if we live in New York?! Location in particular I think it’s a very important targeting tool and in fact, a big success factor of many mobile applications is their ability to be location based. If I search on google map or on yelp for a restaurant my phone proposed me all the restaurants close to my current position. However being able to be “local” doesn’t have to be just a privilege of mobile applications, it could also be the key to success of one of the most popular social networks of the moment. This morning I was reading a very interesting article on Techcrunch about the opportunity for Twitter to gain even more success by becoming “local”, connecting people to places. The article suggests that Twitter should distinguish between regular and business accounts and then use Twitter Places to link pages with the corresponding business accounts and aggregate content from other local sources. Twitter could then add a “where to follow” section to increase the visibility of Twitter Places and become the leader in aggregating all explicit (Foursquare, geo-tagged tweets) and more implicit (Instagram) check-ins to be able to organize what’s happening in any neighborhood. It could also enable paying advertisers to geo-target tweets to followers in a particular location (e.g., Whole Food would be able to make weekly promotions only to New Yorkers without alienating users in other cities) and set up a sort of “Google Alerts” where people get notified when keywords (e.g., location, club, food) happen nearby. By engaging users on a local level and increase usage by local businesses, Twitter could find a lot of natural monetization opportunities.
2 comments:
As a marketer running previous promotions I believe that the market and most companies haven't understood yet the power of combining location + mobility working together... It's not just the fact that companies can run promotions depending on your location... but also identify what your consumer behavior in terms of where you go and what you consume can further create new classification for consumers market target as well as can deepen the understanding of consumer behaviors... If you think about it, we are outsourcing consumer research for free and consumers are voluntarily and even happy checking in their locations and twitting their activities without been bias... which also brings another benefit that the information is objective which eliminates the huge bias of consumer surveys... So the big question is how twitter, facebook and furesquare will use these information to help companies further develop products and better understand consumers... Does this represent a threat for existence of consumer research companies...?
I wanted to add some comments about the use of Twitter, since I am currently developing the marketing strategy for a luxury product and Twitter is one of the levers that we intend to utilize. I do agree on the fact that if Twitter were locally focused some additional potential could be reaped through improved targeting: in particular we are trying to launch a luxury golf watch in New York and Hamptons and Florida. In this case, being the watch a luxury product not maintaining local focus could lead to risks of diluting the brand.
Another comment that I wanted to add in relation to luxury products: in addition to the potential of the local focus, Twitter can be really leveraged only through selecting the right ambassadors. In fact the real WOM power of Twitter is also in "Who" is actually talking about the product and what this tells us about the product (the only relevant factor is again not only the number of followers).
So if you operate in luxury beware of Twitter, might lead to brand dilution and focus on the right location and the right ambassadors!
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